Ballmer shoots himself in the foot so badly with this argument that it's not even funny. The reason why some of the underlying design of Linux (and several other operating systems) is 20 years old is because it works! If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We've been using round wheels on vehicles now for thousands of years; if Microsoft came up with a square wheel tomorrow, all of the platitudes and slick marketing campaigns in the world would not change the basic fact that "newer" does not mean "better."
Ballmer is (apparently) suggesting that it is preferable to throw away stable, dependable, and well-established technologies in favor of the latest unproven flash-in-the-pan offerings from the think tank at Redmond. Well, no thanks, Steve. All too often, we've seen what can happen when one goes down that road.
Don't you think that Slashdot readers are intelligent enough to surf over to CNN or the BBC or (insert news site here?) These sites have all of the latest updates that anybody could want. What can Slashdot possibly contribute to this other than posting an article that is going to result in a whole lot of political flaming?
(Hit the damn "Submit" button instead of "Preview.")
To continue, the fan kept on giving me problems, and so I called Dell back. This time I got an American operator, who went back over the notes that the Indian operator had taken during the previous call. According to those notes, I was having problems with my processor fan, and he had asked me to do a bunch of things that I had never heard of before! I explained that I had been very explicit: the problem was the PSU fan, I had thoroughly blown it out with compressed air, the fan was noisy and dying, and I needed a replacement.
Within five minutes, he had placed an order to send me a new power supply and I was on my way. Long story short: I don't mind people who come here to work for their own slice of the American dream.. that's what the US is supposed to be all about. I don't even so much mind the process of farming out work to overseas groups. But when your job description is to take service calls from primarily English-speaking people in America, you're going to end up with a lot of frustration if the people you've got doing that job cannot speak English very well.
The power supply fan on my Dimension 4100 was starting to go out, and so I called Dell tech support to get them to send out a new power supply (the machine is still under warranty.) I ended up talking to an Indian tech support guy. I spent about 10 minutes explaining that I know perfectly well where the power supply is, what the fan is supposed to sound like, and what it sounds like now. I told him that I couldn't go into the Windows "Control Panel" because I'm not running Linux.
After a lot of verbal gymnastics, he ended up telling me that the fans have been somewhat problematic and that I should try unseating and reseating the fan within the power supply frame over the next couple of days and see if that makes any difference, and to call back if it didn't.
Remember kids, if you criticize the current actions of the current government of Israel, you're an anti-Semite.
We've learned this lesson well in America, too; if you criticize the current actions of the current government of the United States, you're a terrorist.
Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which is considered by many critics to be the greatest motion picture ever made, only received a single Academy Award for its screenplay. This despite the fact that it contained a riveting performance by Welles (and others, notably Dorothy Comingore), unparalleled make-up work, some of the most technically adept cinematography ever seen (before or since), and an inventiveness that influences movies to this day.
It's generally accepted that Kane's poor showing at the Oscars was due largely to the influence of William Randolph Hearst, whose life the film was based on. The reasons are largely irrelevant; the basic fact is that Welles was shafted by the Academy. However, history has judged Citizen Kane rather differently than the fickle and politically-charged audiences of 1941 did. It took Kane several years to get back on the front burner of the American moviegoer's conscience, but since then, it's never left.
The bottom line is that a movie's success (or lack thereof) at the Oscars doesn't necessarily translate into success for how the film is judged as time goes on. This is why in 50 years, people will still be watching Citizen Kane but you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who's even seen Gladiator. (Apologies to Gladiator fans, but it just wasn't that good.)
Incidentally, as somebody who has used both the Free and Commercial versions of Qt, I can vouch for the quality of Trolltech's support. Any technical questions that we've had about the library have been promptly answered, bug fixes have been handled well, and they are always receptive to requests for new features.
If I go into a place like Circuit City or Best Buy, wander over to the CD section, and buy the soundtrack for a movie such as The Fellowship of the Ring, I can expect to pay about $17.99 USD. Yet I can now wander over to the DVD section and pick up the DVD for that same movie for $19.99 USD -- and there I get the whole movie plus commentary tracks, deleted scenes, documentaries, etc. The soundtrack is only a couple of bucks less and all I get is the soundtrack.
And yet Hillary Rosen and her goose-stepping Gestapo at the RIAA complain about falling CD sales figures and they have the nerve to act surprised. What's that you say, Hillary? CD sales are off? No shit, Sherlock.
The fact of that matter is that 90% of what the RIAA puts out is complete garbage and 100% of it is overpriced. They're well aware of this fact, but really don't care; they're more concerned about preserving their ancient sales model and revenue stream than they are about putting out a high-quality product for a good value. Perhaps that's why DVD sales are skyrocketing and CD sales are flat. DVD movies are cheap, high quality, and offer a lot of bang for the buck.
The fact that DVDs are outselling $20 CDs that only have one or two decent tracks on them should come as a surprise to nobody.
Dude, calm down. Take a deep breath. Go outside for a walk or something.
Nobody is suggesting that you (or anybody else that is unable or unwilling to help out financially) should feel obligated to send money to MandrakeSoft (or anybody else, for that matter.) The point that the original poster was trying to make was that if people use Mandrake and have been toying with the idea of sending them a contribution, then now would be a pretty good time to do it. If you want to help out by writing code, then that's great! Code away! But telling somebody to "shut the fuck up" simply for suggesting another way to help out is enormously immature.
If you couldn't care less about the whole thing, then there's no reason to get worked up over people making monetary contributions, right? I know that I will do so (largely as a result of your post.) By and large, it's a free hemisphere; folks are allowed to do what they want with their money. If you disagree with how I or others spend our own money, je m'en fiche.
The Voter News Service did not call states for one candidate or the other. It is up to media organizations (i.e., news channels) to actually make calls like that. Incidentally, do you remember the first station to call Florida for Al Gore in 2000? It was a little outfit called the Fox News Channel. What's this complaining about "liberals", again?
Let's be frank: Widespread belief in evolution is due to its pop culture status.
No offense intended, but this is one of the most inane things I have read on Slashdot in five years.
You may want to consider that widespread "belief" in evolution is because it is part of standard biology curriculum all around the world. And it is part of this curriculum because of the weight of the evidence in favor of it, not because the Illuminati, the ACLU, and the homosexuals have a clandestine conspiracy with the Evil Atheist Underground in order to enslave children so that they may be fattened and eaten. (This is extreme hyperbole, of course, but your talk of evolution as "propaganda to further a sociological agenda" is a fine example of fundamentalist paranoia.)
Here's an honest question for you: There are millions and millions of biologists, zoologists, botanists, paleontologists, etc. all over the world. Biological evolution frames the work that these folks do each and every day. If evolution is as flawed as some of you folks seem to think it is, don't you think that we'd see some major scientific outcry? All that I can see is hemming and hawing from a small but vocal number of "creation scientists", most of whom are from the US, and almost all of whom are Protestant fundamentalists.
The problem is that it's taught as more true than religion, and the atheism aspect of evolution ("man evolved from apes") isn't seperated from the observable theory ("life evolves to the survival of the fittest.")
If you believe that biological evolution predicts that "man evolved from apes", then it is perhaps unsurprising that you have problems with the theory. Let us cut the creationist hyperbole and consider what it really predicts: that mankind and modern apes have a distant, common ancestor. How is this the "atheism aspect" of evolution? What does this say about the existence or nonexistence of God? Be specific. Accuracy counts.
Come on, now. Be brave and say what you really mean: twin-nested common descent is not the "atheism aspect", it is the "anti-Protestant-fundamentalist aspect" of evolution. That would be an accurate statement. If you believe that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old and that the book of Genesis is the literal truth, then you're obviously going to have problems with biological evolution (and most of the rest of the natural sciences, as well.) However, you should know that you are in the minority; the vast majority of Christians have no problems reconciling their faith with obvious scientific fact.
Science education is about the presentation of the current state of the art of various fields of study. This includes chemistry, physics, and yes.. biology. Evolutionary common descent happens to be part of the state of the art in biology (and has been for some time.) That's why it's taught in schools. There are millions of biologists, botanists, zoologists, etc. around the world. If biological evolution is as flawed as some people claim it is, then you would think that there would be massive scientific outcry against the theory. Instead, what we have is a small but vocal handful of "creation scientists", the majority of which are located in the U.S. and just happen to be (surprise!) Protestant fundamentalists.
What does this tell you?
Finally, to get this more on-topic, it should be noted that evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the formation or the age of the universe, the formation or the age of the Earth, the validity of the Koran, or the score of yesterday's Giants-49ers game. It is a biological theory that discusses changes in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all it is.
While this is not usually something of concern, there were TV edits made that removed "the Libyans" from the first movie, shortly after the 9-11 events.
I can believe that overly-nervous TV executives would want to cut this out, but I'm at a loss to actually figure out how they would do it. The Libyans are sort of a central plot point to the film (after all, they are the whole reason that Marty ends up in 1955 to begin with!) Has anybody seen this edit?
Do you realize how massive a moon-landing hoax conspiracy would have to be? We're not talking about a handful of NASA officials concocting some hairbrain story and then passing it on to the media. We are talking about a national effort that involved hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of participants. Consider:
The U.S. government enlisted the help of many private defense and aerospace contractors in order to reach the moon. For example, the lunar module was built by hundreds (if not thousands) of engineers at Grumman Aerospace. Are you suggesting that all of these people were "in on" your conspiracy, or that they were simply duped?
The national (and in many cases, international) media was very close to NASA during the years of the moon landings. Reporters were routinely given access to the Apollo crews in the months and weeks before their launch, whereby they could follow the crew around and record their day-to-day activities. There was also a large amount of technical cooperation between NASA and the media for things such as the live feeds from the moon. Certainly the media would have had some complicity in your conspiracy; have all of these people remained silent, as well?
The Soviet military establishment would have jumped at the chance to demonstrate that the American capitalist pig-dog "moon landings" were, in fact, fake. Is it your contention that the Soviets, even with their considerable (at the time) intelligence infrastructure within the borders of the United States, would not have known about such a far-reaching conspiracy? Or are they part of it, as well?
Finally, let us not forget the names of three men: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. These were the astronauts that perished in the Apollo 1 fire, an incident that almost got the entire program shut down. If we never actually went to the moon, then why would NASA have to have launches in the first place? How do the deaths of these brave men fit into your conspiracy theory? I suspect that you find them rather inconvenient.
Lots of things bother me about moon-landing conspiracy theorists, but they way that they callously disregard the sacrifice of the Apollo 1 astronauts is by far the most disgraceful thing about them.
When most users are having a problem with something, it's easier and far more reliable to fix it at the computer then to try and educate every user.
I don't disagree with this, but the fact remains that the set of C programmers that work in OpenBSD environments is a vanishingly small subset of the set of C programmers as a whole. The functions to which the original poster refers are not a part of the C language and are not available under any of the environments that I develop for (those being IRIX and Linux.) So if I have a choice between educating people on how to use their tools effectively and simply letting them go on blissfully abusing said tools, I tend to lean towards the former option.
.. if only those functions (strlcpy, strlcat) were part of the standard C library. They are of little use on platforms where they are not available.
In the interim, it is more productive to make sure that developers are more clueful when it comes to the standard string-handling facilities in C. It is really not that much of a chore to write safe string-handling code in C; the problem is that most C programmers aren't taught how to do so. That's an education problem, not a language problem.
Oh my goodness, if we don't save the humpback whale, the Earth is going to become uninhabitable by humans!
Are you suggesting that environmentalists actually believe this? That some freaky alien ship is going to come to Earth and kill us all if the whales disappear? I'm not an environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I know that a lot of them have some pretty fringe beliefs, and I don't believe I have ever heard this particular theory put forth.
Hey, dude? It's only a movie. Lighten up.
"Over-the-top environmentalist message"?
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Let me get this straight.. you honestly believe that a statement like "At present rates of hunting, humpback whales will become extinct in the next 50 years" is an "over-the-top environmentalist message?" You're kidding, right? If you don't care about the whales, that's your business, but the whole humpback sub-plot was not about the crew of the Enterprise chaining themselves to trees or railing about the evil of "multinational corporate polluters." There's a world of difference between conservation and radical, over-the-top (as you say) environmentalism.
If you didn't like The Voyage Home, then that's fine, but try to keep your criticism credible.
What's the correct term? "Pro-choice" is a laughable euphemism..
If "pro-choice" is inappropriate, then "pro-abortion" is even more so. As an example, take my stance. I believe that with regards to an issue that deeply divides so many people and has no real scientific consensus either way, it is not the job of the government to step in and make a decision for everybody. Rather, it is up to individuals (with the help of their families, medical professionals, etc.) to exercise a bit of personal responsibility and make their own choice.
Personally, if I were ever in a situation involving an unwanted pregnancy, I can tell you that abortion would not be a consideration.. not for one minute. However, I do not presume to make that decision for everybody. Now, by your terminology, I am "pro-abortion." I hope you can understand why many reasonable folks object to this slur and consider it to be little more than an emotionally-loaded phrase concoted purely for debate purposes.
Okay, so my first assumption was correct and my second assumption was wrong. I would then again ask that you not blame your almost unbelievably skewed views of modern scientific theories on the theories themselves. Just because Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps says "the Big Bang says there was a bunch of empty space, and then there's this BOOM, and then there's a bunch of rocks and dirt floating around, and right soon you've got a bunch of monkeys and then they got together and formed the ACLU" doesn't make it an accurate depiction of what the theory actually says.
If what you have posted is indeed the sum total of your understanding of the Big Bang, cosmology, biology, and evolutionary common descent, then it is no small wonder that you find them to be silly and unbelievable. However, I would kindly ask that you not blame your inestimable ignorance on the theories themselves, but rather on a deficient education.
However, I find it more likely that you are engaging in an attempt at witty hyperbole, attempting to ridicule modern science (the same modern science that gave you the very keyboard that you use to lash out at it) and make it out to be an atheistic tool of secular humanists with such loaded phrases as "for no reason" and "by accident." This is deceitful and treacherous, and has (unfortunately) become a standard tactic of the anti-science crowd.
The truth, if any of you were willing to listen to it, is that modern science (even some of the more "evil" sciences, such as cosmology, chemistry and biology) are completely silent on religious issues. They do not attempt to answer the big "why" questions, despite your claim that science says that things happen "for no reason" and "by accident." The vast majority of Christians around the world have no problem reconciling biological evolutionary common descent with their faith; perhaps you ought to ask them what their secret is.
Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer shoots himself in the foot so badly with this argument that it's not even funny. The reason why some of the underlying design of Linux (and several other operating systems) is 20 years old is because it works! If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We've been using round wheels on vehicles now for thousands of years; if Microsoft came up with a square wheel tomorrow, all of the platitudes and slick marketing campaigns in the world would not change the basic fact that "newer" does not mean "better."
Ballmer is (apparently) suggesting that it is preferable to throw away stable, dependable, and well-established technologies in favor of the latest unproven flash-in-the-pan offerings from the think tank at Redmond. Well, no thanks, Steve. All too often, we've seen what can happen when one goes down that road.
Correction: They were on the Web.
Unfortunately, nobody knew what a Slashdotting was in 1985.
Don't you think that Slashdot readers are intelligent enough to surf over to CNN or the BBC or (insert news site here?) These sites have all of the latest updates that anybody could want. What can Slashdot possibly contribute to this other than posting an article that is going to result in a whole lot of political flaming?
Just curious.
(Hit the damn "Submit" button instead of "Preview.")
.. that's what the US is supposed to be all about. I don't even so much mind the process of farming out work to overseas groups. But when your job description is to take service calls from primarily English-speaking people in America, you're going to end up with a lot of frustration if the people you've got doing that job cannot speak English very well.
To continue, the fan kept on giving me problems, and so I called Dell back. This time I got an American operator, who went back over the notes that the Indian operator had taken during the previous call. According to those notes, I was having problems with my processor fan, and he had asked me to do a bunch of things that I had never heard of before! I explained that I had been very explicit: the problem was the PSU fan, I had thoroughly blown it out with compressed air, the fan was noisy and dying, and I needed a replacement.
Within five minutes, he had placed an order to send me a new power supply and I was on my way. Long story short: I don't mind people who come here to work for their own slice of the American dream
I had a similar experience just last week.
The power supply fan on my Dimension 4100 was starting to go out, and so I called Dell tech support to get them to send out a new power supply (the machine is still under warranty.) I ended up talking to an Indian tech support guy. I spent about 10 minutes explaining that I know perfectly well where the power supply is, what the fan is supposed to sound like, and what it sounds like now. I told him that I couldn't go into the Windows "Control Panel" because I'm not running Linux.
After a lot of verbal gymnastics, he ended up telling me that the fans have been somewhat problematic and that I should try unseating and reseating the fan within the power supply frame over the next couple of days and see if that makes any difference, and to call back if it didn't.
I can't wait for the next series of ads from Focus on the Family:
MASTURBATION PROVIDES AID TO TERRORISTS
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; float y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
And what would be your suggestion for the value of y? Zero times anything is zero.
Remember kids, if you criticize the current actions of the current government of Israel, you're an anti-Semite.
We've learned this lesson well in America, too; if you criticize the current actions of the current government of the United States, you're a terrorist.
Aren't sweeping generalizations fun?
Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which is considered by many critics to be the greatest motion picture ever made, only received a single Academy Award for its screenplay. This despite the fact that it contained a riveting performance by Welles (and others, notably Dorothy Comingore), unparalleled make-up work, some of the most technically adept cinematography ever seen (before or since), and an inventiveness that influences movies to this day.
It's generally accepted that Kane's poor showing at the Oscars was due largely to the influence of William Randolph Hearst, whose life the film was based on. The reasons are largely irrelevant; the basic fact is that Welles was shafted by the Academy. However, history has judged Citizen Kane rather differently than the fickle and politically-charged audiences of 1941 did. It took Kane several years to get back on the front burner of the American moviegoer's conscience, but since then, it's never left.
The bottom line is that a movie's success (or lack thereof) at the Oscars doesn't necessarily translate into success for how the film is judged as time goes on. This is why in 50 years, people will still be watching Citizen Kane but you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who's even seen Gladiator. (Apologies to Gladiator fans, but it just wasn't that good.)
I would be only too happy to!
Qt/X11 Free Edition (Unix)
Qt/Embedded Free Edition
Qt/Windows Non-Commercial Edition
The key word there is "commercial."
Qt is free if you're developing free software.
Incidentally, as somebody who has used both the Free and Commercial versions of Qt, I can vouch for the quality of Trolltech's support. Any technical questions that we've had about the library have been promptly answered, bug fixes have been handled well, and they are always receptive to requests for new features.
Absolutely agree.
If I go into a place like Circuit City or Best Buy, wander over to the CD section, and buy the soundtrack for a movie such as The Fellowship of the Ring, I can expect to pay about $17.99 USD. Yet I can now wander over to the DVD section and pick up the DVD for that same movie for $19.99 USD -- and there I get the whole movie plus commentary tracks, deleted scenes, documentaries, etc. The soundtrack is only a couple of bucks less and all I get is the soundtrack.
And yet Hillary Rosen and her goose-stepping Gestapo at the RIAA complain about falling CD sales figures and they have the nerve to act surprised. What's that you say, Hillary? CD sales are off? No shit, Sherlock.
The fact of that matter is that 90% of what the RIAA puts out is complete garbage and 100% of it is overpriced. They're well aware of this fact, but really don't care; they're more concerned about preserving their ancient sales model and revenue stream than they are about putting out a high-quality product for a good value. Perhaps that's why DVD sales are skyrocketing and CD sales are flat. DVD movies are cheap, high quality, and offer a lot of bang for the buck.
The fact that DVDs are outselling $20 CDs that only have one or two decent tracks on them should come as a surprise to nobody.
Dude, calm down. Take a deep breath. Go outside for a walk or something.
Nobody is suggesting that you (or anybody else that is unable or unwilling to help out financially) should feel obligated to send money to MandrakeSoft (or anybody else, for that matter.) The point that the original poster was trying to make was that if people use Mandrake and have been toying with the idea of sending them a contribution, then now would be a pretty good time to do it. If you want to help out by writing code, then that's great! Code away! But telling somebody to "shut the fuck up" simply for suggesting another way to help out is enormously immature.
If you couldn't care less about the whole thing, then there's no reason to get worked up over people making monetary contributions, right? I know that I will do so (largely as a result of your post.) By and large, it's a free hemisphere; folks are allowed to do what they want with their money. If you disagree with how I or others spend our own money, je m'en fiche.
"VNS liberals?" Are you cray-see?
The Voter News Service did not call states for one candidate or the other. It is up to media organizations (i.e., news channels) to actually make calls like that. Incidentally, do you remember the first station to call Florida for Al Gore in 2000? It was a little outfit called the Fox News Channel. What's this complaining about "liberals", again?
Let's be frank: Widespread belief in evolution is due to its pop culture status.
No offense intended, but this is one of the most inane things I have read on Slashdot in five years.
You may want to consider that widespread "belief" in evolution is because it is part of standard biology curriculum all around the world. And it is part of this curriculum because of the weight of the evidence in favor of it, not because the Illuminati, the ACLU, and the homosexuals have a clandestine conspiracy with the Evil Atheist Underground in order to enslave children so that they may be fattened and eaten. (This is extreme hyperbole, of course, but your talk of evolution as "propaganda to further a sociological agenda" is a fine example of fundamentalist paranoia.)
Here's an honest question for you: There are millions and millions of biologists, zoologists, botanists, paleontologists, etc. all over the world. Biological evolution frames the work that these folks do each and every day. If evolution is as flawed as some of you folks seem to think it is, don't you think that we'd see some major scientific outcry? All that I can see is hemming and hawing from a small but vocal number of "creation scientists", most of whom are from the US, and almost all of whom are Protestant fundamentalists.
What does this tell you?
The problem is that it's taught as more true than religion, and the atheism aspect of evolution ("man evolved from apes") isn't seperated from the observable theory ("life evolves to the survival of the fittest.")
.. biology. Evolutionary common descent happens to be part of the state of the art in biology (and has been for some time.) That's why it's taught in schools. There are millions of biologists, botanists, zoologists, etc. around the world. If biological evolution is as flawed as some people claim it is, then you would think that there would be massive scientific outcry against the theory. Instead, what we have is a small but vocal handful of "creation scientists", the majority of which are located in the U.S. and just happen to be (surprise!) Protestant fundamentalists.
If you believe that biological evolution predicts that "man evolved from apes", then it is perhaps unsurprising that you have problems with the theory. Let us cut the creationist hyperbole and consider what it really predicts: that mankind and modern apes have a distant, common ancestor. How is this the "atheism aspect" of evolution? What does this say about the existence or nonexistence of God? Be specific. Accuracy counts.
Come on, now. Be brave and say what you really mean: twin-nested common descent is not the "atheism aspect", it is the "anti-Protestant-fundamentalist aspect" of evolution. That would be an accurate statement. If you believe that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old and that the book of Genesis is the literal truth, then you're obviously going to have problems with biological evolution (and most of the rest of the natural sciences, as well.) However, you should know that you are in the minority; the vast majority of Christians have no problems reconciling their faith with obvious scientific fact.
Science education is about the presentation of the current state of the art of various fields of study. This includes chemistry, physics, and yes
What does this tell you?
Finally, to get this more on-topic, it should be noted that evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the formation or the age of the universe, the formation or the age of the Earth, the validity of the Koran, or the score of yesterday's Giants-49ers game. It is a biological theory that discusses changes in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all it is.
While this is not usually something of concern, there were TV edits made that removed "the Libyans" from the first movie, shortly after the 9-11 events.
I can believe that overly-nervous TV executives would want to cut this out, but I'm at a loss to actually figure out how they would do it. The Libyans are sort of a central plot point to the film (after all, they are the whole reason that Marty ends up in 1955 to begin with!) Has anybody seen this edit?
- The U.S. government enlisted the help of many private defense and aerospace contractors in order to reach the moon. For example, the lunar module was built by hundreds (if not thousands) of engineers at Grumman Aerospace. Are you suggesting that all of these people were "in on" your conspiracy, or that they were simply duped?
- The national (and in many cases, international) media was very close to NASA during the years of the moon landings. Reporters were routinely given access to the Apollo crews in the months and weeks before their launch, whereby they could follow the crew around and record their day-to-day activities. There was also a large amount of technical cooperation between NASA and the media for things such as the live feeds from the moon. Certainly the media would have had some complicity in your conspiracy; have all of these people remained silent, as well?
- The Soviet military establishment would have jumped at the chance to demonstrate that the American capitalist pig-dog "moon landings" were, in fact, fake. Is it your contention that the Soviets, even with their considerable (at the time) intelligence infrastructure within the borders of the United States, would not have known about such a far-reaching conspiracy? Or are they part of it, as well?
Finally, let us not forget the names of three men: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. These were the astronauts that perished in the Apollo 1 fire, an incident that almost got the entire program shut down. If we never actually went to the moon, then why would NASA have to have launches in the first place? How do the deaths of these brave men fit into your conspiracy theory? I suspect that you find them rather inconvenient.Lots of things bother me about moon-landing conspiracy theorists, but they way that they callously disregard the sacrifice of the Apollo 1 astronauts is by far the most disgraceful thing about them.
When most users are having a problem with something, it's easier and far more reliable to fix it at the computer then to try and educate every user.
I don't disagree with this, but the fact remains that the set of C programmers that work in OpenBSD environments is a vanishingly small subset of the set of C programmers as a whole. The functions to which the original poster refers are not a part of the C language and are not available under any of the environments that I develop for (those being IRIX and Linux.) So if I have a choice between educating people on how to use their tools effectively and simply letting them go on blissfully abusing said tools, I tend to lean towards the former option.
.. if only those functions (strlcpy, strlcat) were part of the standard C library. They are of little use on platforms where they are not available.
In the interim, it is more productive to make sure that developers are more clueful when it comes to the standard string-handling facilities in C. It is really not that much of a chore to write safe string-handling code in C; the problem is that most C programmers aren't taught how to do so. That's an education problem, not a language problem.
Oh my goodness, if we don't save the humpback whale, the Earth is going to become uninhabitable by humans!
Are you suggesting that environmentalists actually believe this? That some freaky alien ship is going to come to Earth and kill us all if the whales disappear? I'm not an environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I know that a lot of them have some pretty fringe beliefs, and I don't believe I have ever heard this particular theory put forth.
Hey, dude? It's only a movie. Lighten up.
Let me get this straight .. you honestly believe that a statement like "At present rates of hunting, humpback whales will become extinct in the next 50 years" is an "over-the-top environmentalist message?" You're kidding, right? If you don't care about the whales, that's your business, but the whole humpback sub-plot was not about the crew of the Enterprise chaining themselves to trees or railing about the evil of "multinational corporate polluters." There's a world of difference between conservation and radical, over-the-top (as you say) environmentalism.
If you didn't like The Voyage Home, then that's fine, but try to keep your criticism credible.
What's the correct term? "Pro-choice" is a laughable euphemism ..
.. not for one minute. However, I do not presume to make that decision for everybody. Now, by your terminology, I am "pro-abortion." I hope you can understand why many reasonable folks object to this slur and consider it to be little more than an emotionally-loaded phrase concoted purely for debate purposes.
If "pro-choice" is inappropriate, then "pro-abortion" is even more so. As an example, take my stance. I believe that with regards to an issue that deeply divides so many people and has no real scientific consensus either way, it is not the job of the government to step in and make a decision for everybody. Rather, it is up to individuals (with the help of their families, medical professionals, etc.) to exercise a bit of personal responsibility and make their own choice.
Personally, if I were ever in a situation involving an unwanted pregnancy, I can tell you that abortion would not be a consideration
Okay, so my first assumption was correct and my second assumption was wrong. I would then again ask that you not blame your almost unbelievably skewed views of modern scientific theories on the theories themselves. Just because Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps says "the Big Bang says there was a bunch of empty space, and then there's this BOOM, and then there's a bunch of rocks and dirt floating around, and right soon you've got a bunch of monkeys and then they got together and formed the ACLU" doesn't make it an accurate depiction of what the theory actually says.
:-)
See, I can be sarcastic too.
If what you have posted is indeed the sum total of your understanding of the Big Bang, cosmology, biology, and evolutionary common descent, then it is no small wonder that you find them to be silly and unbelievable. However, I would kindly ask that you not blame your inestimable ignorance on the theories themselves, but rather on a deficient education.
However, I find it more likely that you are engaging in an attempt at witty hyperbole, attempting to ridicule modern science (the same modern science that gave you the very keyboard that you use to lash out at it) and make it out to be an atheistic tool of secular humanists with such loaded phrases as "for no reason" and "by accident." This is deceitful and treacherous, and has (unfortunately) become a standard tactic of the anti-science crowd.
The truth, if any of you were willing to listen to it, is that modern science (even some of the more "evil" sciences, such as cosmology, chemistry and biology) are completely silent on religious issues. They do not attempt to answer the big "why" questions, despite your claim that science says that things happen "for no reason" and "by accident." The vast majority of Christians around the world have no problem reconciling biological evolutionary common descent with their faith; perhaps you ought to ask them what their secret is.