What you are talking about is building super bacteria. This is biotechnology. I agree that scary things could be done with biotechnology, and that this is the most likely form of "nanotechnology" to be seen in the next hundred years. But it's not what most people working on "nanotechnology" are working on, nor what Drexler et. al. call nanotechnology.
I'm all for doing good things that are right. The US government should probably do more, but frankly, a LOT of money is given away purely as aid. If you still want to borrow money from the US government, that's fine, but that doesn't mean all debts should always be forgiven. The concept of blanket debt forgiveness is silly, it will just encourage more terrible borrowing and lending practices. I fail to see how this could be a good thing.
The loans were not made to the the corrupt despots, they were made to a government of a country. If there is really no continuity between the old country and the new country, I suppose you could argue there is no way the new country should be responsible for the acts of the old country.
However, I likened this above to the same analogy - if your father borrows a bunch of money and squanders it, then his assets are up for grab to creditors before you inherit them. Likewise, the creditors should be able to come in and grab assets from the government (not from private citizens obviously) to pay off the loan. The reality is that if we all looked at it the way you do, and we did not hold governments responsible for any length of time longer than that of one particular regime, NOBODY in their right mind would lend a penny to a government. Of course, the US government and people have to live with the various responsibilities, debts and consequences of past leaders, but obviously those stupid third world people are not capable of assuming responsibility for anything they do. In that case, we should just come in and patronizingly determine for them how their money gets spents and make sure they don't hurt themselves.
I don't know what you are talking about - if your father has a lot of debt and dies, his assets will be harvested to pay back that debt before you inherit a damned thing. Yes, if he was 10 million in the red the debt won't pass onto you, but whatever he can pay back will be paid back.
So if your analogy were carried through, then those regimes should pay back until they have 0 dollars and 0 assets left, and then whatever remains should be cancelled.
Also note that private individual interest rates are different than the interest rates paid by countries PRECISELY because of this kind of difference in risk level. The lenders will lend to a country because they know that the lifespan of a country is long while the lifespan of an individual is unpredictable.
Are you people all that stupid??? I AM NOT EXPLOITING THEM. Any person or company is free to move money to other countries and start organizations/factories/companies there. Globalization as a concept is a myth. If Nike moves money to China and starts factories there that violate workers rights, how the hell do you propose the US government is supposed to stop that? They don't have jurisdiction in China. They can't stop Nike from transferring money to China, since ultimately the entire organization may (or may not) be run by Chinese people there, they just happen to be financed with money from an American parent company.
You only have two choices: either prevent all money from flowing out of the US (isolationism), or force better laws in China. I am all for the latter, I am just asking some one of you whiny liberals to come up with a real proposal. Others have said it: if the people are so oppressed, they ought to revolt against their oppressive government. If we can help them get their government changed or reformed, I'm all for that. If they don't want to get it changed or reformed, who am I to say they shouldn't live the way they do??
If the government in Indonesia or China is failing to protect it's citizens, then those people should rise up against the government. I know that Americans, even though we may be a bunch of fat, happy, well-fed consumerists, would never let ourselves be shit on like that, and would die to prevent it.
What you are talking about is something that ought to be illegal ANYWHERE in the world. You are describing slave labor and politicians effectively selling citizens to companies. I don't understand why you choose to blame this on globalism/globalization. A big fucking Chinese company could move into an area and do the same damned thing. So could a Chinese government owned company.
It is the job of a government to protect its people from slavery, forced labor, etc. and the job of a people to NEVER allow an opressive government to take over their lives. I would die for my freedom, and if these people are really being treated as you describe, I can't for the life of me imagine why they never rose up against the people treating them that way and organized a government that doesn't force its people to work as slave laborers.
I fail entirely to see what you expect the US government or other first world governments to do about this. If you want to force labor protection laws in these countries, the correct vehicle would have to be a world-wide governmental organization, a UN with vastly expanded powers. The thing is that NONE of these third world countries want that. Like I said, if what you say is true, it's the responsibility of those people or their government.
I agree with you. I'm just scoffing at the people who think that the first world countries should do all that hard work FOR the third world countries, fork over a huge chunk in taxes, just to have it handed over to third world countries, who then squander it with miraculous ease, make no progress, then DEMAND along with every whiny euro-liberal that the first world is blood-sucking the third world dry, and the first world is obligated to forgive these debts. If they didn't know what to do with the money, they shouldn't have borrowed it. Borrowing money for unproven projects is ALWAYS risky. Deal with it.
Shot by police defending themselves against rioters who were attacking private and public property.
I only regret that the other rioters weren't shot too.
Yes, you have a right to PEACEFUL protest, that does not mean you can go march up to the doorstep of the G-whatever meeting and bang on the windows where the world leaders are meeting with your 10000 closest friends, many of whom are violent anarchists. As soon as you lose track of the fact that your rights only extend to peaceful protest and not to violence (unless somebody is committing violence against you, that is a somewhat different scenario), you deserve a smack down.
I'm not saying I approve of all corporate activities, a lot of them are morally despicable. But that's why we have laws. If you want to get things changed, and encourage more responsible corporate behavior, you could try making the UN something other than an anti-semitic whining camp run by third world rights violators and jealous Europeans. An effective governing body that put a real global framework of trade laws in place to force fair play on everybody - international tariffs to enforce passing equitable worker's rights laws in the third world countries that supposedly have lots of "exploited" workers, etc. etc.
Of course, no country wants to give up any portion of its sovereignty, even the weak and poor ones. Furthermore, the big problem with the UN is that since many of its members aren't representative in any way (non-democratic) the body as a whole does not necessarily represent the best interests of the people of the world.
Oh, and did I mention that many of said third world countries being so dreadfully "exploited" don't see anything wrong at all? They are getting cash infusions, their workers are employed, and they don't want to scare off the companies that are supporting local economies there. Maybe that's why it hasn't happened.
In other words, the only way to prevent corporate exploitation is to get a consensus that such a thing exists. There is no such consensus because it doesn't seem to bother those who are exploited, and the exploitation is purely voluntary in nature. The people that seem to be really bothered are the whiny protestors who go around destroying public and private property and then don't seem to understand why they are more hated than the corporations they are protesting against.
Give me a break. If you don't want the money (you meaning collective third world countries) and don't plan to use it to build out your economic infrastructure so you can pay it back with interest, then DON'T BORROW IT. If I borrow money to pay for my college education because it's hard to get grants, then I whine and say "you should cancel my debt, I just graduated from college, blah blah blah" everyone will tell me to go fsck myself, and rightfully so. Nobody forced an education on me, nobody forces economic development on the third world.
Either learn to play the game according to the rules which are quite fair, or fuck off and retreat into isolationism. Grow your own goddamned corn and feed yourselves, and build your own industrial infrastructure, and your own educational institutions, and call us in 200 years.
Re:Rather than whine about Mozilla...
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Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 2
You can't possibly tell me "no, you and everyone else who complains is wrong". We aren't wrong, because a perceptual experience can't be "right" or "wrong". The fucking thing feels slow and unresponsive, in qualitative terms. I tried to explain in my last post why it feels that way, and how I think it could be fixed. However, since I feel that K-Meleon fixes the problem, I will keep using K-Meleon, you can keep using Mozilla and we can all appreciate Netscape's effort on this project.
Oh yes, that's a good logical argument. Do you know anything about the current state or history of the region at all? Palestinians regularly attack Israeli civilians and Israeli tanks regularly roll into areas where Palestinians live. Your analysis is beyond facile, it's not worth responding to. Get a clue, come up with a good solution and until then shut the fuck up.
Because the IRA doesn't claim that Jesus wants them to kill British civilians. They are a blatantly nationalist organization. The fact that they are Catholic is more or less incidental. Al Qaeda on the other hand talks about killing the Jews (the "Little Satan", Israel) and the evil supporters of Zionism, the US (the "Big Satan"). Given that everything is couched in terms of religious extremism, it's fairly natural to characterize them as _muslim_ extremists. The IRA are Irish nationalist extremists, first and foremost. David Koresh was a Christian extremist - a religious nutcase who killed people and hoarded arms on the basis of an extreme interpretation of the Bible.
I'm not going to defend Sharon, as I believe he's a pretty evil dude. Like I said, his election was a sign of the frustration of the Israeli people - if the Arabs want hardball, give it to them.
The Barak deal was a fair one. It's better than what they have now, which is nothing. They aren't going to get better than that. Of course Israel is going to control the borders - they don't want terrorist bombers sneaking in. What the hell would you do?
As for the settlements, I agree that some of them are questionable and perhaps should go away. I don't support taking people's homes or throwing them off their land (either Palestinians or Israelis). This could have been worked out in some way when a peace plan was on the table. Now there is nothing on the table and almost no hope of getting it there. Barak was willing to deal, Arafat wasn't. It's that simple.
Re:Rather than whine about Mozilla...
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Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 2
It's not necessarily slow per se anymore, it's relatively fast on PIII+ level hardware. However, there are intermittent freezes of the entire UI (it won't respond to user interaction just after a page starts loading) due to the fact that the same damned thread is rendering the XUL interface as renders the browser window contents (at least, that's my guess, it may be totally off base though). Also the look and feel of widgets is not quite the same as for native applications on any OS even with a good chrome. This is always annoying, I understand the reasons for the design decision, and they are good reasons if you want to make an embedded cross-platform browser, but they are not good design decisions if you want to make a usable browser for a general purpose PC running a general purpose OS with its own GUI which has native behavior and widgets. Though at one point in time there was a fabulous Native.Windows Mozilla chrome, it no longer exists for up-to-date versions of Mozilla, which is very unfortunate.
There is also an annoying lag between the interaction with a XUL widget and the side effect that doesn't happen with native widgets on any platform. This is even true in K-Meleon, with text boxes on certain pages (I press a key and there is a substantial lag before the character appears). Again, maybe bad use of threading, maybe something else.
I don't think these issues are unsolvable, but I think you have to be VERY unaware of the user experience with your applications to NOT notice that Mozilla is substantially different than all your native apps, and probably worse in several ways (and I've been a Mozilla user, bug filer and even occasional fixer since around M11).
Re:why is mozilla engine so slow?
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Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 2
It's not. You may be confusing Mozilla the browser with the Gecko engine. Netscape 6.x is basically Mozilla. Galeon, which you mention, is relatively fast, though I haven't used it much since I mostly stick with Konqueror when I'm in Linux-land (I don't like the KHTML rendering, but I find Konqueror a much more pleasant browser in my KDE environment than Gecko, and when needed I use Mozilla).
If you try K-Meleon and compare it to IE I think you'll find that the Gecko engine is not vastly different in performance from IE. Yes, some types of pages are faster in IE and some are faster in Gecko, depending on bandwidth and latency factors, your processor speed, amount of RAM on your computer, and # and type of widgets on page. On anything that's a PIII 700 or faster (like my Athlon 1200 at home) I can't really notice the difference subjectively, and it's clearly no more than a factor of 1.5x-2x in either direction in most normal scenarios.
The _feel_ of Mozilla the browser is a big problem, XUL just does not feel natural or responsive - a lot of Mozilla hardcore fans won't agree that there is a problem with XUL, and I can't quantify it meaningfully or say "it's slow", but it's more that the interface tends to freeze up or stop rendering when the engine is busy. I think it could be worked around and XUL could be made to work well in practice, but it just isn't 100% usable right now.
Rather than whine about Mozilla...
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Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 5, Informative
I recommend those of you (and it's quite a few) who whine about Mozilla's performance check out K-Meleon. I think most of you will agree the real problem with Mozilla is not Gecko, it's the damned XUL-based Interface of Infinite Slowness +2. K-Meleon is one of the nicer attempts out there to take Gecko and wrap it in a native interface, in this case for Windows (yes, I use Win2k at work, so sue me).
If you tried K-Meleon 0.1 or 0.2 and thought "gee this would be great if it actually supported cookies and had some configurable options and felt like more than a toy" then check out 0.6. Actually, it's been quite usable for a couple of releases now, and 0.6 seems as good as ever. Yes, I still use IE sometimes, but unlike my repeated attempts to wean myself to Mozilla that inevitably end in me getting sick of the poor UI response times and rendering freezes in Mozilla, I can actually get used to the snappy K-Meleon look and feel.
No, it's not perfect or bugless, and it still isn't quite as pretty or slick looking as IE, but it is nice to see how fast and responsive a Gecko based browser can be when the entire UI isn't getting rendered from XUL, and it's nice to have a real native browser alternative on Windows.
And neither is Arafat. He is directly responsible for what is going on right now. This second Intifada was started by his failure to negotiate with Barak when a deal was on the table which would have brought peace and Palestinian statehood. The deal was rejected, the violence started, then Sharon was elected. Get it? The Israeli people are saying "if you don't want peace, then we will protect ourselves at all costs." I don't think they like Sharon either, but this is what Arafat has brought on them. The Israelis should NOT stand by while Palestinian terrorists attack Israeli targets, and suggesting otherwise is insulting as well as moronic. As for the settlements, I don't believe that they are being extended, nor is any land being taken to make room for them (certainly not now), but it's not particularly more right to suggest the Israelis living there should be kicked out than anybody else at this point.
Agreed. I don't agree with some Israeli government policies, as I don't agree with many US government policies. I do think the US, Britain and the UN are all, for better or worse, obligated to help settle borders for the Israelis and Palestinians and help force a peace if necessary. They will eventually learn to get along, I believe, but it requires some sustained peace and the breeding out of the murderous attitude of many Palestinians that makes them think, like Osama bin Laden, that past injustices can be rectified by spilling innocent blood.
Furthermore, we have to be a bit understanding - the Israelis tried to put a deal on the table to GIVE the Palestinians statehood and peace when Barak was in power. The response was the current Intifada2, which now has the whiny Europeans and even sometimes George Bush condemning the Israelis for defending themselves. I don't support the killing of civilians by Israeli troops, but this time, I have to say the conflict causing the casualties was reignited almost entirely by the Palestinians. Arafat should have negotiated when he had the chance. Should innocent civilians on either side die as a result of Arafat's blunder? No, it's not fair, but such is the nature of war.
Your comment on DUAL POLICY ignores the fact that foreign policy and domestic policy and and always have been two entirely separate areas. A country is supposed to represent its own citizens in its domestic policy and represent ITS OWN CITIZENS in foreign policy. Your country does the same, and I know that because EVERY country does this. The only way to prevent this is to have a world-wide governing organization. Hell, every state in the US would screw over every other state for its own resident's interests were it not for the federal government limiting that and preventing it from happening.
So rather than complaining about our government doing its job to represent our people's interests, you should get together with everyone else out there who feels wronged and strengthen the UN and world trade agreements and force the US to play nice by rules that everyone can mutually agree upon and are maximally fair to all.
But if the US doesn't respond to the standard whiny eurotrash/third world resident attitude don't be surprised : "fund the third world countries, give us money and forgive our debt, then pay us reparations for being evil and creating guns and weapons and selling them to us with the money you gave us, etc. blah blah blah". Look, you should have been looking out for your own interests before - why do you expect a free lunch? That's not the job of other countries, your OWN country needs to represent your interests as well as the US does for its own citizens (I'm mostly happy except for this fucking DMCA shit which I'm fighting to get repealed here).
Re:The Lexus and the Olive Tree
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Globalization
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· Score: 2
This is basically weak moral relativism. The other responder said it well - individual choice and freedom among other principles are absolute goods and take precedence over "a people" or "a culture" defining participation in anything. The Taliban should not be allowed to force isolation on the people of Afghanistan. The people of Afghanistan should be as free as possible to watch TV (assuming they can find one to watch) or use the internet, or to REFUSE to do those things on religious or other grounds.
As soon as you bring hints of moral relativism into the equation, anybody can argue anything. If the Taliban isn't wrong to force isolationism and a despotic, islamist regime on their own people, how is it more wrong for us to force freedom and democracy on them? Just because the Taliban consists of other Arabs and Afghanis (no, they aren't all Afghanis in Al Qaeda OR the Taliban)? Why is it more okay for an ethnic Pashtun to force his radicalist religious interpretation on a moderate ethnic Tajik in Afghanistan than it is for the US to enforce freedom?
Anyway, this kind of argument goes nowhere. Eschew moral relativism, make some decisions up front, then let's talk.
No, he said _validating_ XML parsers. If you want to validate that in fact a document matches a DTD or a Schema you do have to read the entire document. You can have a validating SAX parser by the way (though it doesn't really make sense to me to do so), though the most simple SAX parsers don't validate the document structure, they just fire events into the event handler. Clearly, validation is a more logical concept with DOM-style parsing, as you are building an in-memory tree representation of the document.
You are exactly on target. Unfortunately, this is why a lot of us say that X is long in the tooth and its time is hopefully nearing an end. Network transparency should really not mean rendering stuff on the server (err... X client... err... you know what I mean) and transmitting large bitmaps over the network. Furthermore, the X protocol is somewhat chatty, at least according to people who know better than I do.
The problem is that this is more or less dictated by the genericity of X - the widget sets have to be rendered on the server because widgets aren't part of X itself, but rather are tacked on top of X. Some argue this makes X flexible, you can have GTK+ widgets, Athena/XAW widgets, Qt widgets, etc. It may be possible to tack some other egregious hack on top of the current X window system, and if widgets are available on the client then render them there with far lighter messages, like you said. But then you basically aren't using the X protocol anymore.
Also X has so many extensions and egregious hacks already in place (Xrender/Xft font crap for anti-aliasing, the direct multimedia extension - whatever it's called), that adding more just makes my skin squirm.
The fact is that 1-bit bitmaps for fonts doesn't hack it these days, rendering widgets on the (X-client) server side is slow and the concept of entirely separating widgets from the windowing environment is not beneficial for remote usage of GUI apps nor for consistency of look and feel as a whole. These are required features for a modern graphical environment, and BeOS and MacOSX do this well. Windows also does this well, even though it sucks in many ways. And this lets WTS beat the pants off of X for remote display, and lets Windows beat X for local windowing operations (this is an empirical statement based on my observations and not something I can prove meaningfully to you).
It's at least enough of a real concern that people are studying it in an academic environment and presenting results on it to IEEE forums.
I also found this one, which is substantially more informative and complete:
http://www.wi-fi.com/downloads/Coexistence_Paper_I ntersil_Aug18.pdf. This is a good discussion, which seems to conclude that yes, they do interfere to an extent, but performance degradation is graceful, though it apparently depends greatly on the amount of usage Bluetooth is getting (density of Bluetooth traffic in the locale of an 802.11b access point).
I read that as the author brushing off the issue. I am commenting based on anecdotes I have heard from those who have seen the two technologies used together and based on my very real experience with 2.4GHz which proved to me that in older incarnations, pre-802.11b technology did not deal well at ALL with interference.
So yes, I understand that theoretically FHSS is designed to make this a non-issue by avoiding bad (used) frequency ranges, I'm asking a question about the reality or practice of using the two together, not about the theory which the author appeals to as an argument by authority. I think I have a valid basis for at least ASKING the question, whether or not it turns out to be a real issue.
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What you are talking about is building super bacteria. This is biotechnology. I agree that scary things could be done with biotechnology, and that this is the most likely form of "nanotechnology" to be seen in the next hundred years. But it's not what most people working on "nanotechnology" are working on, nor what Drexler et. al. call nanotechnology.
I'm all for doing good things that are right. The US government should probably do more, but frankly, a LOT of money is given away purely as aid. If you still want to borrow money from the US government, that's fine, but that doesn't mean all debts should always be forgiven. The concept of blanket debt forgiveness is silly, it will just encourage more terrible borrowing and lending practices. I fail to see how this could be a good thing.
However, I likened this above to the same analogy - if your father borrows a bunch of money and squanders it, then his assets are up for grab to creditors before you inherit them. Likewise, the creditors should be able to come in and grab assets from the government (not from private citizens obviously) to pay off the loan. The reality is that if we all looked at it the way you do, and we did not hold governments responsible for any length of time longer than that of one particular regime, NOBODY in their right mind would lend a penny to a government. Of course, the US government and people have to live with the various responsibilities, debts and consequences of past leaders, but obviously those stupid third world people are not capable of assuming responsibility for anything they do. In that case, we should just come in and patronizingly determine for them how their money gets spents and make sure they don't hurt themselves.
So if your analogy were carried through, then those regimes should pay back until they have 0 dollars and 0 assets left, and then whatever remains should be cancelled.
Also note that private individual interest rates are different than the interest rates paid by countries PRECISELY because of this kind of difference in risk level. The lenders will lend to a country because they know that the lifespan of a country is long while the lifespan of an individual is unpredictable.
You only have two choices: either prevent all money from flowing out of the US (isolationism), or force better laws in China. I am all for the latter, I am just asking some one of you whiny liberals to come up with a real proposal. Others have said it: if the people are so oppressed, they ought to revolt against their oppressive government. If we can help them get their government changed or reformed, I'm all for that. If they don't want to get it changed or reformed, who am I to say they shouldn't live the way they do??
If the government in Indonesia or China is failing to protect it's citizens, then those people should rise up against the government. I know that Americans, even though we may be a bunch of fat, happy, well-fed consumerists, would never let ourselves be shit on like that, and would die to prevent it.
It is the job of a government to protect its people from slavery, forced labor, etc. and the job of a people to NEVER allow an opressive government to take over their lives. I would die for my freedom, and if these people are really being treated as you describe, I can't for the life of me imagine why they never rose up against the people treating them that way and organized a government that doesn't force its people to work as slave laborers.
I fail entirely to see what you expect the US government or other first world governments to do about this. If you want to force labor protection laws in these countries, the correct vehicle would have to be a world-wide governmental organization, a UN with vastly expanded powers. The thing is that NONE of these third world countries want that. Like I said, if what you say is true, it's the responsibility of those people or their government.
I agree with you. I'm just scoffing at the people who think that the first world countries should do all that hard work FOR the third world countries, fork over a huge chunk in taxes, just to have it handed over to third world countries, who then squander it with miraculous ease, make no progress, then DEMAND along with every whiny euro-liberal that the first world is blood-sucking the third world dry, and the first world is obligated to forgive these debts. If they didn't know what to do with the money, they shouldn't have borrowed it. Borrowing money for unproven projects is ALWAYS risky. Deal with it.
I only regret that the other rioters weren't shot too.
Yes, you have a right to PEACEFUL protest, that does not mean you can go march up to the doorstep of the G-whatever meeting and bang on the windows where the world leaders are meeting with your 10000 closest friends, many of whom are violent anarchists. As soon as you lose track of the fact that your rights only extend to peaceful protest and not to violence (unless somebody is committing violence against you, that is a somewhat different scenario), you deserve a smack down.
I'm not saying I approve of all corporate activities, a lot of them are morally despicable. But that's why we have laws. If you want to get things changed, and encourage more responsible corporate behavior, you could try making the UN something other than an anti-semitic whining camp run by third world rights violators and jealous Europeans. An effective governing body that put a real global framework of trade laws in place to force fair play on everybody - international tariffs to enforce passing equitable worker's rights laws in the third world countries that supposedly have lots of "exploited" workers, etc. etc.
Of course, no country wants to give up any portion of its sovereignty, even the weak and poor ones. Furthermore, the big problem with the UN is that since many of its members aren't representative in any way (non-democratic) the body as a whole does not necessarily represent the best interests of the people of the world.
Oh, and did I mention that many of said third world countries being so dreadfully "exploited" don't see anything wrong at all? They are getting cash infusions, their workers are employed, and they don't want to scare off the companies that are supporting local economies there. Maybe that's why it hasn't happened.
In other words, the only way to prevent corporate exploitation is to get a consensus that such a thing exists. There is no such consensus because it doesn't seem to bother those who are exploited, and the exploitation is purely voluntary in nature. The people that seem to be really bothered are the whiny protestors who go around destroying public and private property and then don't seem to understand why they are more hated than the corporations they are protesting against.
Either learn to play the game according to the rules which are quite fair, or fuck off and retreat into isolationism. Grow your own goddamned corn and feed yourselves, and build your own industrial infrastructure, and your own educational institutions, and call us in 200 years.
You can't possibly tell me "no, you and everyone else who complains is wrong". We aren't wrong, because a perceptual experience can't be "right" or "wrong". The fucking thing feels slow and unresponsive, in qualitative terms. I tried to explain in my last post why it feels that way, and how I think it could be fixed. However, since I feel that K-Meleon fixes the problem, I will keep using K-Meleon, you can keep using Mozilla and we can all appreciate Netscape's effort on this project.
Oh yes, that's a good logical argument. Do you know anything about the current state or history of the region at all? Palestinians regularly attack Israeli civilians and Israeli tanks regularly roll into areas where Palestinians live. Your analysis is beyond facile, it's not worth responding to. Get a clue, come up with a good solution and until then shut the fuck up.
Because the IRA doesn't claim that Jesus wants them to kill British civilians. They are a blatantly nationalist organization. The fact that they are Catholic is more or less incidental. Al Qaeda on the other hand talks about killing the Jews (the "Little Satan", Israel) and the evil supporters of Zionism, the US (the "Big Satan"). Given that everything is couched in terms of religious extremism, it's fairly natural to characterize them as _muslim_ extremists. The IRA are Irish nationalist extremists, first and foremost. David Koresh was a Christian extremist - a religious nutcase who killed people and hoarded arms on the basis of an extreme interpretation of the Bible.
The Barak deal was a fair one. It's better than what they have now, which is nothing. They aren't going to get better than that. Of course Israel is going to control the borders - they don't want terrorist bombers sneaking in. What the hell would you do?
As for the settlements, I agree that some of them are questionable and perhaps should go away. I don't support taking people's homes or throwing them off their land (either Palestinians or Israelis). This could have been worked out in some way when a peace plan was on the table. Now there is nothing on the table and almost no hope of getting it there. Barak was willing to deal, Arafat wasn't. It's that simple.
There is also an annoying lag between the interaction with a XUL widget and the side effect that doesn't happen with native widgets on any platform. This is even true in K-Meleon, with text boxes on certain pages (I press a key and there is a substantial lag before the character appears). Again, maybe bad use of threading, maybe something else.
I don't think these issues are unsolvable, but I think you have to be VERY unaware of the user experience with your applications to NOT notice that Mozilla is substantially different than all your native apps, and probably worse in several ways (and I've been a Mozilla user, bug filer and even occasional fixer since around M11).
If you try K-Meleon and compare it to IE I think you'll find that the Gecko engine is not vastly different in performance from IE. Yes, some types of pages are faster in IE and some are faster in Gecko, depending on bandwidth and latency factors, your processor speed, amount of RAM on your computer, and # and type of widgets on page. On anything that's a PIII 700 or faster (like my Athlon 1200 at home) I can't really notice the difference subjectively, and it's clearly no more than a factor of 1.5x-2x in either direction in most normal scenarios.
The _feel_ of Mozilla the browser is a big problem, XUL just does not feel natural or responsive - a lot of Mozilla hardcore fans won't agree that there is a problem with XUL, and I can't quantify it meaningfully or say "it's slow", but it's more that the interface tends to freeze up or stop rendering when the engine is busy. I think it could be worked around and XUL could be made to work well in practice, but it just isn't 100% usable right now.
If you tried K-Meleon 0.1 or 0.2 and thought "gee this would be great if it actually supported cookies and had some configurable options and felt like more than a toy" then check out 0.6. Actually, it's been quite usable for a couple of releases now, and 0.6 seems as good as ever. Yes, I still use IE sometimes, but unlike my repeated attempts to wean myself to Mozilla that inevitably end in me getting sick of the poor UI response times and rendering freezes in Mozilla, I can actually get used to the snappy K-Meleon look and feel.
No, it's not perfect or bugless, and it still isn't quite as pretty or slick looking as IE, but it is nice to see how fast and responsive a Gecko based browser can be when the entire UI isn't getting rendered from XUL, and it's nice to have a real native browser alternative on Windows.
And neither is Arafat. He is directly responsible for what is going on right now. This second Intifada was started by his failure to negotiate with Barak when a deal was on the table which would have brought peace and Palestinian statehood. The deal was rejected, the violence started, then Sharon was elected. Get it? The Israeli people are saying "if you don't want peace, then we will protect ourselves at all costs." I don't think they like Sharon either, but this is what Arafat has brought on them. The Israelis should NOT stand by while Palestinian terrorists attack Israeli targets, and suggesting otherwise is insulting as well as moronic. As for the settlements, I don't believe that they are being extended, nor is any land being taken to make room for them (certainly not now), but it's not particularly more right to suggest the Israelis living there should be kicked out than anybody else at this point.
Furthermore, we have to be a bit understanding - the Israelis tried to put a deal on the table to GIVE the Palestinians statehood and peace when Barak was in power. The response was the current Intifada2, which now has the whiny Europeans and even sometimes George Bush condemning the Israelis for defending themselves. I don't support the killing of civilians by Israeli troops, but this time, I have to say the conflict causing the casualties was reignited almost entirely by the Palestinians. Arafat should have negotiated when he had the chance. Should innocent civilians on either side die as a result of Arafat's blunder? No, it's not fair, but such is the nature of war.
So rather than complaining about our government doing its job to represent our people's interests, you should get together with everyone else out there who feels wronged and strengthen the UN and world trade agreements and force the US to play nice by rules that everyone can mutually agree upon and are maximally fair to all.
But if the US doesn't respond to the standard whiny eurotrash/third world resident attitude don't be surprised : "fund the third world countries, give us money and forgive our debt, then pay us reparations for being evil and creating guns and weapons and selling them to us with the money you gave us, etc. blah blah blah". Look, you should have been looking out for your own interests before - why do you expect a free lunch? That's not the job of other countries, your OWN country needs to represent your interests as well as the US does for its own citizens (I'm mostly happy except for this fucking DMCA shit which I'm fighting to get repealed here).
As soon as you bring hints of moral relativism into the equation, anybody can argue anything. If the Taliban isn't wrong to force isolationism and a despotic, islamist regime on their own people, how is it more wrong for us to force freedom and democracy on them? Just because the Taliban consists of other Arabs and Afghanis (no, they aren't all Afghanis in Al Qaeda OR the Taliban)? Why is it more okay for an ethnic Pashtun to force his radicalist religious interpretation on a moderate ethnic Tajik in Afghanistan than it is for the US to enforce freedom?
Anyway, this kind of argument goes nowhere. Eschew moral relativism, make some decisions up front, then let's talk.
No, he said _validating_ XML parsers. If you want to validate that in fact a document matches a DTD or a Schema you do have to read the entire document. You can have a validating SAX parser by the way (though it doesn't really make sense to me to do so), though the most simple SAX parsers don't validate the document structure, they just fire events into the event handler. Clearly, validation is a more logical concept with DOM-style parsing, as you are building an in-memory tree representation of the document.
The problem is that this is more or less dictated by the genericity of X - the widget sets have to be rendered on the server because widgets aren't part of X itself, but rather are tacked on top of X. Some argue this makes X flexible, you can have GTK+ widgets, Athena/XAW widgets, Qt widgets, etc. It may be possible to tack some other egregious hack on top of the current X window system, and if widgets are available on the client then render them there with far lighter messages, like you said. But then you basically aren't using the X protocol anymore.
Also X has so many extensions and egregious hacks already in place (Xrender/Xft font crap for anti-aliasing, the direct multimedia extension - whatever it's called), that adding more just makes my skin squirm.
The fact is that 1-bit bitmaps for fonts doesn't hack it these days, rendering widgets on the (X-client) server side is slow and the concept of entirely separating widgets from the windowing environment is not beneficial for remote usage of GUI apps nor for consistency of look and feel as a whole. These are required features for a modern graphical environment, and BeOS and MacOSX do this well. Windows also does this well, even though it sucks in many ways. And this lets WTS beat the pants off of X for remote display, and lets Windows beat X for local windowing operations (this is an empirical statement based on my observations and not something I can prove meaningfully to you).
It's at least enough of a real concern that people are studying it in an academic environment and presenting results on it to IEEE forums.
I also found this one, which is substantially more informative and complete:
http://www.wi-fi.com/downloads/Coexistence_Paper_
So yes, I understand that theoretically FHSS is designed to make this a non-issue by avoiding bad (used) frequency ranges, I'm asking a question about the reality or practice of using the two together, not about the theory which the author appeals to as an argument by authority. I think I have a valid basis for at least ASKING the question, whether or not it turns out to be a real issue.