I for one am very glad the US is not subjecting themselves to the ICC. The ICC is evil, IMO, and I don't want them (or the UN) to be able to dictate what US citizens can and can't do. The citizens of many other countries may have been brain washed into giving up all their rights, but they are mistaken if they think US citizens will roll over an play dead as easily as they do. This is all about other countries being jealous of the US and the power we have. It's normal to be afraid of a very powerful country, epecially if you assume they will behave as badly as your own country would if they were in power. But the US is not like France or Germany, we actually cared about the people who are being oopressed by Saddam, not just concerned about our national economy.
Why is an international court for processing war criminals evil? You seem to think that your rights (or American rights) include genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. This is exactly why an international court is necessary, with as little bias as possible.
For the first time, terrorists are being dealt with in a decisive manner. All attempts to placate the terrorists in the past have failed miserably. They view themselves as engaged in mortal combat, we must respond with righteous anger toward those who seek to kill just because of the color of your skin or the way you worship.
All attempts to placate terrorists in the past pretty much boiled down to responding with righteous anger, and that's partly why they have been so successful. The hate speech you are showing here only makes the situation worse and creates terrorists. Speaking about North Korea etc. supporting Kerry, why don't you mention the fact that the same "Muslim" fundamentalists, whom you so love, supported G.W.Bush, because they didn't want a Jew (Lieberman) to be a vice president. Quite ironic.
Man, what a screwed up country we'd have if Algore had won his home state. We'd all be bowing to toward Mecca each day and Osama would be nominated as a Supreme Court Justice.
And off you go with a racist comment. I guess that answered my previous question very well, thank you.
Romania and Bosnia have signed such an agreement, which puts them in a very bad situation with the EU, which opposes such contracts (both countries are hoping to join the EU in the near future).
What makes the whole thing worse is that the countries from the region are asked to extradite their own war criminals to that same international tribunal. So, for example, Bosnia has to extradite its own citizens, but is not allowed to extradite Americans.
Why did they sign this? Because if they didn't, the Americans would have pulled their troops and the civil war would have broken up again. The various peoples of Bosnia have narrowly escaped genocide less than a decade ago and now this is used to force them to protect foreign war criminals. Isn't politics a funny affair?
Unfortunately, I don't have any figures, but I have met Platt speakers while living in Hamburg. It's true, they are not in the majority, but this has a lot to do with the growth of Hamburg and the arrival of people from other parts of Germany. The number of people whose families have lived in Hamburg for generations is quite low. It is the same way that Bavarian is not the predominant language/dialect in Munich even though it's spoken almost exclusively around it.
I have actually met several people from Hamburg whose mother tongue was Platt. There's plenty of literature available in Plattdeutsch. Hell, most of the city's locations have Plattdeutsch names. There's plenty of speakers in Hamburg still, at least it's my impression.
Sorry, the fancy words part was more of a general comment, not related specifically to your post. Anarchy is just one of those concepts which get thrown around by many without being understood.
I see where you're going with your comment about chaos going against laws and government, but in practice, this chaos only reinforces the need for strong authority which can in turn defeat chaos and restore order. As such, it is contrary to the idea of anarchy, which seeks to reduce the amount of authority in a society. Anarchy cannot be achieved through chaos, anarchy can only be achieved as a consequence of a society where authority is not needed.
Anarchists sometimes confront the system (police, military and such), but this is an attack on the instruments of power and, as such, are working towards reducing their authority in a society. People and companies raiding each others while the government sits on top and is above such laws can only strengthen the hierarchical structure of society.
I'm not sure you know the meaning of word anarchy. How can a union of 25 governments passing laws which limit freedom be considered anarchy, when anarchy is the absence of government and laws? More information in the Anarchist FAQ.
Yes, I know that people (ab)use the word 'anarchy' when they actually mean 'chaos', but using fancy words does not make your point stronger if you don't know what they mean. If you mean 'chaos', then say 'chaos'.
I am not sure if there is a Cyrillic version of Serbian out there, but I would assume that Latin would be preferred for a high-tech application such as computers - especially for a nation which uses both.
If there were two, however, it would be smarter to first make the Cyrillic translations, and then write a script to generate Latin version of them. The opposite doesn't work, because some Slavic sounds are represented by more then one Latin character (lj and nj spring to mind) so there is some ambiguity. Cyrillic alphabet has exactly one character per audible sound and such a script would be trivial.
This is very wrong. Serbian language uses both Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets. In fact, many daily newspapers appear in both Cyrillic and Latin editions. Croatian is also a supported language, and they organise translation marathons regularly.
Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are considered separate languages for many reasons, including political ones. You are probably confused by the fact that all three were grouped together during Yugoslavia and called 'Serbo-Croatian' (in Serbia) and 'Croato-Serbian' (in Croatia). In fact, the speakers of either language can understand each others very easily, despite the differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Originally, though, those languages had separate development through history.
The reason why Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian are so similar has a lot to do with the Illiryan pan-slavic movement during early 20th century and the push to bring the languages closer together for easier communication, led by the leading authors of the time, as well as politicians. The many Croatian and Serbian dialects, on the other hand, are comprehensible only to Croats and Serbs, respectively. A good parallel elsewhere in the world would be the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) or Czech and Slovak. They are still sufficiently distinct to cause serious annoyance for users who are forced to use a language which is only similar to their own.
On the other hand, WinXP won't run on those machines either. They are probably running Win98, in which case they can be safely replaced by KDE1 or an older version of GNOME. You can't expect all the latest features with 32 megs of RAM.
I mean, who could have thought of a worse, more stupid way to piss off the whole tech sector and drive yourself into bankruptcy. The more I think about it, the more this strange idea develops that SCO (Caldera) is actually doing all this rubbish to help the Linux community. OK, it is way out there, but in some perverted way, it makes sense.
First of all, you have a Linux company (Caldera) who, despite their best efforts, has trouble staying afloat. At this time, there is no corporate support for Linux, the big vendors are running away from it, and the "GPL has never been tested in court" is touted as an argument all over the place. Big UNIX vendors only see Linux as a way to get people into their more proprietary solutions.
So, Caldera buys out a UNIX vendor and does the most ridiculous thing imaginable: sues everybody, proclaims that Linux is communist and all that bullshit. Fast forward to the current situation: IBM, HP, Novell and other big players are squarely behind Linux and protecting it. Microsoft is exposed as a greedy monopolist who uses underhand tactics (yet again). GPL gets tested in court and it is under such circumstances that guarantee a strong precedent in GPL's favour. The UNIX heritage is cleared once and for all. Linux wins, in a BSD fashion, and is free from corporate FUD. And who pays the bill? Greedy investors.
This could turn out the be the best thing for the corporate image of Linux ever.
I agree, and this lack of realism also pisses me off. When I play a game, I want it to be realistic dammit. For example, in Quake3, you never have to stop and pee, WTF?! I mean, you can play for 10 hours straight, and never once have to urinate!!!! Wouldn't it be much more exciting if you had to stop in a corner from time to time and pee, exposing your vulnerable back to the enemy!
Then there's the eating. Since Duke3d we haven't had hot-dog stands in FPS maps, and even those weren't fully operational. What I want is that each UT2004 map have a hot-dog stand so people can eat, just like at paintball, it would be much more realistic that way. And if you cuss, your mother should come and ground you for a day.
On a semi-serious note, why the hell would anyone want to play a shooting game where your shots are semi-random?
You might want to try out Quanta. It's been making great strides recently, and its visual (WYSIWYG-ish) layer looks like it will be the best thing since sliced bread. In any case, it is one of the programs with the most devoted following in linux-land.
One leads to public disturbance and danger, one directly violates the laws of the realm in question. They are indeed different, yet both bear on the question of free speech.
Arguing for democracy leads to public disturbance and danger in some countries. Arguing for women's rights leads to public disturbance and danger in some countries. Even arguing for a heliocentric solar system lead to public disturbance and danger. As soon as you start imposing arbitrary restrictions on 'free' speech, it's no longer free.
I stand by my conviction that the action of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre (especially the kind of theatre you described) is only dangerous because of the very specific context in which it happens (like some other examples I gave in this thread). Thus, it is a part of a larger action, and this action causes the disturbance, not your uttering of the word 'fire'. As such, there is no relation to censorship of certain ideas regardless of how they are expressed, which is what people argue for by using this example.
Really? if there's really a fire and you yell fire, is that disallowed? Yes you couldn't yell gibberish either. That will get you kicked out as a nuisance. But yelling fire could get you arrested for inciting a panic.
In which case, inciting panic is what gets you arrested, not speech. Speech is only one part of it. You don't get arrested for saying 'fire', but for doing it in a way which puts people in danger. There is nothing wrong with saying 'fire' under different circumstances.
You are allowed to swing a baseball bat, but if you swing it into somebody's head, you will get arrested. You won't get arrested for swinging a baseball bat, but for murder.
If you stand next to a cliff and I jump at you and say 'boo!', and you fall, I might get arrested for murder as well. I won't get arrested because I said 'boo!', but because I did it in a way which would obviously result in somebody's death. I can still write a book and write 'boo!' in it.
But according to what you say, writing a note that says "there's a bomb under my seat" and passing it to an usher would be perfectly acceptable. If that usher shouts out "Bomb", who would be found liable, the notewriter or the shouter?
An interesting example, but in this case, passing such a note is equivalent to shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre -- it incites panic in a crowded place. There is still no relation to these heavily context-dependent examples and open censorship, which is what this story is about.
If it's limited, it's not free. You have limited freedom in a prison, yet you are not a free man. 'Limited free speech' is an oxymoron and if you believe in it, you do not believe in free speech.
True. My point was that it was the action that was illegal, not the idea you are expressing, which is what free speech is all about. If you express it in a more civil way, it's not illegal.
Similarly, if you grab an old lady and scream cooking recipes at her for an hour, you'll likely get yourself arrested. Again, it's not the cooking recipes which are illegal, but the way you expressed your, ahem, affection for them. This is not an argument for censorship.
On the other hand, if you're in a totalitarian regime, and express certain ideas in any way, shape or form, you will get arrested. Here the issue is the freedom of speech, as your ideas are considered illegal, regardless of the way you choose to express them.
The 'fire in a crowded theatre' is a knee-jerk reaction by people who do not grasp the concept of freedom. If you are not free to say some things, then you not any more free than (to name another knee-jerk example) under the Taliban regime -- there people were also allowed to say SOME things, as long as they were deemed acceptable.
No, free speech is unlimited, and only makes sense as such. Yelling fire in a theatre is a ridiculous example, because its focus is not on the idea you are expressing, but on the action you are doing, which isn't allowed - yelling in a theatre. You are also not allowed to go up to the screen and piss all over the audience, yet this never gets cited as an example against free expression. It's illegal because you are breaking an implicit contract which you agreed to when you bought the ticket, not because you are expressing a dangerous idea.
Whisper 'fire' to your neighbour in a theatre. Or better yet, write it on a piece of paper and show it to the people behind you. See if that gets you arrested. Now whisper revolutionary poems to a policeman/soldier of an oppressive regime. See why it's different? One is the issue of free speech and the other is not. Yet people keep quoting the 'fire' example to support mind control and fight against freedom of speech.
The problem with the KDE/GNOME split is that the two great programming frameworks are not compatible: GNOME apps cannot embed KDE apps other than through ugly hacks and vice versa. Communication between these apps is nonexistent. They look and act differently, etc etc.
On the other hand, there has been great progress recently. Already, there is a GTK theme which uses Qt to do all the drawing, so all GTK apps automagically looks like KDE apps, with the currently selected KDE theme.
Furthermore, the two desktops seem to plan a migration to DBUS (a successor to DCOP) as a standard desktop communication protocol. There are ever-louder rumours of KDE migrating to GStreamer instead of the aged and unloved aRts. All linux apps can already use KPrinter framework, and there is work being done (already running, I believe) for combining the GTK and Qt event loops, making it possible to run commonly used dialog windows (file open etc) from any app. Finally, there was talk of migrating the KIO slaves down to a lower level so they can be accessible to all apps (even non-graphical ones).
With this in mind, it is possible that in the (not so distant) future, we have two desktops, but which are freely interchangeable because they are based on the same standards, developed in a cooperative fashion. One could use GTK+ and write fully functional KDE apps with it. We would have choice, and diversity! Great for all
But by only running Qt and GTK+ apps, you miss out on all the cool technologies described in this article, which are a part of KDE. You cannot save directly to an ftp/ssh/samba server from the Save As dialog, you cannot embed applications into each other, you cannot script your programs etc etc (GNOME has similar technology, pure Qt and GTK+ apps don't).
XFCE4 doesn't have a web browser. Doesn't have an office suite. Doesn't have a chat client. If you want these things, you have to either run GNOME apps, KDE apps, or Mozilla/OpenOffice/something even more resource hungry.
And if you're running a KDE app from your XFCE4 desktop, you ARE running KDE, whether you like it or not. You're just using another window managed with it, which, more likely than not, is making it slower rather than faster.
The best thing about KDE is not the window manager/panel, but the application framework, like the technologies discussed in the articles. If you don't like the feel of KDE, you can always run fluxbox, but use KDE apps like Quanta, Konqueror, KDevelop and the likes. I've done that with Afterstep and WindowMaker as I'm not a fan of KWin.
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Why is an international court for processing war criminals evil? You seem to think that your rights (or American rights) include genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. This is exactly why an international court is necessary, with as little bias as possible.
All attempts to placate terrorists in the past pretty much boiled down to responding with righteous anger, and that's partly why they have been so successful. The hate speech you are showing here only makes the situation worse and creates terrorists. Speaking about North Korea etc. supporting Kerry, why don't you mention the fact that the same "Muslim" fundamentalists, whom you so love, supported G.W.Bush, because they didn't want a Jew (Lieberman) to be a vice president. Quite ironic.
And off you go with a racist comment. I guess that answered my previous question very well, thank you.
Romania and Bosnia have signed such an agreement, which puts them in a very bad situation with the EU, which opposes such contracts (both countries are hoping to join the EU in the near future).
What makes the whole thing worse is that the countries from the region are asked to extradite their own war criminals to that same international tribunal. So, for example, Bosnia has to extradite its own citizens, but is not allowed to extradite Americans.
Why did they sign this? Because if they didn't, the Americans would have pulled their troops and the civil war would have broken up again. The various peoples of Bosnia have narrowly escaped genocide less than a decade ago and now this is used to force them to protect foreign war criminals. Isn't politics a funny affair?
OMG, the hatemail section is the best thing I've seen all month!
Unfortunately, I don't have any figures, but I have met Platt speakers while living in Hamburg. It's true, they are not in the majority, but this has a lot to do with the growth of Hamburg and the arrival of people from other parts of Germany. The number of people whose families have lived in Hamburg for generations is quite low. It is the same way that Bavarian is not the predominant language/dialect in Munich even though it's spoken almost exclusively around it.
I have actually met several people from Hamburg whose mother tongue was Platt. There's plenty of literature available in Plattdeutsch. Hell, most of the city's locations have Plattdeutsch names. There's plenty of speakers in Hamburg still, at least it's my impression.
Sorry, the fancy words part was more of a general comment, not related specifically to your post. Anarchy is just one of those concepts which get thrown around by many without being understood.
:-)
I see where you're going with your comment about chaos going against laws and government, but in practice, this chaos only reinforces the need for strong authority which can in turn defeat chaos and restore order. As such, it is contrary to the idea of anarchy, which seeks to reduce the amount of authority in a society. Anarchy cannot be achieved through chaos, anarchy can only be achieved as a consequence of a society where authority is not needed.
Anarchists sometimes confront the system (police, military and such), but this is an attack on the instruments of power and, as such, are working towards reducing their authority in a society. People and companies raiding each others while the government sits on top and is above such laws can only strengthen the hierarchical structure of society.
That's why I disagreed with your post
I'm not sure you know the meaning of word anarchy. How can a union of 25 governments passing laws which limit freedom be considered anarchy, when anarchy is the absence of government and laws? More information in the Anarchist FAQ.
Yes, I know that people (ab)use the word 'anarchy' when they actually mean 'chaos', but using fancy words does not make your point stronger if you don't know what they mean. If you mean 'chaos', then say 'chaos'.
I am not sure if there is a Cyrillic version of Serbian out there, but I would assume that Latin would be preferred for a high-tech application such as computers - especially for a nation which uses both.
If there were two, however, it would be smarter to first make the Cyrillic translations, and then write a script to generate Latin version of them. The opposite doesn't work, because some Slavic sounds are represented by more then one Latin character (lj and nj spring to mind) so there is some ambiguity. Cyrillic alphabet has exactly one character per audible sound and such a script would be trivial.
This is very wrong. Serbian language uses both Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets. In fact, many daily newspapers appear in both Cyrillic and Latin editions. Croatian is also a supported language, and they organise translation marathons regularly.
Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are considered separate languages for many reasons, including political ones. You are probably confused by the fact that all three were grouped together during Yugoslavia and called 'Serbo-Croatian' (in Serbia) and 'Croato-Serbian' (in Croatia). In fact, the speakers of either language can understand each others very easily, despite the differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Originally, though, those languages had separate development through history.
The reason why Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian are so similar has a lot to do with the Illiryan pan-slavic movement during early 20th century and the push to bring the languages closer together for easier communication, led by the leading authors of the time, as well as politicians. The many Croatian and Serbian dialects, on the other hand, are comprehensible only to Croats and Serbs, respectively. A good parallel elsewhere in the world would be the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) or Czech and Slovak. They are still sufficiently distinct to cause serious annoyance for users who are forced to use a language which is only similar to their own.
Can you say 'Hamburg'?
It's only Europe's second largest port and the city with most millionaires per capita in the world. Many Low Saxon speakers there.
On the other hand, WinXP won't run on those machines either. They are probably running Win98, in which case they can be safely replaced by KDE1 or an older version of GNOME. You can't expect all the latest features with 32 megs of RAM.
I mean, who could have thought of a worse, more stupid way to piss off the whole tech sector and drive yourself into bankruptcy. The more I think about it, the more this strange idea develops that SCO (Caldera) is actually doing all this rubbish to help the Linux community. OK, it is way out there, but in some perverted way, it makes sense.
First of all, you have a Linux company (Caldera) who, despite their best efforts, has trouble staying afloat. At this time, there is no corporate support for Linux, the big vendors are running away from it, and the "GPL has never been tested in court" is touted as an argument all over the place. Big UNIX vendors only see Linux as a way to get people into their more proprietary solutions.
So, Caldera buys out a UNIX vendor and does the most ridiculous thing imaginable: sues everybody, proclaims that Linux is communist and all that bullshit. Fast forward to the current situation: IBM, HP, Novell and other big players are squarely behind Linux and protecting it. Microsoft is exposed as a greedy monopolist who uses underhand tactics (yet again). GPL gets tested in court and it is under such circumstances that guarantee a strong precedent in GPL's favour. The UNIX heritage is cleared once and for all. Linux wins, in a BSD fashion, and is free from corporate FUD. And who pays the bill? Greedy investors.
This could turn out the be the best thing for the corporate image of Linux ever.
I agree, and this lack of realism also pisses me off. When I play a game, I want it to be realistic dammit. For example, in Quake3, you never have to stop and pee, WTF?! I mean, you can play for 10 hours straight, and never once have to urinate!!!! Wouldn't it be much more exciting if you had to stop in a corner from time to time and pee, exposing your vulnerable back to the enemy!
Then there's the eating. Since Duke3d we haven't had hot-dog stands in FPS maps, and even those weren't fully operational. What I want is that each UT2004 map have a hot-dog stand so people can eat, just like at paintball, it would be much more realistic that way. And if you cuss, your mother should come and ground you for a day.
On a semi-serious note, why the hell would anyone want to play a shooting game where your shots are semi-random?
You might want to try out Quanta. It's been making great strides recently, and its visual (WYSIWYG-ish) layer looks like it will be the best thing since sliced bread. In any case, it is one of the programs with the most devoted following in linux-land.
On the other hand, Corel invested a lot of work in WordPerfect office working well with WINE and we all remember what that looked like :(
Actually, the recent spirit photos seem to indicate that the Martians are not really interested in a treaty!
It would be a joke if it weren't exactly what SCO is doing. It's too bizarre to be true, except that it is.
One leads to public disturbance and danger, one directly violates the laws of the realm in question. They are indeed different, yet both bear on the question of free speech.
Arguing for democracy leads to public disturbance and danger in some countries. Arguing for women's rights leads to public disturbance and danger in some countries. Even arguing for a heliocentric solar system lead to public disturbance and danger. As soon as you start imposing arbitrary restrictions on 'free' speech, it's no longer free.
I stand by my conviction that the action of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre (especially the kind of theatre you described) is only dangerous because of the very specific context in which it happens (like some other examples I gave in this thread). Thus, it is a part of a larger action, and this action causes the disturbance, not your uttering of the word 'fire'. As such, there is no relation to censorship of certain ideas regardless of how they are expressed, which is what people argue for by using this example.
Really? if there's really a fire and you yell fire, is that disallowed?
Yes you couldn't yell gibberish either. That will get you kicked out as a nuisance. But yelling fire could get you arrested for inciting a panic.
In which case, inciting panic is what gets you arrested, not speech. Speech is only one part of it. You don't get arrested for saying 'fire', but for doing it in a way which puts people in danger. There is nothing wrong with saying 'fire' under different circumstances.
You are allowed to swing a baseball bat, but if you swing it into somebody's head, you will get arrested. You won't get arrested for swinging a baseball bat, but for murder.
If you stand next to a cliff and I jump at you and say 'boo!', and you fall, I might get arrested for murder as well. I won't get arrested because I said 'boo!', but because I did it in a way which would obviously result in somebody's death. I can still write a book and write 'boo!' in it.
But according to what you say, writing a note that says "there's a bomb under my seat" and passing it to an usher would be perfectly acceptable. If that usher shouts out "Bomb", who would be found liable, the notewriter or the shouter?
An interesting example, but in this case, passing such a note is equivalent to shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre -- it incites panic in a crowded place. There is still no relation to these heavily context-dependent examples and open censorship, which is what this story is about.
If it's limited, it's not free. You have limited freedom in a prison, yet you are not a free man. 'Limited free speech' is an oxymoron and if you believe in it, you do not believe in free speech.
True. My point was that it was the action that was illegal, not the idea you are expressing, which is what free speech is all about. If you express it in a more civil way, it's not illegal.
Similarly, if you grab an old lady and scream cooking recipes at her for an hour, you'll likely get yourself arrested. Again, it's not the cooking recipes which are illegal, but the way you expressed your, ahem, affection for them. This is not an argument for censorship.
On the other hand, if you're in a totalitarian regime, and express certain ideas in any way, shape or form, you will get arrested. Here the issue is the freedom of speech, as your ideas are considered illegal, regardless of the way you choose to express them.
Freedom of expression should not be placed above human rights.
Let me get this right, you don't consider freedom of expression to be a basic human right?
The 'fire in a crowded theatre' is a knee-jerk reaction by people who do not grasp the concept of freedom. If you are not free to say some things, then you not any more free than (to name another knee-jerk example) under the Taliban regime -- there people were also allowed to say SOME things, as long as they were deemed acceptable.
No, free speech is unlimited, and only makes sense as such. Yelling fire in a theatre is a ridiculous example, because its focus is not on the idea you are expressing, but on the action you are doing, which isn't allowed - yelling in a theatre. You are also not allowed to go up to the screen and piss all over the audience, yet this never gets cited as an example against free expression. It's illegal because you are breaking an implicit contract which you agreed to when you bought the ticket, not because you are expressing a dangerous idea.
Whisper 'fire' to your neighbour in a theatre. Or better yet, write it on a piece of paper and show it to the people behind you. See if that gets you arrested. Now whisper revolutionary poems to a policeman/soldier of an oppressive regime. See why it's different? One is the issue of free speech and the other is not. Yet people keep quoting the 'fire' example to support mind control and fight against freedom of speech.
The problem with the KDE/GNOME split is that the two great programming frameworks are not compatible: GNOME apps cannot embed KDE apps other than through ugly hacks and vice versa. Communication between these apps is nonexistent. They look and act differently, etc etc.
On the other hand, there has been great progress recently. Already, there is a GTK theme which uses Qt to do all the drawing, so all GTK apps automagically looks like KDE apps, with the currently selected KDE theme.
Furthermore, the two desktops seem to plan a migration to DBUS (a successor to DCOP) as a standard desktop communication protocol. There are ever-louder rumours of KDE migrating to GStreamer instead of the aged and unloved aRts. All linux apps can already use KPrinter framework, and there is work being done (already running, I believe) for combining the GTK and Qt event loops, making it possible to run commonly used dialog windows (file open etc) from any app. Finally, there was talk of migrating the KIO slaves down to a lower level so they can be accessible to all apps (even non-graphical ones).
With this in mind, it is possible that in the (not so distant) future, we have two desktops, but which are freely interchangeable because they are based on the same standards, developed in a cooperative fashion. One could use GTK+ and write fully functional KDE apps with it. We would have choice, and diversity! Great for all
But by only running Qt and GTK+ apps, you miss out on all the cool technologies described in this article, which are a part of KDE. You cannot save directly to an ftp/ssh/samba server from the Save As dialog, you cannot embed applications into each other, you cannot script your programs etc etc (GNOME has similar technology, pure Qt and GTK+ apps don't).
XFCE4 doesn't have a web browser. Doesn't have an office suite. Doesn't have a chat client. If you want these things, you have to either run GNOME apps, KDE apps, or Mozilla/OpenOffice/something even more resource hungry.
And if you're running a KDE app from your XFCE4 desktop, you ARE running KDE, whether you like it or not. You're just using another window managed with it, which, more likely than not, is making it slower rather than faster.
The best thing about KDE is not the window manager/panel, but the application framework, like the technologies discussed in the articles. If you don't like the feel of KDE, you can always run fluxbox, but use KDE apps like Quanta, Konqueror, KDevelop and the likes. I've done that with Afterstep and WindowMaker as I'm not a fan of KWin.