You've got a very bizarre notion of what racism is.
Do Jackson or Sharpton cause white people to be incarcerated at higher rates than black people, and get longer sentences from courts? Do they cause whites with the same income levels as blacks to be refused bank loans more often? Do they cause police to routinely harass and shoot white people at a higher rate than black people? Are they responsible for higher levels of environmental pollution in white neighborhoods as opposed to black?
A classic symptom of racism is an irrational dislike of those who speak up loudly for the rights of the oppressed.
Do you seriously think factories in Bangladesh and Cambodia have substanially better conditions than in China?! What, are the textile airconditioned or something?
When I was in high school in S. Florida (class of '82) my friends and I would build rockets and pipe-bombs for fun and blow up stuff in the junkyard; by the time we were 18 we all owned semi-auto guns. One of us had Finnish parents; his dad encouraged us, as his grandparents had fought against the Soviet army in the 1940s. He used to chuckle at the bombs, calling it "kid stuff".
Our freshman year science teacher used to regularly demonstrate things like what happens when you put sodium in water, and one time brought in part of his gun collection to show off in class. One time my friends and I were out shooting long guns in a remote area when a cop car pulled up and gave us some friendly advice about gun safety. I graduated near the top of my class and no one ever got hurt from our experiments.
One of my college roomates from rural New Jersey used to do similar stuff, and once blew up a telephone or power line transformer (forget which); the FBI showed up at his house and give him a stern lecture set him straight. He's now a physics professor.
If we did this stuff as teens today no doubt our lives would be ruined. Of course, the fact that we were all white probably helped a lot. That's progress, I suppose.
Ironically, my oldest nephew is your age and recently started school in the Netherlands and hates it. Even though he was born there of Dutch and American parents (i.e. he's white), he was raised in the States and his Dutch is not so good and he gets picked on for being a foreigner, etc. He's outgoing, likes sports and was popular here, so I guess everyone just hates the outsider, even the "tolerant" Dutch.
to just breed anti-biotic resistent strains of every common illness-causing bacteria, spread them around, and be done with it? Clearly our leaders are nostalgic for the days of widespread TB and syphillis.
I don't see that much difference between the Iranian and Israeli state. Both are "representative" theocracies (in Israel, Arabs have little representation, and in the occuppied territories, they are essentially subhuman). In Iran, Jews and Christians are relatively unmolested; in Israel, non-Jews have very limited rights (e.g. to own or buy land). Both states censor their media, although the Israeli press is much more critical and the Iranian state much more heavy-handed. Both states are essentially capitalist.
In the last 60 years, the Israeli state has launched many wars and invasions of its neighbors unilaterally; Iran has not waged a war of aggression in over 200.
Essentially, the only meaningful difference is that Israel is an extension of American global hegemony, and Iran is resisting it.
It's about time socialist countries start doing this. Whether the libertarians like it or not, free software is basically communist, because it's created from each according to their ability, and distributed to each according to their need. It is no longer fully a commodity, as it is easier to give it away than it is to sell it. Free software is a harbinger of the obsolence of money. Ironically many of those who help to make it can't imagine a world without money; but then, the medieval burghers and merchants and runaway serfs who eventually overthrew feudalism rarely imagined a world with aristocrats, either.
I don't get the Perl bashing. Sure, the syntax has a lot of stuff that's irrelavent if you don't come from a UNIX/shell background, and sure, it can be cryptic
I try to keep my code as readible as possible, and when I do write something that's rather dense and "Perlish", I comment it. But CPAN is what keeps me in Perl; there's just too much there to easily give up.
I'm sure Python and Ruby, etc. are great languages, but I see no compelling reason to give up Perl just yet. I'm on the fence with Perl 6 -- if Parrot allows CPAN modules to be used by other scripting languages, I might learn Ruby if I can leverage existing Perl modules.
I'm assuming that DRM laws will increasingly require hardware manufacturers to build DRM into all hardware, so that upgrades will lock us into copy protection and proprietary, closed systems.
So will any manufacturers step up to the plate and start producing hardware that complies with the letter of the law but that's easy for the skilled user to circumvent? Say by doing a firmware update to the BIOS or something.
Alternatively, maybe some countries that don't sign onto DRM treaties (think Russia and AllofMP3.com) can become the source for more expensive but freer hardware?
If terrorists really want to bring down commercial airliners, wouldn't it be much easier to get a job as baggage handler on an airline, or package loader at FedEx, and just plant a cheap, homemade bomb in the cargo bay, than try to smuggle in a manpad or buy one from a probable undercover agent to try and shoot down a moving aircraft?
This generally mirrors my experience. I could never get my old HP Pavillion to work with various distribution unless I disabled the (supposedly supported) PCMCIA chip, which meant no wireless. I used to be able to compile a custom kernel back in the 1.x days, but there's just so many modules and options now that I can't spare the time to figure out how to compile a bootable kernel. If/when I get another laptop it will probably be an Apple, even if they are overpriced, as I don't need the hassle of spending days trying to get a machine to work.
I'm currently using Ubuntu Hoary and applications crash all the time, especially anything that involves sound or video. They work, sort of, but Kaffiene always crashes upon closing.
My production desktop is still running Hoary because I know if I try apt-get to update it, something is going to go wrong and I'll be down for days. I tried that on a clean install of Dapper to Edgy -- nothing custom aside from some Perl modules I'd installed by hand -- and I ended up having to start from scratch. At least this time I've got my home directory on its own partition, because I know that despite all those people who say they upgraded seamlessly with apt-get, I've never had a smooth upgrade with either Ubuntu, Mandrake or Red Hat.
I still use Linux as my daily OS because it's a great development environment. I just don't have the time to keep up with all the configuration options -- I want a distribution that works out of the box and has a safe upgrade path. Haven't found it yet.
Re:Perl Out, Ruby In - Thank God
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The Ruby Way
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Reading stuff like this is why I'm still sticking with Perl. Sure, it has a syntax which is easy to abuse, but give up CPAN? Not yet.
This, combined with the recent nuclear deals with India, are prettly clearly geopolitical moves to bolster an economic and technological counterweight to China. Space science has little to do with it.
As extreme as that may sound to the modern reader, note that it's really not that much of a departure from wartimes of the past. Lincoln suspended both the right to free press and habeas corpus during the Civil War. During WWII, many suspected sympathizers of both Nazi Germany and Japan were put under surveillance (without warrant) and summarily deported (without trial).
Except that the Civil War and WWII were very much existential wars that were largely unavoidable and pushed the U.S. to extremes. The current wars are very much wars of choice (what used to be called "cabinet wars") in which 9/11 was seized as the pretext for a vast power grab in the center of world oil production, in which "fighting terrorism" is largely a rhetorical device.
So in essence you're saying a war of choice necessitates torture and abandonment of the rule of law -- that what we choose automatically becomes a necissity. Nice logic.
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You beat me to the punch
You've got a very bizarre notion of what racism is.
Do Jackson or Sharpton cause white people to be incarcerated at higher rates than black people, and get longer sentences from courts? Do they cause whites with the same income levels as blacks to be refused bank loans more often? Do they cause police to routinely harass and shoot white people at a higher rate than black people? Are they responsible for higher levels of environmental pollution in white neighborhoods as opposed to black?
A classic symptom of racism is an irrational dislike of those who speak up loudly for the rights of the oppressed.
Do you seriously think factories in Bangladesh and Cambodia have substanially better conditions than in China?! What, are the textile airconditioned or something?
When I was in high school in S. Florida (class of '82) my friends and I would build rockets and pipe-bombs for fun and blow up stuff in the junkyard; by the time we were 18 we all owned semi-auto guns. One of us had Finnish parents; his dad encouraged us, as his grandparents had fought against the Soviet army in the 1940s. He used to chuckle at the bombs, calling it "kid stuff".
Our freshman year science teacher used to regularly demonstrate things like what happens when you put sodium in water, and one time brought in part of his gun collection to show off in class. One time my friends and I were out shooting long guns in a remote area when a cop car pulled up and gave us some friendly advice about gun safety. I graduated near the top of my class and no one ever got hurt from our experiments.
One of my college roomates from rural New Jersey used to do similar stuff, and once blew up a telephone or power line transformer (forget which); the FBI showed up at his house and give him a stern lecture set him straight. He's now a physics professor.
If we did this stuff as teens today no doubt our lives would be ruined. Of course, the fact that we were all white probably helped a lot. That's progress, I suppose.
Ironically, my oldest nephew is your age and recently started school in the Netherlands and hates it. Even though he was born there of Dutch and American parents (i.e. he's white), he was raised in the States and his Dutch is not so good and he gets picked on for being a foreigner, etc. He's outgoing, likes sports and was popular here, so I guess everyone just hates the outsider, even the "tolerant" Dutch.
So what about the many Communist POWs and political prisoners who survived?
to just breed anti-biotic resistent strains of every common illness-causing bacteria, spread them around, and be done with it? Clearly our leaders are nostalgic for the days of widespread TB and syphillis.
I don't see that much difference between the Iranian and Israeli state. Both are "representative" theocracies (in Israel, Arabs have little representation, and in the occuppied territories, they are essentially subhuman). In Iran, Jews and Christians are relatively unmolested; in Israel, non-Jews have very limited rights (e.g. to own or buy land). Both states censor their media, although the Israeli press is much more critical and the Iranian state much more heavy-handed. Both states are essentially capitalist.
In the last 60 years, the Israeli state has launched many wars and invasions of its neighbors unilaterally; Iran has not waged a war of aggression in over 200.
Essentially, the only meaningful difference is that Israel is an extension of American global hegemony, and Iran is resisting it.
... Richard Stallman was seen banging his shoe on a table while shouting "we will bury you!".
Oh, I didn't know the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba uses Linux.
It's about time socialist countries start doing this. Whether the libertarians like it or not, free software is basically communist, because it's created from each according to their ability, and distributed to each according to their need. It is no longer fully a commodity, as it is easier to give it away than it is to sell it. Free software is a harbinger of the obsolence of money. Ironically many of those who help to make it can't imagine a world without money; but then, the medieval burghers and merchants and runaway serfs who eventually overthrew feudalism rarely imagined a world with aristocrats, either.
This is one of the most interesting posts I have read here in a long time.
I try to keep my code as readible as possible, and when I do write something that's rather dense and "Perlish", I comment it. But CPAN is what keeps me in Perl; there's just too much there to easily give up.
I'm sure Python and Ruby, etc. are great languages, but I see no compelling reason to give up Perl just yet. I'm on the fence with Perl 6 -- if Parrot allows CPAN modules to be used by other scripting languages, I might learn Ruby if I can leverage existing Perl modules.
I'm assuming that DRM laws will increasingly require hardware manufacturers to build DRM into all hardware, so that upgrades will lock us into copy protection and proprietary, closed systems.
So will any manufacturers step up to the plate and start producing hardware that complies with the letter of the law but that's easy for the skilled user to circumvent? Say by doing a firmware update to the BIOS or something.
Alternatively, maybe some countries that don't sign onto DRM treaties (think Russia and AllofMP3.com) can become the source for more expensive but freer hardware?
If terrorists really want to bring down commercial airliners, wouldn't it be much easier to get a job as baggage handler on an airline, or package loader at FedEx, and just plant a cheap, homemade bomb in the cargo bay, than try to smuggle in a manpad or buy one from a probable undercover agent to try and shoot down a moving aircraft?
I was looking at Mint the other day, but I couldn't tell if it's only 32-bit. Is there an 64-bit version?
I'm currently using Ubuntu Hoary and applications crash all the time, especially anything that involves sound or video. They work, sort of, but Kaffiene always crashes upon closing.
My production desktop is still running Hoary because I know if I try apt-get to update it, something is going to go wrong and I'll be down for days. I tried that on a clean install of Dapper to Edgy -- nothing custom aside from some Perl modules I'd installed by hand -- and I ended up having to start from scratch. At least this time I've got my home directory on its own partition, because I know that despite all those people who say they upgraded seamlessly with apt-get, I've never had a smooth upgrade with either Ubuntu, Mandrake or Red Hat.
I still use Linux as my daily OS because it's a great development environment. I just don't have the time to keep up with all the configuration options -- I want a distribution that works out of the box and has a safe upgrade path. Haven't found it yet.
Reading stuff like this is why I'm still sticking with Perl. Sure, it has a syntax which is easy to abuse, but give up CPAN? Not yet.
... otherpeople.com
Love that URL -- msexchangeteam.com They're the ones working on a gender interchange protocol, right?
Now maybe we can find where Saddam hid his WMDs.
This, combined with the recent nuclear deals with India, are prettly clearly geopolitical moves to bolster an economic and technological counterweight to China. Space science has little to do with it.
Except that the Civil War and WWII were very much existential wars that were largely unavoidable and pushed the U.S. to extremes. The current wars are very much wars of choice (what used to be called "cabinet wars") in which 9/11 was seized as the pretext for a vast power grab in the center of world oil production, in which "fighting terrorism" is largely a rhetorical device.
So in essence you're saying a war of choice necessitates torture and abandonment of the rule of law -- that what we choose automatically becomes a necissity. Nice logic.
Don't suppose you've heard of Kamikaze's, either.
So what about when the anti-war progressive are Iraq war veterans, military families, supporters of the troops or former Green Berets Do you laugh at them too?