Is this a contraditcion in terms with what the Republicans are trying to to with abortion in the US (or do they see it as a continuation of the same issue?)
...
You can't abort "natural" fetuses, but cloned ones? Thats ok!!
Actually, you're missing the point. This kind of anti-cloning sentiment is very consistent with pro-life attitudes. Basically, there were a few unviable attempts at Dolly that had to be put down, and many, many more that never sucessfully grew past the initial stages of fertilization.
Pro-life people hold that a fertilized human zygote has just as much right to live as a newborn baby. They are both people, even though one is far more dependent on their mother for survival than the other. Thus, the creation of hundreds of malformed, doomed to die human beings would be considered abhorrent. This is the same mindset that considers fetal stem cell research as unethical, because it essentially involves harvesting murdered people.
Let me reiterate. The objection is that you are creating (and killing) hundreds of people to attempt to get one successful attempt. They are not saying that it's okay to abort cloned people while its not okay to abort others. They are saying that the necessity to abort failed attempts or to let them continue living broken lives with their deformities is sufficient reason to ban human cloning research.
I find an outright ban to be a bad idea, but as someone who is pro-life, I find the current failure rate to be unacceptable. You can't clone a human nowdays without doing something a little unethical. (I'm not even going to respond to CmdrTaco's outright appeal for the creation of subhuman slaves and mindless people to be killed so that their bodies can be harvested for your own immortality.)
Here's my proposal:
We should have a complete moratorium on human cloning until the cloning of mammals has a failure rate approaching natural human pregnancy. Only then can we attempt it on humans. As is, cloning is far too risky to attempt with humans. We should fund research into cloning of other animals before we attempt it with people. It's just too soon right now. If we try right now, the failured attempts, and the ruined children that come out of them, will create a public backlash that could destroy all cloning research for decades, if not longer. We cannot allow premature attempts to ruin the future of cloning.
I don't have a clue how to reproduce it. I'm convinced it's a bug in the Slash code somewhere. I've seen it disappear upon reloading the page, so you'll just have to hit Slashdot enough times for it to reappear. I've only seen it once about a week ago and today, and I hit Slashdot's main page about 10+ times over the course of a workday.
If it's incorrect behavior as you say, then it's probably a Mozilla bug too, but trying to squeeze it out of Slashdot might be hard.
The tweakers.net article had it wrong. The Pentium 4 uses the i850 chipset, according to links I followed starting at Intel's front page, then to the Pentium 4 page, and finally to the chipset page.
The i860 and its successors were interesting chips. As I mentioned in a reply to a post underneath your original post, at the last company I worked for, we had old servers running an i860 as the CPU sitting next to modern servers with the much, much faster i960 chip running their network cards.
Of course, it was even funnier that my roommate at the time was still using a i386 PC with 8 Megs of RAM. Every day he worked with a network card that had much more processing horsepower and RAM than his PC! I used to tease him about that all the time.
Actually, there were working computers at the time. Stratus, a vendor of ultra-expensive fault-tolerant servers, has used m68k, i860, and PA-RISC processors in successive versions of their servers. The old Stratus XARs were RISC-based, and I believe that they were out in that timeframe. (It was really funny to have a machine running an i860 chip next to another machine with a i960-based network card.)
Of course, these machines would've been completely unsuitable for development of NT, but they were there.
You forgot an added bonues. If drugs were legal they can be taxed. Think of all the money that could then be poured into inner city schools if drugs were taxed.
I think the phrase "squeezing blood from a turnip" applies here. You mean, we should fund local school systems with additional local taxes on a poor community?
The Bush Administration has the will, the moral committment, and the popular support necessary to put an end to the "War on Drugs". You'll see this in action within a year.
Actually, the War on Drugs is pretty popular with the public, particularly the blue-collar rural populace, which is a strong Republican voting block. Years of Reagan activity against drug use has taken root in the heart of conservative voters. Bush can't and won't end the War on Drugs. If he felt that it needed to be curtailed, he would do it quietly, like he has done for environmental programs under the EPA and Department of Interior in his new budget proposal. There's a lot of research, investigation, and enforcement programs that got cut that the public doesn't know about.
(I spent about an hour watching CSPAN when they had a conference one day on all the environmental budget cuts. I found it ironic that he said that the restrictions on arsenic in drinking water needs more scientific research while cutting several departments responsible for that kind of research and the departments that would've tested the drinking water for toxin if the research did pan out.)
Anyway, if he wanted to cut drug enforcement, he'd do it quietly. However, the Bush administration is taking a tough stance on "renewing" the War on Drugs. You can also note that the Republican-lead Congress last year approved more than $1.3 billion to fight drug trade.
Irrelevant. This Administration is not corrupt.
I believe that have adequately responded to this in another post. If you wish to close your eyes to the truth, that is your problem. George W. Bush has committed perjury and stock fraud. He has been responsible to the condemning of personal property that was later given over as lucrative real estate to the owner of the Texas Rangers. He has been rewarding Oil and Mining companies by rolling back government programs intended to protect our people from pollution and to protect our land for future generations. He has opposed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform measure, the best means of reducing corporate/union purchases of politicians, and supported another bill which institutionalizes soft money in a manner that allows wealthy individuals (Republican backers) to contribute millions while restricting unions (Democratic Party backers). He is attempting a huge tax cut intended to profit the richest 1% of our nation, and he has used previous existing tax holes to get out of millions in property taxes in Texas. Hah! People think this is the "moral" candidate.
Bush comes from the same stock as the man who was up his neck in the Iran-Contra affair, who was responsible for the S&L scandals, and who has an even higher body count surrounding him than Bill Clinton. He and his brothers have gotten their power through illicit business deals and use of the Bush family name. They were born into wealth and have ridden a train of Bush family supporters into power. Certainly, if he wasn't a Bush, the Harken oil fiasco would've taken care of him a long time ago, and we'd never be hearing about him now.
Open your eyes! The Bush administration promises to be the most corrupt in years. It's Teapot Dome all over again, with government kickbacks for oil all the way. The Bush budget cut is rife with budget slashes for everything that Oil, Gas, and Mining didn't like. Bush's past business dealing, and his dealing as a Texas governor shows that he will be more than willing to do what it takes to preserve his own interests and keep his family wealthy.
I'm afraid that you are in dire need of a history lesson. The War on Drugs started in the Nixon years in 1972. It escalated during the Reagan years with the appointment of the Drug Czars, increased funding to the DEA, and Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign. These are established, historical facts. This in not a "logical absurdity" as you put it. I remember all of this when I was growing up. I remember Reagan and Bush both taking very strong public stances against drugs. I saw the speeches on TV myself.
Pro-drug sentiment has been highest among liberals, such as the Democrat, the Natrual Order, and the Green parties, and more centrist anti-government parties, such as the Liberatarians. Conservative parties, such as the Republican and Reform parties, and ultra-conservative parties, such as the (still living) Temperance party have very strong anti-drug statements.
Conservatives are people who wish to preserve traditional values. These include pro-life stances, anti-drug stances, censorship of "indecent" material, "zero tolerance" crime policies, expanded law enforcement powers, etc. Some of these can be construed to be liberty constraining. Listen, I don't usually advocate this kind of thing because I disagree with their views, but I think you really need to look into the Liberatarian Party. They seem much more in line with your beliefs on freedom at all costs then the Republicans.
One can't be both totalitarian and pro-freedom at the same time. It's one or the other.
That's untrue. Not everything is either Black or White. Haven't you ever heard of shades of grey? If this person can believe simultaneously in a restrictive view of one policy issue and and a freedom-loving view of another policy issue, then who are you to tell them that they can't?
I'm very pro-government when it comes to environmental issues, but very anti-government when it comes to copyright legislation. I'm pro-life yet I don't have a problem with cloning research/genetic manipulation and would like government to stay out of it. These are alternating views of desiring the government to place restrictions and desiring them not to place restrictions. It's not a matter of one or the other, black or white. I'm free to hold these views, and they are self-consistent. I am neither an anarchist nor a facist. I am, like 99% of America, somewhere in between.
The problem is that you are missing the basic fact that Conservatism is not 100% pro-Freedom. The strong involvement of the Christian Coallition in the Republican party means that certain religious "hot-button" issues will continue to dominate their politics.
Freedom is a glorious thing, but too much freedom is dangerous when taken to the extreme. Should people be free to murder someone who is inconvenient to them? Should people be free to take what they want and only pay for it if they feel like it? Should people be free to drive on whatever side of the road they want and under the influence of whatever drugs they want to take? Should people be free to dump toxic waste in a stream to avoid the cost of safely processing it? Should people be free to sexually molest children and sell images of it to other people, encouraging them to do the same?
Our founding fathers certainly disagreed with some of these, and probably would disagree with the others (pollution and drunk driving) if they were an issue in their day and time. The Constitution grants the government the right to levy taxes, regulate interstate commerce, and draft soldiers for war -- all of which are freedom-restricting powers. I think you yourself need to do some critical thinking about the nature of freedom, the views of your adopted party, and the facts involved in each case.
Of course, you may not be capable of critical thinking at all. Your slightly soft-headed thinking here (I apologize, but I must call a spade a spade) leads me to suspect that there's a liberal arts education somewhere in your past. That would explain it: You've never been taught to think rigorously, logically, and critically, so you end up believing whatever you're told.
You can dismiss things which are a matter of public record and thump your chest about "thinking for yourself" all you want, but all you're really doing is deluding yourself to justify your chosen viewpoint. At some point, you have to accept what someone else says about something you've never proven to yourself, or you can't get anywhere in life. (Certainly, you couldn't get anywhere in physics and chemistry classes if you had to reprove everything yourself!) You seem to ignore the facts about the heavy involvement of conservatives in the War on Drugs that others place forward to continue your attack on liberals. In terms of mathematical proofs, you are changing the postulates to justify your theorem.
Incidentally, a liberal arts major typically includes philosophy, literature, and psychology/sociology -- all of which requires one to research and critically analyze the actions, words, and minds of others. They also typically try to teach you to be open-minded to the beliefs of others and to not dismiss them as "soft-headed." You really should've gotten a better-rounded education if this is honestly your opinion of those classes. I know that they've been an enjoyable change of pace from the heavy math and programming curriculum that I'm taking.
(Of course, this is all assuming that this isn't all some beautifully crafted and tenacious trolling. If so, you got me. Look at how much I typed!)
No, it's not the only way. It's not best way. It's not even a good way. The democrats want to tell you how you can spend your money. They want to rob you to pay for their own agendas. Wouldn't you rather choose where the fruits of your labour go?
If you believe that you should be making your decisions, instead of having politicans tell you how to live your life, then vote for a party who will let you decide how you want to spend your money and your time. Vote Libertarian.
No thanks.
I'd rather have someone informed, who has a better view of how things are (one beyond just their little circle of friends and family) making the important decisions that I can't trust my neighbors to make correctly. Thank you, but I'll keep drinking my local water thanks to the efforts of those who seek to keep people from deciding to dump poison in our rivers instead of choosing for themselves to save money.
Liberatarianism is founded on one of two beliefs: (a) people are inherently good, sensible, and when given the opportunity will choose not harm one another; (b) let me do what I want and fuck everyone else. The first kind of people tend to grow up when they get in the real world and become Republicans or Democrats, depending on which issues of freedom are more important. The second kind of people are why we need lawmakers to protect the public with their own money.
Anarchy/liberatarianism is counterproductive to the survival of the species. Get informed on global warming. That alone should be reason enough to see why letting people do what they want is a suicidal prospect for humanity and civilization. If you're in category B, then go live in the woods. Our collective needs are greater than yours.
It's no coincidence that the Left always resorts to personal attacks, smear tactics, and "digging up dirt" on their political adversaries. They can't win any other way.
Three words: conservative talk radio.
<sarcasm>
I'm sure that such respectful, well-known conservative members of the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, have never stooped to character assassination. Why, it would be ridiculous to insinuate that their entire media empires are based off of namecalling and pigeonholing people into a nebulous, evil group known as "liberals" who can have their views safely dismissed as irrelevant for belonging to this group. They're just the nicest people who always stick to the issues and argue their points elloquently without rhetoric and blustering. In fact, they'd never stoop so low as to run comedy segments with people impersonating well-known Democrats and making fools of them.
</sarcasm>
Oh, and how about Attorney General John Ashcroft's character assassination attempts?
You know, it's surprising to hear a conservative willing to call GWB's drug experimentation in 1972 "alleged" when it's clearly on record and to dismiss it as unimportant since it happened so long ago. Where was all this sympathy for experimentation when Bill Clinton admitted to trying pot in the height of the hippie era? You didn't see much sympathy from Democrats about Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct, about the Whitewater affair, or about his pot comment. Republicans were howling for blood. Oh, but now that a Republican is in office, they seem pretty quiet about his lying under oath, his stock fraud, and his excessive seizure of private property for real estate profitteering.
What? You haven't heard about all this? Maybe the Left Wing just isn't as serious about muckraking as you say they are.
There's a difference between personal attacks and revealing that a person has a history of corruption and bad leadership. Facts are facts. His record clearly shows that he is not the man to be leading the war on drugs. This info's all out there. It took me only about 15 minutes with Altavista to find this information. If this is all so clearly out there, why isn't the vast "Left Wing Mudslinging Conspiracy" promoting it more, like the Republicans did with Clinton's shady record?
Your argument is false. Republican's have been far more prone to the use of lies and character assassination than Democrats for as far back as I can remember (the Reagan years).
I'm not so sure about that. Remember how long it took to get AGP on PowerMacs? Also, PowerMacs only recently moved to PC-133 memory after it being out for a few years. I'd like to see DDR SDRAM in a Mac sometime. They're also still using 64-bit, 33 MHz PCI slots when they could be using 66 MHz slots. I think they're also still only supporting UltraATA/66 instead of UltraATA/100.
Sure, they were quick to move on USB and their own Firewire, but they aren't exactly riding on the bleeding edge on every single component in their systems.
Please, please do not flame or crapflood these people. I have just taken 90 minutes to write a letter to them to try to reason with them, and I hope that it won't get lost in the flames.
Really, if we want to help Sean, we must act positively. Write messages supporting him and explaining our position about this. Don't email bomb them, send them threats, or fill their box with obscense messages. That will never help Sean out.
Agreed. I mean, the very idea that Python, Perl, PHP, and TCL of all things had anything to do with Sun's stance on Java is just ridiculous. TCL?!? Python, Perl, and PHP don't really compete in the same space as Java, but TCL is just really stretching things. Of course, they do have a book on TCL programming to sell...
It was just an attempt to plug their books. The arguments were very weak. I mean, with all the Oracle developers out there, open sourcing their database products would just be a road to having their support sales gutted by a crop of instant competitors pushing their own erstwhile products. Oracle isn't that stupid.
Actually some of us do read at 0 threshhold to catch the rare insightful AC post. I mod down some of the worst stuff at 0, like racist slurs or obscense ascii art, but I typically just ignore the three word nonsense. I don't read at 0 because I think trolls are funny. I read at 0 to catch the people who can't or don't want to use a login to post good stuff.
I mod down named crap flooders whenever I get the chance. I don't touch an AC unless it's something really offensive, like racist slurs or goatse.cx ascii art.
There have been a few other posts about this. See my earlier response to another post about that here.
I'll answer your post with a question. Why should a programmer be free to style their code anyway they want?
The point of a programming language is to communicate instructions to a computer in human-readable format. I still maintain that people who complain about being forced to write readable code are the ones who write the most unreadable code. TMTOWDTI, Perl's motto, is the main reason that when the first Obfuscated Perl Code contest was announced, many Slashdotter's joked that it was redundant. Consistent style is a necessity for maintainability. It helps to allow others (and maybe yourself a year later) to understand what you were doing when you wrote a piece of code.
Honestly, if you think everyone should be able to write code in whatever style they see fit, you've never worked on a large project before. Languages with more freedom just force people to place other personal standards on how their code must be formatted within their project or lose readability of code as multiple programmer styles conflict. Python forces a consistent standard across all development, making it an great relief to maintain.
I will admit that that method, dating back to Ada, Pascal, and the venerable ALGOL, does have its merits for long pieces of code. Typically, it enforces spacing as well, since single-line statements just don't look right in this style of language or may be against the grammar.
I like Python's style and I like the ALGOL-derived style as well.
Three things: first the Mac clone market was in it's infancy and less than two years old (my memory may be off on this, I haven't checked) so it's natural that it would be Apple's market share that initially suffered. I bet IBM had the same experience in the early days of the PC market.
Look how well that worked for IBM's PC business. They're basically a marginal player in the market they created. The OS that operated those machines, MS-DOS, was independent financially from the success of the original hardware maker's sales. This is not the case for the Macintosh.
Second that 10% of clone buyers being new buyers is more than Apple managed up till the iMac was released.
That was a conservative figure since I couldn't remember the exact statistics. The basic fact is that those machines weren't making nearly as much money for Apple in Mac OS and Mac ROM sales as they were costing in lost Apple machine sales.
Thirdly, there is no guarentee that those Mac owners who bought clones would have bought from Apple if the clones hadn't been available. Every time there a story here about OS X or Apple a whole bunch of people complain about the cost of Apple hardware.
Maybe they wouldn't have that financial quarter or the next, but this was in the heyday of the transition of users from m68k to PPC machines. If they wouldn't have bought from Apple then, they would have either bought from Apple in the future, or they would've moved to the Wintel platform. We can't really estimate if the clones significantly staved off movement to Wintel, unfortunately. In the end, though, I believe that the clones were a financially suicidal move for Apple. The damage done by the ending of clones was far less than clones would've done if they had continued. I know that my dream machine in the day was not an Apple machine, it was a Daystar MP machine.
Of course they don't now. Apple screwed them. First Apple dragged their feet over CHRP, then they dragged their feet over PPCP, and then they killed off any opportunity for Mototrola to sell the processors to anyone but Apple. Why should Motorola care? The documentation used to be there. IIRC, you could even get a reference motherboard layout from either IBM or Motorola. They were both committed to AIM, it was Apple who weren't.
Well, CHRP & PPCP were all part of the clone days, when they predicted you would no longer need an Apple Toolbox ROM to run the Mac OS in the future. If Apple had made that move, there would've been no ending the clone fiasco. You do have a good point, though, that IBM and Motorola were backing PREP/CHRP/PPCP pretty well until Apple yanked the carpet out from under them. Perhaps I've been forgetting Apple's role in the slow dissolution of AIM. Moves that seemed necessary at the time may have hurt them in the long term.
As for Exponential, well Apple killed them so they've no one to blaim but themselves for that.
Well, Exponential killed themselves too. Their processor was hotter, drew more power, was more expensive, and was slightly slower than the PPC 750. It was a no-brainer which chip Apple should've gone with. In the end, though, if Apple had given a little wellfare to the company, they might still have one loyal processor vendor.
Apparently, I've touched off a hot button issue for a few Slashdotters. Thanks to the AC who posted a mirror of site's content I have a few more facts straight.
Alright, it does seem a lot like spam when there's the second part of the message piggybacked on the first administrative part. I don't think there's anything wrong with the first part, but the advertisement of new services to someone who specifically asked not to have that advertisement is just cheating, basically. Fair enough. Looks like they got nailed fair and square, and that someone from Kozmo.com did show up and did try to make a decent stance for the company, so it wasn't just flogging a dead horse. Looks like she had a valid case after all.
Now that was amusing. However, I have to ask one thing. Did you have all that information about Ricci up on your webpage at the time? If so, then it could be construed that you were advocating that other people harrass him in his personal life. It seems like a needlessly spiteful amount of information to publicly post about him. I don't think I would've looked too kindly at someone who did this if I were a judge, but outright dismissing the case was a little harsh. Just be glad he demanded that Ricci return your property.
So, this guy was already a Kozmo.com customer, and he's complaining about getting administrative email from them? I think that certainly qualifies as an "established business relationship" for determining whether or not a message is "unsolicited" commercial email. How is this spam? In fact, this is a message that tells you that if you ever want to get an email update, you have to tell them "yes" instead of having to tell the "no" to not get them. If he didn't want email about his account, he should've never created one in the first place.
Admittedly, I don't have all the facts since the site is Slashdotted, but if this guy was a Kozmo.com customer, I don't see how he could've won this case on any legal merits. It sounds like Kozmo.com couldn't afford the legal costs (which would've been way more than $50) and just paid him the money to get the matter out of their hair. Maybe California's definition of spam is a little broader than those that I'm familiar with.
Well, Java is both an API and a language. Witness Jython, which is a Java-based Python interpreter that uses Java APIs instead of standard Python APIs to handle things like graphics. Perhaps I should've been more clear about the fact that Java's AWT & Swing APIs are much cleaner and easier to program for than Motif & X Windows. GTK, however, it a thing of beauty compared to those two. I do find Java's way of doing things a lot more intuitive than even GTK's way, though. While AWT & Swing are "merely" evolutionary, rather than evolutionary, they exemplars of simplicity and clean design -- especially Swing, which makes even AWT look clunky in comparison.
(I didn't know Java could do PS generation as a builtin feature. That's kind of cool.)
Quite possibly. Are you referring to attempts to port X Windows to Darwin, which has some use in Mac OS X itself, or are you perhaps referring to a rekindling of GNUStep efforts, which are attempting to clone Mac OS X?
I don't think a new GUI would have any real point to it, and I don't think that Darwin can stand on its own as a UNIX variant with just X Windows since there are already better, more mature solutions out there. Of course, perhaps, that's just my opinion.
Why do you think the official.pdf viewer is free (as beer), but the complete Acrobat package costs 245usd?
It's the same reason Photoshop costs as much as it does, even though you can work in the open formats it supports with other free tools. Acrobat is the best package for authoring PDF files. It costs that much because people are willing to pay it. You could write your own PDF authoring solution if you wanted to, but people would still probably use Acrobat because of its brand recognition and because Adobe keeps adding new plugins to Acrobat Reader that Acrobat can take advantage of.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you're missing the point. This kind of anti-cloning sentiment is very consistent with pro-life attitudes. Basically, there were a few unviable attempts at Dolly that had to be put down, and many, many more that never sucessfully grew past the initial stages of fertilization.
Pro-life people hold that a fertilized human zygote has just as much right to live as a newborn baby. They are both people, even though one is far more dependent on their mother for survival than the other. Thus, the creation of hundreds of malformed, doomed to die human beings would be considered abhorrent. This is the same mindset that considers fetal stem cell research as unethical, because it essentially involves harvesting murdered people.
Let me reiterate. The objection is that you are creating (and killing) hundreds of people to attempt to get one successful attempt. They are not saying that it's okay to abort cloned people while its not okay to abort others. They are saying that the necessity to abort failed attempts or to let them continue living broken lives with their deformities is sufficient reason to ban human cloning research.
I find an outright ban to be a bad idea, but as someone who is pro-life, I find the current failure rate to be unacceptable. You can't clone a human nowdays without doing something a little unethical. (I'm not even going to respond to CmdrTaco's outright appeal for the creation of subhuman slaves and mindless people to be killed so that their bodies can be harvested for your own immortality.)
Here's my proposal:
We should have a complete moratorium on human cloning until the cloning of mammals has a failure rate approaching natural human pregnancy. Only then can we attempt it on humans. As is, cloning is far too risky to attempt with humans. We should fund research into cloning of other animals before we attempt it with people. It's just too soon right now. If we try right now, the failured attempts, and the ruined children that come out of them, will create a public backlash that could destroy all cloning research for decades, if not longer. We cannot allow premature attempts to ruin the future of cloning.
I don't have a clue how to reproduce it. I'm convinced it's a bug in the Slash code somewhere. I've seen it disappear upon reloading the page, so you'll just have to hit Slashdot enough times for it to reappear. I've only seen it once about a week ago and today, and I hit Slashdot's main page about 10+ times over the course of a workday.
If it's incorrect behavior as you say, then it's probably a Mozilla bug too, but trying to squeeze it out of Slashdot might be hard.
The solution to your problems is to avoid using Netscape 4.x
I'm sure that this doesn't matter to you, but it occasionally happens under Mozilla too.
Better browsers end text formatting at the end of a block element such as a table.
Is that part of the standard? I thought it was just discouraged to span formatting tags across tables, not banned.
The tweakers.net article had it wrong. The Pentium 4 uses the i850 chipset, according to links I followed starting at Intel's front page, then to the Pentium 4 page, and finally to the chipset page.
The i860 and its successors were interesting chips. As I mentioned in a reply to a post underneath your original post, at the last company I worked for, we had old servers running an i860 as the CPU sitting next to modern servers with the much, much faster i960 chip running their network cards.
Of course, it was even funnier that my roommate at the time was still using a i386 PC with 8 Megs of RAM. Every day he worked with a network card that had much more processing horsepower and RAM than his PC! I used to tease him about that all the time.
Actually, there were working computers at the time. Stratus, a vendor of ultra-expensive fault-tolerant servers, has used m68k, i860, and PA-RISC processors in successive versions of their servers. The old Stratus XARs were RISC-based, and I believe that they were out in that timeframe. (It was really funny to have a machine running an i860 chip next to another machine with a i960-based network card.)
Of course, these machines would've been completely unsuitable for development of NT, but they were there.
You forgot an added bonues. If drugs were legal they can be taxed. Think of all the money that could then be poured into inner city schools if drugs were taxed.
I think the phrase "squeezing blood from a turnip" applies here. You mean, we should fund local school systems with additional local taxes on a poor community?
GODDAMMIT! I just spent 2 hours today responding to these. You're good at this.
The Bush Administration has the will, the moral committment, and the popular support necessary to put an end to the "War on Drugs". You'll see this in action within a year.
Actually, the War on Drugs is pretty popular with the public, particularly the blue-collar rural populace, which is a strong Republican voting block. Years of Reagan activity against drug use has taken root in the heart of conservative voters. Bush can't and won't end the War on Drugs. If he felt that it needed to be curtailed, he would do it quietly, like he has done for environmental programs under the EPA and Department of Interior in his new budget proposal. There's a lot of research, investigation, and enforcement programs that got cut that the public doesn't know about.
(I spent about an hour watching CSPAN when they had a conference one day on all the environmental budget cuts. I found it ironic that he said that the restrictions on arsenic in drinking water needs more scientific research while cutting several departments responsible for that kind of research and the departments that would've tested the drinking water for toxin if the research did pan out.)
Anyway, if he wanted to cut drug enforcement, he'd do it quietly. However, the Bush administration is taking a tough stance on "renewing" the War on Drugs. You can also note that the Republican-lead Congress last year approved more than $1.3 billion to fight drug trade.
Irrelevant. This Administration is not corrupt.
I believe that have adequately responded to this in another post. If you wish to close your eyes to the truth, that is your problem. George W. Bush has committed perjury and stock fraud. He has been responsible to the condemning of personal property that was later given over as lucrative real estate to the owner of the Texas Rangers. He has been rewarding Oil and Mining companies by rolling back government programs intended to protect our people from pollution and to protect our land for future generations. He has opposed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform measure, the best means of reducing corporate/union purchases of politicians, and supported another bill which institutionalizes soft money in a manner that allows wealthy individuals (Republican backers) to contribute millions while restricting unions (Democratic Party backers). He is attempting a huge tax cut intended to profit the richest 1% of our nation, and he has used previous existing tax holes to get out of millions in property taxes in Texas. Hah! People think this is the "moral" candidate.
Bush comes from the same stock as the man who was up his neck in the Iran-Contra affair, who was responsible for the S&L scandals, and who has an even higher body count surrounding him than Bill Clinton. He and his brothers have gotten their power through illicit business deals and use of the Bush family name. They were born into wealth and have ridden a train of Bush family supporters into power. Certainly, if he wasn't a Bush, the Harken oil fiasco would've taken care of him a long time ago, and we'd never be hearing about him now.
Open your eyes! The Bush administration promises to be the most corrupt in years. It's Teapot Dome all over again, with government kickbacks for oil all the way. The Bush budget cut is rife with budget slashes for everything that Oil, Gas, and Mining didn't like. Bush's past business dealing, and his dealing as a Texas governor shows that he will be more than willing to do what it takes to preserve his own interests and keep his family wealthy.
Pro-drug sentiment has been highest among liberals, such as the Democrat, the Natrual Order, and the Green parties, and more centrist anti-government parties, such as the Liberatarians. Conservative parties, such as the Republican and Reform parties, and ultra-conservative parties, such as the (still living) Temperance party have very strong anti-drug statements.
Conservatives are people who wish to preserve traditional values. These include pro-life stances, anti-drug stances, censorship of "indecent" material, "zero tolerance" crime policies, expanded law enforcement powers, etc. Some of these can be construed to be liberty constraining. Listen, I don't usually advocate this kind of thing because I disagree with their views, but I think you really need to look into the Liberatarian Party. They seem much more in line with your beliefs on freedom at all costs then the Republicans. That's untrue. Not everything is either Black or White. Haven't you ever heard of shades of grey? If this person can believe simultaneously in a restrictive view of one policy issue and and a freedom-loving view of another policy issue, then who are you to tell them that they can't?
I'm very pro-government when it comes to environmental issues, but very anti-government when it comes to copyright legislation. I'm pro-life yet I don't have a problem with cloning research/genetic manipulation and would like government to stay out of it. These are alternating views of desiring the government to place restrictions and desiring them not to place restrictions. It's not a matter of one or the other, black or white. I'm free to hold these views, and they are self-consistent. I am neither an anarchist nor a facist. I am, like 99% of America, somewhere in between.
The problem is that you are missing the basic fact that Conservatism is not 100% pro-Freedom. The strong involvement of the Christian Coallition in the Republican party means that certain religious "hot-button" issues will continue to dominate their politics.
Freedom is a glorious thing, but too much freedom is dangerous when taken to the extreme. Should people be free to murder someone who is inconvenient to them? Should people be free to take what they want and only pay for it if they feel like it? Should people be free to drive on whatever side of the road they want and under the influence of whatever drugs they want to take? Should people be free to dump toxic waste in a stream to avoid the cost of safely processing it? Should people be free to sexually molest children and sell images of it to other people, encouraging them to do the same?
Our founding fathers certainly disagreed with some of these, and probably would disagree with the others (pollution and drunk driving) if they were an issue in their day and time. The Constitution grants the government the right to levy taxes, regulate interstate commerce, and draft soldiers for war -- all of which are freedom-restricting powers. I think you yourself need to do some critical thinking about the nature of freedom, the views of your adopted party, and the facts involved in each case. You can dismiss things which are a matter of public record and thump your chest about "thinking for yourself" all you want, but all you're really doing is deluding yourself to justify your chosen viewpoint. At some point, you have to accept what someone else says about something you've never proven to yourself, or you can't get anywhere in life. (Certainly, you couldn't get anywhere in physics and chemistry classes if you had to reprove everything yourself!) You seem to ignore the facts about the heavy involvement of conservatives in the War on Drugs that others place forward to continue your attack on liberals. In terms of mathematical proofs, you are changing the postulates to justify your theorem.
Incidentally, a liberal arts major typically includes philosophy, literature, and psychology/sociology -- all of which requires one to research and critically analyze the actions, words, and minds of others. They also typically try to teach you to be open-minded to the beliefs of others and to not dismiss them as "soft-headed." You really should've gotten a better-rounded education if this is honestly your opinion of those classes. I know that they've been an enjoyable change of pace from the heavy math and programming curriculum that I'm taking.
(Of course, this is all assuming that this isn't all some beautifully crafted and tenacious trolling. If so, you got me. Look at how much I typed!)
I'd rather have someone informed, who has a better view of how things are (one beyond just their little circle of friends and family) making the important decisions that I can't trust my neighbors to make correctly. Thank you, but I'll keep drinking my local water thanks to the efforts of those who seek to keep people from deciding to dump poison in our rivers instead of choosing for themselves to save money.
Liberatarianism is founded on one of two beliefs: (a) people are inherently good, sensible, and when given the opportunity will choose not harm one another; (b) let me do what I want and fuck everyone else. The first kind of people tend to grow up when they get in the real world and become Republicans or Democrats, depending on which issues of freedom are more important. The second kind of people are why we need lawmakers to protect the public with their own money.
Anarchy/liberatarianism is counterproductive to the survival of the species. Get informed on global warming. That alone should be reason enough to see why letting people do what they want is a suicidal prospect for humanity and civilization. If you're in category B, then go live in the woods. Our collective needs are greater than yours.
It's no coincidence that the Left always resorts to personal attacks, smear tactics, and "digging up dirt" on their political adversaries. They can't win any other way.
Three words: conservative talk radio.
<sarcasm>
I'm sure that such respectful, well-known conservative members of the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, have never stooped to character assassination. Why, it would be ridiculous to insinuate that their entire media empires are based off of namecalling and pigeonholing people into a nebulous, evil group known as "liberals" who can have their views safely dismissed as irrelevant for belonging to this group. They're just the nicest people who always stick to the issues and argue their points elloquently without rhetoric and blustering. In fact, they'd never stoop so low as to run comedy segments with people impersonating well-known Democrats and making fools of them.
</sarcasm>
Oh, and how about Attorney General John Ashcroft's character assassination attempts?
You know, it's surprising to hear a conservative willing to call GWB's drug experimentation in 1972 "alleged" when it's clearly on record and to dismiss it as unimportant since it happened so long ago. Where was all this sympathy for experimentation when Bill Clinton admitted to trying pot in the height of the hippie era? You didn't see much sympathy from Democrats about Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct, about the Whitewater affair, or about his pot comment. Republicans were howling for blood. Oh, but now that a Republican is in office, they seem pretty quiet about his lying under oath, his stock fraud, and his excessive seizure of private property for real estate profitteering.
What? You haven't heard about all this? Maybe the Left Wing just isn't as serious about muckraking as you say they are.
There's a difference between personal attacks and revealing that a person has a history of corruption and bad leadership. Facts are facts. His record clearly shows that he is not the man to be leading the war on drugs. This info's all out there. It took me only about 15 minutes with Altavista to find this information. If this is all so clearly out there, why isn't the vast "Left Wing Mudslinging Conspiracy" promoting it more, like the Republicans did with Clinton's shady record?
Your argument is false. Republican's have been far more prone to the use of lies and character assassination than Democrats for as far back as I can remember (the Reagan years).
I'm not so sure about that. Remember how long it took to get AGP on PowerMacs? Also, PowerMacs only recently moved to PC-133 memory after it being out for a few years. I'd like to see DDR SDRAM in a Mac sometime. They're also still using 64-bit, 33 MHz PCI slots when they could be using 66 MHz slots. I think they're also still only supporting UltraATA/66 instead of UltraATA/100.
Sure, they were quick to move on USB and their own Firewire, but they aren't exactly riding on the bleeding edge on every single component in their systems.
Please, please do not flame or crapflood these people. I have just taken 90 minutes to write a letter to them to try to reason with them, and I hope that it won't get lost in the flames.
Really, if we want to help Sean, we must act positively. Write messages supporting him and explaining our position about this. Don't email bomb them, send them threats, or fill their box with obscense messages. That will never help Sean out.
Agreed. I mean, the very idea that Python, Perl, PHP, and TCL of all things had anything to do with Sun's stance on Java is just ridiculous. TCL?!? Python, Perl, and PHP don't really compete in the same space as Java, but TCL is just really stretching things. Of course, they do have a book on TCL programming to sell...
It was just an attempt to plug their books. The arguments were very weak. I mean, with all the Oracle developers out there, open sourcing their database products would just be a road to having their support sales gutted by a crop of instant competitors pushing their own erstwhile products. Oracle isn't that stupid.
Actually some of us do read at 0 threshhold to catch the rare insightful AC post. I mod down some of the worst stuff at 0, like racist slurs or obscense ascii art, but I typically just ignore the three word nonsense. I don't read at 0 because I think trolls are funny. I read at 0 to catch the people who can't or don't want to use a login to post good stuff.
I mod down named crap flooders whenever I get the chance. I don't touch an AC unless it's something really offensive, like racist slurs or goatse.cx ascii art.
There have been a few other posts about this. See my earlier response to another post about that here.
I'll answer your post with a question. Why should a programmer be free to style their code anyway they want?
The point of a programming language is to communicate instructions to a computer in human-readable format. I still maintain that people who complain about being forced to write readable code are the ones who write the most unreadable code. TMTOWDTI, Perl's motto, is the main reason that when the first Obfuscated Perl Code contest was announced, many Slashdotter's joked that it was redundant. Consistent style is a necessity for maintainability. It helps to allow others (and maybe yourself a year later) to understand what you were doing when you wrote a piece of code.
Honestly, if you think everyone should be able to write code in whatever style they see fit, you've never worked on a large project before. Languages with more freedom just force people to place other personal standards on how their code must be formatted within their project or lose readability of code as multiple programmer styles conflict. Python forces a consistent standard across all development, making it an great relief to maintain.
I will admit that that method, dating back to Ada, Pascal, and the venerable ALGOL, does have its merits for long pieces of code. Typically, it enforces spacing as well, since single-line statements just don't look right in this style of language or may be against the grammar.
I like Python's style and I like the ALGOL-derived style as well.
Apparently, I've touched off a hot button issue for a few Slashdotters. Thanks to the AC who posted a mirror of site's content I have a few more facts straight.
Alright, it does seem a lot like spam when there's the second part of the message piggybacked on the first administrative part. I don't think there's anything wrong with the first part, but the advertisement of new services to someone who specifically asked not to have that advertisement is just cheating, basically. Fair enough. Looks like they got nailed fair and square, and that someone from Kozmo.com did show up and did try to make a decent stance for the company, so it wasn't just flogging a dead horse. Looks like she had a valid case after all.
Now that was amusing. However, I have to ask one thing. Did you have all that information about Ricci up on your webpage at the time? If so, then it could be construed that you were advocating that other people harrass him in his personal life. It seems like a needlessly spiteful amount of information to publicly post about him. I don't think I would've looked too kindly at someone who did this if I were a judge, but outright dismissing the case was a little harsh. Just be glad he demanded that Ricci return your property.
So, this guy was already a Kozmo.com customer, and he's complaining about getting administrative email from them? I think that certainly qualifies as an "established business relationship" for determining whether or not a message is "unsolicited" commercial email. How is this spam? In fact, this is a message that tells you that if you ever want to get an email update, you have to tell them "yes" instead of having to tell the "no" to not get them. If he didn't want email about his account, he should've never created one in the first place.
Admittedly, I don't have all the facts since the site is Slashdotted, but if this guy was a Kozmo.com customer, I don't see how he could've won this case on any legal merits. It sounds like Kozmo.com couldn't afford the legal costs (which would've been way more than $50) and just paid him the money to get the matter out of their hair. Maybe California's definition of spam is a little broader than those that I'm familiar with.
Well, Java is both an API and a language. Witness Jython, which is a Java-based Python interpreter that uses Java APIs instead of standard Python APIs to handle things like graphics. Perhaps I should've been more clear about the fact that Java's AWT & Swing APIs are much cleaner and easier to program for than Motif & X Windows. GTK, however, it a thing of beauty compared to those two. I do find Java's way of doing things a lot more intuitive than even GTK's way, though. While AWT & Swing are "merely" evolutionary, rather than evolutionary, they exemplars of simplicity and clean design -- especially Swing, which makes even AWT look clunky in comparison.
(I didn't know Java could do PS generation as a builtin feature. That's kind of cool.)
Quite possibly. Are you referring to attempts to port X Windows to Darwin, which has some use in Mac OS X itself, or are you perhaps referring to a rekindling of GNUStep efforts, which are attempting to clone Mac OS X?
I don't think a new GUI would have any real point to it, and I don't think that Darwin can stand on its own as a UNIX variant with just X Windows since there are already better, more mature solutions out there. Of course, perhaps, that's just my opinion.
Why do you think the official .pdf viewer is free (as beer), but the complete Acrobat package costs 245usd?
It's the same reason Photoshop costs as much as it does, even though you can work in the open formats it supports with other free tools. Acrobat is the best package for authoring PDF files. It costs that much because people are willing to pay it. You could write your own PDF authoring solution if you wanted to, but people would still probably use Acrobat because of its brand recognition and because Adobe keeps adding new plugins to Acrobat Reader that Acrobat can take advantage of.