I don't say that awful things did not happened in Europe in the 40's
You said
Britain, France and most other European countries prohibited slavery, racism et al. at least 150 years ago
When in fact, they committed horrible acts of racial genocide less than 60 years ago.
the original poster grossly exagerated the melting pot that the USA is supposed to be.
And you greatly exagerate the purity of Europe. In Northern Ireland, people are killed over thier ancestory and religion. Many European nations have citizenship by blood; it's not good enough to born and raised in the country, if your parents were immigrants. Germany and Scandinavia fight continuing wars against neo-nazis. In France, synagogues have been burned. A quote from The Washington Times:
The war [WWII] did not eliminate anti-Jewish sentiment. Less than a year ago, a survey showed that 24 percent of all Austrians would "prefer" to live in a country without Jews. And even in supposedly neutral Switzerland, a survey reported by the BBC "indicates that 16 percent of Swiss people are fundamentally anti-Semitic, while 60 percent have anti-Semitic views."
Britain, France and most other European countries prohibited slavery, racism et al. at least 150 years ago
Please. So the US outlawed slavery 10 years after Britain did. But it wasn't the US that murdered 7 million people because of their race in the 1940's.
Third, you may write a program in Ada but if you use Gnat to generate your code, it's getting translated to C anyway
First place, GNAT does not compile to C - it compiles to GCC trees and then to assembly, just like the C compiler in GCC does.
Secondly, there's no reason why translating to C would change anything. The reason Ada has less problems than C is that it checks all arrays, it's more restrictive on pointer use, it prevents mixing of unrlated types; all of that is preserved when translating to C, and could be written in C by a very careful programmer.
Packages "was not a feature of Pascal" at the study was done. Packages was not and is not part of ISO 7185 - Basic Pascal. ISO 10206 - Extended Pascal wasn't standardized until 1984, after the study was done and the military had picked a language. And honestly, to this day, Extended Pascal is not a commonly used language; various compiler-specific extension sets are used instead.
orthodox medicine doesn't want to admit it because it raises some foundation breaking possibilities.
And you seem to think that's a bad thing. Once you think you know what's going on, you don't switch foundations on anything less than very strong and compelling evidence.
Frankly, you'll get farther predicting the movement of the planets believing the planets and sun move around the earth in circles, each riding their own little cirles upon cirles, then you'll get believing the planets and Earth move around the sun in simple cirles. And the paths for the first couldn't have been predicted except by many years of devotion to that theory.
the James Randi's of the world look at the fact that New Age books are sold rather than given away for free, as proof positive that New Age books are filled ONLY with lies and that their authors are ALL in it just for the money
The quotation you gave certainly doesn't prove that - he's specifically complaining about scam-artists in that quote. Having read Randi's weekly column, he clearly understands that many authors believe what they are writing.
First off, I am not familiar with any of the three authors [John Edwards, Erich von Daniken, and Uri Geller] (?) you listed.
Really? I know you haven't read Randi's weekly columns, since he goes after John Edwards almost every week. (He channels the dead for people on the Sci-Fi channel; his very successful shows has produced much backlash.) He also mentions Uri Geller frequently. (Uri Geller is, among other things, a spoon-bender and has been around for many decades. He's sued Randi, among others, for slander a couple times, never successful in court, but Randi is now somewhat circumspec about how he refers to Geller.) (Erich von Daniken wrote the very successful Chariot of the Gods and other books.) How you've never heard of them is beyond me; they are arguably the three most succesful (money and fame) non-religious paranormal people of this century.
At least the first group Forget (intentionally misspelled) contacted wasn't the developers of The Gimp or something.
Why would they? When you're doing something like this, open source people don't have cash to pony up, and help keep people dependent on the technology in question.
Science, as usually practiced today, is prejudicial. That is, it pre-judges what is real and what is not real.
That's because that's what thinking creatures do. There is no proof that writing this message wouldn't cause the destruction of the Earth. But by my judgement of what is real, this message will have minimal impact of the world. We go around assuming that floors and the ground won't collapse beneath us; it's not always a correct assumption, but someone who didn't believe that would quickly terrify themselves to death.
If scientists didn't prejudge what was real, they would constantly be doing to experiments to see if 2+2=7 or if things fly upwards when dropped. However, scientists like to do useful research, and people prefer to pay them for useful research. So they study stuff that they believe has a decent possibility of being true.
these bounds are subject to the creeds of materialism and naturalism.
By the nature of science, that's about all you can study using it. Supernatural things don't obey rules that allow them to be studied. They won't appear in a labortory, they frequently won't appear on film, and they can be very good at hiding or destroying evidence about themselves. How exactly are you supposed to study them?
There is no fundamental scientific problem with psionic powers. For some reason, however, while we can pull some guy who can bend a crowbar in half with his hands into a lab and study him, people who can bend a spoon in half with his mind tend to not be able to do that when watched too closely.
But how is it that debunkers are allowed to ask for money in order to publish their information, but that people writing books I might want to read are penalized for the same thing? Is it because James Randi is a hypocrite?
And I bet James Randi doesn't approve of those people who send out the Nigeran letters asking help to embezzle millions, either. What a hypocrit. Wait a second, though; I assume since you think that he should encourage people to give money to his oppenents as well as him, you're a steady donater to him?
James "the Amazing" Randi, however, is a self promoter first and foremost, and he is supported by wealthy forces which want to see his, "Go Back To Sleep Citizen," message spread far and wide.
And that's why James Randi has his own highly rated television show on Sci-Fi and John Edwards is a relative unknown except among a few geeks.
If you can bend a spoon, or whatever, under controlled conditions, then you have legimate enough evidence to win the million dollars. It's not like Randi is going to let someone edit in something.
Even video tape of a shuttle launch, shot with the most expensive 'movie quality' equipment could be argued as fake by somebody with such a bent.
Sure. But the claim that science makes, is that I can go down to Houston one evening and watch the shuttle launch. Science is open to people to people looking over their shoulder; even if I'm not looking over their shoulder at this time, I can trust someone else is.
People who get too successful in convincing the world of phenomenon outside the accepted realm of science are ridiculed, tormented, punished and murdered.
Just look at the bloody way John Edwards died, just when people were starting to hear of him.
Science works by proof, and so far has been very succesful at changing the world around us using that proof. All it demands of psychic powers is the same thing.
My point is that if you actually try, you can devise a near perfect system.
So you can solve the problem by being big brother and keeping track of everyone. It's not a solution to the voting problems anywhere where that's not feasible or not acceptable.
we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan?
That's the way Free Software works. Debian didn't hire translators to translate the release notes; they put out an email saying "anyone who wants to translate the release notes, here they are." Somebody translated them into Catalan. Nobody put the work into translating them into German or Chinese. That's just the way it goes. They'd be in all 5,000 human languages if we could, but we take what we can get.
In any case, you're being a little hard on Catalan. There's 9 million Catalan speakers world wide; it's not one of the top ten world languages, but it is one of the top hundred.
It's true that libc and gcc are indispensable to Linux as it is now, but they are, definitely, replaceable and other libraries or compilers could be used.
Linux can be replaced with a BSD kernel (using Linux compatibility mode) in far less time than any libc or C/C++ compiler could be changed to do the job that GNU libc and GCC does.
Linux is totally independent from GNU
The only compiler that can compile Linux is GCC. That's a pretty strong dependency there.
this constant bickering on why it should be really "GNU/Linux"
There was no bickering here until you brought it up. If Debian wants to call their operating system Debian GNU/Linux, I hardly see how it's any buisness of yours.
The end result, with no disrespect intended to the many people who worked in creating the GNU software, is just "Linux", since GNU is an accessory. Indispensable, like tyres are to a car, but accessory nevertheless
If something is indispensable, it's not an accessory. And unlike tires, much of the GNU software is not replacable out of the box. There's no libc that can replace the GNU libc on Linux; libc4 and libc5 are both based on the GNU libc and don't provide all the nessecary functionality for a modern system. Linux compiles only with GCC; besides which, there's no other free C/C++ compiler that can compile most of the complex code that usually comes with Linux. The linker and binutils are in the same boat. Bash cannot be replaced on Debian; too much stuff depends on its features (for better or worse.)
Frankly, the name of the operating system in question is Debian GNU/Linux. While Linux versus GNU/Linux in general can be debated, Debian has taken a position on that matter, and for the name of our OS, that's what matters.
someone mention TRS-80s and Z80 assembly language, but that's another story -- and another era missed out by today's new generation of computer hot-shots
Actually, the Z80 is used in the TI-82 through the TI-86 (the M68K was used in the more expensive TI-89 and TI-92s). So any computer hot-shot who goes through calculus or even algebra probably owns a computer with the Z80, and many have programmed for it in assembly language.
I have to pick between "recent" and "stable" - I can't have both.
This is a truism. It takes time to find bugs and stabilize the system. Part of the reason people use Debian stable is because it's actually stable, with major bugs having been pounded out over many subreleases or prior to the first release.
Have you ever looked at using "testing"? It's supposed to be the compromise between "stable" and "recent". Honestly, "unstable" isn't that bad, but there's been a couple of times where I've been locked out of my computer by cutting edge bugs.
We all talk about how Osama bin Laden uses 128-bit encyrption, but in actuality, the laptops captured in Afganistan were using the default Windows encryption - lousy 40-bit encryption. Another terrorist used the default encryption on his palmtop, which was quickly enough cracked by the French government. It seem that most terrorists don't know enough to use serious encryption. Now, nothing is going to take serious encyrption out of the hands of geeks, but the default encryption is what matters for most people, and that's what needs to be cracked most the time. Silently turning on strong encryption does not help law and order.
The thing the Internet seems to lack is a Prime Directive, that says it will not interfere in the local decisions of people
We all live on the same small planet and can trace our ancestors back to the same small tribe of African hominids with names like Ogg and Ugh. As time goes on, we getting more and more connected to things that happen half way around the world. There's really isn't many truely local decisions anymore.
Aren't you confusing Language and character set here?
No. He asked about localization and language support. Localization is the process of translation, and was answered by other people. Language support is if you can use the language. It's more than character set, but not only does Linux have the character set down, it also has Norwegian keyboards and ample Latin-1 fonts.
Language support is not going to be an issue. Norwegian uses the same 8-bit character set that English and German do, Latin-1. All software in Debian has been 8-bit clean since Hamm's release in 1998, so they can all handle Latin-1. To the best of my knowledge, there's no Un*x system on the market that can't handle Latin-1.
KDE and GNOME are poor substitutes for the Windows desktop
Really? I know they still are missing the lock-up when there's browser problems feature, but what else are you having trouble with? All the features are there, with fewer bugs, in my experience.
And let's not forget the many sites that won't be viewable under Netscape/Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera.
I can't say I've run into them (especially as considering Flash isn't a real concern for a government computer.) And when you're the government of Norway, the First Bank of Norway has huge incentives to fix whatever problems you may have with their site.
StarOffice, KOffice, and OpenOffice are still miles away
Miles away from what? Sure, they don't handle Hindi as well as Microsoft Word does, but they certianly cover the needs of modern word-processing.
I remember the day that Code Red hit, when the Internet started running slow and my webserver got repeatedly hit by Code Red attacks from all over the place. If and when I see the same effect from a Linux worm, I'll know we've hit the same point.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to say something profound with a silent movie? Try turning the sound off before watching some more recent movies and see if you can discern their underlying messages.
That's like turning off the picture to try and get an idea of what a story told through radio is like. Your medium defines the fundamental nature of how you tell the story.
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I'm not sure I'd actually use Ada (and it's ilk)... any language where you're putting all the info on one line (e.g. Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("Eject!"))
That's why you have use clauses; so you can write stuff like
with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
and then just write Put_Line ("Eject!");
You said
Britain, France and most other European countries prohibited slavery, racism et al. at least 150 years ago
When in fact, they committed horrible acts of racial genocide less than 60 years ago.
the original poster grossly exagerated the melting pot that the USA is supposed to be.
And you greatly exagerate the purity of Europe. In Northern Ireland, people are killed over thier ancestory and religion. Many European nations have citizenship by blood; it's not good enough to born and raised in the country, if your parents were immigrants. Germany and Scandinavia fight continuing wars against neo-nazis. In France, synagogues have been burned. A quote from The Washington Times: The rest of that article is eyeopening, too.
Britain, France and most other European countries prohibited slavery, racism et al. at least 150 years ago
Please. So the US outlawed slavery 10 years after Britain did. But it wasn't the US that murdered 7 million people because of their race in the 1940's.
Third, you may write a program in Ada but if you use Gnat to generate your code, it's getting translated to C anyway
First place, GNAT does not compile to C - it compiles to GCC trees and then to assembly, just like the C compiler in GCC does.
Secondly, there's no reason why translating to C would change anything. The reason Ada has less problems than C is that it checks all arrays, it's more restrictive on pointer use, it prevents mixing of unrlated types; all of that is preserved when translating to C, and could be written in C by a very careful programmer.
Packages "was not a feature of Pascal" at the study was done. Packages was not and is not part of ISO 7185 - Basic Pascal. ISO 10206 - Extended Pascal wasn't standardized until 1984, after the study was done and the military had picked a language. And honestly, to this day, Extended Pascal is not a commonly used language; various compiler-specific extension sets are used instead.
orthodox medicine doesn't want to admit it because it raises some foundation breaking possibilities.
And you seem to think that's a bad thing. Once you think you know what's going on, you don't switch foundations on anything less than very strong and compelling evidence.
Frankly, you'll get farther predicting the movement of the planets believing the planets and sun move around the earth in circles, each riding their own little cirles upon cirles, then you'll get believing the planets and Earth move around the sun in simple cirles. And the paths for the first couldn't have been predicted except by many years of devotion to that theory.
the James Randi's of the world look at the fact that New Age books are sold rather than given away for free, as proof positive that New Age books are filled ONLY with lies and that their authors are ALL in it just for the money
The quotation you gave certainly doesn't prove that - he's specifically complaining about scam-artists in that quote. Having read Randi's weekly column, he clearly understands that many authors believe what they are writing.
First off, I am not familiar with any of the three authors [John Edwards, Erich von Daniken, and Uri Geller] (?) you listed.
Really? I know you haven't read Randi's weekly columns, since he goes after John Edwards almost every week. (He channels the dead for people on the Sci-Fi channel; his very successful shows has produced much backlash.) He also mentions Uri Geller frequently. (Uri Geller is, among other things, a spoon-bender and has been around for many decades. He's sued Randi, among others, for slander a couple times, never successful in court, but Randi is now somewhat circumspec about how he refers to Geller.) (Erich von Daniken wrote the very successful Chariot of the Gods and other books.) How you've never heard of them is beyond me; they are arguably the three most succesful (money and fame) non-religious paranormal people of this century.
At least the first group Forget (intentionally misspelled) contacted wasn't the developers of The Gimp or something.
Why would they? When you're doing something like this, open source people don't have cash to pony up, and help keep people dependent on the technology in question.
Science, as usually practiced today, is prejudicial. That is, it pre-judges what is real and what is not real.
That's because that's what thinking creatures do. There is no proof that writing this message wouldn't cause the destruction of the Earth. But by my judgement of what is real, this message will have minimal impact of the world. We go around assuming that floors and the ground won't collapse beneath us; it's not always a correct assumption, but someone who didn't believe that would quickly terrify themselves to death.
If scientists didn't prejudge what was real, they would constantly be doing to experiments to see if 2+2=7 or if things fly upwards when dropped. However, scientists like to do useful research, and people prefer to pay them for useful research. So they study stuff that they believe has a decent possibility of being true.
these bounds are subject to the creeds of materialism and naturalism.
By the nature of science, that's about all you can study using it. Supernatural things don't obey rules that allow them to be studied. They won't appear in a labortory, they frequently won't appear on film, and they can be very good at hiding or destroying evidence about themselves. How exactly are you supposed to study them?
There is no fundamental scientific problem with psionic powers. For some reason, however, while we can pull some guy who can bend a crowbar in half with his hands into a lab and study him, people who can bend a spoon in half with his mind tend to not be able to do that when watched too closely.
But how is it that debunkers are allowed to ask for money in order to publish their information, but that people writing books I might want to read are penalized for the same thing? Is it because James Randi is a hypocrite?
And I bet James Randi doesn't approve of those people who send out the Nigeran letters asking help to embezzle millions, either. What a hypocrit. Wait a second, though; I assume since you think that he should encourage people to give money to his oppenents as well as him, you're a steady donater to him?
James "the Amazing" Randi, however, is a self promoter first and foremost, and he is supported by wealthy forces which want to see his, "Go Back To Sleep Citizen," message spread far and wide.
And that's why James Randi has his own highly rated television show on Sci-Fi and John Edwards is a relative unknown except among a few geeks.
Evidence is virtually impossible to legitimize.
If you can bend a spoon, or whatever, under controlled conditions, then you have legimate enough evidence to win the million dollars. It's not like Randi is going to let someone edit in something.
Even video tape of a shuttle launch, shot with the most expensive 'movie quality' equipment could be argued as fake by somebody with such a bent.
Sure. But the claim that science makes, is that I can go down to Houston one evening and watch the shuttle launch. Science is open to people to people looking over their shoulder; even if I'm not looking over their shoulder at this time, I can trust someone else is.
People who get too successful in convincing the world of phenomenon outside the accepted realm of science are ridiculed, tormented, punished and murdered.
Just look at the bloody way John Edwards died, just when people were starting to hear of him.
Science works by proof, and so far has been very succesful at changing the world around us using that proof. All it demands of psychic powers is the same thing.
My point is that if you actually try, you can devise a near perfect system.
So you can solve the problem by being big brother and keeping track of everyone. It's not a solution to the voting problems anywhere where that's not feasible or not acceptable.
we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan?
That's the way Free Software works. Debian didn't hire translators to translate the release notes; they put out an email saying "anyone who wants to translate the release notes, here they are." Somebody translated them into Catalan. Nobody put the work into translating them into German or Chinese. That's just the way it goes. They'd be in all 5,000 human languages if we could, but we take what we can get.
In any case, you're being a little hard on Catalan. There's 9 million Catalan speakers world wide; it's not one of the top ten world languages, but it is one of the top hundred.
It's true that libc and gcc are indispensable to Linux as it is now, but they are, definitely, replaceable and other libraries or compilers could be used.
Linux can be replaced with a BSD kernel (using Linux compatibility mode) in far less time than any libc or C/C++ compiler could be changed to do the job that GNU libc and GCC does.
Linux is totally independent from GNU
The only compiler that can compile Linux is GCC. That's a pretty strong dependency there.
this constant bickering on why it should be really "GNU/Linux"
There was no bickering here until you brought it up. If Debian wants to call their operating system Debian GNU/Linux, I hardly see how it's any buisness of yours.
The end result, with no disrespect intended to the many people who worked in creating the GNU software, is just "Linux", since GNU is an accessory. Indispensable, like tyres are to a car, but accessory nevertheless
If something is indispensable, it's not an accessory. And unlike tires, much of the GNU software is not replacable out of the box. There's no libc that can replace the GNU libc on Linux; libc4 and libc5 are both based on the GNU libc and don't provide all the nessecary functionality for a modern system. Linux compiles only with GCC; besides which, there's no other free C/C++ compiler that can compile most of the complex code that usually comes with Linux. The linker and binutils are in the same boat. Bash cannot be replaced on Debian; too much stuff depends on its features (for better or worse.)
Frankly, the name of the operating system in question is Debian GNU/Linux. While Linux versus GNU/Linux in general can be debated, Debian has taken a position on that matter, and for the name of our OS, that's what matters.
someone mention TRS-80s and Z80 assembly language, but that's another story -- and another era missed out by today's new generation of computer hot-shots
Actually, the Z80 is used in the TI-82 through the TI-86 (the M68K was used in the more expensive TI-89 and TI-92s). So any computer hot-shot who goes through calculus or even algebra probably owns a computer with the Z80, and many have programmed for it in assembly language.
I have to pick between "recent" and "stable" - I can't have both.
This is a truism. It takes time to find bugs and stabilize the system. Part of the reason people use Debian stable is because it's actually stable, with major bugs having been pounded out over many subreleases or prior to the first release.
Have you ever looked at using "testing"? It's supposed to be the compromise between "stable" and "recent". Honestly, "unstable" isn't that bad, but there's been a couple of times where I've been locked out of my computer by cutting edge bugs.
I'm still waiting for the next Shirley Temple movie...
We all talk about how Osama bin Laden uses 128-bit encyrption, but in actuality, the laptops captured in Afganistan were using the default Windows encryption - lousy 40-bit encryption. Another terrorist used the default encryption on his palmtop, which was quickly enough cracked by the French government. It seem that most terrorists don't know enough to use serious encryption. Now, nothing is going to take serious encyrption out of the hands of geeks, but the default encryption is what matters for most people, and that's what needs to be cracked most the time. Silently turning on strong encryption does not help law and order.
The thing the Internet seems to lack is a Prime Directive, that says it will not interfere in the local decisions of people
We all live on the same small planet and can trace our ancestors back to the same small tribe of African hominids with names like Ogg and Ugh. As time goes on, we getting more and more connected to things that happen half way around the world. There's really isn't many truely local decisions anymore.
Aren't you confusing Language and character set here?
No. He asked about localization and language support. Localization is the process of translation, and was answered by other people. Language support is if you can use the language. It's more than character set, but not only does Linux have the character set down, it also has Norwegian keyboards and ample Latin-1 fonts.
Language support is not going to be an issue. Norwegian uses the same 8-bit character set that English and German do, Latin-1. All software in Debian has been 8-bit clean since Hamm's release in 1998, so they can all handle Latin-1. To the best of my knowledge, there's no Un*x system on the market that can't handle Latin-1.
KDE and GNOME are poor substitutes for the Windows desktop
Really? I know they still are missing the lock-up when there's browser problems feature, but what else are you having trouble with? All the features are there, with fewer bugs, in my experience.
And let's not forget the many sites that won't be viewable under Netscape/Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera.
I can't say I've run into them (especially as considering Flash isn't a real concern for a government computer.) And when you're the government of Norway, the First Bank of Norway has huge incentives to fix whatever problems you may have with their site.
StarOffice, KOffice, and OpenOffice are still miles away
Miles away from what? Sure, they don't handle Hindi as well as Microsoft Word does, but they certianly cover the needs of modern word-processing.
I remember the day that Code Red hit, when the Internet started running slow and my webserver got repeatedly hit by Code Red attacks from all over the place. If and when I see the same effect from a Linux worm, I'll know we've hit the same point.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to say something profound with a silent movie?
Try turning the sound off before watching some more recent movies and see if you can discern their underlying messages.
That's like turning off the picture to try and get an idea of what a story told through radio is like. Your medium defines the fundamental nature of how you tell the story.