So, in other words, what we thought he was saying, which would support his position, is blatantly false, but what he really did say doesn't support his position at all, because it's true by definition, and not talking about what we...
Huh. You're wrong about almost everything you said.
Java is not now, and never was, a toy programming language. It's used by, among other things, cell phones, large web servers, and of course the annoying web applets you used to see everywhere before Flash stole their cookies. As far as I can see, it has few remaining technological drawbacks, the only big one left for me is how insanely ugly the language itself is. But that's not because it's a "toy" language, it's because it's an industrial-strength language, designed to force the programmer to program correctly, even if it takes 3 times the code and 10 times the time.
Java is not little. It's freakin' huge, when you count all the standard libraries. And the verbosity makes your programs even bigger.
Java may have been essentially interpreted in the past, but it isn't now. Don't believe me? Look up gcj. Even if you don't count a JIT as "compiled", I think gcj pretty much ends that argument.
Java is standard, it just depends how you count. It's not an open standard (yet), it's a proprietary one. Still, that's better than no standard, which is about where most implementations of BASIC are.
Java is not good for learning the basics. BASIC is much better for learning the basics. But have you ever had to sit through "Hello, World" in Java? That was my first Computer Science class in college, ever:
class Hello {
public static void main (String [] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, world!");
} }
Oh, and it has to be in a file called "Hello.java", or it won't work. Case sensitive, too. And, of course, they had to explain every last detail.
I would have quit right there, except I already knew some 5 or 10 languages when I came to class, including Java, so instead, I got to explain it to everyone else.
So what did you get right? Well, BASIC was popular, and Turing probably was, I don't know. And Java did indeed make the list, and like every language, it sees some use by novices and students, as well as trained professionals. But counting all of that, you don't really have much point.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the language as much as the next guy, and bytecode isn't as relevant as it once was (or may be soon). I'd much rather see C make the list -- after all, C is Unix and Unix is C. But then, the list seems pretty arbitrary -- no mention is made of Mosaic being bug-free, but VisiCalc doesn't count because it was buggy, and Excel makes the list because it's less buggy.
Meanwhile, high fees for Unix outraged Richard Stallman, a grad student who used it at the MIT artificial intelligence lab. Software, he decided, was an intellectual asset and should be free, like the published work of his fellow researchers. He set about building a set of tools called GNU that programmers could use to create their own software.
All respect goes out the window here. It wasn't price that pissed off Stallman, it was restrictions on his freedom. He doesn't care how much he has to pay for software, so long as he can do whatever he wants with it when he gets his hands on it.
And what pisses me off is having to read through the whole rest of the article first, then all respect goes out the window on the 3rd paragraph from the bottom.
Hmm. The first sentence of the page about Agnostics sounds about right, though:
Agnosticism is the philosophical view that the (truth) values of certain claims--particularly theological claims regarding the existence of God, gods, or deities--are unknown, inherently unknowable, or incoherent, and therefore, irrelevant to life.
Also, agnostic is what we use in computer science. For instance, many Java programs are OS-agnostic, meaning they work equally well under any OS, or under no OS at all. I've never heard anyone call them OS-atheist. Similarly, most programs are filesystem-agnostic, even as they require a filesystem, they work equally well under most filesystems, without having to know which one they're using.
So, at this point, we're just arguing semantics, and I think my semantics are more common.
I can see your point of view, though. The atheists who don't have a strong assertion one way or another strike me as similar to the hackers who are simply clever programmers, and would prefer to call the black hats "crackers".
Still, there's a reason I support using "hacker" in the japh/Stallman/kernel sense -- there's no other word for it, while we do have another word for "cracker". And if we take the word "atheist" and use it to describe what I'm calling "agnostic", then what is our word for the truly disbelieving "atheist"?
What you're basically saying is, not believing in something in the absence of evidence is just as illogical as believing.
Yes.
So if I say "Santa Claus doesn't exist", based on the total absence of data proving his existance, does that make me an illogical non-santa-ist?
Yes.
Now, it is possible to reasonably believe some things. For instance, if someone says "That's Santa!" and you notice the beard has half-fallen off his face, he's snoring, he smells strongly of rum, and he bears a strong resemblance to that person's father, then there's a very good chance that this person is not Santa.
And certainly, we know Santa doesn't exist in the sense that not every good boy and girl gets a present from him, unless we drastically change our standards for "good".
The problem here, is that absence of belief is the neutral state. As long as you don't have any evidence for something existing, the correct (and default) attitude is absence of belief.
And disbelief is not absence of belief.
I have no reason to believe there's an orange floating 2 feet above my head right now. Faced with such a statement, I would look up, see (or not) if there's indeed an orange floating there, and change my attitude correspondingly.
Faced with such a statement, I would suspend my belief or disbelief until I looked up. It also means I'll be that much less surprised if there is such an orange.
Now, let's assume that someone would claim something that is non-observable by both of us. Say, there's an orange floating above my head, somewhere in space. Unless that person brings some kind of proof (hey I saw in in my telescope, come see for yourself!), the correct, logical attitude here is to say "there isn't an orange floating above my head somewhere in space".
I don't see that as more correct than: "I have no idea if there's an orange floating above my head somewhere in space, but I seriously doubt it."
This statement isn't taking a negative position, it's the *lack* of a positive position.
Oh, but it is taking a negative position, because it is also possible to refuse to believe in God (or the orange) even with direct evidence. That is, if someone brought you a telescope, pointed you at the orange in space, and you looked at it with your own eyes and said "This must be a trick telescope, because I believe that there's no orange in space." (Which is the same as saying you don't believe in the orange in space.)
So it seems like you're the kind of reasonable person who doesn't hold beliefs anyway, only assumptions, and only until you recieve evidence to the contrary. And that's reasonable. I hold assumptions also. I don't believe there's ground under my feet, I could be dreaming or in the Matrix, but for the purposes of walking around, I assume there's ground under my feet. But everyday life doesn't require me to have even an assumption about God.
Besides, why is the default position negative? For instance, if someone said "This table is made of an oak tree I chopped down myself," you can't immediately give a response of disbelief. If anything, your default response should be belief, in that case, unless you have evidence to suggest that this person is a habitual liar.
Same for any number of other suggestions. For instance, I'm sending this from my Mac. You have no way of knowing that. Is your response to immediately tell me that I'm sending it from Windows? Or Linux? Or must you immediately believe that I'm writing this from the Powerbook G4 17" that I'm claiming to? Could you, for once, suspend belief and disbelief and simply not care what I'm writing it from? Or even if you care deeply, must you believe one way or another until I show you a webcam shot to reasonably prove where I'm sending it from? (Sorry,
Also, stupid is as stupid does. You can educate a stupid person to where they can function as well as a smart person, just slower. And you can get smarter with practice.
All they really need is to understand what a comment is, and to have that link to the config file. A good example of that right now is the OpenVPN GUI for my Mac. It gives me a simple menu to connect/disconnect, and it shows me whether the VPN is disabled, trying to connect, or connected. In the connect/disconnect menu, there's an option for "edit config file", which opens the config file in TextEdit. The config file is extremely well documented.
I don't see why showing a checkbox that says "You said 'yes' here" without saving and trying it out is any more helpful. A better place to focus on would be how easy it is to understand what a particular option does, whether it's a checkbox or a line in a config file.
Good idea about the help, though. I think that would be something to implement in text editors -- they already recognize comments, and some comments already contain HTML, so put the two together and you get links to external help resources. But then, that's not hugely more newbie-friendly, if said newbie knows how to use Google. Making comments into tooltips? Is that really more helpful than just coloring them?
Well, maybe it is, I'm not a newbie anymore, so it's sometimes hard to think that way...
If this is true, why do the Muslim polls show that the majority support or have sympathies for the terrorists? Why do we see film clips of dancing in the streets whenever a terrorist succeeds?
Film clips are ancedotes. So show me the polls, anyway -- oh, and I can certainly feel sympathetic to terrorists, but it doesn't mean I support what they're doing, and it doesn't mean I'd hesitate for a second if I had the immediate opportunity to kill one.
The fact is, the Muslim religion is set up in such a way that it empowers extremists.
No, it's not. That's some Muslim people perverting the religion to empower extremists. Or what is your excuse for the Crusades?
There are people that profess to be Muslims that think the way you describe, but they are in the minority.
In what way do they "profess" to be Muslims? They are Muslims. They are certainly more Muslim than I am. You pray at certain times of day, no matter where you are. Stuck in traffic? Get out of the car, put down your prayer mat, and bow to Mecca.
I wouldn't like that, personally, but I definitely say that someone who does that is a Muslim, even if they're also an American, even if they're also in the US Army and committed to killing terrorists.
Virtually every Muslim leader refers to the US as "the great satan." Why is that?
Go read your history. After some of the things we've done to them, I don't blame them. We're just a little too politically correct to call them that. No, instead, we call the terrorists Evildoers, and often we confuse "terrorist" with "Muslim". (You're a great example.)
I think that this is because all Muslims know what the Koran says to do with infidels, but their conscience does not let them do it.
And you call it conscience. Maybe it is simply cowardice, weakness?
In any case, go read the Koran. It has some good things, and some bad things, but there's a lot of modern Islam, especially terrorism, that runs directly contrary to the Koran. You do not get 100 virgins for suicide bombings, you get to go to a special hell where you experience your own suicidal death over and over for eternity.
Certainly not all Muslims. Probably not most. But definately a large fraction.
I'll give you "large fraction". But a large enough fraction of Christians refuse to believe in evolution, and a large enough fraction of Americans refuse to believe in global warming. Still, I'm careful to insert enough adjectives to make a clear distinction between the large fraction of Christians and all of Christianity -- for instance, "Right-wing Bible-pounding fundamentalist Christian nutjobs" instead of just "Christians".
I think that in the end this will come down to a nuclear war, and millions of innocents on both sides will die. The US innocents will die first, as the US is attacked by nuclear terrorists. The US will try to reason for a while, invade some countries - but after New York, LA, and Chicago have been rendered unihabitable (and obviously Isreal will be long gone at this point), the American people will demand a final solution - just like Germany did - and we will erradicate 80% of the Muslim population. The remaining Muslims will "convert or die".
Well, at least wait till that happens. It won't.
Or better, invade the countries we know have nukes now, or the ones we know are developing nukes. Like I said -- North Korea and Iran. Iraq was a mistake -- maybe they had something, but we didn't actually know.
That is what we need to avoid - a Nazi being elected president. Only the Muslims can prevent that,
...why?
The majority of the voters in this country are not Muslims. I'd even argue that the majority of those who can mess with Diebold machines are not Muslims.
Why does it matter that they can, if they won't? In open source, it would matter, that's why we like Mono. In proprietary stuff, all that matters is what they want to do, not what they can do that they won't and we can't.
Weird. Mine apparently flattens it to a temporary file, which it discards after printing. It's still annoying that it asks me permission to do that, but it really doesn't seem to be doing anything different than Photoshop here, it's just not hiding it as well.
Anyway, I get the point. That's why I do tons of research before I start using something, and I usually end up using more than one thing anyway.
If you want to be logical about it, atheism is just as much an irrational belief as any other. Scientists do believe things based on observations, but the thing about God is, he's not disprovable, and isn't currently provable, so a true scientist can't believe one way or the other.
So yeah, you're just like the rest of the population, only a bit more arrogant and elitist.
I'm also arrogant and elitist, but at least I'm not wrong: I'm agnostic.
I can't tell if you're trolling, being sarcastic, or are just stupid^Wretarded^Wmisinformed.
When most scientists agree on something, you had better bring some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary in order to get it labeled "junk science".
Only a tiny minority of Americans will ever use the fact of the Earth revolving around the Sun in their lifetimes. Indeed, the vast majority of the American public will never deal with science directly in their working lives.
But it would help if the people in charge of regulating science and technology (hi there, Ted Stevens) had at least a basic understanding of what it is they're regulating. Since America is a republic, that means it would help a lot if the general public knew at least enough about science to know when the people we elect say things as dumb or dumber than "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday."
The only difference is, most of the general MySpace-enabled population understands that Ted Stevens is a moronic jackass. But most of us have no clue how moronic the whole stem cell debate often is, not to mention evolution. If the general population understood enough about evolution, we wouldn't have the situation like Kansas where they are legislating this moronic "debate" into schools, so that we'll get a whole new generation of morons in Kansas who will ask for the same thing.
Anyone who finds validity in "Intelligent Design" should read about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and anyone who still doesn't get it either completely missed the point of FSM or is in denial.
Go for the USB -- it's writable, and not awkward at all.
I know Javascript pretty well, so I may be able to help, but I don't know anything about how to actually do a Firefox extension, so I probably wouldn't win the bounty. I may end up just doing it and setting up a donation box.
So what you really mean is that they want our (the outside world's) stuff, but they don't want to have to do anything to meet us halfway. In addition to that, their stated aim is to kill everyone that is not Islam - "Convert or Die" I believe is the phrase they use. Even further, Islam is not enough - just must join their particular sect of Islam. And of course, there exists more than one sect saying that.
I in no way meant to sugar-coat it. I realize that there are people who say this, certainly. In fact, find any cause and you'll probably find at least one nutcase willing to kill and die for it. Take the xbox 360 -- ok, no one was willing to die to get you one, but they were willing to kill to get their own.
The question is, would there be so many of them, so organized, with such good funding, training, and arms, if we'd stay the hell away in the first place?
Sorry, but if someone with a gun says they are going to kill you, you are forced to take them seriously and kill them first. If you do not believe that, you will die
Or I will take their gun and call the police. That's not always possible, and certainly, if I was on a plain with a hijacker, I'd kill them. But what kind of a situation do we really have here? ONE attack on American soil; since then they've just been fighting us in Iraq because they want us the hell out.
Therefore, if we allow the Islamic radicals to decide the fate of the world, the world population will be culled until only one Islamic sect remains. If we let the "radical west" decide the fate of the world, Muslims will die until they stop trying to kill people.
You are a bigot, or at least an insightful troll. The majority of Islam does not believe in killing anyone, especially yourself, so the major tool of the terrorist -- suicide bombing -- is as appalling to a Muslim as it would be to anyone else.
You caught yourself the first time and said "Islamic radicals", but our response is to kill all Muslims until they stop trying to kill people?
Fewer people die under the second set - and more importantly to me personally is that me and my family do not die under the second set.
If you're worried about you and your family, you should try for option 3: Stop killing the crazy people and start dealing with the people who have the nukes. Pissing off and repressing people will cause you problems down the road, read Dune for a solid example, or read up on the Revolutionary War for a real example -- and you can find it time and time and time again. The difference is, nukes do actually hold the potential to decide the fate of the world, and we should not have invaded Iraq (which has none, never had any, probably never would have), but we should have invaded North Korea or Iran, if anywhere.
Knowing Bush, it could be as simple as a misspelling. "Iran, Iraq, same difference."
If you're going to be editing the raw config file at all, every config file I've seen supports comments of some sort, so you should be able to figure it out on your own. What you'd want to be seeing is the actual effect (which isn't always visible), not just some checkboxes.
There are some tools, though, which do this the full-on Mac way, where the GUI tools usually affect everything in realtime, and the config changes are saved without asking you -- all you get is a revert button, and a backup if you know where the config files live. Sometimes said config files are human-readable, usually not.
The point I was making about Gentoo and Ubuntu is that once you get it, there are hundreds of thousands of packages you can install, one at a time, when you need them. The base distro is small, but it's got enough (just enough) for the package manager to work. You can still build a full-fledged Ubuntu-like install out of Gentoo, or out of Ubuntu-server.
Can Arch do that? I mean, I'm sure it's got desktop stuff, but how many apps does pacman really have?
Yes, I understand the difference. It also means that some of those tools become more platform-specific than they should. For instance, GNU rm lets me do this:
The argument for/against Wine/Cedega/Crossover is that while they do encourage users to switch over to Linux by making apps available now, they also discourage developing a native Linux version for something that works flawlessly under Wine -- or it may be easier to make it work under Wine (or with WineLib) than to do a real port.
As you point out, we have a hard time getting that kind of critical mass that would prompt people to actually do proper native ports, partly because Wine will never be perfect. Especially since DirectX's dominance, the situation has changed. It used to be that the latest games, if they ran at all, ran faster and better under Wine than they did under Windows, and even faster with a native port -- this was Quake 3.
But nowadays, most games run best under Windows or their native console, mainly because of DirectX.
Still, I don't think Microsoft could sue. Don't you think they would have already, or is it just a sign that we were never a threat? I think in the days before and just after the release of Windows 2000, Linux was the better OS not by leaps and bounds, but by light years -- and games ran better under Linux than they did under Windows -- so why didn't anyone get sued then? I think Transgaming was around in some form, even...
And FYI, Cedega is an Open Source implementation of DirectX. We've also got Wine (and Cedega) which are Open Source implementations of the Windows APIs. Then there's Mono, an Open Source implementation of.NET, and mod_mono, which is an Open Source implementation of ASP.NET on an Apache server. And we can't forget OpenOffice, AbiWord, and others, which include open source implementations of the Word format.
Contrary to popular belief, it is possible for the vast majority of people to go MS free. And yet, MS does nothing.
I don't know what that means -- could be beaurocratic inefficiency, could be we aren't a threat yet, could be Hell froze over and MS decided to play nice. But I wouldn't worry about Cedega getting sued, now or ever.
Fortran is just another compiled language. Does that mean it's as capable as Lisp or C?
I mean, if one language is as usable as another for real applications simply because they run on the same platform, then why not program raw assembly -- or raw CIL if you like.NET?
Or does it just have a bad rap because of a quick learning curve? Well, if that's the case, why hasn't Ruby gotten the same reputation? Why is it that the only complaint most people can find about Ruby is that it's a bit overhyped and dog-slow?
It's the syntax, stupid.
There are still plenty of reasons to hate VB, even though it now comes with.NET tacked on the end.
Slashdot Mirror
So, in other words, what we thought he was saying, which would support his position, is blatantly false, but what he really did say doesn't support his position at all, because it's true by definition, and not talking about what we...
Fucking marketers.
Java is not now, and never was, a toy programming language. It's used by, among other things, cell phones, large web servers, and of course the annoying web applets you used to see everywhere before Flash stole their cookies. As far as I can see, it has few remaining technological drawbacks, the only big one left for me is how insanely ugly the language itself is. But that's not because it's a "toy" language, it's because it's an industrial-strength language, designed to force the programmer to program correctly, even if it takes 3 times the code and 10 times the time.
Java is not little. It's freakin' huge, when you count all the standard libraries. And the verbosity makes your programs even bigger.
Java may have been essentially interpreted in the past, but it isn't now. Don't believe me? Look up gcj. Even if you don't count a JIT as "compiled", I think gcj pretty much ends that argument.
Java is standard, it just depends how you count. It's not an open standard (yet), it's a proprietary one. Still, that's better than no standard, which is about where most implementations of BASIC are.
Java is not good for learning the basics. BASIC is much better for learning the basics. But have you ever had to sit through "Hello, World" in Java? That was my first Computer Science class in college, ever:Oh, and it has to be in a file called "Hello.java", or it won't work. Case sensitive, too. And, of course, they had to explain every last detail.
I would have quit right there, except I already knew some 5 or 10 languages when I came to class, including Java, so instead, I got to explain it to everyone else.
So what did you get right? Well, BASIC was popular, and Turing probably was, I don't know. And Java did indeed make the list, and like every language, it sees some use by novices and students, as well as trained professionals. But counting all of that, you don't really have much point.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the language as much as the next guy, and bytecode isn't as relevant as it once was (or may be soon). I'd much rather see C make the list -- after all, C is Unix and Unix is C. But then, the list seems pretty arbitrary -- no mention is made of Mosaic being bug-free, but VisiCalc doesn't count because it was buggy, and Excel makes the list because it's less buggy.
Actually, TFA explains why VisiCalc isn't on the list. Go read.
I'll read the Unix Haters Handbook next time I get the chance.
All respect goes out the window here. It wasn't price that pissed off Stallman, it was restrictions on his freedom. He doesn't care how much he has to pay for software, so long as he can do whatever he wants with it when he gets his hands on it.
And what pisses me off is having to read through the whole rest of the article first, then all respect goes out the window on the 3rd paragraph from the bottom.
Hmm. The first sentence of the page about Agnostics sounds about right, though:
Also, agnostic is what we use in computer science. For instance, many Java programs are OS-agnostic, meaning they work equally well under any OS, or under no OS at all. I've never heard anyone call them OS-atheist. Similarly, most programs are filesystem-agnostic, even as they require a filesystem, they work equally well under most filesystems, without having to know which one they're using.
So, at this point, we're just arguing semantics, and I think my semantics are more common.
I can see your point of view, though. The atheists who don't have a strong assertion one way or another strike me as similar to the hackers who are simply clever programmers, and would prefer to call the black hats "crackers".
Still, there's a reason I support using "hacker" in the japh/Stallman/kernel sense -- there's no other word for it, while we do have another word for "cracker". And if we take the word "atheist" and use it to describe what I'm calling "agnostic", then what is our word for the truly disbelieving "atheist"?
Yes.
Yes.
Now, it is possible to reasonably believe some things. For instance, if someone says "That's Santa!" and you notice the beard has half-fallen off his face, he's snoring, he smells strongly of rum, and he bears a strong resemblance to that person's father, then there's a very good chance that this person is not Santa.
And certainly, we know Santa doesn't exist in the sense that not every good boy and girl gets a present from him, unless we drastically change our standards for "good".
And disbelief is not absence of belief.
Faced with such a statement, I would suspend my belief or disbelief until I looked up. It also means I'll be that much less surprised if there is such an orange.
I don't see that as more correct than: "I have no idea if there's an orange floating above my head somewhere in space, but I seriously doubt it."
Oh, but it is taking a negative position, because it is also possible to refuse to believe in God (or the orange) even with direct evidence. That is, if someone brought you a telescope, pointed you at the orange in space, and you looked at it with your own eyes and said "This must be a trick telescope, because I believe that there's no orange in space." (Which is the same as saying you don't believe in the orange in space.)
So it seems like you're the kind of reasonable person who doesn't hold beliefs anyway, only assumptions, and only until you recieve evidence to the contrary. And that's reasonable. I hold assumptions also. I don't believe there's ground under my feet, I could be dreaming or in the Matrix, but for the purposes of walking around, I assume there's ground under my feet. But everyday life doesn't require me to have even an assumption about God.
Besides, why is the default position negative? For instance, if someone said "This table is made of an oak tree I chopped down myself," you can't immediately give a response of disbelief. If anything, your default response should be belief, in that case, unless you have evidence to suggest that this person is a habitual liar.
Same for any number of other suggestions. For instance, I'm sending this from my Mac. You have no way of knowing that. Is your response to immediately tell me that I'm sending it from Windows? Or Linux? Or must you immediately believe that I'm writing this from the Powerbook G4 17" that I'm claiming to? Could you, for once, suspend belief and disbelief and simply not care what I'm writing it from? Or even if you care deeply, must you believe one way or another until I show you a webcam shot to reasonably prove where I'm sending it from? (Sorry,
Because stupid people can vote.
Also, stupid is as stupid does. You can educate a stupid person to where they can function as well as a smart person, just slower. And you can get smarter with practice.
All they really need is to understand what a comment is, and to have that link to the config file. A good example of that right now is the OpenVPN GUI for my Mac. It gives me a simple menu to connect/disconnect, and it shows me whether the VPN is disabled, trying to connect, or connected. In the connect/disconnect menu, there's an option for "edit config file", which opens the config file in TextEdit. The config file is extremely well documented.
I don't see why showing a checkbox that says "You said 'yes' here" without saving and trying it out is any more helpful. A better place to focus on would be how easy it is to understand what a particular option does, whether it's a checkbox or a line in a config file.
Good idea about the help, though. I think that would be something to implement in text editors -- they already recognize comments, and some comments already contain HTML, so put the two together and you get links to external help resources. But then, that's not hugely more newbie-friendly, if said newbie knows how to use Google. Making comments into tooltips? Is that really more helpful than just coloring them?
Well, maybe it is, I'm not a newbie anymore, so it's sometimes hard to think that way...
Film clips are ancedotes. So show me the polls, anyway -- oh, and I can certainly feel sympathetic to terrorists, but it doesn't mean I support what they're doing, and it doesn't mean I'd hesitate for a second if I had the immediate opportunity to kill one.
No, it's not. That's some Muslim people perverting the religion to empower extremists. Or what is your excuse for the Crusades?
In what way do they "profess" to be Muslims? They are Muslims. They are certainly more Muslim than I am. You pray at certain times of day, no matter where you are. Stuck in traffic? Get out of the car, put down your prayer mat, and bow to Mecca.
I wouldn't like that, personally, but I definitely say that someone who does that is a Muslim, even if they're also an American, even if they're also in the US Army and committed to killing terrorists.
Go read your history. After some of the things we've done to them, I don't blame them. We're just a little too politically correct to call them that. No, instead, we call the terrorists Evildoers, and often we confuse "terrorist" with "Muslim". (You're a great example.)
And you call it conscience. Maybe it is simply cowardice, weakness?
In any case, go read the Koran. It has some good things, and some bad things, but there's a lot of modern Islam, especially terrorism, that runs directly contrary to the Koran. You do not get 100 virgins for suicide bombings, you get to go to a special hell where you experience your own suicidal death over and over for eternity.
I'll give you "large fraction". But a large enough fraction of Christians refuse to believe in evolution, and a large enough fraction of Americans refuse to believe in global warming. Still, I'm careful to insert enough adjectives to make a clear distinction between the large fraction of Christians and all of Christianity -- for instance, "Right-wing Bible-pounding fundamentalist Christian nutjobs" instead of just "Christians".
Well, at least wait till that happens. It won't.
Or better, invade the countries we know have nukes now, or the ones we know are developing nukes. Like I said -- North Korea and Iran. Iraq was a mistake -- maybe they had something, but we didn't actually know.
...why?
The majority of the voters in this country are not Muslims. I'd even argue that the majority of those who can mess with Diebold machines are not Muslims.
There's Mono, and then there's Rotor. I don't know about the Shared Source licensing on Rotor, and Mono still has rough edges.
But certainly, Microsoft isn't planning to release it for the Mac.
Why does it matter that they can, if they won't? In open source, it would matter, that's why we like Mono. In proprietary stuff, all that matters is what they want to do, not what they can do that they won't and we can't.
And you still haven't answered my question.
Weird. Mine apparently flattens it to a temporary file, which it discards after printing. It's still annoying that it asks me permission to do that, but it really doesn't seem to be doing anything different than Photoshop here, it's just not hiding it as well.
Anyway, I get the point. That's why I do tons of research before I start using something, and I usually end up using more than one thing anyway.
If you want to be logical about it, atheism is just as much an irrational belief as any other. Scientists do believe things based on observations, but the thing about God is, he's not disprovable, and isn't currently provable, so a true scientist can't believe one way or the other.
So yeah, you're just like the rest of the population, only a bit more arrogant and elitist.
I'm also arrogant and elitist, but at least I'm not wrong: I'm agnostic.
I can't tell if you're trolling, being sarcastic, or are just stupid^Wretarded^Wmisinformed.
When most scientists agree on something, you had better bring some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary in order to get it labeled "junk science".
Only a tiny minority of Americans will ever use the fact of the Earth revolving around the Sun in their lifetimes. Indeed, the vast majority of the American public will never deal with science directly in their working lives.
But it would help if the people in charge of regulating science and technology (hi there, Ted Stevens) had at least a basic understanding of what it is they're regulating. Since America is a republic, that means it would help a lot if the general public knew at least enough about science to know when the people we elect say things as dumb or dumber than "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday."
The only difference is, most of the general MySpace-enabled population understands that Ted Stevens is a moronic jackass. But most of us have no clue how moronic the whole stem cell debate often is, not to mention evolution. If the general population understood enough about evolution, we wouldn't have the situation like Kansas where they are legislating this moronic "debate" into schools, so that we'll get a whole new generation of morons in Kansas who will ask for the same thing.
Anyone who finds validity in "Intelligent Design" should read about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and anyone who still doesn't get it either completely missed the point of FSM or is in denial.
Arrogant? Elitist? Maybe, but am I wrong?
It's His Noodly Appendage, you heretic! You shall burn in the cleansing fires of the Great Gas Burner!!
Go for the USB -- it's writable, and not awkward at all.
I know Javascript pretty well, so I may be able to help, but I don't know anything about how to actually do a Firefox extension, so I probably wouldn't win the bounty. I may end up just doing it and setting up a donation box.
I in no way meant to sugar-coat it. I realize that there are people who say this, certainly. In fact, find any cause and you'll probably find at least one nutcase willing to kill and die for it. Take the xbox 360 -- ok, no one was willing to die to get you one, but they were willing to kill to get their own.
The question is, would there be so many of them, so organized, with such good funding, training, and arms, if we'd stay the hell away in the first place?
Or I will take their gun and call the police. That's not always possible, and certainly, if I was on a plain with a hijacker, I'd kill them. But what kind of a situation do we really have here? ONE attack on American soil; since then they've just been fighting us in Iraq because they want us the hell out.
You are a bigot, or at least an insightful troll. The majority of Islam does not believe in killing anyone, especially yourself, so the major tool of the terrorist -- suicide bombing -- is as appalling to a Muslim as it would be to anyone else.
You caught yourself the first time and said "Islamic radicals", but our response is to kill all Muslims until they stop trying to kill people?
If you're worried about you and your family, you should try for option 3: Stop killing the crazy people and start dealing with the people who have the nukes. Pissing off and repressing people will cause you problems down the road, read Dune for a solid example, or read up on the Revolutionary War for a real example -- and you can find it time and time and time again. The difference is, nukes do actually hold the potential to decide the fate of the world, and we should not have invaded Iraq (which has none, never had any, probably never would have), but we should have invaded North Korea or Iran, if anywhere.
Knowing Bush, it could be as simple as a misspelling. "Iran, Iraq, same difference."
Sounds cool, but fairly useless.
If you're going to be editing the raw config file at all, every config file I've seen supports comments of some sort, so you should be able to figure it out on your own. What you'd want to be seeing is the actual effect (which isn't always visible), not just some checkboxes.
There are some tools, though, which do this the full-on Mac way, where the GUI tools usually affect everything in realtime, and the config changes are saved without asking you -- all you get is a revert button, and a backup if you know where the config files live. Sometimes said config files are human-readable, usually not.
The point I was making about Gentoo and Ubuntu is that once you get it, there are hundreds of thousands of packages you can install, one at a time, when you need them. The base distro is small, but it's got enough (just enough) for the package manager to work. You can still build a full-fledged Ubuntu-like install out of Gentoo, or out of Ubuntu-server.
Can Arch do that? I mean, I'm sure it's got desktop stuff, but how many apps does pacman really have?
The argument for/against Wine/Cedega/Crossover is that while they do encourage users to switch over to Linux by making apps available now, they also discourage developing a native Linux version for something that works flawlessly under Wine -- or it may be easier to make it work under Wine (or with WineLib) than to do a real port.
.NET, and mod_mono, which is an Open Source implementation of ASP.NET on an Apache server. And we can't forget OpenOffice, AbiWord, and others, which include open source implementations of the Word format.
As you point out, we have a hard time getting that kind of critical mass that would prompt people to actually do proper native ports, partly because Wine will never be perfect. Especially since DirectX's dominance, the situation has changed. It used to be that the latest games, if they ran at all, ran faster and better under Wine than they did under Windows, and even faster with a native port -- this was Quake 3.
But nowadays, most games run best under Windows or their native console, mainly because of DirectX.
Still, I don't think Microsoft could sue. Don't you think they would have already, or is it just a sign that we were never a threat? I think in the days before and just after the release of Windows 2000, Linux was the better OS not by leaps and bounds, but by light years -- and games ran better under Linux than they did under Windows -- so why didn't anyone get sued then? I think Transgaming was around in some form, even...
And FYI, Cedega is an Open Source implementation of DirectX. We've also got Wine (and Cedega) which are Open Source implementations of the Windows APIs. Then there's Mono, an Open Source implementation of
Contrary to popular belief, it is possible for the vast majority of people to go MS free. And yet, MS does nothing.
I don't know what that means -- could be beaurocratic inefficiency, could be we aren't a threat yet, could be Hell froze over and MS decided to play nice. But I wouldn't worry about Cedega getting sued, now or ever.
Good to see you've got that in the right order.
I do have to wonder how often people actually run into things they can't do with Gimp. It seems the strangeness of it is really the bigger problem.
Fortran is just another compiled language. Does that mean it's as capable as Lisp or C?
.NET?
.NET tacked on the end.
I mean, if one language is as usable as another for real applications simply because they run on the same platform, then why not program raw assembly -- or raw CIL if you like
Or does it just have a bad rap because of a quick learning curve? Well, if that's the case, why hasn't Ruby gotten the same reputation? Why is it that the only complaint most people can find about Ruby is that it's a bit overhyped and dog-slow?
It's the syntax, stupid.
There are still plenty of reasons to hate VB, even though it now comes with
You severely underestimate the willingness of Joe Public to download random programs on the Internet.