take World War II - the U.S. killed more people in the burning of Tokyo than in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. But most people have forgotten that by now.
Unless of course, they've never seen Grave of the Fireflies (or Tombstone for Fireflies, depending on the translation), which depicts the death (the VERY SLOW death) of two japanese children in WWII Japan, when their home town gets fire-bombed. It was not an easy movie to watch, but if you've seen it, the horror of US fire-bombing is not something that you will soon forget.:-|
Acutally, you want to put that in your user.js file, becuase prefs.js will be overwritten when you change your preferences, or when Mozilla feels like it.
First off, a lot of people have asked: why is this worse than a cruise missile? A B2? etc.
Well, a conventional explosive won't do too much. You'll need a lot of them in order to really damage a country's infrastructure, and that takes a lot of time, effort and money (e.g. Gulf War, Bosnia to use US examples). So, you go to nukes. Problem is that there're long-lasting negative effects from nuking (radiation), not just to your target country, but to large portions of the surrounding geography (even the world, of you use enough).
When you're dropping a rock (or car, whatever) from orbit, you have nearly no radiation, and total devistation of the target. So, you can take out N. Korea without any more than kicking up a whole lot of dust at S. Korea. So... why not?! That's the key problem with this kind of weapon: it's a weapon of mass distruction, which cannot distinguish civilians from military targets, and there's very little to hold one back from being the first (an possibly last) to use it....
Second, there's a question of the continued military applications of space. Our population is getting uncontrolably large on this planet, and we may well *need* to start exploring the use of space for: mining, power generation, even manufacture in order to support our population. But, as long as the military presence in space stifles other forms of exploration (and don't kid yourself, right now, we squash any credible civilian attempt to gain a space-borne foot hold), we can't move forward.
Third, darn it, we gave our word (in the form of treaties) and if our word is this worthless, then I submit that we are too!
The "cd" command may fail, if you already have a.ssh directory on your target system.
You probably want to have a look at your permissions as well. Homedir and.ssh should be world readable and executable..ssh/* should be readable except for.identity, id_dsa and random_seed which should only be readable/writeable by owner. You should also own all of the above files.
Mono will be poor quality[...]eventually the Mono C# compiler will be as close to the Microsoft c# compiler as gcc is to vc++. I find that its actually a major pain to switch between the two
So, you are equating quality and duplication of Microsoft features in a compiler?! gcc is an excellent compiler for the C, C++, etc languages, as specified. Its lack of VC++ alikedness is entirely a result of Microsoft's embrace-and-extend approach, and not gcc's quality or lack thereof. They will do the same with C# in reverse (submit the standard, then deviate from it). This makes their product shabby and a poor implementation of the standard, not Ximian's.
I presume that Mono's C# compiler will be of similar quality, at least after half the planet gets a chance to bug-fix it into the ground.
Look, the statistics are for a default install of Red Hat 6.2, which is about 1.5 years old now, but is still pretty secure if you perform the "desktop" install and then apply all of the updates.
If you install 7.1, and then all of the (many fewer than 6.2) updates, it's even more secure owing to: 1) Red Hat 7.1 ships with an ipchains configuration 2) xinetd allows finer grain control over many of the less secure services, should you wish to turn them on.
Red Hat is not the world's most secure OS, but let's be fair and admit that they do an excellent job of staying on top of what's out there, and providing updates to their customers. It's relatively easy to be an OpenBSD and say "our OS is secure as long as you don't install a web server", but companies like Red Hat are actually trying to solve the hard problem of general-purpose, secure operating systems and server software. If, after over a year of everyone beating on it, exploits are found in the default, unpatched version of their OS, I can live with that, as long as they have addressed the problems.
After consecutive straight weeks of hot-air, nothing gained or accomplished, anti-IBM reverse incestuous FUD, underpaidBBStech goes batshit....
C'mon people. Ask yourself, and really think about this. Do you really think that most companies are going to switch to PC clones, if IBM continues with it's bullying of corporate clients, strong-arming of minicomputer manufacturers and subscription models?
I am so sick of all the "DOS will win out in the end" fervour. It's not happening anytime soon, guys. Market penetration and an established userbase are working against you.
This is just not true. GCC 2.95 and was horribly out of date with respect to the ANSI C++ standard. The problem was always that GCC was one of the first C++ compilers, and so it's been evolving along with the C++ language. So, one of the major thrusts in 3.0 (or rather, something so radical that it was not entering the 2.x series) was to incompatibly change much of the C++ implementation to match the ANSI C++ standard (hopefully this will freeze most major work on GCC's C++ so that people can start to rely on source-compatibility with future versions).
Red Hat's 2.96 was a pre-release of 3.0, which they released because they felt that their customers needed many of those features, and that back-fitting them to 2.95 would be too large a task for too little return to the GCC effort (which, recall Cygnus is a MAJOR participant in).
The summer solstice is today, so there's about 15 hours of daylight to enjoy (in my latitude anyway) - turn off the computer, go outside, get a tan.
Ok, just in case anyone doesn't realize this, today the sun's light is it's most direct (in the northern hemisphere, above the tropic of cancer), which means that it is easier to get a severe sunburn than at any other time of the year.
I highly recommend that everyone consider putting some light sunscreen on even if you're only going to be in the sun briefly. Coppertone now makes a very nice oil-free sunscreen in SPFs 15 and 30 (and 45, but we all know that there's no such thing as SPF 45, right) which I recommend if you're going into work in short sleeves.
If you're specifically sunbathing today, be very careful, and limit your exposure to a fraction of what you would, say, in mid-July.
At least three language interpreters, depending on how you count
Mail reader
News reader
Address book
Of course, that's just the high-level for both, you could get a lot more detailed, and X has the example programs and extensions as well. Bottom line is that to be a "modern browser" you have to get pretty big.
If, on the other hand, you were to compare Mozilla to X+Window Manager+Gtk+GNOME, you would find Mozilla to be quite small, and how many people think of a window manager or "buttons" when they think "X source code"? They would, of course, find that these are seperate --
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
What no one ever mentions in anti-GPL rants (and let's face it, MS is tredding well worn ground, here) is that the GPL removes NO rights from you. In fact, if you just want to use GPL'd software you can ignore the GPL and it never applies to you.
What the GPL does is gives you a way around having to be restricted by copyright law, if you want it. Since Microsoft gives you exactly 0 ways to get around such restrictions (in fact their licenses restrict you BEYOND what copyright law gives them), this is high hipocracy.
But, then who expected any more out of Gates at this point.
Ok, for video games, other software and MP3s, CDs are fine. But, for long-term, archival quality storage, CDs suck (and always have, regardless of fungi).
Si, what makes sense?
Actually, DVD-R makes something very interesting possible. Because there's so much storage available per disk: essentially a RAID array of DVDs. What I would do, is automate the whole thing like the old epic storage arrays.
You would have a disk array (like the NetApp Filer), which takes your data to start, and then once you get above the threshold of one DVD-RAID filesystem, you migrate a snapshot out to a RAID-5 set of RAID-1 disk pairs. Thus, you have two DVD-Rs which can fail simultainiusly, and you still don't lose the volume. As soon as a disk fails, you re-create it from a pool of 4 or 5 disks, which you could replentish one a daily or weekly basis as the system informs you that you need to.
Then, it's just a matter of running a periodic check of all of the disks to identify failures ASAP.
Such a device is impervious to power failures (though obviously you need power to actually get the data back), most mundane environment problems (hell, the disks could be soaked or smoke damaged, and just a little polishing should bring them right back to new).
In the gcc-v3 distribution they've been working for many months.
Exactly. Now, step back and think about WHEN Red Hat 7.0 was released.... Red Hat made a hard decision. They had to release a 1.5-year old C++ compiler that did not track the standard or the latest version of C++ off of the 3.0 development snapshots. They did the latter because they felt it would serve more of their customers' interests, and they had the technical staff to back that decision up.
Then, they got burned from both sides. The folks who were writing non-standard C++ complained because their programs no longer compiled. The folks who were tracking the GCC development and the ANSI standard complained that it did not go far enough.
The kicker is that, had they been Sun, releasing ACC, people would have groned because their code broke, put a bunch of #ifdefs in their code (or modified their autoconfigs) and gone on with life. But, because we have a porthole into the development process, we feel we're qualified to second-guess the distribution-creation process. Personally, I'm impressed that Red Hat (or Debian or SuSe, etc) can package a distribution at all, given the huge number of projects and no real coordination between them.
Of course, they will do what they've always done (and every other commercial vendor with large customers does). They will distribute "obsolete" software until their next version, when they will go with the almost-latest-and-greatest that they can get to work.
You have to understand, Red Hat bowed to their customers. Many of their C++ customers told them they needed ANSI C++ compliance badly. GCC 2.96 offered that.
Red Hat has a history of working hard on the compiler, and distributing a custom version. They were the first distribution to ship egcs (remember, 6.2 ran egcs for the C++ compiler). They also did a lot of work on making egcs work for the Linux kernel.
However, I dont really think that it is reasonable to expect privacy when browsing on the Internet
Let's see... what else is not private? How about calling your doctor? The phone network is a "public place", by your reasoning. Sure, let's just have the phone company record your conversations and publish the statistics to interested parties.... Do ISPs do this now? Yes, but I expect that to last until the first law suit that cripples an ISP because they sold what ammounts to medical information to the wrong party. Americans are very sensitive to their tenuous right to privacy, and the trigger is usually violence against women or medical information.
My stepfather has worked with Carnivore(he is a high ranking federal law enforcement agent) and when we talked about the Carnivore system he said that it is much harder to get a warrent for it or for taking a computer than it is to get warrents for searching more traditional things.
Of course, it's harder now; they're working out the ground-rules. However, if attitudes like yours prevailed, I would expect it to be much easier within the next few years. Thankfully, many judges take the long view, and such invasions will likely be curtailed over the next few years.
You'd think that at a web site devoted to computers, nerds and logic, we would be immune to fellatious arguments
Nope, your post disabused me of that notion.
I expect the green factions on Slashdot (oddly enough, they overlap with the Communist factions, and if you can name a greater despoiler of the environment than the Godless commies, name one, cf. the Caspian Sea has shrunk in half due to Communist environmental degradation and water diversion
Wow, that's such a list of logical fallacies, I can't pick which one to point out first. Let's start with the straw-man:
"green factions" "overlap with the Communist factions"? Ok, you don't support this thesis, but there, you've made the statement. Not having backed it up, you will of course refrain from using it as the foundation for futher argument, and get to your original point? Nope, "Godless commies" (appeal to fear/ignorance). "despoiler of the environment"... gee, Dr Potter, are all Godless commies despoilers of the environment? That must mean that all "green factions" are commie, tree-burners too, right? Strawman: 0, Slashdot: 1
will soon be out in force declaring man to be the most heinuos figure of environmental disaster
Strawman #2
instead of our Lord's crown of creation
Offtopic, and unsupported, but ignorable.
If it was up to those greenies
Insults are hardly a form of logical debate, but we're going for "fellatious arguments based on emotion" here, aren't we?
the human population would be 100 million, and we'd live in huts eating soybeans.
Irrational and unsupported strawman #3. I love this guy! What it must be like to be totally unfettered by reason....
The post goes on to posit that Native Americans, given guns would have wiped out the bison herds... Of course, no supporting evidence is given, so I can't really debate the point.
Can someone please mod the original post down a tad?
Since the dawn of GNOME, people have been saying that it was dead. GNOME is, in case there's anyone left who's not paying attention, not going anywhere.
What's more, comments about KDE as the ultimate platform for developers because of Qt, are misplaced. Qt has only one major problem: it's written in C++. But that one's a problem from which I have never seen a toolkit recover without the marketing dominance of Microsoft. Even the very best C++ toolkits are relegated to the backwaters of the developer world because of the cross-platform difficulties (e.g. even Sun had to pass on Qt because it would require choosing acc (thier compiler) or gcc (the one everyone uses) for the shared library format); towering complexity of any sizable code (try to get an average-skill C++ developer up to speed on a project that's been under development for a year or so, and you'll be spending months explaining why you used the language the way you did); and the algorithm-hiding features of the language (e.g. massive overloading, mind-boggling inheiritance rules, four casting operators, etc).
GNOME is written in C. You know, that language that Linux, X, GCC, BSD, Apache, Bind, Sendmail and most of the rest of the civilized world's software is written in. If you want to use a C library from C++ you can. Or from Python, Perl, Scheme, or any of dozens of other languages. C++ libraries can be bent and twisted at the cost of performance and flexibility to be used with most of these.
The level of functionality provided by the bindings vary, from those that only allow you to access a small subset of KDE to bindings that
almost rival C++ native code in scope. [Emphasis mine -AJS]
Now check out what GNOME has to say about language bindings and you'll find a very different story. The matrix is a little hard to read because there are so many languages in it....
Is KDE/Qt nice? Of course, and I recommend it to anyone who finds that they don't like GNOME. I respect the folks that wrote the tools, because they're good tools. I just don't think that they took some very important points into consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
take World War II - the U.S. killed more people in the burning of Tokyo than in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. But most people have forgotten that by now.
:-|
Unless of course, they've never seen Grave of the Fireflies (or Tombstone for Fireflies, depending on the translation), which depicts the death (the VERY SLOW death) of two japanese children in WWII Japan, when their home town gets fire-bombed. It was not an easy movie to watch, but if you've seen it, the horror of US fire-bombing is not something that you will soon forget.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Don't sue me for not knowing the name of the male host
;-)
Ok, now be honest, how many people thought that was a typo...?
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Acutally, you want to put that in your user.js file, becuase prefs.js will be overwritten when you change your preferences, or when Mozilla feels like it.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
And, for the longest time, CC, from Bell Labs was the only C++ compiler (er, translator). Did you have a point to make about quality, or not?
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
First off, a lot of people have asked: why is this worse than a cruise missile? A B2? etc.
Well, a conventional explosive won't do too much. You'll need a lot of them in order to really damage a country's infrastructure, and that takes a lot of time, effort and money (e.g. Gulf War, Bosnia to use US examples). So, you go to nukes. Problem is that there're long-lasting negative effects from nuking (radiation), not just to your target country, but to large portions of the surrounding geography (even the world, of you use enough).
When you're dropping a rock (or car, whatever) from orbit, you have nearly no radiation, and total devistation of the target. So, you can take out N. Korea without any more than kicking up a whole lot of dust at S. Korea. So... why not?! That's the key problem with this kind of weapon: it's a weapon of mass distruction, which cannot distinguish civilians from military targets, and there's very little to hold one back from being the first (an possibly last) to use it....
Second, there's a question of the continued military applications of space. Our population is getting uncontrolably large on this planet, and we may well *need* to start exploring the use of space for: mining, power generation, even manufacture in order to support our population. But, as long as the military presence in space stifles other forms of exploration (and don't kid yourself, right now, we squash any credible civilian attempt to gain a space-borne foot hold), we can't move forward.
Third, darn it, we gave our word (in the form of treaties) and if our word is this worthless, then I submit that we are too!
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
For Version 1:
ssh-keygen .ssh/identity.pub targethost:fooid
.ssh
.ssh/authorized_keys
[return]
[return]
[return]
scp
[type password]
ssh targethost
[type password]
mkdir
cat fooid >>
Done. Now, if you want version 2 (DSA-based):
ssh-keygen -t dsa .ssh/id_dsa.pub targethost:fooid2
.ssh
.ssh/authorized_keys2
[return]
[return]
[return]
scp
[type password]
ssh targethost
[type password]
mkdir
cat fooid2 >>
The "cd" command may fail, if you already have a .ssh directory on your target system.
You probably want to have a look at your permissions as well. Homedir and .ssh should be world readable and executable. .ssh/* should be readable except for .identity, id_dsa and random_seed which should only be readable/writeable by owner. You should also own all of the above files.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
I presume that Mono's C# compiler will be of similar quality, at least after half the planet gets a chance to bug-fix it into the ground.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
I love this kind of response.
Look, the statistics are for a default install of Red Hat 6.2, which is about 1.5 years old now, but is still pretty secure if you perform the "desktop" install and then apply all of the updates.
If you install 7.1, and then all of the (many fewer than 6.2) updates, it's even more secure owing to: 1) Red Hat 7.1 ships with an ipchains configuration 2) xinetd allows finer grain control over many of the less secure services, should you wish to turn them on.
Red Hat is not the world's most secure OS, but let's be fair and admit that they do an excellent job of staying on top of what's out there, and providing updates to their customers. It's relatively easy to be an OpenBSD and say "our OS is secure as long as you don't install a web server", but companies like Red Hat are actually trying to solve the hard problem of general-purpose, secure operating systems and server software. If, after over a year of everyone beating on it, exploits are found in the default, unpatched version of their OS, I can live with that, as long as they have addressed the problems.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
What about the space beer? As others pointed out, there's simply evidence of fluid due to erosion... I say it's space beer! ;-)
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
If you're router/firewall's linux, you can do this:
/sbin/route add -host 198.137.240.92 gw 127.0.0.1 dev lo
That will dump all of that traffic into space, and it will never hit your outbound ethernet card.
I presume similar things are possible on just about every piece of routing hardware out there.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
After consecutive straight weeks of hot-air, nothing gained or accomplished, anti-IBM reverse incestuous FUD, underpaidBBStech goes batshit....
C'mon people. Ask yourself, and really think about this. Do you really think that most companies are going to switch to PC clones, if IBM continues with it's bullying of corporate clients, strong-arming of minicomputer manufacturers and subscription models?
I am so sick of all the "DOS will win out in the end" fervour. It's not happening anytime soon, guys. Market penetration and an established userbase are working against you.
Enough said.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
This is just not true. GCC 2.95 and was horribly out of date with respect to the ANSI C++ standard. The problem was always that GCC was one of the first C++ compilers, and so it's been evolving along with the C++ language. So, one of the major thrusts in 3.0 (or rather, something so radical that it was not entering the 2.x series) was to incompatibly change much of the C++ implementation to match the ANSI C++ standard (hopefully this will freeze most major work on GCC's C++ so that people can start to rely on source-compatibility with future versions).
Red Hat's 2.96 was a pre-release of 3.0, which they released because they felt that their customers needed many of those features, and that back-fitting them to 2.95 would be too large a task for too little return to the GCC effort (which, recall Cygnus is a MAJOR participant in).
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
The summer solstice is today, so there's about 15 hours of daylight to enjoy (in my latitude anyway) - turn off the computer, go outside, get a tan.
Ok, just in case anyone doesn't realize this, today the sun's light is it's most direct (in the northern hemisphere, above the tropic of cancer), which means that it is easier to get a severe sunburn than at any other time of the year.
I highly recommend that everyone consider putting some light sunscreen on even if you're only going to be in the sun briefly. Coppertone now makes a very nice oil-free sunscreen in SPFs 15 and 30 (and 45, but we all know that there's no such thing as SPF 45, right) which I recommend if you're going into work in short sleeves.
If you're specifically sunbathing today, be very careful, and limit your exposure to a fraction of what you would, say, in mid-July.
Be safe, and enjoy!
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
- Display management
- Font Handling
- Protocol management
- Hardware drivers
Now, let's look at what makes up Mozilla:- Display management
- Font handling
- Protocol management
- At least three language interpreters, depending on how you count
- Mail reader
- News reader
- Address book
Of course, that's just the high-level for both, you could get a lot more detailed, and X has the example programs and extensions as well. Bottom line is that to be a "modern browser" you have to get pretty big.If, on the other hand, you were to compare Mozilla to X+Window Manager+Gtk+GNOME, you would find Mozilla to be quite small, and how many people think of a window manager or "buttons" when they think "X source code"? They would, of course, find that these are seperate
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
What no one ever mentions in anti-GPL rants (and let's face it, MS is tredding well worn ground, here) is that the GPL removes NO rights from you. In fact, if you just want to use GPL'd software you can ignore the GPL and it never applies to you.
What the GPL does is gives you a way around having to be restricted by copyright law, if you want it. Since Microsoft gives you exactly 0 ways to get around such restrictions (in fact their licenses restrict you BEYOND what copyright law gives them), this is high hipocracy.
But, then who expected any more out of Gates at this point.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Ok, for video games, other software and MP3s, CDs are fine. But, for long-term, archival quality storage, CDs suck (and always have, regardless of fungi).
Si, what makes sense?
Actually, DVD-R makes something very interesting possible. Because there's so much storage available per disk: essentially a RAID array of DVDs. What I would do, is automate the whole thing like the old epic storage arrays.
You would have a disk array (like the NetApp Filer), which takes your data to start, and then once you get above the threshold of one DVD-RAID filesystem, you migrate a snapshot out to a RAID-5 set of RAID-1 disk pairs. Thus, you have two DVD-Rs which can fail simultainiusly, and you still don't lose the volume. As soon as a disk fails, you re-create it from a pool of 4 or 5 disks, which you could replentish one a daily or weekly basis as the system informs you that you need to.
Then, it's just a matter of running a periodic check of all of the disks to identify failures ASAP.
Such a device is impervious to power failures (though obviously you need power to actually get the data back), most mundane environment problems (hell, the disks could be soaked or smoke damaged, and just a little polishing should bring them right back to new).
Thoughts?
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
In the gcc-v3 distribution they've been working for many months.
Exactly. Now, step back and think about WHEN Red Hat 7.0 was released.... Red Hat made a hard decision. They had to release a 1.5-year old C++ compiler that did not track the standard or the latest version of C++ off of the 3.0 development snapshots. They did the latter because they felt it would serve more of their customers' interests, and they had the technical staff to back that decision up.
Then, they got burned from both sides. The folks who were writing non-standard C++ complained because their programs no longer compiled. The folks who were tracking the GCC development and the ANSI standard complained that it did not go far enough.
The kicker is that, had they been Sun, releasing ACC, people would have groned because their code broke, put a bunch of #ifdefs in their code (or modified their autoconfigs) and gone on with life. But, because we have a porthole into the development process, we feel we're qualified to second-guess the distribution-creation process. Personally, I'm impressed that Red Hat (or Debian or SuSe, etc) can package a distribution at all, given the huge number of projects and no real coordination between them.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Of course, they will do what they've always done (and every other commercial vendor with large customers does). They will distribute "obsolete" software until their next version, when they will go with the almost-latest-and-greatest that they can get to work.
You have to understand, Red Hat bowed to their customers. Many of their C++ customers told them they needed ANSI C++ compliance badly. GCC 2.96 offered that.
Red Hat has a history of working hard on the compiler, and distributing a custom version. They were the first distribution to ship egcs (remember, 6.2 ran egcs for the C++ compiler). They also did a lot of work on making egcs work for the Linux kernel.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Under Windows, you probably want Netscape 6.1 (*not* 6.01, which is *way* too unstable).
You will find NS6.1 to be very privacy friendly (though two of your features are missing: JavaScript per domain and images by size).
It's based on the Mozilla 0.9.1 release which is very nice, and usable on it's own, but adds a number of plug-ins that are worth having.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
However, I dont really think that it is reasonable to expect privacy when browsing on the Internet
Let's see... what else is not private? How about calling your doctor? The phone network is a "public place", by your reasoning. Sure, let's just have the phone company record your conversations and publish the statistics to interested parties.... Do ISPs do this now? Yes, but I expect that to last until the first law suit that cripples an ISP because they sold what ammounts to medical information to the wrong party. Americans are very sensitive to their tenuous right to privacy, and the trigger is usually violence against women or medical information.
My stepfather has worked with Carnivore(he is a high ranking federal law enforcement agent) and when we talked about the Carnivore system he said that it is much harder to get a warrent for it or for taking a computer than it is to get warrents for searching more traditional things.
Of course, it's harder now; they're working out the ground-rules. However, if attitudes like yours prevailed, I would expect it to be much easier within the next few years. Thankfully, many judges take the long view, and such invasions will likely be curtailed over the next few years.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
You'd think that at a web site devoted to computers, nerds and logic, we would be immune to fellatious arguments
Nope, your post disabused me of that notion.
I expect the green factions on Slashdot (oddly enough, they overlap with the Communist factions, and if you can name a greater despoiler of the environment than the Godless commies, name one, cf. the Caspian Sea has shrunk in half due to Communist environmental degradation and water diversion
Wow, that's such a list of logical fallacies, I can't pick which one to point out first. Let's start with the straw-man:
"green factions" "overlap with the Communist factions"? Ok, you don't support this thesis, but there, you've made the statement. Not having backed it up, you will of course refrain from using it as the foundation for futher argument, and get to your original point? Nope, "Godless commies" (appeal to fear/ignorance). "despoiler of the environment"... gee, Dr Potter, are all Godless commies despoilers of the environment? That must mean that all "green factions" are commie, tree-burners too, right? Strawman: 0, Slashdot: 1
will soon be out in force declaring man to be the most heinuos figure of environmental disaster
Strawman #2
instead of our Lord's crown of creation
Offtopic, and unsupported, but ignorable.
If it was up to those greenies
Insults are hardly a form of logical debate, but we're going for "fellatious arguments based on emotion" here, aren't we?
the human population would be 100 million, and we'd live in huts eating soybeans.
Irrational and unsupported strawman #3. I love this guy! What it must be like to be totally unfettered by reason....
The post goes on to posit that Native Americans, given guns would have wiped out the bison herds... Of course, no supporting evidence is given, so I can't really debate the point.
Can someone please mod the original post down a tad?
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
What's more, comments about KDE as the ultimate platform for developers because of Qt, are misplaced. Qt has only one major problem: it's written in C++. But that one's a problem from which I have never seen a toolkit recover without the marketing dominance of Microsoft. Even the very best C++ toolkits are relegated to the backwaters of the developer world because of the cross-platform difficulties (e.g. even Sun had to pass on Qt because it would require choosing acc (thier compiler) or gcc (the one everyone uses) for the shared library format); towering complexity of any sizable code (try to get an average-skill C++ developer up to speed on a project that's been under development for a year or so, and you'll be spending months explaining why you used the language the way you did); and the algorithm-hiding features of the language (e.g. massive overloading, mind-boggling inheiritance rules, four casting operators, etc).
GNOME is written in C. You know, that language that Linux, X, GCC, BSD, Apache, Bind, Sendmail and most of the rest of the civilized world's software is written in. If you want to use a C library from C++ you can. Or from Python, Perl, Scheme, or any of dozens of other languages. C++ libraries can be bent and twisted at the cost of performance and flexibility to be used with most of these.
Here's a quote from the KDE pages on language bindings for Qt and KDE:Now check out what GNOME has to say about language bindings and you'll find a very different story. The matrix is a little hard to read because there are so many languages in it....
Is KDE/Qt nice? Of course, and I recommend it to anyone who finds that they don't like GNOME. I respect the folks that wrote the tools, because they're good tools. I just don't think that they took some very important points into consideration.
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
No... we denounce him for being a neanderthal.
Let's take a few quotes:
Helms is a bigot and quite bluntly, not very swift. He's also an isolationist when it suits his needs.
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
I'd like to see Dr. Shorter tell my wife that the pain is all in her head.
;-)
No, no, she's imagining that it's in her hands, not her head.
You'd have to surgically remove her hands from his throat.
Nope, won't help. Phantom Limb Syndrom (or Phantom Limb Phantom Pain Syndrom, in this case) would be a problem.
On the other hand, what struck me[...]
So, one hand is in pain, and she's hitting you with the other one?! Time for some serious mariage consuling, here.
The term is used as shorthand
Well, if she's already deformed, I guess she was prone to such injury. Hardly a valid sample demographic....
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)