Stallman is not one of the "visionaries of our age". He is a zealout that will stop at nothing to get his point across. Just look at the fact that he calls linux GNU/linux (and many times has stated he wanted the name changed).
*Sighs*. Why don't you look at the fact that he started the GNU project instead? Important, yes?
Stallman should be happy companies are even bothering to support the free software community at all. If you look at any of the large free software projects (Mysql,apache,php, and open office come to mind), they are backed by large companies.
Yeah, and they are all developed using free software tools. It goes both ways;)
The question of whether Stallman should be "grateful" to these companies is entirely separate from the question of whether he should support software patents. One might be very grateful to IBM but still deny them software patents.
BTW, gcc was the first native C++ compiler, and also the first (only?) Objective C compiler. I'm sure there are hoards of other innovations in it if you care to take a closer look.
Compiling C++ natively and compiling objective C are not "innovations" in any significant sense. Both languages are perfectly ordinary block structured imperative languages. There is nothing innovative about writing a compiler for them.
No, it doesn't have rudimentary support for msn webcams in the latest release. They're waiting on farsight, which looks rather over-engineered and will likely take ages to finish.
You're equivocating on "hospitable". You were using it before in a much more literal, interpersonal sense, not to refer to the living conditions created by the politicial system. So you're now making a different argument, though it still doesn't make much sense.
Not sure what you're getting at in your second sentence. Obviously anywhere would be more prosperous under a better system. Clearly the best way to boost the tourist industry wouldn't be a change in Cuba's economic system, but a lift of the US embargo.
There's not much evidence that switching to US puppet capitalism would make Cuba more prosperous. It has a better standard of living than many US-aligned capitalist countries in the region.
For most of them, the problem isn't poverty; it's an attitude.
If you hate us, if you steal from us, if you make our visits a living horror, we won't come, and then there's no reason for us to share.
If you invite us warmly, and if you treat us well, we will visit your country and get $500 a night hotel suites overlooking the ocean. We will go out on the town and eat in your most expensive restaurants.
Oh you wonderful generous American tourists! God bless you! I think the grandparent was referring to "sharing" on a larger scale, i.e. at the scale of trade agreements and embargos.
I'd say the latter. There are plenty of poor places that are hospitable, and those places are getting richer all the time, and more power to them.
But Cuba is famous for being hospitable. So by your argument it shouldn't be poor. But you've just been saying it's poor. Sort your head out. And I think the idea that the prosperity of a country can be related to its hospitality is ludicrous. How hospitable is China? Is France more hospitable than Cuba?
Personally, I don't believe in life imprisonment. Seems like a total and absolute waste. The pragmatic side of me says that if you've acknowledged that someone has transgressed so badly that they can never rejoin society, then keeping them imprisoned is a waste of effort. Again, putting them to death makes more sense.
I find it amazing that people like you can make pragmatic arguments for killing people, as if murder is justified whenever it's convenient.
Institutions (courts, governments, etc.) do not have automatic authority to flaut the moral principles which apply to individuals. If it's not OK for one person to kill another person, why is it OK for a court to kill a person? A trial, after all, is decided by 12 people. We don't normally accept that a group of 12 people have the right to put another person to death, but somehow the institution of the court is supposed to give the jury licence to do this.
Obviously, it's necessary to give governments, courts, etc. more power than individuals in order for them to function. So we have to allow courts to do some things which it would be immoral for an individual to do (e.g. incarcerate someone for life). But I think these powers should always be granted very cautiously. It is perverse to consider murder the ultimate crime when it is comitted by an individual, but on the other hand to consider it "justice" when it is comitted by certain institutions.
I'm half-wondering what part of a civilized society even allows people like this to continue to consume food and oxygen?
That'll be the civlized part of a civilized society. If we were a little more civilized, we might realize that don't we can't become better people through punishing others.
(That's not to say that we shouldn't punish anyone, just that we shouldn't fetishize the act of punishment as if it somehow improved the character of the punishers).
As far as I am concerned, with 1 of the 3 Italian witnesses being a virulent anti-American/anti-war zealot, and the other 2 having TONS of reasons to cover up their own stupidity and non-performance of their job, I believe the other 10 witnesses.
Erm, and the soldiors don't have ANY reason to cover up the mistakes they made? Both sides have pretty much equal motivation to twist the story in their favor, but you can't see this because of your virulent pro-American bias.
There are no independent witness statements and very little evidence confirming one or the other side's story (the satellite photos, of course, only tell you about average speed). Any rational person would be keeping an open mind at the moment. There's in fact some evidence in favour of thee Italian side, in that the car appears to have been shot from the side/back rather than the front.
Those two properties aren't contradictory, dumbass.
Re:Oh things would have different alright...
on
Practical Common Lisp
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, what's given rise to the sluggish crap is implemeting everything in C. Take Gtk, which would be much faster if it was written in a language which actually supported its object model. As it is, the code's clogged up with kludges to string together some kind of OO support and it's slower than it would be if it had been written in C++.
And, although I don't expect you'll listen, Lisp is an efficient language. It compiles to fast machine code.
I'm talking about ML, Haskell, Ruby. Languages that can do all the useful things Lisp can do
Those are all great languages, but they lack some of Lisp's features (though of course Lisp lacks some of their features too). Macros are the obvious example. Seamless bignum arithmetic is another, in the case of ML and Haskell at least.
Generally it's only fighter jets that actually need their FBW systems in order to by flyable. This is because they're designed to be inherently unstable (i.e. prone to giving positive rather than negative feedback on control inputs) in order to make them more agile. Jet liners, in contrast, don't need to be agile, and so they can be made stable enough for manual control even if they use FBW in normal operation.
Well, strongest navy maybe, but the British army was not the strongest army in the world by any stretch of the imagination. But as a point of fact, the American revolutionaries lost virtually every land battle they fought. The war was essentially won because they didn't give up, and the British figured out that it would cost more to try to keep hold of America than it was worth (note: America not a major economic power at this time).
That's as may be, but French philosophers were still a big influence on the founding fathers. At one point, French was almost made the official language of the Unites States (really -- this is not a joke).
That's called 'the economics of capitalism'. The rest of us aren't obliged to use our tax dollars or government power to preserve your 'freedom' to keep going to that store you love so much.
Yes, but the point of the post you're replying to is that the "economics of capitalism" often lead to a loss of freedom in an important sense (I don't know why you feel the need to put that particular instance of freedom in scare quotes). And why should people "suck it up and deal with it?" Why not change it by, say, boycotting Walmart or opening a new local shop?
There is nothing illusory or second-rate about having the freedom in practice to shop in more than one place. It's a freedom which ought to be preserved, and which people ought to care about. It might not be the kind of freedom that's prized by whatever the-market-will-solve-everything political dogma you subscribe to, but the rest of us don't care.
This is always the way though, with C++. We've been waiting more than two decades for it to become a decent language, and it's still not quite there...
The STL is part of the base C++ language. Read the Standard.
Don't be pedantic. I meant that the basic language, i.e. the basic syntax and semantics of C++ minus any libraries/whatever, is badly designed. The STL is not, but it suffers from the underlying bad design.
Damning with faint praise. Have you ever used the STL for more than a trivial 5,000-line app?
Yes. It's OK but not great. It's much easier to do generic data structures in, say, Haskell. Generics feel tacked on in C++, but in Haskell/ML/etc. they're completely integrated into the language, making it natural to write pretty much every algorithm generically. In C++, you always have to make a tradeoff. Is it worth the pain of using templates just to get a little extra genericity which you might never need?
C++ generics predate Ada95's strong generics mechanism by quite some time. In fact, the inventor of generics--Stepanov--used C++ as his testbed for ideas. C++ generics go back to the early 1980s.
Languages which implement generic types go back to the early to mid 1970s. ML, for example, was developed around 1973, and its type inference mechanism is far in advance of anything C++ has.
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Stallman is not one of the "visionaries of our age". He is a zealout that will stop at nothing to get his point across. Just look at the fact that he calls linux GNU/linux (and many times has stated he wanted the name changed).
*Sighs*. Why don't you look at the fact that he started the GNU project instead? Important, yes?
Stallman should be happy companies are even bothering to support the free software community at all. If you look at any of the large free software projects (Mysql,apache,php, and open office come to mind), they are backed by large companies.
Yeah, and they are all developed using free software tools. It goes both ways ;)
The question of whether Stallman should be "grateful" to these companies is entirely separate from the question of whether he should support software patents. One might be very grateful to IBM but still deny them software patents.
Well, maybe it will work better for that purpose than colonialism.
BTW, gcc was the first native C++ compiler, and also the first (only?) Objective C compiler. I'm sure there are hoards of other innovations in it if you care to take a closer look.
Compiling C++ natively and compiling objective C are not "innovations" in any significant sense. Both languages are perfectly ordinary block structured imperative languages. There is nothing innovative about writing a compiler for them.
No, it doesn't have rudimentary support for msn webcams in the latest release. They're waiting on farsight, which looks rather over-engineered and will likely take ages to finish.
You can blame it all on GStreamer.
Not on msn in the latest version.
You're equivocating on "hospitable". You were using it before in a much more literal, interpersonal sense, not to refer to the living conditions created by the politicial system. So you're now making a different argument, though it still doesn't make much sense. Not sure what you're getting at in your second sentence. Obviously anywhere would be more prosperous under a better system. Clearly the best way to boost the tourist industry wouldn't be a change in Cuba's economic system, but a lift of the US embargo. There's not much evidence that switching to US puppet capitalism would make Cuba more prosperous. It has a better standard of living than many US-aligned capitalist countries in the region.
For most of them, the problem isn't poverty; it's an attitude. If you hate us, if you steal from us, if you make our visits a living horror, we won't come, and then there's no reason for us to share. If you invite us warmly, and if you treat us well, we will visit your country and get $500 a night hotel suites overlooking the ocean. We will go out on the town and eat in your most expensive restaurants.
Oh you wonderful generous American tourists! God bless you! I think the grandparent was referring to "sharing" on a larger scale, i.e. at the scale of trade agreements and embargos.
I'd say the latter. There are plenty of poor places that are hospitable, and those places are getting richer all the time, and more power to them.
But Cuba is famous for being hospitable. So by your argument it shouldn't be poor. But you've just been saying it's poor. Sort your head out. And I think the idea that the prosperity of a country can be related to its hospitality is ludicrous. How hospitable is China? Is France more hospitable than Cuba?
Except he didn't say that, troll.
Yes but your point misses the point -- we don't have to prove who we are in the first place.
Yes, but you don't have to show any ID at all in order to vote (you don't even need the polling card).
He was talking about slavery across the world, you silly parochial American.
Personally, I don't believe in life imprisonment. Seems like a total and absolute waste. The pragmatic side of me says that if you've acknowledged that someone has transgressed so badly that they can never rejoin society, then keeping them imprisoned is a waste of effort. Again, putting them to death makes more sense.
I find it amazing that people like you can make pragmatic arguments for killing people, as if murder is justified whenever it's convenient.
Institutions (courts, governments, etc.) do not have automatic authority to flaut the moral principles which apply to individuals. If it's not OK for one person to kill another person, why is it OK for a court to kill a person? A trial, after all, is decided by 12 people. We don't normally accept that a group of 12 people have the right to put another person to death, but somehow the institution of the court is supposed to give the jury licence to do this.
Obviously, it's necessary to give governments, courts, etc. more power than individuals in order for them to function. So we have to allow courts to do some things which it would be immoral for an individual to do (e.g. incarcerate someone for life). But I think these powers should always be granted very cautiously. It is perverse to consider murder the ultimate crime when it is comitted by an individual, but on the other hand to consider it "justice" when it is comitted by certain institutions.
I'm half-wondering what part of a civilized society even allows people like this to continue to consume food and oxygen?
That'll be the civlized part of a civilized society. If we were a little more civilized, we might realize that don't we can't become better people through punishing others.
(That's not to say that we shouldn't punish anyone, just that we shouldn't fetishize the act of punishment as if it somehow improved the character of the punishers).
Again, the satelite photos only show average speed.
As far as I am concerned, with 1 of the 3 Italian witnesses being a virulent anti-American/anti-war zealot, and the other 2 having TONS of reasons to cover up their own stupidity and non-performance of their job, I believe the other 10 witnesses.
Erm, and the soldiors don't have ANY reason to cover up the mistakes they made? Both sides have pretty much equal motivation to twist the story in their favor, but you can't see this because of your virulent pro-American bias.
There are no independent witness statements and very little evidence confirming one or the other side's story (the satellite photos, of course, only tell you about average speed). Any rational person would be keeping an open mind at the moment. There's in fact some evidence in favour of thee Italian side, in that the car appears to have been shot from the side/back rather than the front.
Those two properties aren't contradictory, dumbass.
No, what's given rise to the sluggish crap is implemeting everything in C. Take Gtk, which would be much faster if it was written in a language which actually supported its object model. As it is, the code's clogged up with kludges to string together some kind of OO support and it's slower than it would be if it had been written in C++.
And, although I don't expect you'll listen, Lisp is an efficient language. It compiles to fast machine code.
I'm talking about ML, Haskell, Ruby. Languages that can do all the useful things Lisp can do
Those are all great languages, but they lack some of Lisp's features (though of course Lisp lacks some of their features too). Macros are the obvious example. Seamless bignum arithmetic is another, in the case of ML and Haskell at least.
Generally it's only fighter jets that actually need their FBW systems in order to by flyable. This is because they're designed to be inherently unstable (i.e. prone to giving positive rather than negative feedback on control inputs) in order to make them more agile. Jet liners, in contrast, don't need to be agile, and so they can be made stable enough for manual control even if they use FBW in normal operation.
Well, strongest navy maybe, but the British army was not the strongest army in the world by any stretch of the imagination. But as a point of fact, the American revolutionaries lost virtually every land battle they fought. The war was essentially won because they didn't give up, and the British figured out that it would cost more to try to keep hold of America than it was worth (note: America not a major economic power at this time).
That's as may be, but French philosophers were still a big influence on the founding fathers. At one point, French was almost made the official language of the Unites States (really -- this is not a joke).
There won't be a fork. No-one is using BK in kernel development any more. Really, get a clue.
That's called 'the economics of capitalism'. The rest of us aren't obliged to use our tax dollars or government power to preserve your 'freedom' to keep going to that store you love so much.
Yes, but the point of the post you're replying to is that the "economics of capitalism" often lead to a loss of freedom in an important sense (I don't know why you feel the need to put that particular instance of freedom in scare quotes). And why should people "suck it up and deal with it?" Why not change it by, say, boycotting Walmart or opening a new local shop?
There is nothing illusory or second-rate about having the freedom in practice to shop in more than one place. It's a freedom which ought to be preserved, and which people ought to care about. It might not be the kind of freedom that's prized by whatever the-market-will-solve-everything political dogma you subscribe to, but the rest of us don't care.
This is always the way though, with C++. We've been waiting more than two decades for it to become a decent language, and it's still not quite there...
The STL is part of the base C++ language. Read the Standard.
Don't be pedantic. I meant that the basic language, i.e. the basic syntax and semantics of C++ minus any libraries/whatever, is badly designed. The STL is not, but it suffers from the underlying bad design.
Damning with faint praise. Have you ever used the STL for more than a trivial 5,000-line app?
Yes. It's OK but not great. It's much easier to do generic data structures in, say, Haskell. Generics feel tacked on in C++, but in Haskell/ML/etc. they're completely integrated into the language, making it natural to write pretty much every algorithm generically. In C++, you always have to make a tradeoff. Is it worth the pain of using templates just to get a little extra genericity which you might never need?
C++ generics predate Ada95's strong generics mechanism by quite some time. In fact, the inventor of generics--Stepanov--used C++ as his testbed for ideas. C++ generics go back to the early 1980s.
Languages which implement generic types go back to the early to mid 1970s. ML, for example, was developed around 1973, and its type inference mechanism is far in advance of anything C++ has.