But seriously, 2nd amendment made sense way back when the army only had small arms themselves. But since the invention of the military airplane, bomber, missile, tank and the metalic spoon with a sharp edge, it went down the urinal.
But it came back with the invention of the mugger, rapist, and street gang.
Seriously, if you believe that the government is capable of defending it citizenry at all times and in all ways, you are living in a dream land. We live in a dangerous world, and the govenrment not only has no right to limit our ability to defend ourselves, it has a constitutional obligation to protect out right to defend ourselves.
Take a look at the crime rates in places like Texas, and compare to places like New York City. The more control the state takes over people's lives, the worse living conditions become.
One of my favorite sayings on the matter is "Take away this woman's gun! Keep the streets safe for RAPISTS."
Maybe the effort will result in the kind of relationship that we see with StarOffice and OpenOffice. Sun is certainly moving in some interesting directions. We can only hope that they'll be willing to fund such an endeavor.
That's not really possible; Sun ownes the copyright to StarOffice, and were thus able to close or open it's source as they saw fit. The same is not true for Sun's Linux distro; either it is GPL or it doesn't get released at all. The same would be true if they tried to incorporate work done on their Linux into Solaris; if they do not own the copyright, they would have to GPL the resulting programs.
That's the saddest thing I have read in a long time.
I don't think so. There is room for both free and proprietary code. I see a marked diffrence between the "corporate world" and the "hacker world"; I live and work in both, and I think the same is true for most of us.
The fact is, I have to earn a living. I have to pay the rent, I have to eat, I have to pay off my school loans. Writing code is the best means I have of doing this.
The code that I write is good enough that people are willing to pay me for it, and my time is valuable enough that I need to be paid for it. I have absolutly no moral qualms about writing closed-source programs, or getting paid to do so.
I also write GPL'ed code. Pretty much everything I wrote in college is available under the GPL somewhere; it may not be particularly useful to the community at large, but it has helped up-and-comming programmers learn their stuff. I'm writing a text editor that will be GPL'ed once it is useful; not because I think the world needs one, but because I can learn from it, and if people can learn from what I do, bully for them.
Biblically, wealth was considered having enough to meet your needs, and having enough left over to share. Writing code it what I do, and I must meet my needs with it. I am not being selfish, I am being realistic.
You may notice that I don't think that terrorism is neccesarily any more evil than any other form of warfare. I'm self-centered, and I hate people who attack things I care about more than I hate people who attack things I'm indifferent about. So are most Americans, and thats fine, but lets be honest about it, and not try to claim that we have some sort of moral high ground because "Al-Queda are murderers".
We do have the moral high ground, because Al Qaeda are murderers, and more. We are killing because we were attacked. The actions we take are to preserve our lives and our society. We are defending. Al Qaeda is killing because they disagree with our way of life. We are not a threat to the Muslim world. It is not our goal to overthrow, kill, or enslave them. But because we will not worship their god or bow down before them, they have decided that we must die. That is evil, pure and simple.
Also, there are a lot of things that I do not like about America, but it is still a damn bit better than anything Al Qaeda or the Taliban have planned. The treatment of women alone would earn them the title of "evil" from me.
I really wish that people would stop trying to "see the ther guy's side." There are some sides that do not deserve to be seen, some ideologies that do not deserve respect. A viewpoint that advocates the wholesale slaughter of innocents, or that denies basic human freedoms, is to be understood only so much as it helps us protect ourselves from it. There comes a point where tolerance must end and society musty be able to stand up and say "that is not right." Al Qaeda has crossed that line.
If you want to participate in a discussion about the definition of terrorism, leave your propaganda fed CNN news briefs at home.
CNN. Cute.
Soldiers kill civilians all the time. As mentioned above, it's "collateral damage". Soldiers (yes, American ones too) are notorious for raping and looting. The difference between a terrorist and a partisan is that a) partisan attacks are primarily (not totally) toward targets of military value, while terrorists primarily (not totally) attack targets of social value.
Well, for a 30 second rejoinder, my first post did gloss over some things, but the spirit of it stands.
War is not a pleasent thing, and soldiers are called upon to do some very unpleasent things. Soldiers are sent after military targets; civilians do get killed in the process, but they are not the intended target. Terrorism, on the other hand, seeks primarily civillian targets.
As for raping and looting; anyone who does this, American or not, is an animal, and no better.
b) Partisan attacks are generally part of an ongoing military campaign, whereas terrorist attacks are generally single events, with no greater context.
Not true. The attaks on September 11 stem from decades of US involvement in mideast politics. I agree with much of what we have done over there, from the creation of a Zionist state to the liberation of Kuwait, but I also recognize that these actions have earned the ire of a great number of people. The attacks of Al Qaeda have all been part of an ongoing campaign to remove American influence from that arena.
Also, they come from a much larger context of the militant Islamic movement. These people (the militants, not the whole), truly believe that they are destined by their god to inherit the Earth. Al Qaeda's action's are a manifestation of their god's command to subjugate or murder all non-muslums.
Tangentially, we were defeated in Vietnam primarily by our inability to deal with small, motivated groups of violent men. We expected them to line up on the battlefield and die like nice little soldiers; instead, they hit us from the shadows, and then dissapeared. Al Qaeda is mimicing this; they cannot line up and fight us, but they can strike, hide, strike, hide, and their goal is to do this until every non-muslim government crumbles and falls. Although it does not play like a traditional war, it most certainly does have a larger context.
Some might argue that summarily executing any number of your populace is grounds for the title of monster. Such a viewpoint, unfortunately, leaves us with no means to measure the varying effects upon history these dictatorships had. In the end, it all comes down to your view on the value of a human life, or of human rights in general.
That's it. It's over, we have lost, and it is time to go home.
People are saying that calling a man a "monster" for killing thousands of people is unfortunate, because it lacks perspective, doesn't leave room for people to decide for themselves if human lives a worth anything or not.
I really have no idea how we have come to this place. People are incapable of saying that something is clearly right or clearly wrong, even mass murder. We are all in serious trouble.
I would suggest that dictatorship is actually amoral, neither good or evil, it simply is.
Tyrant, when originally used in Rome, had good connotations; it implied someone with the talent and drive to step up, take control, and make things right. Simmilar in concept to the Jewish Judges in the Old Testememnt, but without divine mandate.
Tyrant (or dictator, or whatever you like) has taken on its current connotations due mainly to experience. People that garner that much power and have nothing to check them become corrupt, almost to the man. A dictatorship is, in and of itself, not evil, but the human condition is such that almost any man with a dictatorship will be.
Is there a site out there that lists various linux user groups? I'm a BSD guy, but I'm willing to volunteer for the greater cause at hand.:-)
That's the way it should be! We need to stop worrying so much about what OS everyone is running, and concentrate more on affordable, reliable computing. I would like to see fewer BSD Users Groups and Linux Users Groups and more *nix Users Groups.
If it's hard to speak and think at the same time, how is it that he can vividly explain experiments they've been conducting, while obviously thinking about what he's saying? People go off on rants about things they feel strongly about, all the time. This obviously takes thinking and speaking at the same time. What gives?
Part of it is that when you really, really know something, it doesn't take a whole lot of thought to speak it out. For example, if you have rehearsed a speach to the point you have it in rote memory, the words come almost of their own volition.
Also, when I speak about something complex, you will see me pause, look up at the ceiling for a moment or two, collect my thoughts, and then start talking. They are disjoint events, not simultnious. The thinking has already been done, and the results are in short term memory, reday to be regurgitated.
For example, the annoyance of 'message boxen'. Let's say you quit your Word Processor. Why does it ask you whether you want to save your file? Is it because 10 years ago a 100 KB file was something significant to store on your disk, or is it because it makes sense?
Because it makes sense. It is a user-friendly feature. It gives you the chance to say "oops, I thought I had saved that file, yes, please save it for me," or "yeah, I know I modified it, but the changes suck, so let's get rid of them, " or even "no, I hit the damn 'exit program' button because it is so close to the 'close file' button." The user should be prompted to confirm any action that is potentially dangerous or difficult to undo, and the computer should never do a potentially dammaging thing like writing to a file withough the user's permission. If my text editor saw that I was closing it without saving a file and just merrily commited my changes to disk, it would be the last time that program ran on my machine.
There are many times when confirmation is innapropriate. I have often said that since ctrl-s saves and ctrl-d deletes, they should not be that close together. Still, I can undo a ctrl-d with a ctrl-z, so I do not need to be asked for confirmation every time I try to delete a line. One of the programs I run fom time to time asks me if I really want to quite when I click on the little "x" up on the top; this is just a pain, and should not have been included.
One thing that should be included in a UI is the ability to keep your hands on the keyboard. Most people are comfortable typing a little, usuing the mouse, typing some more, etc, but power users don't like the distraction. One of the things that would make dialogs more tolerable for example, would be having "Yes" mapped to atl-y, so I could just go alt-f4, alt-y to save changes to the word document on exit.
On the other hand, I started playing with Opera the other day. One of the buttons said "open all folder items," so I clicked it to see what it did. The little box that popped up and said "Do you reall want to open all 1600 items?" was a nice feature, and probably saved me a reboot.
Confirmation diaogs also give you a chance at a moment of sanity. I was running a shell script at work a while ago, and it asked me where to put the tar file it generated. I told it to drop it in my home directory. It would have been really nice of it to tell me that it was going to rm -Rf * the target directory before it tried to go eat everything I own.
then chances are they're just plain stupid. Block the ports and if they come complaining, say you don't know what's going on, you don't use such programs.
Whoa, slow down. I'd recommend sending out a pleasent email or letter explaining the limited bandwidth, as well as the potential liabilities arising from allowing htis software on the network. Be cordial, informative, and make them feel that you are working with them, not against them.
Then block the ports.
Re:Great. My iBook just went old.
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Parent isn't flamebate, he's just upset that his investment isn't going to have the longevity that he would like. Nothing wrong with that.
As an aside, I would not be surprised if Apple hears enough of comments like these to try and lower that 32M threshold.
Out of curiosity, I just grepped our sources for this specific runtime switch. There are 87 occurences of it!
I don't want to be disrespectful, but it sounds like you could get rid of a lot of those with a different design.
If I were doing the networking thing, I would have an abstract class TCP (all methods virtual and = 0), with children MacTCP, OpenTransport, and BSDTCP. I would then create an instance of the appropriate class once at startup, assign it to a TCP*, and use it as necessary. You might get a little overhead from the classes, but probably save wrt the switches. Also, adjust the C++ for ObjectC as necessary; I know nothing about the language, other than it seems to be popular with the mac guys.
The GUI is probably fuzzier; I do allmost all of my GUI stuff in Java, so I don't worry about it that much.
Still, yeah, it is always nice when you get told "go ahead and drop the old crap." I hate those huge switch statements.
Hardware was not being pushed to it's limit when Doom was released; esentially, Caramack said "let's see what these things can do." He was catching up to the capabilities of the machine.
That is no longer the case; we've seen pretty much everything that is possible without some sort of hardware acceleration. The machine is now catching up to the abilities of the prorammers.
If naming the game Doom 3 is really such a problem for you to the point that it ruins the replayability of earlier Dooms, call the game Quake IV or Phexro's Whining Nightmare, or whatever you want, and STFU.
The name isn't the point; it's that the next time you play Doom, you are goning to be comparing it to this new game, whatever it's name may be.
For example, I love Final Fantasy 7 (yeah, flame away, I was never a fan of the older ones). The CGI movies in particular were absolutly stunning. I recently played through some of the game again, and you know what? Those movies aren't quite as stunning as they once were. They look blocky and cartoonish compared to the other games I have since played. Is it still a fun game? Sure. But it no longer has that "holy crap, how did they do that" factor. Doom 3 may very well (forget it, it will) do that to its FPS ancestors. C'est la vie.
You won't ever see a game written in Java, not because Java is slow, but because you can't use Direct X with it(or whatever platform specific lib you want).
OpenGL is the industry standard, and I just downloaded the Java bindings for it about a week ago. It relies on JNI, so there is some platform-dependant code, but so far, I like what I see.
Also, try reading a compiler error that mentions an std::<vector<std::string > >
std::string itself expands to std::basic_string<yadda yadda yadda>. I'm sure there was a good reason for it, but I'll be darned if I can figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
But seriously, 2nd amendment made sense way back when the army only had small arms themselves. But since the invention of the military airplane, bomber, missile, tank and the metalic spoon with a sharp edge, it went down the urinal.
But it came back with the invention of the mugger, rapist, and street gang.
Seriously, if you believe that the government is capable of defending it citizenry at all times and in all ways, you are living in a dream land. We live in a dangerous world, and the govenrment not only has no right to limit our ability to defend ourselves, it has a constitutional obligation to protect out right to defend ourselves.
Take a look at the crime rates in places like Texas, and compare to places like New York City. The more control the state takes over people's lives, the worse living conditions become.
One of my favorite sayings on the matter is "Take away this woman's gun! Keep the streets safe for RAPISTS."
Maybe the effort will result in the kind of relationship that we see with StarOffice and OpenOffice. Sun is certainly moving in some interesting directions. We can only hope that they'll be willing to fund such an endeavor.
That's not really possible; Sun ownes the copyright to StarOffice, and were thus able to close or open it's source as they saw fit. The same is not true for Sun's Linux distro; either it is GPL or it doesn't get released at all. The same would be true if they tried to incorporate work done on their Linux into Solaris; if they do not own the copyright, they would have to GPL the resulting programs.
That's the saddest thing I have read in a long time.
I don't think so. There is room for both free and proprietary code. I see a marked diffrence between the "corporate world" and the "hacker world"; I live and work in both, and I think the same is true for most of us.
The fact is, I have to earn a living. I have to pay the rent, I have to eat, I have to pay off my school loans. Writing code is the best means I have of doing this.
The code that I write is good enough that people are willing to pay me for it, and my time is valuable enough that I need to be paid for it. I have absolutly no moral qualms about writing closed-source programs, or getting paid to do so.
I also write GPL'ed code. Pretty much everything I wrote in college is available under the GPL somewhere; it may not be particularly useful to the community at large, but it has helped up-and-comming programmers learn their stuff. I'm writing a text editor that will be GPL'ed once it is useful; not because I think the world needs one, but because I can learn from it, and if people can learn from what I do, bully for them.
Biblically, wealth was considered having enough to meet your needs, and having enough left over to share. Writing code it what I do, and I must meet my needs with it. I am not being selfish, I am being realistic.
No. He was an athiest or satanist, depending on which story you believe.
You may notice that I don't think that terrorism is neccesarily any more evil than any other form of warfare. I'm self-centered, and I hate people who attack things I care about more than I hate people who attack things I'm indifferent about. So are most Americans, and thats fine, but lets be honest about it, and not try to claim that we have some sort of moral high ground because "Al-Queda are murderers".
We do have the moral high ground, because Al Qaeda are murderers, and more. We are killing because we were attacked. The actions we take are to preserve our lives and our society. We are defending. Al Qaeda is killing because they disagree with our way of life. We are not a threat to the Muslim world. It is not our goal to overthrow, kill, or enslave them. But because we will not worship their god or bow down before them, they have decided that we must die. That is evil, pure and simple.
Also, there are a lot of things that I do not like about America, but it is still a damn bit better than anything Al Qaeda or the Taliban have planned. The treatment of women alone would earn them the title of "evil" from me.
I really wish that people would stop trying to "see the ther guy's side." There are some sides that do not deserve to be seen, some ideologies that do not deserve respect. A viewpoint that advocates the wholesale slaughter of innocents, or that denies basic human freedoms, is to be understood only so much as it helps us protect ourselves from it. There comes a point where tolerance must end and society musty be able to stand up and say "that is not right." Al Qaeda has crossed that line.
If you want to participate in a discussion about the definition of terrorism, leave your propaganda fed CNN news briefs at home.
CNN. Cute.
Soldiers kill civilians all the time. As mentioned above, it's "collateral damage". Soldiers (yes, American ones too) are notorious for raping and looting. The difference between a terrorist and a partisan is that a) partisan attacks are primarily (not totally) toward targets of military value, while terrorists primarily (not totally) attack targets of social value.
Well, for a 30 second rejoinder, my first post did gloss over some things, but the spirit of it stands.
War is not a pleasent thing, and soldiers are called upon to do some very unpleasent things. Soldiers are sent after military targets; civilians do get killed in the process, but they are not the intended target. Terrorism, on the other hand, seeks primarily civillian targets.
As for raping and looting; anyone who does this, American or not, is an animal, and no better.
b) Partisan attacks are generally part of an ongoing military campaign, whereas terrorist attacks are generally single events, with no greater context.
Not true. The attaks on September 11 stem from decades of US involvement in mideast politics. I agree with much of what we have done over there, from the creation of a Zionist state to the liberation of Kuwait, but I also recognize that these actions have earned the ire of a great number of people. The attacks of Al Qaeda have all been part of an ongoing campaign to remove American influence from that arena.
Also, they come from a much larger context of the militant Islamic movement. These people (the militants, not the whole), truly believe that they are destined by their god to inherit the Earth. Al Qaeda's action's are a manifestation of their god's command to subjugate or murder all non-muslums.
Tangentially, we were defeated in Vietnam primarily by our inability to deal with small, motivated groups of violent men. We expected them to line up on the battlefield and die like nice little soldiers; instead, they hit us from the shadows, and then dissapeared. Al Qaeda is mimicing this; they cannot line up and fight us, but they can strike, hide, strike, hide, and their goal is to do this until every non-muslim government crumbles and falls. Although it does not play like a traditional war, it most certainly does have a larger context.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter
Terrorists kill civilians. Soldiers kill terrorists, or each other.
What is the difference between Al Qaeda killing thousands of Americans, and America killing thousands of Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda are murderers.
Some might argue that summarily executing any number of your populace is grounds for the title of monster. Such a viewpoint, unfortunately, leaves us with no means to measure the varying effects upon history these dictatorships had. In the end, it all comes down to your view on the value of a human life, or of human rights in general.
That's it. It's over, we have lost, and it is time to go home.
People are saying that calling a man a "monster" for killing thousands of people is unfortunate, because it lacks perspective, doesn't leave room for people to decide for themselves if human lives a worth anything or not.
I really have no idea how we have come to this place. People are incapable of saying that something is clearly right or clearly wrong, even mass murder. We are all in serious trouble.
I would suggest that dictatorship is actually amoral, neither good or evil, it simply is.
Tyrant, when originally used in Rome, had good connotations; it implied someone with the talent and drive to step up, take control, and make things right. Simmilar in concept to the Jewish Judges in the Old Testememnt, but without divine mandate.
Tyrant (or dictator, or whatever you like) has taken on its current connotations due mainly to experience. People that garner that much power and have nothing to check them become corrupt, almost to the man. A dictatorship is, in and of itself, not evil, but the human condition is such that almost any man with a dictatorship will be.
Is there a site out there that lists various linux user groups? I'm a BSD guy, but I'm willing to volunteer for the greater cause at hand. :-)
That's the way it should be! We need to stop worrying so much about what OS everyone is running, and concentrate more on affordable, reliable computing. I would like to see fewer BSD Users Groups and Linux Users Groups and more *nix Users Groups.
If it's hard to speak and think at the same time, how is it that he can vividly explain experiments they've been conducting, while obviously thinking about what he's saying? People go off on rants about things they feel strongly about, all the time. This obviously takes thinking and speaking at the same time. What gives?
Part of it is that when you really, really know something, it doesn't take a whole lot of thought to speak it out. For example, if you have rehearsed a speach to the point you have it in rote memory, the words come almost of their own volition.
Also, when I speak about something complex, you will see me pause, look up at the ceiling for a moment or two, collect my thoughts, and then start talking. They are disjoint events, not simultnious. The thinking has already been done, and the results are in short term memory, reday to be regurgitated.
For example, the annoyance of 'message boxen'. Let's say you quit your Word Processor. Why does it ask you whether you want to save your file? Is it because 10 years ago a 100 KB file was something significant to store on your disk, or is it because it makes sense?
Because it makes sense. It is a user-friendly feature. It gives you the chance to say "oops, I thought I had saved that file, yes, please save it for me," or "yeah, I know I modified it, but the changes suck, so let's get rid of them, " or even "no, I hit the damn 'exit program' button because it is so close to the 'close file' button." The user should be prompted to confirm any action that is potentially dangerous or difficult to undo, and the computer should never do a potentially dammaging thing like writing to a file withough the user's permission. If my text editor saw that I was closing it without saving a file and just merrily commited my changes to disk, it would be the last time that program ran on my machine.
There are many times when confirmation is innapropriate. I have often said that since ctrl-s saves and ctrl-d deletes, they should not be that close together. Still, I can undo a ctrl-d with a ctrl-z, so I do not need to be asked for confirmation every time I try to delete a line. One of the programs I run fom time to time asks me if I really want to quite when I click on the little "x" up on the top; this is just a pain, and should not have been included.
One thing that should be included in a UI is the ability to keep your hands on the keyboard. Most people are comfortable typing a little, usuing the mouse, typing some more, etc, but power users don't like the distraction. One of the things that would make dialogs more tolerable for example, would be having "Yes" mapped to atl-y, so I could just go alt-f4, alt-y to save changes to the word document on exit.
On the other hand, I started playing with Opera the other day. One of the buttons said "open all folder items," so I clicked it to see what it did. The little box that popped up and said "Do you reall want to open all 1600 items?" was a nice feature, and probably saved me a reboot.
Confirmation diaogs also give you a chance at a moment of sanity. I was running a shell script at work a while ago, and it asked me where to put the tar file it generated. I told it to drop it in my home directory. It would have been really nice of it to tell me that it was going to rm -Rf * the target directory before it tried to go eat everything I own.
I can just see the 1.0; I look at the bottm line on a page, it scrolls down. I look up at the same line, it scrolls up.
"C'mere, Mr. camera..."
There are plenty of times I'm using the computer when I'd rather speak to it than move my eyes or my hands.
I can't tell you how much I wish I could get WIndows to ctrl-alt-del whatever app I was running when I shout "son of a bitch!"
then chances are they're just plain stupid. Block the ports and if they come complaining, say you don't know what's going on, you don't use such programs.
Whoa, slow down. I'd recommend sending out a pleasent email or letter explaining the limited bandwidth, as well as the potential liabilities arising from allowing htis software on the network. Be cordial, informative, and make them feel that you are working with them, not against them.
Then block the ports.
Parent isn't flamebate, he's just upset that his investment isn't going to have the longevity that he would like. Nothing wrong with that.
As an aside, I would not be surprised if Apple hears enough of comments like these to try and lower that 32M threshold.
Out of curiosity, I just grepped our sources for this specific runtime switch. There are 87 occurences of it!
I don't want to be disrespectful, but it sounds like you could get rid of a lot of those with a different design.
If I were doing the networking thing, I would have an abstract class TCP (all methods virtual and = 0), with children MacTCP, OpenTransport, and BSDTCP. I would then create an instance of the appropriate class once at startup, assign it to a TCP*, and use it as necessary. You might get a little overhead from the classes, but probably save wrt the switches. Also, adjust the C++ for ObjectC as necessary; I know nothing about the language, other than it seems to be popular with the mac guys.
The GUI is probably fuzzier; I do allmost all of my GUI stuff in Java, so I don't worry about it that much.
Still, yeah, it is always nice when you get told "go ahead and drop the old crap." I hate those huge switch statements.
Spit-Wad Time!
If only Windows had GCC, then I'd switch.
Go here, and click "Download Now" on the top right.
Hardware was not being pushed to it's limit when Doom was released; esentially, Caramack said "let's see what these things can do." He was catching up to the capabilities of the machine.
That is no longer the case; we've seen pretty much everything that is possible without some sort of hardware acceleration. The machine is now catching up to the abilities of the prorammers.
If naming the game Doom 3 is really such a problem for you to the point that it ruins the replayability of earlier Dooms, call the game Quake IV or Phexro's Whining Nightmare, or whatever you want, and STFU.
The name isn't the point; it's that the next time you play Doom, you are goning to be comparing it to this new game, whatever it's name may be.
For example, I love Final Fantasy 7 (yeah, flame away, I was never a fan of the older ones). The CGI movies in particular were absolutly stunning. I recently played through some of the game again, and you know what? Those movies aren't quite as stunning as they once were. They look blocky and cartoonish compared to the other games I have since played. Is it still a fun game? Sure. But it no longer has that "holy crap, how did they do that" factor. Doom 3 may very well (forget it, it will) do that to its FPS ancestors. C'est la vie.
You won't ever see a game written in Java, not because Java is slow, but because you can't use Direct X with it(or whatever platform specific lib you want).
OpenGL is the industry standard, and I just downloaded the Java bindings for it about a week ago. It relies on JNI, so there is some platform-dependant code, but so far, I like what I see.
you can get it at www.jausoft.com/gl4java/; LGPLed, to boot.
Please, dear Lord please, let that be a joke...
It's called BASIC for a reason; it's not all that hard, even if you aren't a VB guy (which I am not).
And here's the HTML version(dammit):
Also, try reading a compiler error that mentions an std::<vector<std::string > > std::string itself expands to std::basic_string<yadda yadda yadda>. I'm sure there was a good reason for it, but I'll be darned if I can figure it out.