class QDstring {//"(very very) quick and dirty"
unsigned int len_;
char * buf_;
public:
QDstring(int, int) {/* etc. */ }
~QDstring(void){/* not virtual, so don't use
as a base class */ }
const length(void) const{ return len_; }
const char * contents(void) const {return buf_};
};
const QDstring & foo(void)
{
return QDstring(1,2); //I know, returning a temporary is bad, //but what the hell do you want in a post?
}
Hey kids! Mail copyrighted Scientology
works to yourself via HotMail!
Let's test Mickeysoft's claims that all
work posted to their services is magically
impervious to copyright law! Watch the
Church of $cientology's wave of trial lawyers
hit Redmond in a style not seen since D-Day!
Watch M$ hit back! Watch each side bleed torrents of cash!
And don't forget to laugh your ass off in the process.
I don't think man is meant to fly. If the Creator, God Almighty, wanted us to speed through the ether, the upper atmosphere would not be an oxygen-deficient death trap. Ye must remember the tale of the tower of Braniff, when Man tried to reach Heaven, only to be stacked up over LAX for three hours. Must we risk God's wrath once more in an attempt to traverse the heavens?
If you're willing to use Linux and a 2.2.x kernel, and you have a copy of
Win95/98SE lying around, you can use Win4Lin (www.netraverse.com). Cheaper than the "lite"
version of VMWare, and works like a charm for
the occasional Word/Excel/Bloatware task.
If you decide you want it & can't procure a copy, I'll gladly help out by legal means.
It's not the fact that just the DOD is looking for this information. It's the fact that A Government Agency (tm) is looking for it.
Think for a second: Who's next in line? The FBI? ATF? DEA? Hey, why not the CIA? (I know, we have laws on the books preventing CIA from domestic spying, but a law is only as good as its enforcement..)
You may find it shocking, but liberals are also wary of government power. One of the reasons why Boomers (i.e. yesterday's liberals) have a libertarian streak today is because they remember who J. Edgar Hoover was, and what he was copiously compiling in the FBI's basement. (Hint: Files on up to 2 million American citizens.)
Most conservatives recoil in horror at 1984. And they should. But they also need to be shocked by Brave New World as well.
And that is where our nation is heading.
About 20 yrs. ago a guy in Atlanta was very
upset that his dying mother kept sending her
last pennies to a televangelist (might have
been Falwell himself.) He did just what you
suggested.
The televangelist lost a lot of cash, so he
enlisted law enforcement to go after the
caller. The caller was convicted (not sure
if he got a fine, did time, or both).
Moral of the story: When it comes to the
public phone system, the FCC and its brethren
take DoS attacks seriously. Very seriously.
And why not? Simple. It won't live up to its promises. No matter how many of your tax dollars go towards it.
NMD is the direct descendent of SDI, which was the paranoid brainchild of Edward Teller. Teller may be a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (even though he may have used someone else's work to get said honor), but the guy uses fear and secrecy to the extreme. He preys upon the fears of Americans to justify budgets, and uses secrecy to justify hare-brained schemes. (In fact, he rarely submits his "findings" to peer review, which brings his qualifications as a competent scientist in question.)
NMD, if I remember correctly, is now being sheltered by a Teller protege, Dr. Lowell Wood. (I may have the name wrong, sorry.) This guy at least is showing some more political finesse than the hyperbolic Teller, since he's trying to sell NMD (and its "smart pebbles" concept) much like NASA was trying to sell "faster, better, cheaper" probes: getting more for less. (Compare and contrast with the $8 billion flushed down the toilet with SDI in the midst of a Cold War frenzy.) But, Teller & his acolytes still prefer using a veil of secrecy in the name of national security to justify their claims, as opposed to allowing their ideas to stand on their own merit in a public (or at least not so classified) forum, the way real scientists do.
I'll conclude by recommending a great book on the subject of hoodwinking the public with faulty science: "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud" by Dr. Robert Park. Read about it here .
(If you're real nice, and CmdrTaco wouldn't mind, I'll submit a review of it. Ask me or I'll forget about it.)
".sig,.sig a.sog,.sig out loud,.sig out.strog"
Re:my glorious 3 year plan for os x and linux
on
LinuxPPC 2000 Update
·
· Score: 1
This is roughly what I'm planning on doing myself. I'm still trying to convince our home's Secretary of the Treasury (nicknamed "Honey") to agree to the purchase of a G4. Then my current box -- an upgraded PowerCenter Pro with a 250 MHz G3 -- can become one kickass Linux firewall and server.
Add a little wireless ethernet to augment our broadband connection, along with LinuxPPC's support for Samba and AppleTalk as well as IP, et voila : her Linux/Windoze box can use the new LAN as effectively as mine. (I could even use Win4Lin on her box via a remote X connection to access Windoze apps whenever necessary. Heterogeneity rules.)
So, here are some Q's for you all:
I wouldn't mind futzing with Darwin or OS X early on -- it is possible to install it on my current hardware (see above for description)?
Would I want to?
I'm resisting the wife's arguments to pick up an Intel box instead; OS X is sounding too damn sweet to ignore. Got any good verbal kevlar for deflecting her best shots?
Hmm. For places to hang out, well, I'll piss off the first poster on this thread and recommend Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Nice wine bar there. (And if you visit the UNC campus, you might catch Fred Brooks himself in Sitterson Hall.)
I'd also recommend the restaurants in Raleigh near the intersection of Hillsborough and Glenwood; there's an awesome little indy CD store there too. (You'll be staying near Glenwood Ave., so getting to that part of near-downtown should be fairly easy.) And there's also the Raleigh City Market near downtown (West Martin Street).
As for Durham, well, if it was summer, I'd recommend visiting Ninth Street before or after taking in a Bulls game.
I must admit, there was once a time when I was younger when I looked forward to the business trip to SF/SJ. Not any more. Yeah, there's a lot of culture, diversity, and intellect out there. But it's also one of the most expensive rat-holes on Earth.
It blows me away when my company has clients from the area come here (Research Triangle Park, NC) and they rave about the Valley. Then I tell them how much we paid for our 2800 sq. ft. home with our twenty-minute max commutes. The raves stop immediately. Being 2 hours from either the beach or the mountains is pretty cool too.
So yeah: We love NC and the Park, and wouldn't want to go anywhere else. Feel free to visit sometime. Then go home.
For most tasks, I find Win4Lin to be just enough Windows (maybe too much). On one hand, it requires owning a copy of Windows (ick), and only supports up to Win98 SE (no NT or 2000 support -- not yet anyway). Also, there's no decent way AFAICT to enable Network Neighborhood access transparently; you need to specify a mounted Samba partition. (If I'm wrong, please tell me!)
Other than that, I find Win4Lin to be not only quite zippy, but also less of a headache than freeware. (Watching the BSOD occur in an X Window is a scream.)
I'd be very interested in a comparison of the two myself..
In the past nine years, we've seen third party candidates (okay, an independent without a party in '92) take high-profile but low-probability lobs at the presidency.
Why bother?
The whole exercise seems futile for a third party, except perhaps to secure federal funding for the next go-round. (Not that the money is a panacea; the Reform Party has been effectively killed off despite having a war-chest.) So.. why not concentrate on Congress instead?
Yes, you'd have the same "throw your vote away" criticism in a congressional race, but let's face it: the legislature is where power really resides in an official sense. Sure, the Prez can use a "bully pulpit" and propose legislation, but in the end, Congressmen are the ones who do the work.
And who knows? We may actually have enough parties in Congress someday to require a coalition government -- which by default would represent the desires of the nation more closely than our "winner take most" legislative process.
So why aren't third parties concentrating on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue instead? --
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
Apple controls hardware for a good reason: a good chunk of their revenue stream comes from it. Removing the need for anyone to buy Apple hardware by porting OS X to the x86 architecture (and in the process encouraging software designers to abandon the PowerPC) would be a bone-headed maneuver, and probably certain death for Apple Computer.
Also, the x86 realm is fraught with hardware foibles that no one company can resolve completely, let alone control. Whatever revenue would remain would be gobbled up in tech support.
Just in case you don't believe that last tidbit: As I write this, I'm trying to use a PCI/serial port card on my Intel-based Linux box, but something in the BIOS of the machine (I assume) keeps the card from responding properly. I've tried new kernels, new BIOS images, new cards from the manufacturer, and new driver source code, all to no avail. And it's nobody's fault but that of the x86 "standards", which make the Wild West of yore seem as orderly as the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. (If you wish to participate in this wild goose chase, email me with ideas. I'm tearing my hair out, and at this rate, even a new or used Dustbuster would be welcome.)
Suffice to say, I own a Mac at home, and that situation ain't gonna change.
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Awesome. My trusty rusty PowerCenterPro (upgraded to a G3/250) just might be able to run this puppy.
I've been debating whether or not to go with OS X, or to go the Linux/Intel route. The implicit assumption was that I would be buying a machine either way to do one or the other.
Until today, at least.
(Yes, I know about PowerPC Linux. LinuxPPC 2K runs on my machine alongside MacOS 9.0.4. My main gripe with non-Intel Linuces is that hardly anybody acknowledges their existence). -----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Re:One good point -- too much C in open software
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
Actually, this underscores C++'s superiority
to straight C.
Most (okay, most decent) C++ compilers today provide "no overhead" exception handling, and the syntax is well-established (part of ANSI X3J16, the C++ standard).
And allowing/lib/cpp to expand macros - oh God how I loathe the C preprocessor - that determine critical execution flow is a dubious maneuver at best. Good luck debugging the result, even if you never use (gasp!) setjmp() and longjmp().
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
In this kind of business you don't trust a guy by the colours of his eyes or the nice sound of his voice. If you do then I strongly believe you have no place in that business sector.
Um, the VC's involved with Pixelon did just that.. or close enough to it.
They were so quick to believe that Pixelon could deliver, and wanted to believe in The Big Internet Payoff so desperately, that they didn't even bother to investigate Fenne. And a little legwork would have unraveled the whole shebang.
I agree with the original poster: These folks know how to hack into people, like some crazy mix of B. F. Skinner and the l0pht. And, people have been suckered completely by lesser attempts.
Look at our buddies, the Scientologists. Now, if there ever was a see-through scam, Scientology is it, which is something (I hope!) all thinking people can agree on. But the fact remains that they control their members rather well. Many of them would choose to stay, even though the core sales pitch isn't really very good. (Does it surprise you that people are fooled by the "abilities" of computers when some of them believe in the readings of an E-meter?)
Mr. Stanley could have easily become another Jim Jones or L. Ron Hubbard; oddly enough, his belief in Old Time Religion probably prohibited that -- or he was as stupid as the next crook, looking only to make a quick buck and nothing more. Nonetheless, he was slick, and knew how to get seasoned investment bankers to cough up millions for literally no good reason. ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Not to slam religious people, but Stanley/Fenne/Whatshisface preyed upon quite a few older folks, country folks, naive investors.. people who felt a compulsion to believe.. usually in some larger benificence.
Again, I'm not saying that the set of religious people equals the set of suckers -- I know far too many beings who are both intellectual and spiritual -- but would I be wrong in assuming that the latter is certainly a more viable subset for this kind of idiocy? Is there some tendency for those who need a Good Guy for codifying their morals, ethics, cosmology, etc. to also fall prey to a "gold-tounged salesman".. who sells himself as a reasonable facsimile?
There seems to be more than mere gullibility here; it's as if the main character of this sordid little adventure targetted people who would not only believe, but who had an inner desire or need to believe.
Asbestos suit activated, ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
All Things Considered and Morning Edition on NPR are *by far* better than most TV news shows I know of
Very true. Between NPR and Yahoo news headlines, I don't bother with TV news at all. You simply can't get NPR's quality journalism and analysis from anywhere else, frankly. (Not in the States, anyway.)
While you're at it, don't forget to cite Whaddya Know?, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (which is a SCREAM), and, of course, Car Talk. ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
.mob -- So organized crime has it's own space for getting in on the Internet racket (not unlike the.com investors who got fleeced in the Big Securities Takedown yesterday), .cat -- Because one of our felines had his own phone line, why not a domain? .bum -- So Rush Limbaugh's research team can be quickly identified, .firstpost -- umm, never mind.. ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
..it makes Ed Wood's work look good. Hey, Ed had nowhere near the budget that Travolta and company had, and scene for scene, Ed Wood's work was more coherent. ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Moderate the parent comment up please!
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 1
Most excellent point.
"Give me convenience or give me death" does seem to be the Modern American Slogan these days.. ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Socialism relies upon a watered-down form of Christianity for it's moral foundation. What's pathetic is that Stallman probably has no idea that he's really a Christian at heart.
Hoo boy. If RMS is reading this one, I'll bet he's getting a good chuckle or two.
As someone who's old enough to remember when America actually had a Christian left, I'll state that, while the basis of your premise is not necessarily wrong, it is misguided by the confusion between "communism" and "socialism".
Now, most U.S. adults don't know this difference, having been spoon-fed Cold War rhetoric since they were in utero. But, the roots of socialism go back to John Stuart Mill, who predates Karl Marx considerably. (So yeah, Mill's Christian upbringing probably had quite a bit to do with his thinking. Marx, however, saw religion as a puppet of State control -- a view echoed by Lenin, and an accurate description of the Russian Orthodox Church of that day.)
Communism advocates violent revolution by an elite as a prerequisite for the eventual goal of universal equity; socialism merely advocates a fairer distribution of wealth. Not a subtle distinction. Just ask the members of Communist and Socialist parties in European nations about this.
Thus, I would take issue with the Soviet death camps as a symbol of "socialism", as socialism and democracy co-exist fairly well in other parts of the globe. A communist society, on the other hand, is another matter; no blueprint for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was ever specified by Marx or his interpreters, but Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et. al. have removed all doubt on what kind of dictatorship this would be.
In short, say what you will about present-day French National Assembly, but it sure as hell isn't the Khmer Rouge.
As for the statement that a capitalist society is inherently better than a socialist one, well, this is a generalization if there ever was one. Clearly, the States has a better standard of living than, say, Yugoslavia, but I would also venture to say that my civil liberties (as a whole) have a better chance in Canada or the UK than the USA. Capitalism would be ideal IMHO if civil rights and liberties were tied indelibly to economic freedom, somehow,in a very explicit manner. This will probably never happen, certainly not in my lifetime.
He obviously sucks at political philosophy
But I'm afraid he runs rings around you.. ----- "O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Slashdot Mirror
What about calling it an orchard?
Actually, I was hoping that Apple, not 3Com, would get to rename Candlestick Park in SF. The "Apple Orchard" sounds a lot better than "3Com Park".
Then again, "Leprosy Field" sounds better than "3Com Park"..
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
Is time really money? =-P
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
Or better yet, use the Standard string class..
".sig,
Hey kids! Mail copyrighted Scientology works to yourself via HotMail!
Let's test Mickeysoft's claims that all work posted to their services is magically impervious to copyright law!
Watch the Church of $cientology's wave of trial lawyers hit Redmond in a style not seen since D-Day!
Watch M$ hit back!
Watch each side bleed torrents of cash!
And don't forget to laugh your ass off in the process.
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
I don't think man is meant to fly. If the Creator, God Almighty, wanted us to speed through the ether, the upper atmosphere would not be an oxygen-deficient death trap. Ye must remember the tale of the tower of Braniff, when Man tried to reach Heaven, only to be stacked up over LAX for three hours. Must we risk God's wrath once more in an attempt to traverse the heavens?
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
You know the reference: "Yeeee hawwwwwwwwwwww!"
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
2000-03-18 21:15:45
".sig,
If you're willing to use Linux and a 2.2.x kernel, and you have a copy of Win95/98SE lying around, you can use Win4Lin (www.netraverse.com). Cheaper than the "lite" version of VMWare, and works like a charm for the occasional Word/Excel/Bloatware task.
If you decide you want it & can't procure a copy, I'll gladly help out by legal means.
Hope this helps,
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
It's not the fact that just the DOD is looking for this information. It's the fact that A Government Agency (tm) is looking for it.
Think for a second: Who's next in line? The FBI? ATF? DEA? Hey, why not the CIA? (I know, we have laws on the books preventing CIA from domestic spying, but a law is only as good as its enforcement..)
You may find it shocking, but liberals are also wary of government power. One of the reasons why Boomers (i.e. yesterday's liberals) have a libertarian streak today is because they remember who J. Edgar Hoover was, and what he was copiously compiling in the FBI's basement. (Hint: Files on up to 2 million American citizens.)
Most conservatives recoil in horror at 1984. And they should. But they also need to be shocked by Brave New World as well. And that is where our nation is heading.
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
About 20 yrs. ago a guy in Atlanta was very upset that his dying mother kept sending her last pennies to a televangelist (might have been Falwell himself.) He did just what you suggested.
The televangelist lost a lot of cash, so he enlisted law enforcement to go after the caller. The caller was convicted (not sure if he got a fine, did time, or both).
Moral of the story: When it comes to the public phone system, the FCC and its brethren take DoS attacks seriously. Very seriously.
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
And why not? Simple. It won't live up to its promises. No matter how many of your tax dollars go towards it.
NMD is the direct descendent of SDI, which was the paranoid brainchild of Edward Teller. Teller may be a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (even though he may have used someone else's work to get said honor), but the guy uses fear and secrecy to the extreme. He preys upon the fears of Americans to justify budgets, and uses secrecy to justify hare-brained schemes. (In fact, he rarely submits his "findings" to peer review, which brings his qualifications as a competent scientist in question.)
NMD, if I remember correctly, is now being sheltered by a Teller protege, Dr. Lowell Wood. (I may have the name wrong, sorry.) This guy at least is showing some more political finesse than the hyperbolic Teller, since he's trying to sell NMD (and its "smart pebbles" concept) much like NASA was trying to sell "faster, better, cheaper" probes: getting more for less. (Compare and contrast with the $8 billion flushed down the toilet with SDI in the midst of a Cold War frenzy.) But, Teller & his acolytes still prefer using a veil of secrecy in the name of national security to justify their claims, as opposed to allowing their ideas to stand on their own merit in a public (or at least not so classified) forum, the way real scientists do.
I'll conclude by recommending a great book on the subject of hoodwinking the public with faulty science: "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud" by Dr. Robert Park. Read about it here .
(If you're real nice, and CmdrTaco wouldn't mind, I'll submit a review of it. Ask me or I'll forget about it.)
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
This is roughly what I'm planning on doing myself. I'm still trying to convince our home's Secretary of the Treasury (nicknamed "Honey") to agree to the purchase of a G4. Then my current box -- an upgraded PowerCenter Pro with a 250 MHz G3 -- can become one kickass Linux firewall and server.
Add a little wireless ethernet to augment our broadband connection, along with LinuxPPC's support for Samba and AppleTalk as well as IP, et voila : her Linux/Windoze box can use the new LAN as effectively as mine. (I could even use Win4Lin on her box via a remote X connection to access Windoze apps whenever necessary. Heterogeneity rules.)
So, here are some Q's for you all:
Cheers and a Happy New Year to all..
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
Hmm. For places to hang out, well, I'll piss off the first poster on this thread and recommend Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Nice wine bar there. (And if you visit the UNC campus, you might catch Fred Brooks himself in Sitterson Hall.)
I'd also recommend the restaurants in Raleigh near the intersection of Hillsborough and Glenwood; there's an awesome little indy CD store there too. (You'll be staying near Glenwood Ave., so getting to that part of near-downtown should be fairly easy.) And there's also the Raleigh City Market near downtown (West Martin Street).
As for Durham, well, if it was summer, I'd recommend visiting Ninth Street before or after taking in a Bulls game.
Any other Silicon Hillbillies care to add?
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
I must admit, there was once a time when I was younger when I looked forward to the business trip to SF/SJ. Not any more. Yeah, there's a lot of culture, diversity, and intellect out there. But it's also one of the most expensive rat-holes on Earth.
It blows me away when my company has clients from the area come here (Research Triangle Park, NC) and they rave about the Valley. Then I tell them how much we paid for our 2800 sq. ft. home with our twenty-minute max commutes. The raves stop immediately. Being 2 hours from either the beach or the mountains is pretty cool too.
So yeah: We love NC and the Park, and wouldn't want to go anywhere else. Feel free to visit sometime. Then go home.
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
For most tasks, I find Win4Lin to be just enough Windows (maybe too much). On one hand, it requires owning a copy of Windows (ick), and only supports up to Win98 SE (no NT or 2000 support -- not yet anyway). Also, there's no decent way AFAICT to enable Network Neighborhood access transparently; you need to specify a mounted Samba partition. (If I'm wrong, please tell me!)
Other than that, I find Win4Lin to be not only quite zippy, but also less of a headache than freeware. (Watching the BSOD occur in an X Window is a scream.)
I'd be very interested in a comparison of the two myself..
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
Why bother?
The whole exercise seems futile for a third party, except perhaps to secure federal funding for the next go-round. (Not that the money is a panacea; the Reform Party has been effectively killed off despite having a war-chest.) So.. why not concentrate on Congress instead?
Yes, you'd have the same "throw your vote away" criticism in a congressional race, but let's face it: the legislature is where power really resides in an official sense. Sure, the Prez can use a "bully pulpit" and propose legislation, but in the end, Congressmen are the ones who do the work.
And who knows? We may actually have enough parties in Congress someday to require a coalition government -- which by default would represent the desires of the nation more closely than our "winner take most" legislative process.
So why aren't third parties concentrating on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue instead?
--
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
Apple controls hardware for a good reason: a good chunk of their revenue stream comes from it. Removing the need for anyone to buy Apple hardware by porting OS X to the x86 architecture (and in the process encouraging software designers to abandon the PowerPC) would be a bone-headed maneuver, and probably certain death for Apple Computer.
Also, the x86 realm is fraught with hardware foibles that no one company can resolve completely, let alone control. Whatever revenue would remain would be gobbled up in tech support.
Just in case you don't believe that last tidbit: As I write this, I'm trying to use a PCI/serial port card on my Intel-based Linux box, but something in the BIOS of the machine (I assume) keeps the card from responding properly. I've tried new kernels, new BIOS images, new cards from the manufacturer, and new driver source code, all to no avail. And it's nobody's fault but that of the x86 "standards", which make the Wild West of yore seem as orderly as the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. (If you wish to participate in this wild goose chase, email me with ideas. I'm tearing my hair out, and at this rate, even a new or used Dustbuster would be welcome.)
Suffice to say, I own a Mac at home, and that situation ain't gonna change.
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
I've been debating whether or not to go with OS X, or to go the Linux/Intel route. The implicit assumption was that I would be buying a machine either way to do one or the other.
Until today, at least.
(Yes, I know about PowerPC Linux. LinuxPPC 2K runs on my machine alongside MacOS 9.0.4. My main gripe with non-Intel Linuces is that hardly anybody acknowledges their existence).
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Actually, this underscores C++'s superiority to straight C.
Most (okay, most decent) C++ compilers today provide "no overhead" exception handling, and the syntax is well-established (part of ANSI X3J16, the C++ standard).
And allowing /lib/cpp to expand macros - oh God how I loathe the C preprocessor - that determine critical execution flow is a dubious maneuver at best. Good luck debugging the result, even if you never use (gasp!) setjmp() and longjmp().
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Um, the VC's involved with Pixelon did just that.. or close enough to it.
They were so quick to believe that Pixelon could deliver, and wanted to believe in The Big Internet Payoff so desperately, that they didn't even bother to investigate Fenne. And a little legwork would have unraveled the whole shebang.
I agree with the original poster: These folks know how to hack into people, like some crazy mix of B. F. Skinner and the l0pht. And, people have been suckered completely by lesser attempts.
Look at our buddies, the Scientologists. Now, if there ever was a see-through scam, Scientology is it, which is something (I hope!) all thinking people can agree on. But the fact remains that they control their members rather well. Many of them would choose to stay, even though the core sales pitch isn't really very good. (Does it surprise you that people are fooled by the "abilities" of computers when some of them believe in the readings of an E-meter?)
Mr. Stanley could have easily become another Jim Jones or L. Ron Hubbard; oddly enough, his belief in Old Time Religion probably prohibited that -- or he was as stupid as the next crook, looking only to make a quick buck and nothing more. Nonetheless, he was slick, and knew how to get seasoned investment bankers to cough up millions for literally no good reason.
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Not to slam religious people, but Stanley/Fenne/Whatshisface preyed upon quite a few older folks, country folks, naive investors.. people who felt a compulsion to believe.. usually in some larger benificence.
Again, I'm not saying that the set of religious people equals the set of suckers -- I know far too many beings who are both intellectual and spiritual -- but would I be wrong in assuming that the latter is certainly a more viable subset for this kind of idiocy? Is there some tendency for those who need a Good Guy for codifying their morals, ethics, cosmology, etc. to also fall prey to a "gold-tounged salesman" .. who sells himself as a reasonable facsimile?
There seems to be more than mere gullibility here; it's as if the main character of this sordid little adventure targetted people who would not only believe, but who had an inner desire or need to believe.
Asbestos suit activated,
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
All Things Considered and Morning Edition on NPR are *by far* better than most TV news shows I know of
Very true. Between NPR and Yahoo news headlines, I don't bother with TV news at all. You simply can't get NPR's quality journalism and analysis from anywhere else, frankly. (Not in the States, anyway.)
While you're at it, don't forget to cite Whaddya Know?, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (which is a SCREAM), and, of course, Car Talk.
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"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
.mob -- So organized crime has it's own space for getting in on the Internet racket (not unlike the .com investors who got fleeced in the Big Securities Takedown yesterday),
.cat -- Because one of our felines had his own phone line, why not a domain?
.bum -- So Rush Limbaugh's research team can be quickly identified,
.firstpost -- umm, never mind..
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"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
..it makes Ed Wood's work look good. Hey, Ed had nowhere near the budget that Travolta and company had, and scene for scene, Ed Wood's work was more coherent.
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"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Most excellent point.
"Give me convenience or give me death" does seem to be the Modern American Slogan these days..
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"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
Hoo boy. If RMS is reading this one, I'll bet he's getting a good chuckle or two.
As someone who's old enough to remember when America actually had a Christian left, I'll state that, while the basis of your premise is not necessarily wrong, it is misguided by the confusion between "communism" and "socialism".
Now, most U.S. adults don't know this difference, having been spoon-fed Cold War rhetoric since they were in utero. But, the roots of socialism go back to John Stuart Mill, who predates Karl Marx considerably. (So yeah, Mill's Christian upbringing probably had quite a bit to do with his thinking. Marx, however, saw religion as a puppet of State control -- a view echoed by Lenin, and an accurate description of the Russian Orthodox Church of that day.)
Communism advocates violent revolution by an elite as a prerequisite for the eventual goal of universal equity; socialism merely advocates a fairer distribution of wealth. Not a subtle distinction. Just ask the members of Communist and Socialist parties in European nations about this.
Thus, I would take issue with the Soviet death camps as a symbol of "socialism", as socialism and democracy co-exist fairly well in other parts of the globe. A communist society, on the other hand, is another matter; no blueprint for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was ever specified by Marx or his interpreters, but Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et. al. have removed all doubt on what kind of dictatorship this would be.
In short, say what you will about present-day French National Assembly, but it sure as hell isn't the Khmer Rouge.
As for the statement that a capitalist society is inherently better than a socialist one, well, this is a generalization if there ever was one. Clearly, the States has a better standard of living than, say, Yugoslavia, but I would also venture to say that my civil liberties (as a whole) have a better chance in Canada or the UK than the USA. Capitalism would be ideal IMHO if civil rights and liberties were tied indelibly to economic freedom, somehow ,in a very explicit manner. This will probably never happen, certainly not in my lifetime.
He obviously sucks at political philosophy
But I'm afraid he runs rings around you..
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"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."