you're asserting something to be true which is far from universally accepted. folks speaking British English treat collective entities as collections of individual elements, and therefore plural. this mode of speaking is more consistent. take, for example, the hypothetical example (spoken from the point of view of a FooCo representative): American: FooCo is going to enter market blah. We think we can make money there. British: FooCo are going to enter market blah. We think we can make money there. note that the American English version changes tense half way through, which marks a significant inconsistency. the British version has inconsistencies as well, but it's more consistent than the American version.
perhaps it's a good time to note that there are more British English speakers in the world than American English (thanks mostly to India and China). also, psychologically, i prefer the focus on the entity being a collection of individuals rather than a single entity.
So stealing for individuals is wrong, but stealing from a big, bad company is okay? This is a great example of moral relativism.
no, it's not. what you've just described has nothing to do with moral relativism. moral relativism is the belief that what is "good" for me is not necessarily the same as what is "good" for you. as long as i believe that it's okay for either of us to steal from big companies and it's not okay for either of us to steal from individuals, there is no moral relativism here. moral relativism is a statement on actors, not the things upon which they act.
what this is an example of is Kant's Categorical Imperative, or a certain portion thereof. this idea is, among other things, a rejection of the idea that whatever produces the greatest happiness is the moral action - an idea still popular today. Kant's idea asserts that, in essence, there are "rules", and there are no exceptions to these rules.
the primary problem with Kant's idea here (or at least with how it's most commonly understood today) is that it seems to discard the importance - or even significance - of circumstances. Kant says it is wrong for someone to steal a loaf of bread to feed her starving family from a baker who won't notice the loss because if everyone stole the world would be chaos; he makes no accommodation for the idea that it's okay for everyone to steal when in those circumstances. moral relativism, by contrast, would simply say it's okay for her to steal as long as she believes it to be. neither (inherently) cares whether the baker is an individual or a multinational corporation.
Look at cell phones and regular land-line phones... That's where it's heading.
and this is a bad thing how? this isn't just an issue of you being too young (as a sibling suggested), but being totally ignorant (in the literal sense). long distance rates have come down noticeably in the past two to three years, and continue to do so (on average). international rates have gone through the floor in the same time period. included minutes (of any variety) continue to trend upwards per dollar/euro/whatever, and more features tend to get bundled. if everything follows a cost pattern similar to what phone service has done, either over the past ten/twenty or the past two/three years, i'd be pretty excited (except, of course, my pay, which i want to remain as high as possible!).
the issue is that this isn't likely to happen. domain registrars have a totally different business structure, cost structure, and price point to hit. it's not really a useful comparison at all.
this is just false. not to mention kinda mean, and very unhelpful.
okay, there's lots of kids for whom it's true, but there's way more for whom it's not. there's an awful lot of kids in american schools who are actually interested in learning. science isn't the "thing" for all of them, but for many it is. i've worked with high school kids from various schools and backgrounds, and this holds (to varying degrees) across all of them. and the idea that all bright kids - or, more importantly, all kids interested in actually learning - are going to be anti-social nerds getting beat up in the back of the room is somewhere between stereotypically inaccurate and grossly outdated, likely based in personal historical issues.
to the poster: i don't really know what specifically to suggest you try, but please ignore the parent here. give your stuff a shot; you're likely to be pleasantly surprised by the response you get.
The "plastic surgery" generation is nothing more than human nature with better tools for the job.
no way. first of all, there's a significant difference between accessorizing and body modification. the permanence is significant, but the external/internal boundary is the most important difference.
also, what are the end results of plastic surgery? they are not, on the whole, people going out on a limb to try something different and demonstrate how much of an individual they are (there are exceptions, but they are statistically very rare). people get done up to look like other people - or worse, like pictures in magazines and on telly. our ideas of beauty and appropriate body image are manipulated by corporate-media-dominated culture to make sure nobody ever feels "good enough" (or at least that's the goal). this is different than at any point in history.
less important objections: the hill/valley split is centuries older than you said, and still goes on; i think you mean signify, not signalize; you're mixing examples from unrelated areas of human psychology with different implications.
sort of. there are important differences between the US and China, for sure. with the exception of recent (post-9/11) abominations, the process of imprisoning people in the states is much more transparent and the involved parties have much greater accountability. we seem to be past the stage of our history where we slaughter our native population, by several decades maybe. the fact that we still have a death penalty is, by broader western or industrialized standards, appalling, but at least the same accountability exists there as for imprisonment, unlike China.
but it is flatly not true that the US isn't killing large numbers of "anyone else's" citizens: numberssayotherwise.
the charitable answer: war is bad, and should only be used in times of real crisis when no other options exist. china isn't currently killing large numbers of its (or anyone else's) citizens (only small numbers, and imprisoning large numbers).
the realistic answer: money. china is a huge market that US business interests want to be able to sell into. even if cost of living, many goods, and average wage are all one tenth of the west, there's still one out of every five people on the planet there. that's a lot of buying power.
also, seriously, i'm not aware of any reason to call China's government unstable; can you provide one? certainly war doesn't serve to make governments more stable.
mind you, i'd love to see some non-military action taken against China. the fact that the US continually grants them Most Favored Nation status is appalling. were i in charge of the world, i'd move the UN's China seat back to where it was in 1970. but (thankfully for the world) i'm not in charge.
the summary is interesting: why isn't it "asserting Taiwan's independence"? i have no interest in supporting either PRoChina's stance or actions here, but it's worth noting that the government in Taiwan does not "recognize" taiwan as independent. the fact that most of the people there, as well as most Chinese (of any variation) living elsewhere, do is another mater entirely.
a few years back, a coworker of mine, doing a database project containing short and long form country names, called the Taiwanese consulate (?) in the US to find the country names. it took several tries, and the answers were neither consistent with themselves nor with the published standards. after he published the DB on the internal network, using the values the consulate had provided, he and his manager received many angry phone calls from both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists, separatist, and unificationists. in the end, he did what i think was the only sensible thing (in his position): punt to the standards.
i appreciate the sentiment (and am more interested in replies than mods, anyway - i've got plenty of karma), but it looks like my faith in people's ability to be engaged readers was misplaced: at current, my post is 100% troll.
and now i can combine it with being sufficiently off-topic! rock on!;-)
(see the wink? i have an emoticon there! that means it's a joke!)
i really hope it's apparent to all readers that my post was intended to be humorous. i mean, come on! but then, this is the internet: it's not a joke unless it has a sideways wink or smile at the end.
this new iPod variant will fail miserably, mark my words. just like the lack of wireless and ogg support destroyed the original iPod's chances of success, and the lack of an FM tuner and getting the price point all wrong prevented Apple from selling more than a handful of the iPod minis, this one will never be more than a bragging point for the apple hard-core. when will Apple learn? everyone on slashdot knows how to build a killer iPod... killer...
I don't see the point of being able to boot into a random chip because you also have to emulate the entire computer, not just the cpu.
your observation is true, and i agree with your conclusion that being able to boot into a given chip arch wouldn't be particularly useful. the endpoint the parent suggested - being able to run multiple ones at once - would be quite useful, however. think about current emulation programs like bochs or Darwine: their biggest performance issues are in translating the instructions. it would be a huge win to them if they could farm off that to actual hardware.
while programming in a multithreaded/multiprocessor environment takes a bit more thought than programming otherwise, it's not nearly as hard as it used to be - or rather, it needn't be so. many modern languages (like my favorite, Limbo) can give you multithreading support (with or without multiprocessors) effectively for free. as long as that goes with light-weight threads (like Inferno and Plan 9 give, or with the stupid "special light-weight process" junk present in many unixes), you've got most of the battle won (there's still some design questions to answer, but all your crap work goes away). even the older languages have a plethora of thread models that work (some better than others), at least enough to make it so that you don't have to think about threading more than the problem you're actually trying to solve. in these languages it's certainly not "free", but it makes the cost/benefit tradeoff much more reasonable than it used to be.
IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention.
you need a better IM client. iChat has no pop-ups or other advertising, is fairly unobtrusive, can be easily told not to notify you of pretty much anything (or chatter on endlessly, as you like), has reasonable defaults, and does A/V very well. i'm quite pleased with it, and i tend strongly towards minimalist interfaces.
you're right about the "wealth" of IM protocols. it's a pain right now. for myself, i found that ~90% of the people i wanted to talk to use AIM, so i just picked that one. no need to use them all just because they're out there. it will improve over time.
there are also various tools available for sorting and searching IM logs, for example. it's younger technology, but is maturing rapidly.
During our chat, Law revealed that he used to be an avid comics collector - which is a surprise, given that Law is good-looking, slim and has a girlfriend.
unfortunately, unlike journaling, case-sensitivity can't be turned on for an existing file system. you have to make the choice when you format the disk. it's one of the options in Disk Utility when you format a disk.
what you said was commonly held to be true, say, 25 years ago. more recently, however, the realization that there is no semantic or syntactic reason that "he" can be inclusive and "she" cannot has changed that. please remember that languages (except dead ones) are evolving things. this deficiency in our language, in fact, is a product of that evolution: we once had gender-neutral second-person-singular pronouns in english, but they fell out of use. "she" was a (comparatively) late addition to the language.
looking at linguistic history, the fact that "he" got the widespread use as a gender-neutral pronoun and "she" didn't reflects the fact that "scholarly" control of the english language was firmly in the hands of men: if nothing else, they ran the universities and printing presses.
various people aware of this problem use a range of tactics for addressing it. there's a few small movements to, effectively, make up words for the missing gender-neutral pronouns. this tends to sound "silly", at least for the first hundred years or so. the most common approach is to use "they", "their", &c, but this actually introduces a grammar conflict, and most scholarly and "benchmark" (folks like the NY Times) sources object to this solution. using "he" and "she" interchangeably for this purpose is sub-optimal, but has the benefit of being an easier "sell" (as evidenced by its presence in mainstream "benchmark" sources), not arbitrarily/artificially introducing new words, and not altering the syntactic value of any existing words.
also, your comparison to languages without gender-neutral nouns or pronouns is not useful. their evolution and history are very different from that of english. in such languages, the lack of gender-neutral nouns makes the lack of gender-neutral pronouns kinda moot.
where to start? as a lifelong progressive Christian who's registered as independent and voted for Kerry in the last election, i'm telling you first hand that there's plenty of counter-examples to your profoundly ignorant idea of Christians. people like those involved with the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, or Appalachia Service Project, or Habitat for Humanity - all of which are service organizations, founded by Christians who understood their religion to be one of service to others, and who serve without regard to, among other things, religious belief in those they're serving.
you say "they" an awful lot when referring to a group that doesn't even agree on a common creed (Apostle's? Nicean? which version? none?). and in ways which are pretty verifiably false, even using well-known public figures rather than (the very numerous) individuals like myself. you do, for example, realize that John Kerry is a professing Christian, right? yet he's no slave to Christian doctrine (to the point where various church's won't let him take communion (which, theologically, is despicable, IMHO)).
i'm pretty sick of preachers who equate atheist (or liberal) with immoral, too. so when i hear such preachers, i stop going to that church, and find a sane preacher. the fact that one guy says stupid things doesn't, in any rational sense, invalidate the teachings of a group that he - along with billions of others - happens to be a member of. when i hear a black guy saying all white people are evil racists who'd gladly lynch blacks if they thought they could get away with it, i stop listening to that guy; i make no assumption that he speaks for all black people. how are you supposed to react to GHW Bush saying idiotic, arrogant things? how 'bout by getting annoyed with him, rather than some group he happens to be part of? he's also an American - does that make all Americans right-wing conservative whacos? of course not. GHW Bush does not speak for all Christians - nor, to the best of my knowledge, even any substantial subset (unlike, say, the Pope, who arguably speaks for a substantial subset on certain issues).
i've never "persecuted" an atheist in my life, nor held any prejudice against them. more to the point, in my time involved in youth ministry, i've actively attacked such prejudice when i've found it (in addition to prejudice against other religions). the majority of Christians i know, and certainly the overwhelming majority that i associate regularly with, harbor no hatred towards those who believe differently.
you have some strange idea of "complacency", too. do you think the suicide bombers are polling their congregations, making sure everyone's okay with their actions? that if only someone objected, they'd sit back down or turn themselves in? or that the psychos who kill abortion doctors care that their church session (or whatever the appropriate body for their denomination is) thinks that's immoral? that's just stupid, and demonstrates a total lack of any sort of understanding of human psychology.
you have some sort of axe to grind with Christianity, and/or religion in general. that's fine, i'm not here to play shrink to you or say you shouldn't have "issues". i'm just pointing out that your post represents at least the same level of bigotry you're accusing Christians of, that you're failing to apply any reasonable amount of discernment, and that the standard that you're holding religious people to is not one you'd measure up to yourself.
The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.
this really made me laugh. now, don't get me wrong, i think what they've done is neat and all, but this statement is still laughable. what else have you used? i think Plan 9 and Inferno have no equal in this realm. as noted elsewhere, you can't 'cat ftp://what/ever/' or the like; in Plan 9/Inferno, that works fine... along with putting tar files in/n/tar and doing 'cat/n/tar/some/file', or/net/tcp/3/data, or/n/remoteserver/dev/eia0... oh, and how 'bout mounting/n/remoteserver/dev/eia0 onto/dev/eia0, so anything that wants to get at a serial port now goes to the remote serial port? and this is all in the kernel level, so cat gets it.
oh, and "network transparency" has other possible meanings, as well. i've done the above over ethernet (of various vintages), IR, raw serial interface, pipes... and various combinations.
note that nothing here was intended at bashing the KDE stuff, just refuting your superlative.
in my job, we have the same sorts of constraints both from customers (telecommunications companies from small to really, really big) and governments where our customers operate (mostly because we move money around on their behalf). we have to use a certain level of data encryption; we have to keep records for a certain period of time; there's certain services we can't offer customers in certain countries. but all these mandates or restrictions are of the form "you must do X" or "you must not do Y". nobody ever says how. they tell us we must use 256-bit encryption, but they don't care whether we're using Cisco gateway-to-gateway or software VPN tunnels. we need to provide reports in a given format, but they don't care if we use MS Office, OpenOffice, or whatever to generate them. with the obvious exception of providing a customer with software that they need to be able to run, i've never seen (or heard a first hand account of) a customer restriction that mandated what operating system you could use. it would just be ridiculous.
although given the amount of spam and virus mail i've gotten from customers, i'd sometimes like to make some demands on what software they use...
just because someone's come up with a (theoretical) way to send video around does not make it a television network. how 'bout just calling it a video network? or (if they somehow manage to make it streaming, which most P2P things (like bittorrent) are not, streaming video? let's get imaginative here. they didn't call "television" "picture radio".
Slashdot Mirror
you're asserting something to be true which is far from universally accepted. folks speaking British English treat collective entities as collections of individual elements, and therefore plural. this mode of speaking is more consistent. take, for example, the hypothetical example (spoken from the point of view of a FooCo representative):
American:
FooCo is going to enter market blah. We think we can make money there.
British:
FooCo are going to enter market blah. We think we can make money there.
note that the American English version changes tense half way through, which marks a significant inconsistency. the British version has inconsistencies as well, but it's more consistent than the American version.
perhaps it's a good time to note that there are more British English speakers in the world than American English (thanks mostly to India and China). also, psychologically, i prefer the focus on the entity being a collection of individuals rather than a single entity.
what this is an example of is Kant's Categorical Imperative, or a certain portion thereof. this idea is, among other things, a rejection of the idea that whatever produces the greatest happiness is the moral action - an idea still popular today. Kant's idea asserts that, in essence, there are "rules", and there are no exceptions to these rules.
the primary problem with Kant's idea here (or at least with how it's most commonly understood today) is that it seems to discard the importance - or even significance - of circumstances. Kant says it is wrong for someone to steal a loaf of bread to feed her starving family from a baker who won't notice the loss because if everyone stole the world would be chaos; he makes no accommodation for the idea that it's okay for everyone to steal when in those circumstances. moral relativism, by contrast, would simply say it's okay for her to steal as long as she believes it to be. neither (inherently) cares whether the baker is an individual or a multinational corporation.
the issue is that this isn't likely to happen. domain registrars have a totally different business structure, cost structure, and price point to hit. it's not really a useful comparison at all.
this is just false. not to mention kinda mean, and very unhelpful.
okay, there's lots of kids for whom it's true, but there's way more for whom it's not. there's an awful lot of kids in american schools who are actually interested in learning. science isn't the "thing" for all of them, but for many it is. i've worked with high school kids from various schools and backgrounds, and this holds (to varying degrees) across all of them. and the idea that all bright kids - or, more importantly, all kids interested in actually learning - are going to be anti-social nerds getting beat up in the back of the room is somewhere between stereotypically inaccurate and grossly outdated, likely based in personal historical issues.
to the poster: i don't really know what specifically to suggest you try, but please ignore the parent here. give your stuff a shot; you're likely to be pleasantly surprised by the response you get.
also, what are the end results of plastic surgery? they are not, on the whole, people going out on a limb to try something different and demonstrate how much of an individual they are (there are exceptions, but they are statistically very rare). people get done up to look like other people - or worse, like pictures in magazines and on telly. our ideas of beauty and appropriate body image are manipulated by corporate-media-dominated culture to make sure nobody ever feels "good enough" (or at least that's the goal). this is different than at any point in history.
less important objections: the hill/valley split is centuries older than you said, and still goes on; i think you mean signify, not signalize; you're mixing examples from unrelated areas of human psychology with different implications.
sort of. there are important differences between the US and China, for sure. with the exception of recent (post-9/11) abominations, the process of imprisoning people in the states is much more transparent and the involved parties have much greater accountability. we seem to be past the stage of our history where we slaughter our native population, by several decades maybe. the fact that we still have a death penalty is, by broader western or industrialized standards, appalling, but at least the same accountability exists there as for imprisonment, unlike China.
but it is flatly not true that the US isn't killing large numbers of "anyone else's" citizens: numbers say otherwise.
the charitable answer: war is bad, and should only be used in times of real crisis when no other options exist. china isn't currently killing large numbers of its (or anyone else's) citizens (only small numbers, and imprisoning large numbers).
the realistic answer: money. china is a huge market that US business interests want to be able to sell into. even if cost of living, many goods, and average wage are all one tenth of the west, there's still one out of every five people on the planet there. that's a lot of buying power.
also, seriously, i'm not aware of any reason to call China's government unstable; can you provide one? certainly war doesn't serve to make governments more stable.
mind you, i'd love to see some non-military action taken against China. the fact that the US continually grants them Most Favored Nation status is appalling. were i in charge of the world, i'd move the UN's China seat back to where it was in 1970. but (thankfully for the world) i'm not in charge.
the summary is interesting: why isn't it "asserting Taiwan's independence"? i have no interest in supporting either PRoChina's stance or actions here, but it's worth noting that the government in Taiwan does not "recognize" taiwan as independent. the fact that most of the people there, as well as most Chinese (of any variation) living elsewhere, do is another mater entirely.
a few years back, a coworker of mine, doing a database project containing short and long form country names, called the Taiwanese consulate (?) in the US to find the country names. it took several tries, and the answers were neither consistent with themselves nor with the published standards. after he published the DB on the internal network, using the values the consulate had provided, he and his manager received many angry phone calls from both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists, separatist, and unificationists. in the end, he did what i think was the only sensible thing (in his position): punt to the standards.
i appreciate the sentiment (and am more interested in replies than mods, anyway - i've got plenty of karma), but it looks like my faith in people's ability to be engaged readers was misplaced: at current, my post is 100% troll.
;-)
and now i can combine it with being sufficiently off-topic! rock on!
(see the wink? i have an emoticon there! that means it's a joke!)
i really hope it's apparent to all readers that my post was intended to be humorous. i mean, come on! but then, this is the internet: it's not a joke unless it has a sideways wink or smile at the end.
this new iPod variant will fail miserably, mark my words. just like the lack of wireless and ogg support destroyed the original iPod's chances of success, and the lack of an FM tuner and getting the price point all wrong prevented Apple from selling more than a handful of the iPod minis, this one will never be more than a bragging point for the apple hard-core. when will Apple learn? everyone on slashdot knows how to build a killer iPod... killer...
while programming in a multithreaded/multiprocessor environment takes a bit more thought than programming otherwise, it's not nearly as hard as it used to be - or rather, it needn't be so. many modern languages (like my favorite, Limbo) can give you multithreading support (with or without multiprocessors) effectively for free. as long as that goes with light-weight threads (like Inferno and Plan 9 give, or with the stupid "special light-weight process" junk present in many unixes), you've got most of the battle won (there's still some design questions to answer, but all your crap work goes away). even the older languages have a plethora of thread models that work (some better than others), at least enough to make it so that you don't have to think about threading more than the problem you're actually trying to solve. in these languages it's certainly not "free", but it makes the cost/benefit tradeoff much more reasonable than it used to be.
you're right about the "wealth" of IM protocols. it's a pain right now. for myself, i found that ~90% of the people i wanted to talk to use AIM, so i just picked that one. no need to use them all just because they're out there. it will improve over time.
there are also various tools available for sorting and searching IM logs, for example. it's younger technology, but is maturing rapidly.
unfortunately, unlike journaling, case-sensitivity can't be turned on for an existing file system. you have to make the choice when you format the disk. it's one of the options in Disk Utility when you format a disk.
for what it's worth, OS X now comes with the option to use a case-sensitive HFS+.
what you said was commonly held to be true, say, 25 years ago. more recently, however, the realization that there is no semantic or syntactic reason that "he" can be inclusive and "she" cannot has changed that. please remember that languages (except dead ones) are evolving things. this deficiency in our language, in fact, is a product of that evolution: we once had gender-neutral second-person-singular pronouns in english, but they fell out of use. "she" was a (comparatively) late addition to the language.
looking at linguistic history, the fact that "he" got the widespread use as a gender-neutral pronoun and "she" didn't reflects the fact that "scholarly" control of the english language was firmly in the hands of men: if nothing else, they ran the universities and printing presses.
various people aware of this problem use a range of tactics for addressing it. there's a few small movements to, effectively, make up words for the missing gender-neutral pronouns. this tends to sound "silly", at least for the first hundred years or so. the most common approach is to use "they", "their", &c, but this actually introduces a grammar conflict, and most scholarly and "benchmark" (folks like the NY Times) sources object to this solution. using "he" and "she" interchangeably for this purpose is sub-optimal, but has the benefit of being an easier "sell" (as evidenced by its presence in mainstream "benchmark" sources), not arbitrarily/artificially introducing new words, and not altering the syntactic value of any existing words.
also, your comparison to languages without gender-neutral nouns or pronouns is not useful. their evolution and history are very different from that of english. in such languages, the lack of gender-neutral nouns makes the lack of gender-neutral pronouns kinda moot.
You, sir, are an ass.
where to start? as a lifelong progressive Christian who's registered as independent and voted for Kerry in the last election, i'm telling you first hand that there's plenty of counter-examples to your profoundly ignorant idea of Christians. people like those involved with the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, or Appalachia Service Project, or Habitat for Humanity - all of which are service organizations, founded by Christians who understood their religion to be one of service to others, and who serve without regard to, among other things, religious belief in those they're serving.
you say "they" an awful lot when referring to a group that doesn't even agree on a common creed (Apostle's? Nicean? which version? none?). and in ways which are pretty verifiably false, even using well-known public figures rather than (the very numerous) individuals like myself. you do, for example, realize that John Kerry is a professing Christian, right? yet he's no slave to Christian doctrine (to the point where various church's won't let him take communion (which, theologically, is despicable, IMHO)).
i'm pretty sick of preachers who equate atheist (or liberal) with immoral, too. so when i hear such preachers, i stop going to that church, and find a sane preacher. the fact that one guy says stupid things doesn't, in any rational sense, invalidate the teachings of a group that he - along with billions of others - happens to be a member of. when i hear a black guy saying all white people are evil racists who'd gladly lynch blacks if they thought they could get away with it, i stop listening to that guy; i make no assumption that he speaks for all black people. how are you supposed to react to GHW Bush saying idiotic, arrogant things? how 'bout by getting annoyed with him, rather than some group he happens to be part of? he's also an American - does that make all Americans right-wing conservative whacos? of course not. GHW Bush does not speak for all Christians - nor, to the best of my knowledge, even any substantial subset (unlike, say, the Pope, who arguably speaks for a substantial subset on certain issues).
i've never "persecuted" an atheist in my life, nor held any prejudice against them. more to the point, in my time involved in youth ministry, i've actively attacked such prejudice when i've found it (in addition to prejudice against other religions). the majority of Christians i know, and certainly the overwhelming majority that i associate regularly with, harbor no hatred towards those who believe differently.
you have some strange idea of "complacency", too. do you think the suicide bombers are polling their congregations, making sure everyone's okay with their actions? that if only someone objected, they'd sit back down or turn themselves in? or that the psychos who kill abortion doctors care that their church session (or whatever the appropriate body for their denomination is) thinks that's immoral? that's just stupid, and demonstrates a total lack of any sort of understanding of human psychology.
you have some sort of axe to grind with Christianity, and/or religion in general. that's fine, i'm not here to play shrink to you or say you shouldn't have "issues". i'm just pointing out that your post represents at least the same level of bigotry you're accusing Christians of, that you're failing to apply any reasonable amount of discernment, and that the standard that you're holding religious people to is not one you'd measure up to yourself.
// ...outlaw Pentium 4s outside the U.S....
:-)
see? they're not all bad. that's kinda a public service!
oh, and "network transparency" has other possible meanings, as well. i've done the above over ethernet (of various vintages), IR, raw serial interface, pipes... and various combinations.
note that nothing here was intended at bashing the KDE stuff, just refuting your superlative.
No. My next car will not run Windows.
in my job, we have the same sorts of constraints both from customers (telecommunications companies from small to really, really big) and governments where our customers operate (mostly because we move money around on their behalf). we have to use a certain level of data encryption; we have to keep records for a certain period of time; there's certain services we can't offer customers in certain countries. but all these mandates or restrictions are of the form "you must do X" or "you must not do Y". nobody ever says how. they tell us we must use 256-bit encryption, but they don't care whether we're using Cisco gateway-to-gateway or software VPN tunnels. we need to provide reports in a given format, but they don't care if we use MS Office, OpenOffice, or whatever to generate them. with the obvious exception of providing a customer with software that they need to be able to run, i've never seen (or heard a first hand account of) a customer restriction that mandated what operating system you could use. it would just be ridiculous.
although given the amount of spam and virus mail i've gotten from customers, i'd sometimes like to make some demands on what software they use...
just because someone's come up with a (theoretical) way to send video around does not make it a television network. how 'bout just calling it a video network? or (if they somehow manage to make it streaming, which most P2P things (like bittorrent) are not, streaming video? let's get imaginative here. they didn't call "television" "picture radio".