An extensive vocabulary is useful only insofar as it helps you make your meaning clear or use a pretty turn of phrase. But using uncommon words merely to seem intelligent is pure snobbery, and we instinctively react against snobbery and pretension. In this case, there was really no use for the Latin words instead of the plain and better-understood Saxon ones. E.g.
"They try, but they can't, because they wear shoes precisely designed to prevent any form of rapid ambulation."
->
"They try, but they can't, because they wear shoes precisely designed to prevent them walking quickly."
We could have kept "any form of" but it wasn't needed.
Straw man. The part about teenager being a social construct, like childhood, is spot-on. Childhood was a very different thing before the Victorians, people in ages before that wouldn't recognise our idea of childhood. Similarly, the teenager is a social construct of the last half of this century (though some say it began in the 20s).
'Twas ever thus. In all the history of mankind, most people have never taken the effort to think hard and properly, and their language merely reflected this. There's no difference between the ugly and stilted English of Palin supporters I recently saw on television and the ugly and pretentious English I read when someone links me to an article in the New Yorker. In both cases, the speaker or the writer hasn't anything interesting to say, but must say something, so he lets his mouth or fingers do the talking or writing for him, without having to rely on any thinking at all. But attend a few meetings in a business or listen to a few politicians' speeches, or read some scholarly essays, or pick up a popular novel, or watch some television drama -- from the present or any time in the past -- and you will find the same phenomenon: brilliant people with something to say will find ways to express their meaning in good English (or whatever other language). Ordinary people with nothing to say will cover up the fact with bad English. (Just remember to account for selection bias with past works.) Orwell used to write about this kind of thing, both in 1984 and his polemics and essays like "Politics and the English Language".
I think he's just trying to say there's a difference between free speech for some reason and free speech for speech's sake. Words without meaning are just hot air, and I'm not terribly bothered that Facebook, being a private corporation, decided to enforce one further censorship. After all, they already don't allow things to do with nudity and sex and gore and other random stuff. Many forums filter out words like fuck and shit. I don't agree with these types of rules, I think they're all misguided, and I don't like the forums that do it. But I know some people will always want to run their boards (and what else is facebook than a really big forum/board/BBS) in a way they hope will promote a decent community and reasonable discussion, and though I think the efforts do more harm than good, I don't care. The only thing in this incident which I deplored was Pakistan's blocking of Facebook, because as a government, it ought to be held to a higher standard -- Pakistanis can choose not to use Facebook, but they can't choose not to use their government, and they couldn't choose to use Facebook once their government decided it didn't want them to. But I'm not from Pakistan so all I can do is be disappointment at their backwardness and small-mindedness with respect to things like political freedom and the other rights delineated by documents like the UDHR which they only pay lip-service to. In an ideal world, Facebook wouldn't have backed down, but let's not forget who are the real infringers of freedoms here -- the government of Pakistan.
But books have shown that flipping is much more efficient than scrolling around. I'm sure there will be books of e-paper or oled pages stuck together eventually, and I'll certainly be buying them.
It's kind of what I said, but part of what you said is exactly the kind of propaganda I'm talking about. Kings of England haven't been able to pull that sort of shit since the Magna Carta. Fact is, the people who came here first were the folks who had nothing to lose, the dregs of society. Later, merchants and wealthy investors came, but the beginnings were relentlelssly lower-class. Ditto Australia.
Except for a few happy periods in its history, there has always been something of an anti-intellectual trend in the US. Perhaps it has to do with the people who originally came here and the way the revolution is portrayed in its history books, but there is a great deal of reverse snobbery, and that goes against intellectualism too.
Thanks for the wealth of info. I see I've been wrong about some of my ideas about the two Boer wars. I'm going to order Pakenham's book and read through it, but obviously that will take months, so I'm afraid our debate, which has been interesting and informative for me, is over. Thanks and have fun.
Wish that were true. KDE 3 ran perfectly fine on my macbook pro (last year's model). Then I finally switched to KDE 4 and found the simplest damn apps stuttering and hogging the CPU.
Just to clarify one thing for you: I'm not British (nor a woman). I'm
Hungarian, and the total time I've spent in Britain is roughly a day
between two flights. Nor have I ever learnt history from them through
textbooks or whatever. My country actually has good reason to be angry
at the Allied decision to ignore the southern front during the War,
though I understand Churchill was overruled on that by Roosevelt.
> Is that actually what you believe ? Sheez... the historical records
> are very clear on how wrong you are. You basically got EVERY detail wrong.
I'm afraid it's your details that are wrong, but I can understand they
would be, for nationalistic reasons.
> The first boer war was a small war, but Britain was hardly that unprepared
> -the difference is that our lose-knit tactics WORKED better, we knew the
> country, we knew the teritory and my ancestors were excellent marksman -
> it was a basic survival skill for them. They took down a soldier with
> every single bullet fired - and could take out a squadron before anybody
> even managed to see ONE of them because they were THAT good at camouflage
> (again - a basic survival skill in their culture).
The first Boer war involved a few thousand Boers and about a thousand
British soldiers, who being unprepared (untrained) for the conditions and
terrain with which the Boers were perfectly familiar, was a predictable
and one-sided affair. I think we have no disagreement here.
> In the second war, we repeatedly won almost every battle, in fact in the
> first two years of the war Britain achieved only TWO successes. They
> took Pretoria and they won one battle. So we laid siege to Pretoria,
> and also most of the cities where British folk lived - and kept winning
> every battle. When it got to 10-to-1 numbers by the end of the second
> year - there was no POSSIBILITY anymore of winning a conventional war,
> so we came up with our guerilla warfare, small squads of between three
> and five highly mobile soldiers, working entirely indepently - raiding
> supply chains and taking on (and defeating) much bigger squads by being
> better at fighting in this country. Again - we were winning. Without
> the concentration camps we WOULD have won the war.
The second Boer war was not the same as the first. You fielded tens
of thousands of troops, properly organised and equipped with proper
artillery. When these failed, you turned to guerilla tactics, which the
British countered by locking down supply lines and key infrastructure
points and with a scorched earth policy. Both of you fought with small
mobile units, but that doesn't mean that they were on either side these
undisciplined free-thinking hippies you try to paint them as. I would
say neither of you fought much differently from the other; for instance
you both shot spies out of hand and often with little proof.
> Now... as for the rest. Yes it bloody well WAS a struggle for
> liberation. We were NEVER British immigrants, our ancestry was
> predominantly Flemish, Dutch, French and German - in fact Modern day
> Afrikaans is so close to Flemish that I can chit-chat with Flemish
> people as if we're both speaking to a mothertongue speaker. The two
> boer republics WERE independent republics for nearly 80 years by the
> time of the first boer war - and their independence had previously
> been recognized by Britain in 1853. The desire for our gold and
> diamonds was the major reason why you decided that you now wanted to
> conquer these democratic republics we had built and reinstall over
> us the monarchic rule we had fled from more than a century before,
> the process that culminated in the foundation of these republics.
BS. You were not British immigrants, but immigrants nonetheless. When
Why? What "gets in the way" about being able to have your GUI and CLI, too.
I do understand why certain tasks MIGHT be easier or even possible in CLI-world than in GUI-world (mostly due to the GUI designer making tradeoffs between having a clean, consistent GUI vs. having every single knob and switch exposed). But I simply cannot understand why most, if not all, Linux geeks would be so actively hostile toward an OS (OS X) that, while not completely F/OSS, is at least created by a company that actively participates in the F/OSS community.
Don't get me wrong, I run a GUI -- fluxbox or Gnome depending on whether I'm using a laptop or desktop. I need a GUI as a framework because there's no browser to beat Firefox and because I need calendaring for my job and that means Thunderbird, though I prefer pine. Fluxbox doesn't get in my way and lets me do things easily; Gnome isn't so good at letting me do things easily but still doesn't get in my way. And I'm not anti-Apple, their record of openness on desktops is decent; they're no saints but apart from mobile devices they're not fascists.
What I hate is OS X's interface. I gave it a try for a couple of months. It really gets in my way and takes away a lot of power. Sure it's got some decent ideas but it's fundamentally broken. I want to alt-tab between windows, not apps. Even with third-party apps I never found a way of doing so. Terminal is a piece of crap just like every terminal emulator since xterm and rxvt (yeah, gnome-terminal and konsole, you guys suck too). So I run xterm, but that doesn't play nicely with "Spaces" which is a very brittle implementation of multiple desktops, as you'll know if you've tried alt-tabbing between X and native apps on multiple Spaces. I really couldn't comment on the Finder as I never use graphical file managers, and there's no hiding going on in the shell.
I thought my original post would have made it clear that I don't like to poke around and tinker, but I appreciate that I can configure things as I want to if I need to, after consulting some manual or after some Googling. I found this somewhat true of OS X too; obviously less so than on Linux but it was clear that they made an effort to have a robust Unixlike OS with text config files.
I guess I'm also not your target user. I don't give a fig about Photoshop and I don't even know what the other tools you list are. For the very simple image editing I need to do sometimes, I use the gimp, and sometimes I burn an audio CD or video DVD with k3b or something. I don't collect my own photos and videos, and I think making a 3D model of my house is a waste of time. It sounds like you're rather more into the tech world than I am, because I just don't care about photo/video editing. I manage my information in a simple text file in vim (ca 10k lines) and my data is logically organised in a directory structure. Therefore I don't need apps to manage my data, because I get around in it much more quickly with the generic tools.
Basically to answer the question which you implied but didn't ask, which is what it would take for me to like OS X as much as I like Linux: from a broad philosophical standpoint, if they made the GUI more configurable so I can adapt it to my workflow instead of adapting to it. I mean I had to install a damn third-party app (Insomnia) to prevent sleep on lid close. On the detail side, if X apps were first-class citizens, you could alt-tab between windows, if they made the window manager as powerful as any run-of-the-mill X window manager (seriously Aqua is anaemic), and perhaps documented the system config files so I didn't have to Google to configure anything they forgot to put in the System Preferences tool. I don't mind having to install GNU awk or date from third-party repositories to work around their totally lame awk and other standard tools but if they provided the GNU tools themselves that would be nice too. I'm not from the Windows world so I want more power from my OS and if you don't appreciate that I need GNU awk and an xterm and fluxbox or Gnome because the equivalent apps on OS X are light-years behind, then don't try to champion OS X.
My machine is a MacBookPro from last year and I gave OS X a decent chance for 2-3 months. Now I run Debian on it.
Re:Idle's the right place for this...
on
Happy Towel Day
·
· Score: 1
I'm guessing by your description that you're Afrikaner and are referring to the Boer Wars. I'll proceed as such but correct me if I'm wrong.
As another poster has pointed out, the tactics you use depend on your adversary. The British, with their accidental empires and their sense of fair play, are one thing and the Russians, with their calculated brutality and naked aggression, are another.
But even on strictly military terms, the first Boer war was a very small affair, against a few local and totally unprepared British troops, which is the only reason it could be run successfully with that very loose structure you describe. The second one was a quite different affair, with professionally run armies on both sides and a significant investment of resources from both. You lost that one. The British were perfectly prepared to give your country self-government along with other Dominions in due course, less than 30 years later, with the Statute of Westminster in '31. The reason for the original intervention wasn't some master policy to exploit your resources -- you were immigrants to begin with, and all that happened was that there were a lot of British immigrants who wanted some power and protection. When the same thing happened between the US and Mexico and the US and Britain (in the Pacific Northwest) nobody portrayed it in terms of an independence struggle, because it wasn't. All of these cases were just conflicts between classes of immigrants who got there at different times and had loyalties to different original cultures/countries, the difference being since your side eventually won you try to talk about it unhistorically.
Put another way, you paint an appealing enough picture, but it is just historical sleight of hand. No, you can't run a military on the terms you describe and no, your country didn't fight two valiant wars of independence. Just ask the British on how to run an army, since their historical record of success actually backs them up. Iron discipline, but not top-down absolutism like the Prussian tradition (there was room for more initiative).
Re:Prien715 is Weird
on
Fedora 13 Is Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
GP is an idiot but so are you. I happen not to give a shit about the tech industry -- about all I follow is a couple of Slashdot stories every week. I just need to get things done as efficiently as possible. There's no faster way for just about any general-purpose task involving a computer than the Unix shell. When you get to specialised tasks, it's often the case that a program that deals with text interfaces is still going to be the fastest, because you can mangle text or edit it much better with grep/awk/sed/cut and vim/emacs or in a pinch perl/python than with anything else. And if your OS is built around text, which you get with the Unix CLI, then you're gold.
All I'm trying to say is that the computer to me is not a "reason-to-live" as you put it, just another tool like my car. But it so happens that the fastest way to get things done and get things done that would be impossible with other interfaces, and do all this with the minimum rise in blood pressure, is the Unix CLI. And that's why I run Debian Linux -- it doesn't get in my way, just gives me more power than the non-Unixlike OSes. (OS X really gets in my way and I hate it even though it has acceptable underlying tools.)
Rather agree with you except the bit about snapping to word boundaries. If you complain about that, you vastly underrate its importance. I get that with xterms, not text entry fields, but I tell you, double-clicking on the beginning word and right-clicking on an ending word (or blank at the end of the line) to select is so much damn easier than trying to drag the mouse so precisely from the beginning of the selection to the end. Just that way of selecting has probably saved me days of computer time, and that's with me very rarely using the mouse (in an xterm). It's one of the only things I think a mouse is useful for in an xterm.
Or... just Debian. FFS. You manage your updates however you want them but it's actually properly designed and a breeze to set up. I ran Arch for half a year a couple of years ago but there's not much point in doing so.
They've already taken down geocities, lycos, angelfire, whatever. People used to make sites and put their own content up. Today they don't seem to anymore, and I think the web is poorer for it. Luckily, I had recursively downloaded a couple of sites that had valuable info for myself, and archive.org has some, but the shift on all fronts (ditto usenet or forums) is towards fewer and bigger sites run by corporations instead of more, smaller sites run by individuals.
Just try sticking the place up with a baseball or a knife. Seriously, listen to yourself.
And to the clown who brought up shooting sports: you do know those got started shooting animals? For that matter, guns were developed for killing people. It's not a case of ploughshares into swords, face facts: guns were always intended for violence.
Except the British Empire actually built railroads, hospitals, schools, sports-grounds, forts, governments, civil services, militaries, markets. (Remember that sketch from Monty Python -- what did the Romans ever do for us?) For all their mistakes in administration, they made places better, they ended slavery, they defended the freedom of international trade, and they defended Europe from several dictators over the centuries.
America went into the empire business with a great deal of enthusiasm and zeal (something that was almost entirely lacking from the British "accidental empire"), but as for results, except for a few shining successes, like Cuba, mostly produced misery and suffering and death, from the Native Americans to the Philippines. On the flip side, she took on the role of the defender of international trade and defended Europe from Russia.
But all I am trying to say is don't equate Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism with the White Man's Burden -- the latter had a lot of truth to it, the former was a disaster.
The electoral college was an attempt to get something like the House of Commons, an independent body of representatives choosing an executive in a manner removed from direct democracy. But since they had this principle of keeping the executive and legislative separate, they had to split the Commons into a Congress and an Electoral College. Since the College isn't involved in legislation, it doesn't meet regularly, and withered just a few decades after being set up. This split hasn't been good for either Congress (weak) or the College (dead), as you'll observe if you listen to debates in Congress versus debates in any other democracy's Parliament (they're much more vibrant). You can be only so meaningful in law-writing if you're far removed from law-making. Obviously the party system hasn't helped things, but that's a bad trend that's taken over everywhere, not just in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
An extensive vocabulary is useful only insofar as it helps you make your meaning clear or use a pretty turn of phrase. But using uncommon words merely to seem intelligent is pure snobbery, and we instinctively react against snobbery and pretension. In this case, there was really no use for the Latin words instead of the plain and better-understood Saxon ones. E.g.
"They try, but they can't, because they wear shoes precisely designed to prevent any form of rapid ambulation."
->
"They try, but they can't, because they wear shoes precisely designed to prevent them walking quickly."
We could have kept "any form of" but it wasn't needed.
Straw man. The part about teenager being a social construct, like childhood, is spot-on. Childhood was a very different thing before the Victorians, people in ages before that wouldn't recognise our idea of childhood. Similarly, the teenager is a social construct of the last half of this century (though some say it began in the 20s).
'Twas ever thus. In all the history of mankind, most people have never taken the effort to think hard and properly, and their language merely reflected this. There's no difference between the ugly and stilted English of Palin supporters I recently saw on television and the ugly and pretentious English I read when someone links me to an article in the New Yorker. In both cases, the speaker or the writer hasn't anything interesting to say, but must say something, so he lets his mouth or fingers do the talking or writing for him, without having to rely on any thinking at all. But attend a few meetings in a business or listen to a few politicians' speeches, or read some scholarly essays, or pick up a popular novel, or watch some television drama -- from the present or any time in the past -- and you will find the same phenomenon: brilliant people with something to say will find ways to express their meaning in good English (or whatever other language). Ordinary people with nothing to say will cover up the fact with bad English. (Just remember to account for selection bias with past works.) Orwell used to write about this kind of thing, both in 1984 and his polemics and essays like "Politics and the English Language".
Because I can't stand the fucking taste? Yeah, it's an acquired taste too.
I think he's just trying to say there's a difference between free speech for some reason and free speech for speech's sake. Words without meaning are just hot air, and I'm not terribly bothered that Facebook, being a private corporation, decided to enforce one further censorship. After all, they already don't allow things to do with nudity and sex and gore and other random stuff. Many forums filter out words like fuck and shit. I don't agree with these types of rules, I think they're all misguided, and I don't like the forums that do it. But I know some people will always want to run their boards (and what else is facebook than a really big forum/board/BBS) in a way they hope will promote a decent community and reasonable discussion, and though I think the efforts do more harm than good, I don't care. The only thing in this incident which I deplored was Pakistan's blocking of Facebook, because as a government, it ought to be held to a higher standard -- Pakistanis can choose not to use Facebook, but they can't choose not to use their government, and they couldn't choose to use Facebook once their government decided it didn't want them to. But I'm not from Pakistan so all I can do is be disappointment at their backwardness and small-mindedness with respect to things like political freedom and the other rights delineated by documents like the UDHR which they only pay lip-service to. In an ideal world, Facebook wouldn't have backed down, but let's not forget who are the real infringers of freedoms here -- the government of Pakistan.
But books have shown that flipping is much more efficient than scrolling around. I'm sure there will be books of e-paper or oled pages stuck together eventually, and I'll certainly be buying them.
It's kind of what I said, but part of what you said is exactly the kind of propaganda I'm talking about. Kings of England haven't been able to pull that sort of shit since the Magna Carta. Fact is, the people who came here first were the folks who had nothing to lose, the dregs of society. Later, merchants and wealthy investors came, but the beginnings were relentlelssly lower-class. Ditto Australia.
Except for a few happy periods in its history, there has always been something of an anti-intellectual trend in the US. Perhaps it has to do with the people who originally came here and the way the revolution is portrayed in its history books, but there is a great deal of reverse snobbery, and that goes against intellectualism too.
The mods were on a Friday night bender... They probably looked up, didn't see a moon, and were grateful for the explanation.
I personally prefer Craig, but have you read any of the books? The Bond of the books is Craig to a tee, all the others are rather different.
Hi,
Thanks for the wealth of info. I see I've been wrong about some of my ideas about the two Boer wars. I'm going to order Pakenham's book and read through it, but obviously that will take months, so I'm afraid our debate, which has been interesting and informative for me, is over. Thanks and have fun.
Cheers,
laddie
Wish that were true. KDE 3 ran perfectly fine on my macbook pro (last year's model). Then I finally switched to KDE 4 and found the simplest damn apps stuttering and hogging the CPU.
Just to clarify one thing for you: I'm not British (nor a woman). I'm
Hungarian, and the total time I've spent in Britain is roughly a day
between two flights. Nor have I ever learnt history from them through
textbooks or whatever. My country actually has good reason to be angry
at the Allied decision to ignore the southern front during the War,
though I understand Churchill was overruled on that by Roosevelt.
> Is that actually what you believe ? Sheez... the historical records
> are very clear on how wrong you are. You basically got EVERY detail wrong.
I'm afraid it's your details that are wrong, but I can understand they
would be, for nationalistic reasons.
> The first boer war was a small war, but Britain was hardly that unprepared
> -the difference is that our lose-knit tactics WORKED better, we knew the
> country, we knew the teritory and my ancestors were excellent marksman -
> it was a basic survival skill for them. They took down a soldier with
> every single bullet fired - and could take out a squadron before anybody
> even managed to see ONE of them because they were THAT good at camouflage
> (again - a basic survival skill in their culture).
The first Boer war involved a few thousand Boers and about a thousand
British soldiers, who being unprepared (untrained) for the conditions and
terrain with which the Boers were perfectly familiar, was a predictable
and one-sided affair. I think we have no disagreement here.
> In the second war, we repeatedly won almost every battle, in fact in the
> first two years of the war Britain achieved only TWO successes. They
> took Pretoria and they won one battle. So we laid siege to Pretoria,
> and also most of the cities where British folk lived - and kept winning
> every battle. When it got to 10-to-1 numbers by the end of the second
> year - there was no POSSIBILITY anymore of winning a conventional war,
> so we came up with our guerilla warfare, small squads of between three
> and five highly mobile soldiers, working entirely indepently - raiding
> supply chains and taking on (and defeating) much bigger squads by being
> better at fighting in this country. Again - we were winning. Without
> the concentration camps we WOULD have won the war.
The second Boer war was not the same as the first. You fielded tens
of thousands of troops, properly organised and equipped with proper
artillery. When these failed, you turned to guerilla tactics, which the
British countered by locking down supply lines and key infrastructure
points and with a scorched earth policy. Both of you fought with small
mobile units, but that doesn't mean that they were on either side these
undisciplined free-thinking hippies you try to paint them as. I would
say neither of you fought much differently from the other; for instance
you both shot spies out of hand and often with little proof.
> Now... as for the rest. Yes it bloody well WAS a struggle for
> liberation. We were NEVER British immigrants, our ancestry was
> predominantly Flemish, Dutch, French and German - in fact Modern day
> Afrikaans is so close to Flemish that I can chit-chat with Flemish
> people as if we're both speaking to a mothertongue speaker. The two
> boer republics WERE independent republics for nearly 80 years by the
> time of the first boer war - and their independence had previously
> been recognized by Britain in 1853. The desire for our gold and
> diamonds was the major reason why you decided that you now wanted to
> conquer these democratic republics we had built and reinstall over
> us the monarchic rule we had fled from more than a century before,
> the process that culminated in the foundation of these republics.
BS. You were not British immigrants, but immigrants nonetheless. When
Why? What "gets in the way" about being able to have your GUI and CLI, too. I do understand why certain tasks MIGHT be easier or even possible in CLI-world than in GUI-world (mostly due to the GUI designer making tradeoffs between having a clean, consistent GUI vs. having every single knob and switch exposed). But I simply cannot understand why most, if not all, Linux geeks would be so actively hostile toward an OS (OS X) that, while not completely F/OSS, is at least created by a company that actively participates in the F/OSS community.
Don't get me wrong, I run a GUI -- fluxbox or Gnome depending on whether I'm using a laptop or desktop. I need a GUI as a framework because there's no browser to beat Firefox and because I need calendaring for my job and that means Thunderbird, though I prefer pine. Fluxbox doesn't get in my way and lets me do things easily; Gnome isn't so good at letting me do things easily but still doesn't get in my way. And I'm not anti-Apple, their record of openness on desktops is decent; they're no saints but apart from mobile devices they're not fascists.
What I hate is OS X's interface. I gave it a try for a couple of months. It really gets in my way and takes away a lot of power. Sure it's got some decent ideas but it's fundamentally broken. I want to alt-tab between windows, not apps. Even with third-party apps I never found a way of doing so. Terminal is a piece of crap just like every terminal emulator since xterm and rxvt (yeah, gnome-terminal and konsole, you guys suck too). So I run xterm, but that doesn't play nicely with "Spaces" which is a very brittle implementation of multiple desktops, as you'll know if you've tried alt-tabbing between X and native apps on multiple Spaces. I really couldn't comment on the Finder as I never use graphical file managers, and there's no hiding going on in the shell.
I thought my original post would have made it clear that I don't like to poke around and tinker, but I appreciate that I can configure things as I want to if I need to, after consulting some manual or after some Googling. I found this somewhat true of OS X too; obviously less so than on Linux but it was clear that they made an effort to have a robust Unixlike OS with text config files.
I guess I'm also not your target user. I don't give a fig about Photoshop and I don't even know what the other tools you list are. For the very simple image editing I need to do sometimes, I use the gimp, and sometimes I burn an audio CD or video DVD with k3b or something. I don't collect my own photos and videos, and I think making a 3D model of my house is a waste of time. It sounds like you're rather more into the tech world than I am, because I just don't care about photo/video editing. I manage my information in a simple text file in vim (ca 10k lines) and my data is logically organised in a directory structure. Therefore I don't need apps to manage my data, because I get around in it much more quickly with the generic tools.
Basically to answer the question which you implied but didn't ask, which is what it would take for me to like OS X as much as I like Linux: from a broad philosophical standpoint, if they made the GUI more configurable so I can adapt it to my workflow instead of adapting to it. I mean I had to install a damn third-party app (Insomnia) to prevent sleep on lid close. On the detail side, if X apps were first-class citizens, you could alt-tab between windows, if they made the window manager as powerful as any run-of-the-mill X window manager (seriously Aqua is anaemic), and perhaps documented the system config files so I didn't have to Google to configure anything they forgot to put in the System Preferences tool. I don't mind having to install GNU awk or date from third-party repositories to work around their totally lame awk and other standard tools but if they provided the GNU tools themselves that would be nice too. I'm not from the Windows world so I want more power from my OS and if you don't appreciate that I need GNU awk and an xterm and fluxbox or Gnome because the equivalent apps on OS X are light-years behind, then don't try to champion OS X.
My machine is a MacBookPro from last year and I gave OS X a decent chance for 2-3 months. Now I run Debian on it.
Just remember, Hitler was a vegetarian.
South Africa actually, but I'm sure it's easier to call others ignorant than to spend a moment in thought.
I'm guessing by your description that you're Afrikaner and are referring to the Boer Wars. I'll proceed as such but correct me if I'm wrong.
As another poster has pointed out, the tactics you use depend on your adversary. The British, with their accidental empires and their sense of fair play, are one thing and the Russians, with their calculated brutality and naked aggression, are another.
But even on strictly military terms, the first Boer war was a very small affair, against a few local and totally unprepared British troops, which is the only reason it could be run successfully with that very loose structure you describe. The second one was a quite different affair, with professionally run armies on both sides and a significant investment of resources from both. You lost that one. The British were perfectly prepared to give your country self-government along with other Dominions in due course, less than 30 years later, with the Statute of Westminster in '31. The reason for the original intervention wasn't some master policy to exploit your resources -- you were immigrants to begin with, and all that happened was that there were a lot of British immigrants who wanted some power and protection. When the same thing happened between the US and Mexico and the US and Britain (in the Pacific Northwest) nobody portrayed it in terms of an independence struggle, because it wasn't. All of these cases were just conflicts between classes of immigrants who got there at different times and had loyalties to different original cultures/countries, the difference being since your side eventually won you try to talk about it unhistorically.
Put another way, you paint an appealing enough picture, but it is just historical sleight of hand. No, you can't run a military on the terms you describe and no, your country didn't fight two valiant wars of independence. Just ask the British on how to run an army, since their historical record of success actually backs them up. Iron discipline, but not top-down absolutism like the Prussian tradition (there was room for more initiative).
GP is an idiot but so are you. I happen not to give a shit about the tech industry -- about all I follow is a couple of Slashdot stories every week. I just need to get things done as efficiently as possible. There's no faster way for just about any general-purpose task involving a computer than the Unix shell. When you get to specialised tasks, it's often the case that a program that deals with text interfaces is still going to be the fastest, because you can mangle text or edit it much better with grep/awk/sed/cut and vim/emacs or in a pinch perl/python than with anything else. And if your OS is built around text, which you get with the Unix CLI, then you're gold.
All I'm trying to say is that the computer to me is not a "reason-to-live" as you put it, just another tool like my car. But it so happens that the fastest way to get things done and get things done that would be impossible with other interfaces, and do all this with the minimum rise in blood pressure, is the Unix CLI. And that's why I run Debian Linux -- it doesn't get in my way, just gives me more power than the non-Unixlike OSes. (OS X really gets in my way and I hate it even though it has acceptable underlying tools.)
Rather agree with you except the bit about snapping to word boundaries. If you complain about that, you vastly underrate its importance. I get that with xterms, not text entry fields, but I tell you, double-clicking on the beginning word and right-clicking on an ending word (or blank at the end of the line) to select is so much damn easier than trying to drag the mouse so precisely from the beginning of the selection to the end. Just that way of selecting has probably saved me days of computer time, and that's with me very rarely using the mouse (in an xterm). It's one of the only things I think a mouse is useful for in an xterm.
Or... just Debian. FFS. You manage your updates however you want them but it's actually properly designed and a breeze to set up. I ran Arch for half a year a couple of years ago but there's not much point in doing so.
The way one of my co-workers puts it: If you torture the data long enough, it'll tell you anything you want to hear.
They've already taken down geocities, lycos, angelfire, whatever. People used to make sites and put their own content up. Today they don't seem to anymore, and I think the web is poorer for it. Luckily, I had recursively downloaded a couple of sites that had valuable info for myself, and archive.org has some, but the shift on all fronts (ditto usenet or forums) is towards fewer and bigger sites run by corporations instead of more, smaller sites run by individuals.
Just try sticking the place up with a baseball or a knife. Seriously, listen to yourself.
And to the clown who brought up shooting sports: you do know those got started shooting animals? For that matter, guns were developed for killing people. It's not a case of ploughshares into swords, face facts: guns were always intended for violence.
Except the British Empire actually built railroads, hospitals, schools, sports-grounds, forts, governments, civil services, militaries, markets. (Remember that sketch from Monty Python -- what did the Romans ever do for us?) For all their mistakes in administration, they made places better, they ended slavery, they defended the freedom of international trade, and they defended Europe from several dictators over the centuries.
America went into the empire business with a great deal of enthusiasm and zeal (something that was almost entirely lacking from the British "accidental empire"), but as for results, except for a few shining successes, like Cuba, mostly produced misery and suffering and death, from the Native Americans to the Philippines. On the flip side, she took on the role of the defender of international trade and defended Europe from Russia.
But all I am trying to say is don't equate Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism with the White Man's Burden -- the latter had a lot of truth to it, the former was a disaster.
The electoral college was an attempt to get something like the House of Commons, an independent body of representatives choosing an executive in a manner removed from direct democracy. But since they had this principle of keeping the executive and legislative separate, they had to split the Commons into a Congress and an Electoral College. Since the College isn't involved in legislation, it doesn't meet regularly, and withered just a few decades after being set up. This split hasn't been good for either Congress (weak) or the College (dead), as you'll observe if you listen to debates in Congress versus debates in any other democracy's Parliament (they're much more vibrant). You can be only so meaningful in law-writing if you're far removed from law-making. Obviously the party system hasn't helped things, but that's a bad trend that's taken over everywhere, not just in the USA.