I've used other systems and have generally been appalled at the way they work. We regularly must use the Defense Travel System on a Windows XP box. Yuck.
I agree, but have you used it as your default system? I had to use it more or less exclusively for long enough to force me to learn to use it effectively. Once I did that, it wasn't that bad.
The Linux boxes I've used weren't much better. I even bought yellow dog Linux for my Mac...
Never tried Yellow Dog, and IIRC, it's dead now. (Also, I remember it being free -- you bought it?) How long ago was that?
You seem to make your decisions on the price of RAM and whether it runs Linux.
Nope, these days, I base it on whether it runs Linux, and the overall price and support for what I'm getting.
I have bought RAM and not from Apple. I don't understand what that has to do with Apple equipment in general.
RAM is a small part of it, but it's an example of the kind of ludicrous markup you can expect from Apple. You even admit this, by not buying it from Apple. Does Apple support third-party RAM?
The problem I find with/. is so many people seem to be doing the "well v6 was crap, v10.1 must be awful" routine.
What? 10.0 was awful. Why should I expect more from 10.1?
Please go and read this
Currently there is no other company out there trying to deliver such a comprehensive write once, run anywhere solution.
No single company, maybe, but the Web is trying to be exactly that.
Please go and read this
Top of that page is "Power and battery optimizations," next is "Maximizing performance," which would be cool if I could believe it. So far, no one's shown any examples of this working.
Oh, and the cherry on top:
this is just the start of our work to bring the full Flash Player to mobile devices.
You mean, kind of like the full Web has always existed for mobile devices? Oh yes, I had a full Gecko browser working on a handheld long before iPhone was released, because it wasn't at the whim of Adobe, it was at the whim of anyone who wanted to compile Gecko for ARM.
If they pull this off, my life as a developer becomes a lot simpler.
And if Flash dies, my life as a developer, user, system administrator, and defacto family support tech becomes a lot simpler.
for a long time it was the only way to do all sorts of things that are only just becoming viable with other methods,
So you admit they are becoming viable.
Things like Joe Cartoon, RatherGood.com and Fly Guy would never have existed without Flash,
Or they'd just have waited a long time.
there is all sorts of information stored in SWF files going back to the 90s.
Yeah, that kind of sucks.
You may argue that this information is now in the wrong format, but there's lots of things that will never be updated to HTML5 or JavaScript equivalents.
Unless someone writes an automatic conversion tool. In any case, I'm not sure how relevant it is. If I only have to use Flash for stuff from the 90s, that's fine with me. It's still a marked improvement.
I can understand a lot of the complaints about Flash, but if goes, we lose a large chunk of internet history with it.
Do you think the past versions will just disappear?
What I would hope is that Flash as a platform will die, and Adobe will eventually give up, and either open-source the player, or
Oh, and really, too bad. I mean, everyone who chose Flash as a platform should've known what they were getting into. Maybe that lost history will be a lesson to people to choose an open platform next time.
The battles between Adobe and Apple is all about their own self interest,
Are there still people who think this is about Adobe vs Apple?
Yes, Apple is leading the charge against Adobe. They're also doing it for shitty reasons, and they're presenting a platform (the App Store) which I would never in a thousand years choose over Flash. I don't hate Flash because I like Apple, I hate Flash because I like actual open standards, the kind that give me freedom from both Adobe and Apple.
This seems a little bit too much like book burning to me.
Really? Really? Is it also "book burning" when I no longer support IE6 in anything I build, or when I no longer care to visit IE6-only websites?
Are you sure you didn't just Godwin this discussion?
That's a bit like claiming that it was "book burning" to disable DOS emulation support in recent versions of Windows. At a certain point, technology moves on, and if you didn't build something to last, you have to scramble if you want to preserve it.
Meanwhile, those who knew what they were doing built things in 30-year-old standards like TeX, which are going to continue to exist and be standards for a long time.
Last I checked, it could only be used for authoring tools, not for writing an actual client/plugin.
it can still deliver applications or 3D gaming experiences or whatever
Only very recently did it get actual hardware-accelerated 3D. I'm pretty sure Java doesn't, but JavaScript is getting 3D support soon (they're in the nightlies of the major open source browsers).
the 30 year old Pacman clone on Google's homepage stutters like a bitch.
Didn't stutter for me. What crappy browser are you running?
There's enough open for you to write flash authoring tools, but not enough to write an actual client. In particular, last I checked, the "open" parts forbid you from writing a client.
Unfortunately, Write once, run anywhere will never be a reality.
Huh? I've been living that reality for awhile. From the Java homework assignments I'm forced to do in college, to the web apps I've developed for work and play, I certainly haven't had to recompile anything, and very rarely have I even had cross-browser issues.
I suppose if you take a stricter definition of "anywhere", sure, my apps won't run on all mobile phones right now, but that's not something any software or tech company can do until the mobile industry pulls their collective heads out of their asses and catches up to where PCs have been for at least 15 years.
Even if they do eventually catch up to the Adobe player, they still have the exact same issue as HTML5 currently does: H.264 and other proprietary codecs.
At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros.
Most nvidia cards come with a hardware H.264 decoder, which the Linux drivers support, so that's one way of getting it free. I bought a Dell with Linux preloaded, and it had the Fluendo codecs preloaded, so that's another way. Oh, and you could always just ignore software patents, or use a format other than H.264.
From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.
From what I've seen, it still beats Flash in that regard. Of course, none of that is required by the spec -- see, unlike Flash, if you have a problem with HTML5's performance, you can actually fix it!
And let us not forget the real enemy here is MPEG-LA... Old Steve may like having only H.264 on his iStuff ( and why not? Apple and MSFT are a part of MPEG-LA) but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check.
Well, let's see: First, you can't actually run it anywhere, including iStuff, and of course Linux distributions on odd architectures.
Second, H.264 is included and widely used in Flash, so I don't see why you're assuming you'll never have to write a check. That's entirely at the whim of Adobe.
MPEG-LA has made it clear that even just using a browser plugin to view H.264 means you WILL pay up.
So apparently, you will. Thanks for explaining why Flash solves nothing.
Why anyone not drinking the iKoolaid would actually want MPEG-LA with their major douchebag behavior to win over Flash...
How would that work, again, given that Flash includes H.264?
And please don't claim the H.264 paywall is a "standard"...
No, but HTML5 is.
benefits Apple and MSFT while screwing Linux?
Yes, Flash does. Their Linux player has always sucked, even more than their Mac player, which has always sucked. It's one of a very small number of pieces of proprietary software which are essentially required -- software patents aside, I can build a fully-functional HTML5 player with H.264 support using entirely free software, and I can even avoid the legal minefield by simply avoiding countries where software patents are respected.
I honestly can't see why you're wanting to trade an open, transparent standard which you may have to pay for (but probably not -- every major OS either bundles the codecs or offers them for an under-$100 fee), for a closed, proprietary standard you also may have to pay for.
the only thing I've seen from the big box manufacturers is...what...no taste.
If that's really what matters to you, I suppose Apple has the best, from a certain point of view -- though PCs do come in a lot more variety.
Besides, comparable systems from outside Apple are not all that much cheaper.
The first thing every Mac power user will tell you about buying a Mac is, "Don't get your RAM from Apple."
So no, I don't buy that, especially when you don't necessarily need a comparable system. As a trivial example, where's Apple's competitor to the mainstream PC? They have all sorts of odd compromises -- Mac Mini, iMac, etc -- but when you get right down to it, the closest thing to an actual desktop computer in terms of form factor, upgradability, and expandability is a Mac Pro. And while you can spec a Mac Pro that's only slightly more expensive than a comparable PC, you can also build a PC that's almost as fast and half the price.
Also, I've been on Macs since they came out.
That would suggest you haven't seriously looked at the alternatives. I had dismissed the Mac out of hand as a platform until I used one for about a year, mostly because I'd bought a Powerbook to run Linux on, but Linux wouldn't work and OS X ended up being not that bad. I also used Windows XP for about a year (after Vista and before 7), and found that while I have a list of annoyances even longer than the Mac, it's not as bad as I remembered from 98 or even 2K. While I'd never be happy with it, I could get used to it, and it handled keyboard navigation much better than the Mac.
Now, as you said, you're locked in, so this might be more difficult for you, but I don't think you can pretend it's either a particularly frugal decision or a particularly well-informed one.
I find out I spend at average 2 hours a week doing maintanance stuff and being prevented from work by various windows activilties.
What makes you think Windows is the only alternative?
That is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Microsoft was so adamant for us to look at when talking about LInux as alternative. So I took a hint and looked at it and switched to Mac the next day. (Away from both Windows and Linux)
You don't mention why you switched away from Linux. Did you actually believe Microsoft's TCO numbers?
Well, if you are willing to shell out 100$ for the developer license you *can* develop whatever you want
I very much doubt the license allows that.
and you can even install it on 100 iPhones.
Wow! 100 of them! </sarcasm>
You can even distribute the source code.
Nope. The license most explicitly forbids that. As I understand it, the only way you can distribute the app at all is either personally and directly to those 100 phones, or via the App Store.
I could be entirely wrong on that -- it's possible that this only applies to binaries -- but even among open source programs, being available only in source form is a significant annoyance, and I'm fairly sure even that is forbidden.
Yes, I Google'd it, couldn't find an answer in 5 minutes, so I'm giving up for now. You made the claim first that you can distribute the source, so maybe the burden is on you?
The declaration of independence includes prayers to Christ.
Oh? Care to quote something specific?
That is what "divine providence" refers to,
Nope, that's Deism. It's not an atheist document, by any means, but it's far from a Christian document, either.
Also the phrase "endowed by our creator" is a reference to God,
Yep. Still Deist.
the christian one
Nope. You apparently don't know what deism is.
there weren't very many Jews or Muslims
Do you honestly believe those are the only other religions?
The phrase "judge of the world" is a direct reference to Christ since Christ is the only religious figure addressed by that phrase in religious texts.
You might have me there, but it's also quite clearly a phrase which could easily apply to any monotheistic god, or, indeed, a few from polytheistic religions -- Anubis, in particular, is the judge of where you go in the afterlife.
Does this make the US a "christian nation?" Maybe, maybe not.
Definitely not. If it was in the constitution, you'd have a tiny sliver of a case for saying that, but the Declaration is hardly a legal document, nor is it the foundation of our current nation. Or have you forgotten the Articles of Confederation?
it certainly wasn't meant to be a theocracy or an atheist nation.
Yes, I realize the Google page showing you a list of results is secure. However, the instant you actually click on one of those results -- say, Slashdot -- you're probably not on SSL anymore (most of the Internet isn't), and your Referer header will tell anyone listening exactly what search terms you used to get there.
Dude, be a real man and break your own taboos for a change, not that of people thousands of miles away.
I do, frequently. Or rather, those of my society.
Really, try it now and do what many cultures find an entirely natural (and harmless) form of freedom of expression: go for a walk in the street, entirely naked.
Personally? No. We have laws against it, for one. But I don't actually have a problem with that, and I have considerably less of a problem when it's not a public street, but a public website. If someone doesn't want to see me naked, or the Prophet Mohammed, it's a lot easier to avoid a website than a street.
It's roughly akin to the difference between, say, drawing Mohammed with spray paint on someone else's property, and drawing Mohammed on a website which no one is even forcing you to view.
The thing is, pretty much every western culture has taboos that run deep, and if you break them, you should expect a counter reaction.
Indeed, but the only taboo I've seen which actually results in censorship is child pornography, and the rationale there is that anyone who purchases child pornography is supporting people who abuse children. At least, that's the more rational rationale -- it seems to be a kneejerk reaction against "perverts", and I see no reason possession should be a crime.
Think boob-gate, which showed nipples for a few seconds. All the major channels introduced a 5 second delay into their live broadcasts to give the operator a chance to censor out any embarrassing scene.
In other words, they didn't want to broadcast nipples. And this is coming from independent organizations -- there are plenty of alternate sources of nipples, including Naked News if you want a serious program.
Note that, while there was a bit of an overreaction, there also wasn't a single word of legislation introduced, nor a single government action taken.
Or think how your politicians would react to a huge Facebook campaign depicting Jesus as having good sex with his wife
You still don't get it, do you? That would get a lot of people angry, yes. Worst case, Facebook would self-censor and remove it. But no laws would be passed, no government action would be taken, no websites would be blocked, and no one would die. In fact, I think the above comic shows that pretty much any amount of blasphemy is allowed, so long as you do it on your own website.
Of course, the other point you're missing is that the vast majority of Americans would shrug at even this -- sure, it would offend them, but it wouldn't drive them into a mindless rage. They'd just close that page and never come back.
The Islamic world has many taboos as well, one of them is to not depict Mohammed, because his teachings were to not idolize.
Which makes this all the more hilarious. None of these actual drawings were likely to be something anyone would idolize. While I agree with what this guy is doing, he's idolizing that name (in calligraphy) a hell of a lot more than anyone's idolizing the pedobear-in-a-turban illustration. And to be fair, there was clear idolatry, to the point of turning Mohammed into a god, without the need for any drawings whatsoever.
Arguably, from a purely scientific point of view taboos are both silly and are harmful, because they inhibit rational discussion.
Unless I'm missing something, this is only for the search itself. As soon as you actually click on of those results, you're at the mercy of whatever server you're connecting to -- and probably no longer encrypted.
PHP has its problems, but it is simple, forgiving, and widespread.
Well, I guess one out of three...
PHP is simple as a language -- too simple to be useful -- but that simplicity is utterly destroyed by the absurdity of the standard libraries. And you have to go pretty far before you get "forgiving", at least as far as SQL injections go.
You can do anything in any language, but PHP sucks for anything but web development, and is far from the best language for that.
You started out with a blatant assumption: That no one on Slashdot understands how offensive it is. That alone renders it difficult to take merely as an "explanation", certainly when you're deliberately slanting it:
You're looking at this from the point of "those Muslims are trying to tell us what we can say".
That is objectively what is happening.
If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective...
Providing an emotional context for it doesn't really change what is happening, especially when that analogy (or whatever you want to call it) is inaccurate. Since it doesn't really change much, why would you assume that we don't understand what we're doing? I'm sure some don't. I'm also sure many of us know exactly what it feels like, because that's exactly what it felt like when the South Park episode was censored, and then pulled -- and probably not as bad, even, as how Matt Stone and Trey Parker felt when they received a personal death threat.
And notice something else: 18 replies. No death threats, let alone real violence. Just some replies. This is the system working.
And that's going to have significant drawbacks. In particular, you're either going to give up plain HTTP access, or it's going to be absurdly slow, or you're going to have a buffer the size of the entire filesystem.
Really? Or is it because someone's already written the 'copy' utility for you?
I can't speak for DOS (or NT, which is what you're probably talking about), but I know that on Unix, there's (unfortunately) no "copy" system call. The 'cp' utility is thus fairly complex -- it has to copy the file, and its permissions, and anything else relevant, all by itself. The code for this is almost certainly much more complex than the sample code given.
But hey, if you want to work at a higher level, go for it! I'm sure someone has already written a library that hides all that complexity from you.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used other systems and have generally been appalled at the way they work. We regularly must use the Defense Travel System on a Windows XP box. Yuck.
I agree, but have you used it as your default system? I had to use it more or less exclusively for long enough to force me to learn to use it effectively. Once I did that, it wasn't that bad.
The Linux boxes I've used weren't much better. I even bought yellow dog Linux for my Mac...
Never tried Yellow Dog, and IIRC, it's dead now. (Also, I remember it being free -- you bought it?) How long ago was that?
You seem to make your decisions on the price of RAM and whether it runs Linux.
Nope, these days, I base it on whether it runs Linux, and the overall price and support for what I'm getting.
I have bought RAM and not from Apple. I don't understand what that has to do with Apple equipment in general.
RAM is a small part of it, but it's an example of the kind of ludicrous markup you can expect from Apple. You even admit this, by not buying it from Apple. Does Apple support third-party RAM?
What? No, Facebook, like most of what we do on the Web, is personal, and not the business of our employers.
Fuck. That. Shit.
The problem I find with /. is so many people seem to be doing the "well v6 was crap, v10.1 must be awful" routine.
What? 10.0 was awful. Why should I expect more from 10.1?
Please go and read this
Currently there is no other company out there trying to deliver such a comprehensive write once, run anywhere solution.
No single company, maybe, but the Web is trying to be exactly that.
Please go and read this
Top of that page is "Power and battery optimizations," next is "Maximizing performance," which would be cool if I could believe it. So far, no one's shown any examples of this working.
Oh, and the cherry on top:
this is just the start of our work to bring the full Flash Player to mobile devices.
You mean, kind of like the full Web has always existed for mobile devices? Oh yes, I had a full Gecko browser working on a handheld long before iPhone was released, because it wasn't at the whim of Adobe, it was at the whim of anyone who wanted to compile Gecko for ARM.
If they pull this off, my life as a developer becomes a lot simpler.
And if Flash dies, my life as a developer, user, system administrator, and defacto family support tech becomes a lot simpler.
for a long time it was the only way to do all sorts of things that are only just becoming viable with other methods,
So you admit they are becoming viable.
Things like Joe Cartoon, RatherGood.com and Fly Guy would never have existed without Flash,
Or they'd just have waited a long time.
there is all sorts of information stored in SWF files going back to the 90s.
Yeah, that kind of sucks.
You may argue that this information is now in the wrong format, but there's lots of things that will never be updated to HTML5 or JavaScript equivalents.
Unless someone writes an automatic conversion tool. In any case, I'm not sure how relevant it is. If I only have to use Flash for stuff from the 90s, that's fine with me. It's still a marked improvement.
I can understand a lot of the complaints about Flash, but if goes, we lose a large chunk of internet history with it.
Do you think the past versions will just disappear?
What I would hope is that Flash as a platform will die, and Adobe will eventually give up, and either open-source the player, or
Oh, and really, too bad. I mean, everyone who chose Flash as a platform should've known what they were getting into. Maybe that lost history will be a lesson to people to choose an open platform next time.
The battles between Adobe and Apple is all about their own self interest,
Are there still people who think this is about Adobe vs Apple?
Yes, Apple is leading the charge against Adobe. They're also doing it for shitty reasons, and they're presenting a platform (the App Store) which I would never in a thousand years choose over Flash. I don't hate Flash because I like Apple, I hate Flash because I like actual open standards, the kind that give me freedom from both Adobe and Apple.
This seems a little bit too much like book burning to me.
Really? Really? Is it also "book burning" when I no longer support IE6 in anything I build, or when I no longer care to visit IE6-only websites?
Are you sure you didn't just Godwin this discussion?
That's a bit like claiming that it was "book burning" to disable DOS emulation support in recent versions of Windows. At a certain point, technology moves on, and if you didn't build something to last, you have to scramble if you want to preserve it.
Meanwhile, those who knew what they were doing built things in 30-year-old standards like TeX, which are going to continue to exist and be standards for a long time.
Last I checked, it could only be used for authoring tools, not for writing an actual client/plugin.
it can still deliver applications or 3D gaming experiences or whatever
Only very recently did it get actual hardware-accelerated 3D. I'm pretty sure Java doesn't, but JavaScript is getting 3D support soon (they're in the nightlies of the major open source browsers).
the 30 year old Pacman clone on Google's homepage stutters like a bitch.
Didn't stutter for me. What crappy browser are you running?
There's enough open for you to write flash authoring tools, but not enough to write an actual client. In particular, last I checked, the "open" parts forbid you from writing a client.
Unfortunately, Write once, run anywhere will never be a reality.
Huh? I've been living that reality for awhile. From the Java homework assignments I'm forced to do in college, to the web apps I've developed for work and play, I certainly haven't had to recompile anything, and very rarely have I even had cross-browser issues.
I suppose if you take a stricter definition of "anywhere", sure, my apps won't run on all mobile phones right now, but that's not something any software or tech company can do until the mobile industry pulls their collective heads out of their asses and catches up to where PCs have been for at least 15 years.
Even if they do eventually catch up to the Adobe player, they still have the exact same issue as HTML5 currently does: H.264 and other proprietary codecs.
At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros.
Most nvidia cards come with a hardware H.264 decoder, which the Linux drivers support, so that's one way of getting it free. I bought a Dell with Linux preloaded, and it had the Fluendo codecs preloaded, so that's another way. Oh, and you could always just ignore software patents, or use a format other than H.264.
From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.
From what I've seen, it still beats Flash in that regard. Of course, none of that is required by the spec -- see, unlike Flash, if you have a problem with HTML5's performance, you can actually fix it!
And let us not forget the real enemy here is MPEG-LA... Old Steve may like having only H.264 on his iStuff ( and why not? Apple and MSFT are a part of MPEG-LA) but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check.
Well, let's see: First, you can't actually run it anywhere, including iStuff, and of course Linux distributions on odd architectures.
Second, H.264 is included and widely used in Flash, so I don't see why you're assuming you'll never have to write a check. That's entirely at the whim of Adobe.
MPEG-LA has made it clear that even just using a browser plugin to view H.264 means you WILL pay up.
So apparently, you will. Thanks for explaining why Flash solves nothing.
Why anyone not drinking the iKoolaid would actually want MPEG-LA with their major douchebag behavior to win over Flash...
How would that work, again, given that Flash includes H.264?
And please don't claim the H.264 paywall is a "standard"...
No, but HTML5 is.
benefits Apple and MSFT while screwing Linux?
Yes, Flash does. Their Linux player has always sucked, even more than their Mac player, which has always sucked. It's one of a very small number of pieces of proprietary software which are essentially required -- software patents aside, I can build a fully-functional HTML5 player with H.264 support using entirely free software, and I can even avoid the legal minefield by simply avoiding countries where software patents are respected.
I honestly can't see why you're wanting to trade an open, transparent standard which you may have to pay for (but probably not -- every major OS either bundles the codecs or offers them for an under-$100 fee), for a closed, proprietary standard you also may have to pay for.
the only thing I've seen from the big box manufacturers is...what...no taste.
If that's really what matters to you, I suppose Apple has the best, from a certain point of view -- though PCs do come in a lot more variety.
Besides, comparable systems from outside Apple are not all that much cheaper.
The first thing every Mac power user will tell you about buying a Mac is, "Don't get your RAM from Apple."
So no, I don't buy that, especially when you don't necessarily need a comparable system. As a trivial example, where's Apple's competitor to the mainstream PC? They have all sorts of odd compromises -- Mac Mini, iMac, etc -- but when you get right down to it, the closest thing to an actual desktop computer in terms of form factor, upgradability, and expandability is a Mac Pro. And while you can spec a Mac Pro that's only slightly more expensive than a comparable PC, you can also build a PC that's almost as fast and half the price.
Also, I've been on Macs since they came out.
That would suggest you haven't seriously looked at the alternatives. I had dismissed the Mac out of hand as a platform until I used one for about a year, mostly because I'd bought a Powerbook to run Linux on, but Linux wouldn't work and OS X ended up being not that bad. I also used Windows XP for about a year (after Vista and before 7), and found that while I have a list of annoyances even longer than the Mac, it's not as bad as I remembered from 98 or even 2K. While I'd never be happy with it, I could get used to it, and it handled keyboard navigation much better than the Mac.
Now, as you said, you're locked in, so this might be more difficult for you, but I don't think you can pretend it's either a particularly frugal decision or a particularly well-informed one.
I find out I spend at average 2 hours a week doing maintanance stuff and being prevented from work by various windows activilties.
What makes you think Windows is the only alternative?
That is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Microsoft was so adamant for us to look at when talking about LInux as alternative. So I took a hint and looked at it and switched to Mac the next day. (Away from both Windows and Linux)
You don't mention why you switched away from Linux. Did you actually believe Microsoft's TCO numbers?
From the "support" I've gotten from Apple, I can say with confidence that it wouldn't be missed.
No, what I'd be afraid of is Apple deliberately breaking it with the next update. Yes, Steve Jobs hates DRM... except on software.
Well, if you are willing to shell out 100$ for the developer license you *can* develop whatever you want
I very much doubt the license allows that.
and you can even install it on 100 iPhones.
Wow! 100 of them! </sarcasm>
You can even distribute the source code.
Nope. The license most explicitly forbids that. As I understand it, the only way you can distribute the app at all is either personally and directly to those 100 phones, or via the App Store.
I could be entirely wrong on that -- it's possible that this only applies to binaries -- but even among open source programs, being available only in source form is a significant annoyance, and I'm fairly sure even that is forbidden.
Yes, I Google'd it, couldn't find an answer in 5 minutes, so I'm giving up for now. You made the claim first that you can distribute the source, so maybe the burden is on you?
Unfortunately, any attempt to do so renders you a "militant atheist", even if you're neither.
The declaration of independence includes prayers to Christ.
Oh? Care to quote something specific?
That is what "divine providence" refers to,
Nope, that's Deism. It's not an atheist document, by any means, but it's far from a Christian document, either.
Also the phrase "endowed by our creator" is a reference to God,
Yep. Still Deist.
the christian one
Nope. You apparently don't know what deism is.
there weren't very many Jews or Muslims
Do you honestly believe those are the only other religions?
The phrase "judge of the world" is a direct reference to Christ since Christ is the only religious figure addressed by that phrase in religious texts.
You might have me there, but it's also quite clearly a phrase which could easily apply to any monotheistic god, or, indeed, a few from polytheistic religions -- Anubis, in particular, is the judge of where you go in the afterlife.
Does this make the US a "christian nation?" Maybe, maybe not.
Definitely not. If it was in the constitution, you'd have a tiny sliver of a case for saying that, but the Declaration is hardly a legal document, nor is it the foundation of our current nation. Or have you forgotten the Articles of Confederation?
it certainly wasn't meant to be a theocracy or an atheist nation.
No, but it was meant to be a secular one.
And when did socialism become a dirty word?
No wait, don't tell me...
This one.
It's about what you do with them.
Yes, I realize the Google page showing you a list of results is secure. However, the instant you actually click on one of those results -- say, Slashdot -- you're probably not on SSL anymore (most of the Internet isn't), and your Referer header will tell anyone listening exactly what search terms you used to get there.
Dude, be a real man and break your own taboos for a change, not that of people thousands of miles away.
I do, frequently. Or rather, those of my society.
Really, try it now and do what many cultures find an entirely natural (and harmless) form of freedom of expression: go for a walk in the street, entirely naked.
Personally? No. We have laws against it, for one. But I don't actually have a problem with that, and I have considerably less of a problem when it's not a public street, but a public website. If someone doesn't want to see me naked, or the Prophet Mohammed, it's a lot easier to avoid a website than a street.
It's roughly akin to the difference between, say, drawing Mohammed with spray paint on someone else's property, and drawing Mohammed on a website which no one is even forcing you to view.
The thing is, pretty much every western culture has taboos that run deep, and if you break them, you should expect a counter reaction.
Indeed, but the only taboo I've seen which actually results in censorship is child pornography, and the rationale there is that anyone who purchases child pornography is supporting people who abuse children. At least, that's the more rational rationale -- it seems to be a kneejerk reaction against "perverts", and I see no reason possession should be a crime.
Think boob-gate, which showed nipples for a few seconds. All the major channels introduced a 5 second delay into their live broadcasts to give the operator a chance to censor out any embarrassing scene.
In other words, they didn't want to broadcast nipples. And this is coming from independent organizations -- there are plenty of alternate sources of nipples, including Naked News if you want a serious program.
Note that, while there was a bit of an overreaction, there also wasn't a single word of legislation introduced, nor a single government action taken.
Or think how your politicians would react to a huge Facebook campaign depicting Jesus as having good sex with his wife
You mean, like this? Or maybe like this?
You still don't get it, do you? That would get a lot of people angry, yes. Worst case, Facebook would self-censor and remove it. But no laws would be passed, no government action would be taken, no websites would be blocked, and no one would die. In fact, I think the above comic shows that pretty much any amount of blasphemy is allowed, so long as you do it on your own website.
Of course, the other point you're missing is that the vast majority of Americans would shrug at even this -- sure, it would offend them, but it wouldn't drive them into a mindless rage. They'd just close that page and never come back.
The Islamic world has many taboos as well, one of them is to not depict Mohammed, because his teachings were to not idolize.
Which makes this all the more hilarious. None of these actual drawings were likely to be something anyone would idolize. While I agree with what this guy is doing, he's idolizing that name (in calligraphy) a hell of a lot more than anyone's idolizing the pedobear-in-a-turban illustration. And to be fair, there was clear idolatry, to the point of turning Mohammed into a god, without the need for any drawings whatsoever.
Arguably, from a purely scientific point of view taboos are both silly and are harmful, because they inhibit rational discussion.
I'm glad you agree.
Ignore
Unless I'm missing something, this is only for the search itself. As soon as you actually click on of those results, you're at the mercy of whatever server you're connecting to -- and probably no longer encrypted.
PHP has its problems, but it is simple, forgiving, and widespread.
Well, I guess one out of three...
PHP is simple as a language -- too simple to be useful -- but that simplicity is utterly destroyed by the absurdity of the standard libraries. And you have to go pretty far before you get "forgiving", at least as far as SQL injections go.
You can do anything in any language, but PHP sucks for anything but web development, and is far from the best language for that.
You started out with a blatant assumption: That no one on Slashdot understands how offensive it is. That alone renders it difficult to take merely as an "explanation", certainly when you're deliberately slanting it:
You're looking at this from the point of "those Muslims are trying to tell us what we can say".
That is objectively what is happening.
If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective...
Providing an emotional context for it doesn't really change what is happening, especially when that analogy (or whatever you want to call it) is inaccurate. Since it doesn't really change much, why would you assume that we don't understand what we're doing? I'm sure some don't. I'm also sure many of us know exactly what it feels like, because that's exactly what it felt like when the South Park episode was censored, and then pulled -- and probably not as bad, even, as how Matt Stone and Trey Parker felt when they received a personal death threat.
And notice something else: 18 replies. No death threats, let alone real violence. Just some replies. This is the system working.
And that's going to have significant drawbacks. In particular, you're either going to give up plain HTTP access, or it's going to be absurdly slow, or you're going to have a buffer the size of the entire filesystem.
Really? Or is it because someone's already written the 'copy' utility for you?
I can't speak for DOS (or NT, which is what you're probably talking about), but I know that on Unix, there's (unfortunately) no "copy" system call. The 'cp' utility is thus fairly complex -- it has to copy the file, and its permissions, and anything else relevant, all by itself. The code for this is almost certainly much more complex than the sample code given.
But hey, if you want to work at a higher level, go for it! I'm sure someone has already written a library that hides all that complexity from you.
I saw it just now, and it starts on its own after awhile.
What I don't get is how they're doing it. I can't find an audio tag on that page, or any indication of Flash or any other plugin.