First, you're not dumb; you just don't know much about the issue. Which is good: it means you know a lot more than a lot of the people who have been responding so far.
Essentially, C++ offers support for many, many different types of programming. Just like there are some tasks for which object-orientation is better than procedural, there are some projects for which generics are superior, for which functional programming is superior, etc., etc.
C++ is not an object-oriented language and was never intended to be (as reading Stroustrup will tell you); C++ was meant to support a broad variety of programming styles, of which object-oriented programming is just one.
So what do we gain by allowing the kernel to use C++? Mostly, we allow kernel programmers flexibility to solve problems in different ways. However, the trick to this is that while we're giving the programmers additional tools with which to do their jobs, we're giving them more complex tools which sometimes fail in extremely bad ways.
Exceptions are a good example. Up until very recently, code that used exceptions was about 5% slower than code that was exception-free. This five percent penalty was unavoidable overhead. Now, some people got bit by this five percent hit (usually people working in realtime fields) and came to the conclusion of "oh, C++ sucks for RTOS because exceptions give a five percent hit".
The reason why they came to that conclusion is easy to understand: it's easier to blame their tool than their knowledge of the tool. It's easy to say "oh, C++ sucks"; it's harder on the ego to say "well, I didn't know that about C++, and it bit me in the ass."
Many--and maybe most--people who condemn C++ have not used it recently. Linus, for instance, condemns C++ based on his experiences with it from 1992, six years before the C++ language had been standardized and ten years before GNU got a decent C++ compiler.
C++ is a very complex language, as anyone, even C++ aficionados, will tell you. On the other hand, in the hands of someone who's made the (significant) investment to become a skilled C++ programmer, C++ is capable of breathtaking power and elegance.
The conflict is essentially this: one side believes "if we add C++ support to the kernel, we'll have lots of incompetent C++ people doing all manner of incompetent C++ things which are really stupid and killing performance" and the other believes "with C++ support to the kernel, we give programmers different ways to solve approach problems, and I'm not going to deny all programmers the benefit of C++ just because many programmers can't use it effectively."
I sincerely think that adding C++ support to the kernel is a good idea, subject to some strict requirements. For instance, have a C++ Czar for the kernel, someone Linus trusts to have wisdom and understanding of C++; and make sure that all C++ checkins to the kernel go through the C++ Czar to ensure that C++ is being used wisely, and not as an impediment to understanding.
In your own words, leave that false dichotomy alone. They're not criminals, can't be criminals, because their actions are taking place far outside of US jurisdiction. (Hamid Karzai's government might correctly call them criminals, but the US doesn't get to do that.)
And since the Geneva Accords have made it expressly clear that the Taliban do not qualify, the Accords do not extend to them.
Which part of this are you failing to understand?
Why is it the United States is the bad guy here? Did we force the Taliban to be so offensive to the common decency of the world that only one country recognized their government? Did we force the Taliban to not organize into an army? Did we force the Taliban to conceal their arms, to attack from civilian enclaves, to dress in civilian clothes and mix into the population? Did we force the Taliban to violate the laws of armed combat?
So let me get this straight: we did none of the things which cause the Taliban to be considered outside the coverage of Geneva... and somehow, we're the bad guys.
No, the world recognized the Taliban as armed forces. The world also did not recognize the Taliban as an army. No matter what country you're in (unless it's Pakistan), your country declared them to be armed forces but not an army and not in the service of a government.
You keep on talking about Miranda as if it's some part of international law. Miranda does not mean what you think it means. Miranda applies solely to criminal law within the borders of the United States. It doesn't apply to civil law within the United States, and it has never been construed by any court, anywhere, anywhen, as applying to military operations.
If you're sincere in wanting to continue this discussion, please learn what Miranda is before continuing. If I see another wildly uninformed message from you, I'm going to assume that you're trolling.
I'm not arguing for evil. I'm arguing that people are talking an awful lot about how we're violating the Geneva Conventions without for a moment thinking about what the Geneva Conventions actually say.
I'm not arguing in favor of evil. I'm arguing against closed-mindedness and folly.
It's not an oversimplification. It's a statement: study one, or study the other; but don't study one and fool yourself into thinking you're studying the other.
I'm a computer scientist--I'm a grad student in CS in a very theoretical curriculum. I also have a very strong background in real-world programming. So yes, speaking as someone who's done both, if you want programming, go to DeVry. If you want CS, study Scheme.
Once you're done with one, study the other if you like.
The reason why you're learning Scheme is because you're learning computer science, not programming. If you want to learn programming, go to DeVry. If you want to learn computer science, learn Scheme.
Want Scheme to be an object-oriented language? You can make it one pretty easily, but first you have to understand the concept of closures and lexical scope. Want to learn functional programming? You can make a Y-combinator in just a few lines. Want to learn backwards-chaining declarative logic? Under 100 lines.
The beauty of Scheme is twofold. One, it's so minimalist that by itself it's almost useless; and two, in the process of making Scheme useful, you learn a lot about the way languages are designed and why they're designed that way. I didn't truly understand exceptions until I understood Scheme's call-with-current-continuation, for instance.
If you want programming, go to DeVry. If you want to learn computer science, stick with Scheme.
The government of the USA and many multinational corporations negotiated with them in such a capacity
False. Trade with Afghanistan was very tightly controlled. The largest American contribution to the Afghanistan GDP came from humanitarian aid. Nor did the US negotiate with the Taliban except at the very end, in an attempt to prevent war by telling them "give Bin Laden over, or else."
The Taliban's or Iraq's soldiers weren't all 'terrorists', most of them were just collecting paychecks.
Even if true, it's irrelevant. The purpose of Geneva is not what you say it is. The purpose of Geneva is really, really simple: to establish the rule of law.
The rule of law is perhaps the greatest thing in the history of humanity. The rule of law has led, quite directly, to economic and political liberty. The rule of law has prevented the loss of billions of lives and has allowed countries which have embraced the rule of law to flourish.
Before the Hague and Geneva Conventions of the 19th century, war was an entirely lawless thing. After 1949 and the modern revision of the Geneva Conventions, war remained hell, but the idea was it would remain hell within certain constraints defined by law. Countries who embraced these Conventions had the possibility, for the first time in history, of substantially reducing civilian bodycount from military activity. This was considered to be an enormous gain. And in order to give soldiers a reason to obey Geneva, from the mightiest general all the way down to the lowliest private, soldiers were given a guarantee: obey Geneva and you'll be treated humanely by your captors.
And to try and compel Geneva on evil people--because the final Geneva revision was in 1949, and the evil of Naziism was still strong in people's minds--Geneva has some damn compelling language. You can be evil. But if you break the laws of armed combat, you get no protection from the laws of armed combat. You can be executed. You can be treated inhumanely. You can be denied the benefit of law. You can be imprisoned arbitrarily and for duration. You can be summarily executed.
Geneva is the original Bush II. You're either with Geneva or you're against it, and if you're against it, then brother, you are in the hurtful place.
The Taliban are against it. They're in the hurtful place.
Recognition is implicitly involved. You can't profess allegiance to a non-recognized government, after all. If I have a bunch of people sworn to service of the People's Republic of Tuesday, that doesn't make them an army.
you argue that they can't be considered soldiers, but at the same time arguing that they 'militarized' an area. Surely only an army can militarize an area?
Only armed forces can militarize an area, yes. But if those armed forces do not belong to a government and are not conducting themselves within the laws of armed combat, then they receive no Geneva protections. It's really quite simple that way.
You wish to treat them as an army in order to turn them into spies
If they were considered an army operating within the laws of armed combat, then they could not be considered spies.
but refuse to where it would turn them into PoWs.
Nothing would please me more than hearing the Taliban had started obeying the laws of armed combat. Once the Taliban stop targeting women, children, medical personnel and people of different religious faiths, and start conducting themselves like a professional army, I'll be the first to demand they be treated in accordance with NATO standards for prisoners of war. In NATO, Geneva is considered the minimum standard--not an acceptable standard.
We call them criminals.
You call them criminals. So does most of Europe, apparently. However, there's still a substantial body of legal opinion which calls them illegal combatants and subject to the most draconian measures imaginable, up to and including summary execution.
not given their Miranda rights
If you think Miranda applies to non-Geneva troops in a time of declared hostilities, you're absolutely mad. Find me one bit of case law to support that proposition.
You have to be diplomatically recognized by the United Nations for your government to count under the Geneva Conventions. Given that the US is recognized, our soldiers would be entitled to full Geneva protections.
The Taliban government was formally recognized by only one government--Pakistan--and that government's a tinhorn dictatorship. The Taliban never had any legitimacy in the eyes of the world. (Okay, the world less Pakistan.)
The Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. They were recognized as being in power, but they were not recognized as being the government. Syria is in power in parts of Lebanon, but that doesn't make Syria the government in those parts of Lebanon; it just makes them in power. The Lebanese government is still the recognized authority over those areas.
Before you go about accusing people of propagating utter bullshit, perhaps you should learn to carefully read what people say, and learn that's not the same thing as what you think they mean.
Oh, I entirely agree with you. At the same time, though, there's a strong argument that the Taliban was simply too poor to afford uniforms, and thus shouldn't be excluded from Geneva protections simply because of that.
And hey, I agree. If the Taliban had been a recognized government, and their militia had been a regular force, and their militia had upheld the laws of armed combat save for the uniform issue, then I'd say go ahead and waive the uniform issue. But that's a whole lot of ifs and ands, and none of them are true.
if cival war were to break out then anyone captured during that cival war who was not fighting on the side of the Government could be denied their rights under the Geneva convention.
The Geneva Conventions have never been construed as applying to internal conflict. Geneva only talks about international hostilities, not intranational hostilities.
You're incorrect in thinking rebels in a civil war could be denied their rights under the Geneva Conventions. They can't be, because they have no rights under the Geneva Conventions.
This is something that Bush seems to forget, or just ignore.
I would take this criticism much more seriously if it were made by people who have read the Geneva Conventions and understand what it says, as well as what it doesn't.
First, the United States has not signed all the Geneva Conventions.
Second, the Geneva Conventions are in some ways absolutely absurd. For instance, prisoners are supposed to be guaranteed athletic uniforms. In a lot of ways the Geneva Conventions are a reflection of a 1920s notion of how gentlemen ought to act to each other in a state of peace; they do not speak very much to the modern state of the world or to the modern state of war. Let's not forget that Geneva was drafted in the post-WW2 period by diplomats whose military experience and notions of 'the laws of war' were shaped by WW1.
Third, Geneva sees the world in strict black and white. For Geneva to apply, you must be either a civilian or a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government. If you're neither a civilian nor a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government, Geneva considers you to be a spy and entirely outside the protections of the Geneva accords.
So think about this: the detainees captured during combat operations in Afghanistan are not civilians. (Some may be, and we desperately need a legal process to determine who is a civilian and who is not; but I do not believe the majority of them are civilians.)
The Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. Only one country in the world recognized their government as being legitimate, and anyone who suggests that the opinion of a generalissimo dictator (i.e., Pakistan's Musharraf) lends credibility to the Taliban-as-government idea has no credibility at all.
Thus, no Taliban fighter could be considered a soldier under the Geneva Conventions. Even if the Taliban were a recognized government, they'd still fail because they didn't have uniforms. (A pedantic point? Sure. But that's law for you; law is nothing more than the rigorous application of pedantism.)
Not only that, but the Taliban committed gross breaches of the laws of armed combat. They mixed in with civilians; they militarized noncombatant areas; they targeted medical personnel; they engaged in military operations against civilian targets. Under the Geneva Accords, they can be summarily executed for this without judicial process. After all, they're not in uniform, not in the service of a government, and not civilians--they're spies. Kill 'em without trials. It's legal.
So when you start talking about Geneva, start thinking long and hard. Do you really want us to treat them in strict accordance with Geneva? Or do you want us to treat them in accordance with some nebulous 'standard' which far, far exceeds Geneva protections?
If you want Geneva, fine. But don't go about talking how awful it is that Bush isn't strictly adhering to Geneva without understanding just how horrible Geneva allows us to be. I'm no fan of Bush, but I have to give him this: he's not summarily executing people in Gitmo. And under the law, he's allowed to.
(Addendum: None of this is an argument to abandon Geneva. I'm only suggesting that we acknowledge Geneva's many shortcomings and understand what it actually says, not what we wish it to mean. If I had my way, NATO would agree on uniform standards for prisoners, both regular and irregulars, with severe penalties for violators. I don't trust the UN to form a new Geneva Convention, given that Geneva is fundamentally a human rights issue and Libya's the current chair of the UN Human Rights committee.)
If you want C, you know where to find it:/usr/bin/gcc is a good guess.
If you want Java, then use Java.
One of Java's most significant advantages is that it doesn't expose pointers or dynamic memory allocation to the programmer. This is a Very Big Deal, because there are only two kinds of programmers out there: the sort who know they can't be trusted to never leave a dangling pointer or a memory leak, and the sort who are living in denial.
Why in the world would you want to throw away one of Java's major advantages just to save yourself the minor inconvenience of having to learn something new?
Most of the good programmers that I know--and, without exception, all of the great programmers I know--are fluent in more languages than they have pairs of clean socks. So my advice to you is simple:
Abandon C. Really. For the next year, don't touch C. Walk away from it. Use Java or C# or LISP or SML/NJ or Ocaml or Prolog or FORTH or Fortran95 or whateverthehell floats your boat, but for the next year, just get away from C. Explore what else is out there. Learn other languages. Become fluent in them. See what new things they give you. See how they're better than C. See what C does better than them.
When I was seventeen I read Muller's Nemesis: the Death Star. I suspect that title was foisted on him by his publisher; it's too sensationalistic for Dr. Muller, I think. Anyway, yes, Rich Muller is the guy who came up with the Nemesis hypothesis.
I loved the book. It wasn't a one-sided argument in favor of his theory. Rather, the book was more about the history of his hypothesis rather than "look at me, I'm so cool". (For all that I love Linus Pauling, he did a lot of the latter in his writing.) The book made mention of some experiments which could disprove the Nemesis hypothesis, and I waited for the results of the Hipparcos sat... and didn't hear anything in the media.
So, with the simple wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, I decided to write Rich Muller and ask him the results of Hipparcos. I mentioned how I'd found his book, that I was going to college next year to pursue an engineering degree, the usual stuff a seventeen-year-old talks about.
Three weeks later, I had a two-page letter back from him. He explained the Hipparcos results; he wished me luck in my undergraduate career; and asked me to drop him a line in a couple of years to let him know how my engineering studies were going.
I never got around to responding to Rich, because by the time I got to my undergraduate career I'd become infected with the common wisdom of adults: "of course he's got better things to do than hear from me." When I was seventeen I knew better; when I was twenty, I was an idiot.
Well, now I'm looking at 30 in a couple of months. So. Rich, if you're reading this?
The 17-year-old from the early '90s who wrote you asking about Hipparcos? That's me. I'm now 29 and working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science. It's been a helluva ride, let me tell you. I'm basically doing applied math, and some of the ways the math gets applied take my breath away.
Thanks for taking me seriously when I was seventeen. Only a couple of people did.
If I recall my last examination properly (I'm KC0SJE), ham operators essentially don't need a permit to put up a usefully-tall tower. Under FCC regulations, cities may not refuse to give a ham operator a tower permit.
There are some caveats to this regulation, of course. But as a practical matter, if you're a ham and you want to put a tower up in the middle of downtown, there's not much the city or state can do to stop you.
So rejecting Kyoto isn't a matter of saying 'we want to help the environment in our own way,' it is a matter of saying 'we don't want to help the environment as much as Kyoto would ask.' People who claim the former are either deceived or partisan.
And they say that Bush has a polarized view of the world.
So let me get this straight: it doesn't matter that people--myself included--are willing to say "sure, let's spend a trillion dollars converting coal plants into nuclear". All that matters is Kyoto; and if you're not in favor of Kyoto, you're "deceived or partisan"?
You need to start separating your goals from your ideology. If your goal is to reduce carbon output, and the price of getting people to sign on to mass conversion of coal to nuclear is you taking out an ad in the New York Times blaming the Kyoto plan for everything from body odor to the disaster that was Gigli, that you wouldn't? Because if you're not in favor of Kyoto, you're either "deluded or partisan"?
What PBS's expert fails to mention is U-235/U-238 are far from the only fissionable elements in nature. They're just the most common.
Prof. John McCarthyyes, that Prof. John McCarthyhas an excellent page which explains the counterarguments here. Take a gander at it sometime: it's good reading.
Between the two, I find McCarthy's arguments considerably more credible.
Kyoto is about reducing greenhouse emission in industrialized countries by whatever way you want, right?
No, in point of fact, it's not. If that's all Kyoto was, I'd agree to it in a heartbeat.
But you don't need thousands of pages of legalese and jargon and international diplomacy to say "we're going to cut our carbon emissions by a few percent". The sheer heftiness of the Kyoto plan is strong evidence that implementing Kyoto is nowhere near as simple as its proponents like to believe.
Zambia is *not* going to fund a Fusion Reactor project!
Of course not. On the other hand, the best thing Zambia could do for its environmental policy is--surprise, surprise--adopt a democratic government with a free market. History shows that environmentalism has only flourished in those nations which embrace both political and economic liberty. The Soviet Union committed environmental catastrophes never before seen in history. China's environmental legacy is the Three Gorges Dam--a real champ if ever I saw one. Eastern Europe is still scarred by fifty years of despotic rule. (My last trip to Germany, I could literally see the old border between East and West; not in terms of fences and border guards, but in terms of readily-apparent environmental damage.)
So no, I'm not expecting Zambia to fund fusion reactor research. If they want to be environmentally friendly, though, they'll have to adopt the rule of law; republican or democratic government; and free-market reforms. That, they can do.
You don't pave the way for the Third World to use fusion reactors by having the First World develop them. After all, the First World has developed reliable and easy-to-operate pebble bed fission reactors: how many of these do you see operating in Africa? You won't see nuclear technology of any kind in Africa until Africa develops the social and political infrastructure to use nuclear power safely.
So if you want environmentalism in Africa, start by advocating African political and social reforms.
Don't start by suggesting the US has an obligation to develop fusion technology, and that once it's developed Africa will end their emissions problem. That dog just won't hunt.
U238 is very common in nature; it's pretty much dirt cheap. Is it a finite energy supply? Sure, it's a finite energy supply, but we're talking about centuries of power generation even assuming the most wild energy use imaginable. By the time we need to start worrying about uranium prices--hell, long before we ever need to worry about filling up Yucca Mountain--we'll have the technology to put orbital satellites up, hundreds of kilometers on a side, beaming terawatts of power down to Earth.
Nobody in their right mind ever proposes anything as a permanent power solution. Nor have many of your alternate sources had much in the way of EPA review. A windmill has no environmental impact--great. What happens when we have acres upon acres upon acres of them, and we're taking enough energy from them to significantly disrupt prevailing wind patterns?
Tidal harnesses? Great: what happens when we've got so many of them that we're significantly impacting aqualife? Where are the large-scale, long-term studies?
Solar? Right now, solar is about the most toxic power supply there is. They take huge energy to make, oftentimes fail to generate that much energy over their lives, and the chemicals involved in the lithography are spectacularly toxic. I don't want to see large-scale solar operations, not with our current level of solar tech.
Nuclear? Nuclear has its problems, yes. On the other hand, we know what those problems are; we know how to mitigate those risks; and we know that nuclear scales extraordinarily well. It's a good solution that's available right now, and that's a hell of a lot better than a perfect solution which won't be available/debugged for another twenty years.
I'm impressed by how you come to that conclusion without knowing how that came to pass. That was something my friend Phil Munson said about me in October 1994, at his marriage to Sonja Backstrom. Phil's employer was a DoD agency concerned with secrecy, and thus whenever he was asked what he did, his answer was the same: "Unamerican activities, like fortifying cereals and irradiating meats."
At his bachelor party, I gave him a box of Golden Grahams and an irradiated pot roast. His brother, Mike, asked if it was really irradiated. I was about to answer when Phil interjected with "Most people are never thought about after they're gone. 'I wonder where Rob got the plutonium' is better than most get."
It was, is, probably the funniest thing anyone's ever said about me, and that's why it's my.sig.
Now that you've heard the story, would you care to revise your theory about me having a plutonium fetish?
Either that, or else the global-warming advocates are consistently misrepresenting and/or demonizing the careful, considered objections the "anti-global-warmers". Me, for instance. Do I believe global warming exists? Sure I do. Am I in favor of Kyoto? Hell, no.
Even its proponents agree that it would only delay global warming by a handful of months, at a cost of trillions of dollars. Kyoto opponents, such as myself, are generally not opposed to fighting global warming: we're opposed to fighting it in silly non-cost-effective means which are more public relations than results. For a trillion dollars, I'd far rather see Kyoto abandoned and a thousand coal plants converted to nuclear. Think about those carbon savings for a moment--uff da!
On the other hand, do you know how often "global-warming advocates" have heard my alternative to Kyoto, given it consideration, and responded intelligently? Zero. All they hear is I'm anti-Kyoto, and suddenly I'm a crackpot neocon. (I'm neither.)
You're right that "sometimes, you know, the other side is just wrong, or lying, and pointing this out does not constitute demonization."
On the other hand, sometimes the side that's just wrong is your side, when you state what the other person's perspective is.
It's hardly ad-hominem. My objection to his conduct is quite well-considered, quite rationally stated, with a minimum of hystrionics or slander. Nor was my comment offhand or inaccurate.
It is not ad-hominem to exercise sincere and honest judgement, even if that judgement is something with which other people disagree.
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First, you're not dumb; you just don't know much about the issue. Which is good: it means you know a lot more than a lot of the people who have been responding so far.
Essentially, C++ offers support for many, many different types of programming. Just like there are some tasks for which object-orientation is better than procedural, there are some projects for which generics are superior, for which functional programming is superior, etc., etc.
C++ is not an object-oriented language and was never intended to be (as reading Stroustrup will tell you); C++ was meant to support a broad variety of programming styles, of which object-oriented programming is just one.
So what do we gain by allowing the kernel to use C++? Mostly, we allow kernel programmers flexibility to solve problems in different ways. However, the trick to this is that while we're giving the programmers additional tools with which to do their jobs, we're giving them more complex tools which sometimes fail in extremely bad ways.
Exceptions are a good example. Up until very recently, code that used exceptions was about 5% slower than code that was exception-free. This five percent penalty was unavoidable overhead. Now, some people got bit by this five percent hit (usually people working in realtime fields) and came to the conclusion of "oh, C++ sucks for RTOS because exceptions give a five percent hit".
The reason why they came to that conclusion is easy to understand: it's easier to blame their tool than their knowledge of the tool. It's easy to say "oh, C++ sucks"; it's harder on the ego to say "well, I didn't know that about C++, and it bit me in the ass."
Many--and maybe most--people who condemn C++ have not used it recently. Linus, for instance, condemns C++ based on his experiences with it from 1992, six years before the C++ language had been standardized and ten years before GNU got a decent C++ compiler.
C++ is a very complex language, as anyone, even C++ aficionados, will tell you. On the other hand, in the hands of someone who's made the (significant) investment to become a skilled C++ programmer, C++ is capable of breathtaking power and elegance.
The conflict is essentially this: one side believes "if we add C++ support to the kernel, we'll have lots of incompetent C++ people doing all manner of incompetent C++ things which are really stupid and killing performance" and the other believes "with C++ support to the kernel, we give programmers different ways to solve approach problems, and I'm not going to deny all programmers the benefit of C++ just because many programmers can't use it effectively."
I sincerely think that adding C++ support to the kernel is a good idea, subject to some strict requirements. For instance, have a C++ Czar for the kernel, someone Linus trusts to have wisdom and understanding of C++; and make sure that all C++ checkins to the kernel go through the C++ Czar to ensure that C++ is being used wisely, and not as an impediment to understanding.
In your own words, leave that false dichotomy alone. They're not criminals, can't be criminals, because their actions are taking place far outside of US jurisdiction. (Hamid Karzai's government might correctly call them criminals, but the US doesn't get to do that.)
And since the Geneva Accords have made it expressly clear that the Taliban do not qualify, the Accords do not extend to them.
Which part of this are you failing to understand?
Why is it the United States is the bad guy here? Did we force the Taliban to be so offensive to the common decency of the world that only one country recognized their government? Did we force the Taliban to not organize into an army? Did we force the Taliban to conceal their arms, to attack from civilian enclaves, to dress in civilian clothes and mix into the population? Did we force the Taliban to violate the laws of armed combat?
So let me get this straight: we did none of the things which cause the Taliban to be considered outside the coverage of Geneva... and somehow, we're the bad guys.
I think you need to grow up.
No, the world recognized the Taliban as armed forces. The world also did not recognize the Taliban as an army. No matter what country you're in (unless it's Pakistan), your country declared them to be armed forces but not an army and not in the service of a government.
You keep on talking about Miranda as if it's some part of international law. Miranda does not mean what you think it means. Miranda applies solely to criminal law within the borders of the United States. It doesn't apply to civil law within the United States, and it has never been construed by any court, anywhere, anywhen, as applying to military operations.
If you're sincere in wanting to continue this discussion, please learn what Miranda is before continuing. If I see another wildly uninformed message from you, I'm going to assume that you're trolling.
I'm not arguing for evil. I'm arguing that people are talking an awful lot about how we're violating the Geneva Conventions without for a moment thinking about what the Geneva Conventions actually say.
I'm not arguing in favor of evil. I'm arguing against closed-mindedness and folly.
It's not an oversimplification. It's a statement: study one, or study the other; but don't study one and fool yourself into thinking you're studying the other.
I'm a computer scientist--I'm a grad student in CS in a very theoretical curriculum. I also have a very strong background in real-world programming. So yes, speaking as someone who's done both, if you want programming, go to DeVry. If you want CS, study Scheme.
Once you're done with one, study the other if you like.
The reason why you're learning Scheme is because you're learning computer science, not programming. If you want to learn programming, go to DeVry. If you want to learn computer science, learn Scheme.
Want Scheme to be an object-oriented language? You can make it one pretty easily, but first you have to understand the concept of closures and lexical scope. Want to learn functional programming? You can make a Y-combinator in just a few lines. Want to learn backwards-chaining declarative logic? Under 100 lines.
The beauty of Scheme is twofold. One, it's so minimalist that by itself it's almost useless; and two, in the process of making Scheme useful, you learn a lot about the way languages are designed and why they're designed that way. I didn't truly understand exceptions until I understood Scheme's call-with-current-continuation, for instance.
If you want programming, go to DeVry. If you want to learn computer science, stick with Scheme.
The rule of law is perhaps the greatest thing in the history of humanity. The rule of law has led, quite directly, to economic and political liberty. The rule of law has prevented the loss of billions of lives and has allowed countries which have embraced the rule of law to flourish.
Before the Hague and Geneva Conventions of the 19th century, war was an entirely lawless thing. After 1949 and the modern revision of the Geneva Conventions, war remained hell, but the idea was it would remain hell within certain constraints defined by law. Countries who embraced these Conventions had the possibility, for the first time in history, of substantially reducing civilian bodycount from military activity. This was considered to be an enormous gain. And in order to give soldiers a reason to obey Geneva, from the mightiest general all the way down to the lowliest private, soldiers were given a guarantee: obey Geneva and you'll be treated humanely by your captors.
And to try and compel Geneva on evil people--because the final Geneva revision was in 1949, and the evil of Naziism was still strong in people's minds--Geneva has some damn compelling language. You can be evil. But if you break the laws of armed combat, you get no protection from the laws of armed combat. You can be executed. You can be treated inhumanely. You can be denied the benefit of law. You can be imprisoned arbitrarily and for duration. You can be summarily executed.
Geneva is the original Bush II. You're either with Geneva or you're against it, and if you're against it, then brother, you are in the hurtful place.
The Taliban are against it. They're in the hurtful place.
Recognition is implicitly involved. You can't profess allegiance to a non-recognized government, after all. If I have a bunch of people sworn to service of the People's Republic of Tuesday, that doesn't make them an army.
You have to be diplomatically recognized by the United Nations for your government to count under the Geneva Conventions. Given that the US is recognized, our soldiers would be entitled to full Geneva protections.
The Taliban government was formally recognized by only one government--Pakistan--and that government's a tinhorn dictatorship. The Taliban never had any legitimacy in the eyes of the world. (Okay, the world less Pakistan.)
The Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. They were recognized as being in power, but they were not recognized as being the government. Syria is in power in parts of Lebanon, but that doesn't make Syria the government in those parts of Lebanon; it just makes them in power. The Lebanese government is still the recognized authority over those areas.
Before you go about accusing people of propagating utter bullshit, perhaps you should learn to carefully read what people say, and learn that's not the same thing as what you think they mean.
Oh, I entirely agree with you. At the same time, though, there's a strong argument that the Taliban was simply too poor to afford uniforms, and thus shouldn't be excluded from Geneva protections simply because of that.
And hey, I agree. If the Taliban had been a recognized government, and their militia had been a regular force, and their militia had upheld the laws of armed combat save for the uniform issue, then I'd say go ahead and waive the uniform issue. But that's a whole lot of ifs and ands, and none of them are true.
You're incorrect in thinking rebels in a civil war could be denied their rights under the Geneva Conventions. They can't be, because they have no rights under the Geneva Conventions.I would take this criticism much more seriously if it were made by people who have read the Geneva Conventions and understand what it says, as well as what it doesn't.
First, the United States has not signed all the Geneva Conventions.
Second, the Geneva Conventions are in some ways absolutely absurd. For instance, prisoners are supposed to be guaranteed athletic uniforms. In a lot of ways the Geneva Conventions are a reflection of a 1920s notion of how gentlemen ought to act to each other in a state of peace; they do not speak very much to the modern state of the world or to the modern state of war. Let's not forget that Geneva was drafted in the post-WW2 period by diplomats whose military experience and notions of 'the laws of war' were shaped by WW1.
Third, Geneva sees the world in strict black and white. For Geneva to apply, you must be either a civilian or a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government. If you're neither a civilian nor a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government, Geneva considers you to be a spy and entirely outside the protections of the Geneva accords.
So think about this: the detainees captured during combat operations in Afghanistan are not civilians. (Some may be, and we desperately need a legal process to determine who is a civilian and who is not; but I do not believe the majority of them are civilians.)
The Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. Only one country in the world recognized their government as being legitimate, and anyone who suggests that the opinion of a generalissimo dictator (i.e., Pakistan's Musharraf) lends credibility to the Taliban-as-government idea has no credibility at all.
Thus, no Taliban fighter could be considered a soldier under the Geneva Conventions. Even if the Taliban were a recognized government, they'd still fail because they didn't have uniforms. (A pedantic point? Sure. But that's law for you; law is nothing more than the rigorous application of pedantism.)
Not only that, but the Taliban committed gross breaches of the laws of armed combat. They mixed in with civilians; they militarized noncombatant areas; they targeted medical personnel; they engaged in military operations against civilian targets. Under the Geneva Accords, they can be summarily executed for this without judicial process. After all, they're not in uniform, not in the service of a government, and not civilians--they're spies. Kill 'em without trials. It's legal.
So when you start talking about Geneva, start thinking long and hard. Do you really want us to treat them in strict accordance with Geneva? Or do you want us to treat them in accordance with some nebulous 'standard' which far, far exceeds Geneva protections?
If you want Geneva, fine. But don't go about talking how awful it is that Bush isn't strictly adhering to Geneva without understanding just how horrible Geneva allows us to be. I'm no fan of Bush, but I have to give him this: he's not summarily executing people in Gitmo. And under the law, he's allowed to.
(Addendum: None of this is an argument to abandon Geneva. I'm only suggesting that we acknowledge Geneva's many shortcomings and understand what it actually says, not what we wish it to mean. If I had my way, NATO would agree on uniform standards for prisoners, both regular and irregulars, with severe penalties for violators. I don't trust the UN to form a new Geneva Convention, given that Geneva is fundamentally a human rights issue and Libya's the current chair of the UN Human Rights committee.)
If you want C, you know where to find it: /usr/bin/gcc is a good guess.
If you want Java, then use Java.
One of Java's most significant advantages is that it doesn't expose pointers or dynamic memory allocation to the programmer. This is a Very Big Deal, because there are only two kinds of programmers out there: the sort who know they can't be trusted to never leave a dangling pointer or a memory leak, and the sort who are living in denial.
Why in the world would you want to throw away one of Java's major advantages just to save yourself the minor inconvenience of having to learn something new?
Most of the good programmers that I know--and, without exception, all of the great programmers I know--are fluent in more languages than they have pairs of clean socks. So my advice to you is simple:
Abandon C. Really. For the next year, don't touch C. Walk away from it. Use Java or C# or LISP or SML/NJ or Ocaml or Prolog or FORTH or Fortran95 or whateverthehell floats your boat, but for the next year, just get away from C. Explore what else is out there. Learn other languages. Become fluent in them. See what new things they give you. See how they're better than C. See what C does better than them.
Avoid COBOL if at all possible, though.
When I was seventeen I read Muller's Nemesis: the Death Star. I suspect that title was foisted on him by his publisher; it's too sensationalistic for Dr. Muller, I think. Anyway, yes, Rich Muller is the guy who came up with the Nemesis hypothesis.
I loved the book. It wasn't a one-sided argument in favor of his theory. Rather, the book was more about the history of his hypothesis rather than "look at me, I'm so cool". (For all that I love Linus Pauling, he did a lot of the latter in his writing.) The book made mention of some experiments which could disprove the Nemesis hypothesis, and I waited for the results of the Hipparcos sat... and didn't hear anything in the media.
So, with the simple wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, I decided to write Rich Muller and ask him the results of Hipparcos. I mentioned how I'd found his book, that I was going to college next year to pursue an engineering degree, the usual stuff a seventeen-year-old talks about.
Three weeks later, I had a two-page letter back from him. He explained the Hipparcos results; he wished me luck in my undergraduate career; and asked me to drop him a line in a couple of years to let him know how my engineering studies were going.
I never got around to responding to Rich, because by the time I got to my undergraduate career I'd become infected with the common wisdom of adults: "of course he's got better things to do than hear from me." When I was seventeen I knew better; when I was twenty, I was an idiot.
Well, now I'm looking at 30 in a couple of months. So. Rich, if you're reading this?
The 17-year-old from the early '90s who wrote you asking about Hipparcos? That's me. I'm now 29 and working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science. It's been a helluva ride, let me tell you. I'm basically doing applied math, and some of the ways the math gets applied take my breath away.
Thanks for taking me seriously when I was seventeen. Only a couple of people did.
If I recall my last examination properly (I'm KC0SJE), ham operators essentially don't need a permit to put up a usefully-tall tower. Under FCC regulations, cities may not refuse to give a ham operator a tower permit.
There are some caveats to this regulation, of course. But as a practical matter, if you're a ham and you want to put a tower up in the middle of downtown, there's not much the city or state can do to stop you.
So let me get this straight: it doesn't matter that people--myself included--are willing to say "sure, let's spend a trillion dollars converting coal plants into nuclear". All that matters is Kyoto; and if you're not in favor of Kyoto, you're "deceived or partisan"?
You need to start separating your goals from your ideology. If your goal is to reduce carbon output, and the price of getting people to sign on to mass conversion of coal to nuclear is you taking out an ad in the New York Times blaming the Kyoto plan for everything from body odor to the disaster that was Gigli, that you wouldn't? Because if you're not in favor of Kyoto, you're either "deluded or partisan"?
What PBS's expert fails to mention is U-235/U-238 are far from the only fissionable elements in nature. They're just the most common.
Prof. John McCarthyyes, that Prof. John McCarthyhas an excellent page which explains the counterarguments here. Take a gander at it sometime: it's good reading.
Between the two, I find McCarthy's arguments considerably more credible.
But you don't need thousands of pages of legalese and jargon and international diplomacy to say "we're going to cut our carbon emissions by a few percent". The sheer heftiness of the Kyoto plan is strong evidence that implementing Kyoto is nowhere near as simple as its proponents like to believe.Of course not. On the other hand, the best thing Zambia could do for its environmental policy is--surprise, surprise--adopt a democratic government with a free market. History shows that environmentalism has only flourished in those nations which embrace both political and economic liberty. The Soviet Union committed environmental catastrophes never before seen in history. China's environmental legacy is the Three Gorges Dam--a real champ if ever I saw one. Eastern Europe is still scarred by fifty years of despotic rule. (My last trip to Germany, I could literally see the old border between East and West; not in terms of fences and border guards, but in terms of readily-apparent environmental damage.)
So no, I'm not expecting Zambia to fund fusion reactor research. If they want to be environmentally friendly, though, they'll have to adopt the rule of law; republican or democratic government; and free-market reforms. That, they can do.
You don't pave the way for the Third World to use fusion reactors by having the First World develop them. After all, the First World has developed reliable and easy-to-operate pebble bed fission reactors: how many of these do you see operating in Africa? You won't see nuclear technology of any kind in Africa until Africa develops the social and political infrastructure to use nuclear power safely.
So if you want environmentalism in Africa, start by advocating African political and social reforms.
Don't start by suggesting the US has an obligation to develop fusion technology, and that once it's developed Africa will end their emissions problem. That dog just won't hunt.
McCain 2004. If I can't in good conscience vote for any major candidate, then I'll vote for someone I can in good conscience vote for.
U238 is very common in nature; it's pretty much dirt cheap. Is it a finite energy supply? Sure, it's a finite energy supply, but we're talking about centuries of power generation even assuming the most wild energy use imaginable. By the time we need to start worrying about uranium prices--hell, long before we ever need to worry about filling up Yucca Mountain--we'll have the technology to put orbital satellites up, hundreds of kilometers on a side, beaming terawatts of power down to Earth.
Nobody in their right mind ever proposes anything as a permanent power solution. Nor have many of your alternate sources had much in the way of EPA review. A windmill has no environmental impact--great. What happens when we have acres upon acres upon acres of them, and we're taking enough energy from them to significantly disrupt prevailing wind patterns?
Tidal harnesses? Great: what happens when we've got so many of them that we're significantly impacting aqualife? Where are the large-scale, long-term studies?
Solar? Right now, solar is about the most toxic power supply there is. They take huge energy to make, oftentimes fail to generate that much energy over their lives, and the chemicals involved in the lithography are spectacularly toxic. I don't want to see large-scale solar operations, not with our current level of solar tech.
Nuclear? Nuclear has its problems, yes. On the other hand, we know what those problems are; we know how to mitigate those risks; and we know that nuclear scales extraordinarily well. It's a good solution that's available right now, and that's a hell of a lot better than a perfect solution which won't be available/debugged for another twenty years.
At his bachelor party, I gave him a box of Golden Grahams and an irradiated pot roast. His brother, Mike, asked if it was really irradiated. I was about to answer when Phil interjected with "Most people are never thought about after they're gone. 'I wonder where Rob got the plutonium' is better than most get."
It was, is, probably the funniest thing anyone's ever said about me, and that's why it's my
Now that you've heard the story, would you care to revise your theory about me having a plutonium fetish?
Either that, or else the global-warming advocates are consistently misrepresenting and/or demonizing the careful, considered objections the "anti-global-warmers". Me, for instance. Do I believe global warming exists? Sure I do. Am I in favor of Kyoto? Hell, no.
Even its proponents agree that it would only delay global warming by a handful of months, at a cost of trillions of dollars. Kyoto opponents, such as myself, are generally not opposed to fighting global warming: we're opposed to fighting it in silly non-cost-effective means which are more public relations than results. For a trillion dollars, I'd far rather see Kyoto abandoned and a thousand coal plants converted to nuclear. Think about those carbon savings for a moment--uff da!
On the other hand, do you know how often "global-warming advocates" have heard my alternative to Kyoto, given it consideration, and responded intelligently? Zero. All they hear is I'm anti-Kyoto, and suddenly I'm a crackpot neocon. (I'm neither.)
You're right that "sometimes, you know, the other side is just wrong, or lying, and pointing this out does not constitute demonization."
On the other hand, sometimes the side that's just wrong is your side, when you state what the other person's perspective is.
It's hardly ad-hominem. My objection to his conduct is quite well-considered, quite rationally stated, with a minimum of hystrionics or slander. Nor was my comment offhand or inaccurate.
It is not ad-hominem to exercise sincere and honest judgement, even if that judgement is something with which other people disagree.