The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people
Firstly, this is the perfect way to protect the environment. It's kinda like protecting a PC from internet hackers and virii (not viruses, n00bs) by unplugging it and hiding it in a bunker somewhere. Sure, it's pretty trollish, but it IS a solution, and it certainly is final.
backslashdot had a lot of good points -
Expensive energy is the root cause of global poverty
Well, it is. How much food do you think Africa would be able to grow if they had infinite energy to fertizlize and cultivate their soil? How much would goods cost if the energy needed to ship them was negligible? If you count the costs of pollution control in with the cost of power, having the cheapest power possible maces environmental sense, too.
only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting
Of course. The easiest and cheapest way to make electricity - something any nation needs if it wants to creep its way out of poverty - is to burn coal (or anything, really) - and environmental regulations be damned. Saving the environment costs MONEY - making/using cleaner coal, building more efficient plants, using solar/nuclear/etc. And if protecting the environment costs money how is any poor nation supposed to have a clean environment?
Unless, of course, you do like your world starving and poor while you sit comfortably in front of a computer demonizing the power used by said computer, running your mouth on slashdot.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, I think every peasant in China becoming excessively wealthy would be a good thing. I'm generally against starvation, brutality, and the unnecessary suffering and toil inflicted upon them by a backwards government. So, yes, that would be great.
If they could all afford gas-guzzling SUVs, the gas that they guzzle, the power for all those 300 watt bulbs, the year-round climate control, and enough pollution controls to keep their air breathable, I would be all for it - for that means the average peasant has left poverty and become exceedingly wealthy.
Tell me, do you like seeing them making a subsistence living, mired in poverty, unrepresented in government, with no hope of escape? Even if you assume that a decent standard of living would fill their air with smog and pollutants and particulates and hellspawn and immolated puppies, I think they would much rather deal with pollution than starvation.
Tell me, would you rather face starvation on a daily basis, or suffer through the horror of SUV ownership?
Other countries don't get to decide the prices of China's goods. The PRC heavily regulates its commerce and fixes the price of its currency to make its products artificially competitive price-wise. Even if China magically became free-market capitalist overnight, the manufacturers decide prices they want to sell at. So, we can't exactly say "charge us more for goods so that you can have proper environmental regulation."
Of course, we could just send the PRC a giant check and tell them to pollute less. Even if we assume absolutely zero corruption (no winter dachas) and that 100% of the money actually went to environmental regulation, why should we subsidize China's practice of putting money before its ecology? They sacrifice their environment to glean a bit more $money out of foreign markets - and now we want to HELP them do that?
The point: China inflicts this upon itself, with the government putting its own nationalistic agenda ahead of the health of its people. It's not that we won't pay them enough; it's that their leadership has other priorities, such as amassing a giant army in peacetime, threatening Taiwan, and conducting cooperative military "exercises" with Russia.
No amount of money would fix this, nor should we fund environmental programs that China should be funding itself like every other modern nation on the planet.
You people all seem to have forgotten about nerds - the geeks who are either unaware or in denial of their geekery. Although they may be able to function normally in society ("functional nerds") one must treat these with extra caution as feeding them will make them lose their natural fear of humanity and encourage them to encroach on what is normally "human" territory.
Remember, while geeks are generally "smart" - understand computers, science, math, etc. - nerds are generally dumb and into Yu-Gi-Oh, pokemon, and debating the winner of the fantasy bout of Picard v. Kirk v. Darth Vader. Be careful not to confuse geeks and nerds, for soon a holy war shall start between these two technology-controlling factions of the planet, and the world will end when the inevitable fighting takes place in our internet backbones, financial systems, and military mainframes.
The only way to avoid this catastrophe is to provide proper "Geek or Nerd?" training to employers, namely H.R. and recruiters, and to lock the nerds safely away in a dark cave, so that the peaceful geek shall roam wild and free through a verdant pasture of green clover, swimming among daffodils, unicorns, and leprechaun's tails.
And my point is NOT that money would enlighten the slavers. My point was that there would eventually be more slavers chasing money than workers, and to get anyone to work in their sweatshop, they would have to pay more. If there are 50 workers in town, and two sweatshops need 50 workers each to run, what are they going to do? They would have to pay each worker more, or otherwise they'd work at the other sweatshop. Wages increase as a third, and fourth slaver move in - they're all competing for the same workers. So, the greed of the slavers made them each open competing sweatshops, driving up the cost of labor. Economics 101 - where before labor was plentiful and cheap, it is now scarce and expensive. In the king's English, a profitable industry is one with high(er) wages.
So, regardless the label applied to an industry, let's make sure that the industies of impoverished nations are profitable. Boycotting because wages are too low will not magically create better conditions, but rather, the opposite. Support your sweatshops!
Hrm... Think of factory conditions in this way, if you would:
We should buy as much from possible from sweatshops to increase the wages of their workers.
Stop laughing >.<
Firstly, if we buy a lot from sweatshops, that would mean there would be massive $money to be made in sweatshoppery. Opportunistic taskmasters would open their own sweatshops, wanting their own peace of the pie. And, they'll want "workers," too. Eventually, the sweatshops will run out of workers to exploit, and would have to, gasp, pay them more in order to grab workers away from competitors. By putting a sufficiently large carrot in front of the taskmasters, their own greed will help the impoverished. Spooky, eh?
Also remember, that in countries that can barely feed themselves, their idea of a "living wage" is completely different.
Also, what would happened if we all stopped buying from sweatshops? They'd be shut down, of course, and yay, we liberated the poor, starving serfs earning diddly/squat per hour. Of course, that means that they're now making $0 per hour, because we just killed their one source of income and only chance of feeding their family, as feeble as was.
Although sweatshops are deplorable, they are the first babysteps towards a modern economy. We have to learn to balance humanitarian issues with economic ones. How would you rather spend your money? Would you rather a small portion of it drops into the pockets of the starving and impoverished or would you rather give a large chunk of it towards unskilled, over-privileged, unionized button-pressers?
Yay! <3! I thought I was the *only* nerd alive who knew Z80 asm. I mean, it's the only way to go if you want to write calculator games...
...and hence, why calculator games should be the intro programming class. I mean, really, it's something most n00b programmers want to do, it teaches from the ground up (no "omfg wtf si t3h piontr wtf" later on) and it'll give a proper appreciation of of why efficient coding is important. It would also weed out those hooligans who think computer science is just an easier way to get a math credit than learning math...
Lawl, thanks. I'm an anal-retentive nitpicker, so your pointer is appreciated.:-D Printf is a function, and cout is an instance of an ostream, I think. It's just that basic_ostreams and multiple-inheritances turn me on...
Everyone here seems to be under the impression that Visual Studio hides the source/nuts and bolts/inner workings from you. It doesn't. You can program assembly and K&R C if you so wish. (Using Visual Basic/J++/C# is a different thing, but that's more of an argument against those languages than Visual Studio.)
Granted, you can draw a dialog box by hand, but you can also create that dialog by assigning an HWND to point to the result of a CreateWindowEx(). You can also manually code your own.rc resource scripts and use the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro. Do whatever makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, but don't say Visual Studio is t3h n00b! shift+1
Here I was, thinking you were talking about the little text file on a CD-ROM, and not Windows' mangled USB device support. If it bothers you that much, click "do nothing" and check "always do this action."
But, I believe the bigger problem is why it bothers you...
C isn't "complicated." It's just that BASIC is retarded. I mean, really, in the "real world," you will never have to make a starry background. C (and especially C++) allow the perfect mixture of high- and low-level elements. In fact, in C++, you can mix machine language and derived classes in the same function if you were so inclined.
And, *no*, you do not have to understand anything about rendering black or whatever. No Fourier transforms or 11-dimension existentialism either. (The only "strings" for you are null-terminated char arrays!)
Anyway, your code in C:
#include <iostream>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
using namespace std;
int main(int* argc, char** argv) {
srand( (unsigned)time(NULL));
for (;;)
if ( rand() % 100 == 1)
cout << '.';
else
cout << ' ';
return 0;
}
Written in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, by the way. Sorry for the formatting, the <pre> tag is evidently disabled in slashdot
Not really that much more complicated. Just a few more lines, most of that formatting to be pleasing to the eye. Not only that, but it's faster and provides more flexibility. What if you don't want to seed the random number generator and want the same numbers each time? Very useful for debugging more sophisticated programs. What if you want input from the command prompt to determine the number of loop iterations, or the frequency of "stars?" No problem in C/C++.
So, the point: Sure it's a few lines longer, but it's
Faster.
Stronger.
Better.
And, most importantly, it's not using a dead, worthless language.
And, at the end of this post, *god* do I need to take a deep, cleansing breath and lay off the zealotry.:-D I guess my point is that there is definately no need of "rendering black."
And, barriers to entry are good. It keeps stupid n00bs out of my programming classes.:-D
90% of people *are* total asshats, as well as idiots. But remember, idiots think that we are idiots. In fact, if there's no difference between the two groups, how do we if we're idiots or not? I mean, if we were idiots, we'd have no way of knowing by virtue of our idiocy.
As for dying sad and lonely... People who despise humanity congregate. As, ironically, do anti-social people. Just remember that most people are best avoided and the trick is to surround yourself with those both likeable and compitent.
You realize a faster version of your program would be:
for(;;)
printf("Fuck You");
'Cuz, ya see, your compiler might otherwise generate code to compare 1 with true, whereas the empty for header has no such overhead. Y'see, that's 'cuz IntelliSense is is GOD.
You realize that the vast majority of people who use Open Office (namely, all of them) will never be Microsoft customers? In fact, many of them want Microsoft dead. How are they customers? And how is their demand "customer demand?"
Y'know, rather than just flame every Linux user (I'll get you all eventually:-D) and every Mac user (all five of you:-D) I might just start submitting some Microsoft stories.... Haha, my goal is to now get a WHOLE THREAD devoted to flames against *me*! Support my flame-me cause!
I spent 15 minutes yesterday trying to disable autoplay (for all drives, not just the cdrom) in Windows. In the end I had search on the internet to find the solution, download a program and do some very non-intuitive stuff.
Uh... correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't autoplay *only* supported on CD-ROMs anyway? And why the heck would you download a program to disable it? Or, if it bothers you that much and you can't figure out one of the simplest GUIs ever devised, you can hold down SHIFT to bypass autoplay.
Jesus kills a puppy every day someone can't figure out how to use Windows...
When I have to use Windows it's unfamiliar and illogical
And... how have you lived and not used Windows? Whether you like it or not, it's everywhere, and somehow you're complaining that you've managed to remain ignorant for so long...
Sure, it's slashdot, but yeesh, if you don't like Windows, don't use it. If you have to use Windows, learn how. Yeesh, my dad doesn't have problems with it. (He can even use a DOS prompt!) My grandparents know how to use Windows, and my grandmother writes and publishes novels from her desktop. Yeesh, some octogenarians deserve a nerd badge more than you...
Malware and virii are evil. Your for and return statements are not plotting to take over the world, though. They just sit around, waiting to be turned into native code for the CPU to crunch.
So, programmers and programs can be evil. Code isn't, be it open or closed source.
From what the article said, it only affects balance, i.e., you walk to the right because the electrical stimulation inside your ear makes you feel as though your balance is off. I s'pose that by wearing t3h headgear, someone could make you walk off a cliff... or stamp an embarrassing message into the sand.... or make you fall down.
The API is a great tool for them because it prevents competition
Err... the API in and of itself does not stifle competition. It's an Applications Programming Interface - it just allows you to write Windows programs (with the cool titlebar an' everything), and a fancy acronym for a set of functions designed to let your program talk to Windows.
I doubt it since MS is in the process of throwing it (the API) away anyway
Not *exactly* true. Granted, Windows Vista is using Avalon instead of the API to create a 3D GUI needing a 256MB video card to render. However, because the Windows API has been around since the dawn of time (by "dawn of time" I mean "Windows 3.1") it's unlikely to go away soon, and is still supported by Vista. Remember, every Windows program for the past decade has been written with the API, and no-one's going to throw it away and break every Window's app in existence.
I don't think anybody in the open source world is afraid of it
Just flaming again.:P From what I've seen, open-sourcers are quite competent coders, and mastery of the API is not above any competent programmer's understanding. It *is* a pain, but it's just a new programming paradigm - in Soviet Union (Windows 95 and up) your program doesn't call Windows, Windows calls you(r program)!
And, Office generates more revenue than Windows. Cheers, and bow down to the Microsoft Zealot!
Despite generally being stubborn, Microsoft does bend when it's in its benefit. Remember t3h "glory days" of Windows 95? They were pushing their own communications standard incompatible with TCP/IP. However, when they were getting left out in the cold, they adopted TCP/IP and shipped it with Windows.
My point is that Microsoft's primary source of income is Microsoft Office, as Office promotes Windows. Nice synergies. Open-sourcing something would vastly increase the number of the masses using the software (as opposed to charging great $money). As soon as it becomes cost effectiveMicrosoft will support OPEN SOURCE, if only to increase the distribution of one of their OS or Office platforms.
<THE POINT> Microsoft will do all it can to benefit open source, as soon as its profitable. And that will be the golden age of open source, because when its profitable for Microsoft it will be profitable for all companies and damned near everything will be open source.
Ever think that all open-sourcey people might just be scared of the Windows API?:-D
Oh, and I am a proud Microsoft Zealot, although don't have anything against Linux. Let the best OS and the best coders win.
What was that, Addain? I thought that code in and of itself was neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Lollercost, here I was thinking it was just human-readable instructions to a interpreter/compiler. I suppose closed source might be evil, insofar that "they" (the man, or men? Penguins, maybe.... shift+1) would force only evil source to close itself...
But then again, you could just be a zealot nerd (not affiliated with myself, of course) who believes that anyone trying to make money is somehow evil. This is worse than when you commies flouridated our water to weaken our resolve and corrupt our youth. >.<
I'm sorry. If Bill Gates molestered you when you were young, I shouldn't mock your psychological trauma. </flame>
Anyway..... I still don't get the "holy-war" thing. The instant MICRO$OFT Windows stops being worth $money++, people will stop paying $money and get Linux, or whatever alternatives there are. I mean, it would be a great day for both camps to admit that Windows is a good desktop OS and that Linux runs servers goodly. Then the healing could begin. Heck, if both Windows and Linux camps keep acting so extreme, everyone may just get pissed off and buy a Mac.... And then I'd have to hunt you down.:-D I have my own holy war against Apple to wage....
By the way, can anyone tell me if the W3C deprecated the <flame> tag for some kinda stylesheet? I'd like to know for future rants, 'k thx
"Going Green" would be nice, but in most cases (with current technology) it would be bad for the environment. Namely:
Hydrogen sucks. As of yet, we lack a good source of hydrogen, meaning it has to be refined from another source. The energy for this refinement would have to come from traditional fuel sources,meaning approximately the same quantity of fuel would be burned anyway.
Hybrids suck. In fact, hybrid cars are so expensive that it takes YEARS to recover the purchase cost in gas savings. The instant they become more cost effective is the same instant that they do something meaningful other than allow auto manufacturers to tap a niche market.
Solar power is cool for small applications, like creating hot water and a warm indoor environment. Solar-powered cars have not yet been practical in any way, shape, or form.
Good luck with the nuclear car, the geothermal car, the ocean-currents car (boat?), the hydroelectric car(disposable boat?), etc., etc.:-D
As for the companies listed, aren't most of them (near) bankruptcy? GM's bonds are rated as "junk," for example, and they've posted a loss of ~$4 billion, give or take. (Remember, $4 billion has a lot of zeroes.) How are they going to subsidize an ill-fated green movement? And isn't the SUV's newfound lack of popularity a sign of such a green movement?
If anyone has a more practical "green movement" I'd love to hear it. I admit that I haven't kept up on the bleeding-edge green technology, so I'd be very appreciative of hearing of any advance towards a comercially-viable solution I am ignorant of.
Please don't eat my soul.
Slashdot Mirror
The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people
Firstly, this is the perfect way to protect the environment. It's kinda like protecting a PC from internet hackers and virii (not viruses, n00bs) by unplugging it and hiding it in a bunker somewhere. Sure, it's pretty trollish, but it IS a solution, and it certainly is final.
backslashdot had a lot of good points -
Expensive energy is the root cause of global poverty
Well, it is. How much food do you think Africa would be able to grow if they had infinite energy to fertizlize and cultivate their soil? How much would goods cost if the energy needed to ship them was negligible? If you count the costs of pollution control in with the cost of power, having the cheapest power possible maces environmental sense, too.
only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting
Of course. The easiest and cheapest way to make electricity - something any nation needs if it wants to creep its way out of poverty - is to burn coal (or anything, really) - and environmental regulations be damned. Saving the environment costs MONEY - making/using cleaner coal, building more efficient plants, using solar/nuclear/etc. And if protecting the environment costs money how is any poor nation supposed to have a clean environment?
Unless, of course, you do like your world starving and poor while you sit comfortably in front of a computer demonizing the power used by said computer, running your mouth on slashdot.
Yes, I think every peasant in China becoming excessively wealthy would be a good thing. I'm generally against starvation, brutality, and the unnecessary suffering and toil inflicted upon them by a backwards government. So, yes, that would be great.
If they could all afford gas-guzzling SUVs, the gas that they guzzle, the power for all those 300 watt bulbs, the year-round climate control, and enough pollution controls to keep their air breathable, I would be all for it - for that means the average peasant has left poverty and become exceedingly wealthy.
Tell me, do you like seeing them making a subsistence living, mired in poverty, unrepresented in government, with no hope of escape? Even if you assume that a decent standard of living would fill their air with smog and pollutants and particulates and hellspawn and immolated puppies, I think they would much rather deal with pollution than starvation.
Tell me, would you rather face starvation on a daily basis, or suffer through the horror of SUV ownership?
Other countries don't get to decide the prices of China's goods. The PRC heavily regulates its commerce and fixes the price of its currency to make its products artificially competitive price-wise. Even if China magically became free-market capitalist overnight, the manufacturers decide prices they want to sell at. So, we can't exactly say "charge us more for goods so that you can have proper environmental regulation."
Of course, we could just send the PRC a giant check and tell them to pollute less. Even if we assume absolutely zero corruption (no winter dachas) and that 100% of the money actually went to environmental regulation, why should we subsidize China's practice of putting money before its ecology? They sacrifice their environment to glean a bit more $money out of foreign markets - and now we want to HELP them do that?
The point: China inflicts this upon itself, with the government putting its own nationalistic agenda ahead of the health of its people. It's not that we won't pay them enough; it's that their leadership has other priorities, such as amassing a giant army in peacetime, threatening Taiwan, and conducting cooperative military "exercises" with Russia.
No amount of money would fix this, nor should we fund environmental programs that China should be funding itself like every other modern nation on the planet.
You people all seem to have forgotten about nerds - the geeks who are either unaware or in denial of their geekery. Although they may be able to function normally in society ("functional nerds") one must treat these with extra caution as feeding them will make them lose their natural fear of humanity and encourage them to encroach on what is normally "human" territory.
Remember, while geeks are generally "smart" - understand computers, science, math, etc. - nerds are generally dumb and into Yu-Gi-Oh, pokemon, and debating the winner of the fantasy bout of Picard v. Kirk v. Darth Vader. Be careful not to confuse geeks and nerds, for soon a holy war shall start between these two technology-controlling factions of the planet, and the world will end when the inevitable fighting takes place in our internet backbones, financial systems, and military mainframes.
The only way to avoid this catastrophe is to provide proper "Geek or Nerd?" training to employers, namely H.R. and recruiters, and to lock the nerds safely away in a dark cave, so that the peaceful geek shall roam wild and free through a verdant pasture of green clover, swimming among daffodils, unicorns, and leprechaun's tails.
Act now shift+1
And my point is NOT that money would enlighten the slavers. My point was that there would eventually be more slavers chasing money than workers, and to get anyone to work in their sweatshop, they would have to pay more. If there are 50 workers in town, and two sweatshops need 50 workers each to run, what are they going to do? They would have to pay each worker more, or otherwise they'd work at the other sweatshop. Wages increase as a third, and fourth slaver move in - they're all competing for the same workers. So, the greed of the slavers made them each open competing sweatshops, driving up the cost of labor. Economics 101 - where before labor was plentiful and cheap, it is now scarce and expensive. In the king's English, a profitable industry is one with high(er) wages.
So, regardless the label applied to an industry, let's make sure that the industies of impoverished nations are profitable. Boycotting because wages are too low will not magically create better conditions, but rather, the opposite. Support your sweatshops!
Hrm... Think of factory conditions in this way, if you would:
We should buy as much from possible from sweatshops to increase the wages of their workers.
Stop laughing >.<
Firstly, if we buy a lot from sweatshops, that would mean there would be massive $money to be made in sweatshoppery. Opportunistic taskmasters would open their own sweatshops, wanting their own peace of the pie. And, they'll want "workers," too. Eventually, the sweatshops will run out of workers to exploit, and would have to, gasp, pay them more in order to grab workers away from competitors. By putting a sufficiently large carrot in front of the taskmasters, their own greed will help the impoverished. Spooky, eh?
Also remember, that in countries that can barely feed themselves, their idea of a "living wage" is completely different.
Also, what would happened if we all stopped buying from sweatshops? They'd be shut down, of course, and yay, we liberated the poor, starving serfs earning diddly/squat per hour. Of course, that means that they're now making $0 per hour, because we just killed their one source of income and only chance of feeding their family, as feeble as was.
Although sweatshops are deplorable, they are the first babysteps towards a modern economy. We have to learn to balance humanitarian issues with economic ones. How would you rather spend your money? Would you rather a small portion of it drops into the pockets of the starving and impoverished or would you rather give a large chunk of it towards unskilled, over-privileged, unionized button-pressers?
Yay! <3! I thought I was the *only* nerd alive who knew Z80 asm. I mean, it's the only way to go if you want to write calculator games...
...and hence, why calculator games should be the intro programming class. I mean, really, it's something most n00b programmers want to do, it teaches from the ground up (no "omfg wtf si t3h piontr wtf" later on) and it'll give a proper appreciation of of why efficient coding is important. It would also weed out those hooligans who think computer science is just an easier way to get a math credit than learning math...
Lawl, thanks. I'm an anal-retentive nitpicker, so your pointer is appreciated. :-D Printf is a function, and cout is an instance of an ostream, I think. It's just that basic_ostreams and multiple-inheritances turn me on...
Everyone here seems to be under the impression that Visual Studio hides the source/nuts and bolts/inner workings from you. It doesn't. You can program assembly and K&R C if you so wish. (Using Visual Basic/J++/C# is a different thing, but that's more of an argument against those languages than Visual Studio.)
Granted, you can draw a dialog box by hand, but you can also create that dialog by assigning an HWND to point to the result of a CreateWindowEx(). You can also manually code your own .rc resource scripts and use the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro. Do whatever makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, but don't say Visual Studio is t3h n00b! shift+1
Haha, my first flame war! Hooray for me! :-D
Here I was, thinking you were talking about the little text file on a CD-ROM, and not Windows' mangled USB device support. If it bothers you that much, click "do nothing" and check "always do this action."
But, I believe the bigger problem is why it bothers you...
C isn't "complicated." It's just that BASIC is retarded. I mean, really, in the "real world," you will never have to make a starry background. C (and especially C++) allow the perfect mixture of high- and low-level elements. In fact, in C++, you can mix machine language and derived classes in the same function if you were so inclined.
And, *no*, you do not have to understand anything about rendering black or whatever. No Fourier transforms or 11-dimension existentialism either. (The only "strings" for you are null-terminated char arrays!)
Anyway, your code in C:
Written in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, by the way. Sorry for the formatting, the <pre> tag is evidently disabled in slashdot
Not really that much more complicated. Just a few more lines, most of that formatting to be pleasing to the eye. Not only that, but it's faster and provides more flexibility. What if you don't want to seed the random number generator and want the same numbers each time? Very useful for debugging more sophisticated programs. What if you want input from the command prompt to determine the number of loop iterations, or the frequency of "stars?" No problem in C/C++.
So, the point: Sure it's a few lines longer, but it's
- Faster.
- Stronger.
- Better.
And, most importantly, it's not using a dead, worthless language.And, at the end of this post, *god* do I need to take a deep, cleansing breath and lay off the zealotry. :-D I guess my point is that there is definately no need of "rendering black."
And, barriers to entry are good. It keeps stupid n00bs out of my programming classes. :-D
Peace.
90% of people *are* total asshats, as well as idiots. But remember, idiots think that we are idiots. In fact, if there's no difference between the two groups, how do we if we're idiots or not? I mean, if we were idiots, we'd have no way of knowing by virtue of our idiocy.
As for dying sad and lonely... People who despise humanity congregate. As, ironically, do anti-social people. Just remember that most people are best avoided and the trick is to surround yourself with those both likeable and compitent.
You realize a faster version of your program would be:
'Cuz, ya see, your compiler might otherwise generate code to compare 1 with true, whereas the empty for header has no such overhead. Y'see, that's 'cuz IntelliSense is is GOD.
You realize that the vast majority of people who use Open Office (namely, all of them) will never be Microsoft customers? In fact, many of them want Microsoft dead. How are they customers? And how is their demand "customer demand?"
Y'know, rather than just flame every Linux user (I'll get you all eventually :-D) and every Mac user (all five of you :-D) I might just start submitting some Microsoft stories.... Haha, my goal is to now get a WHOLE THREAD devoted to flames against *me*! Support my flame-me cause!
I spent 15 minutes yesterday trying to disable autoplay (for all drives, not just the cdrom) in Windows. In the end I had search on the internet to find the solution, download a program and do some very non-intuitive stuff.
Uh... correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't autoplay *only* supported on CD-ROMs anyway? And why the heck would you download a program to disable it? Or, if it bothers you that much and you can't figure out one of the simplest GUIs ever devised, you can hold down SHIFT to bypass autoplay.
Jesus kills a puppy every day someone can't figure out how to use Windows...
When I have to use Windows it's unfamiliar and illogical
And... how have you lived and not used Windows? Whether you like it or not, it's everywhere, and somehow you're complaining that you've managed to remain ignorant for so long...
Sure, it's slashdot, but yeesh, if you don't like Windows, don't use it. If you have to use Windows, learn how. Yeesh, my dad doesn't have problems with it. (He can even use a DOS prompt!) My grandparents know how to use Windows, and my grandmother writes and publishes novels from her desktop. Yeesh, some octogenarians deserve a nerd badge more than you...
Malware and virii are evil. Your for and return statements are not plotting to take over the world, though. They just sit around, waiting to be turned into native code for the CPU to crunch.
So, programmers and programs can be evil. Code isn't, be it open or closed source.
From what the article said, it only affects balance, i.e., you walk to the right because the electrical stimulation inside your ear makes you feel as though your balance is off. I s'pose that by wearing t3h headgear, someone could make you walk off a cliff... or stamp an embarrassing message into the sand.... or make you fall down.
Don't use headphones from strangers! :-D
The API is a great tool for them because it prevents competition
Err... the API in and of itself does not stifle competition. It's an Applications Programming Interface - it just allows you to write Windows programs (with the cool titlebar an' everything), and a fancy acronym for a set of functions designed to let your program talk to Windows.
I doubt it since MS is in the process of throwing it (the API) away anyway
Not *exactly* true. Granted, Windows Vista is using Avalon instead of the API to create a 3D GUI needing a 256MB video card to render. However, because the Windows API has been around since the dawn of time (by "dawn of time" I mean "Windows 3.1") it's unlikely to go away soon, and is still supported by Vista. Remember, every Windows program for the past decade has been written with the API, and no-one's going to throw it away and break every Window's app in existence.
I don't think anybody in the open source world is afraid of it
Just flaming again. :P From what I've seen, open-sourcers are quite competent coders, and mastery of the API is not above any competent programmer's understanding. It *is* a pain, but it's just a new programming paradigm - in Soviet Union (Windows 95 and up) your program doesn't call Windows, Windows calls you(r program)!
And, Office generates more revenue than Windows. Cheers, and bow down to the Microsoft Zealot!
Or, just don't eat his soul.
Good point. Google's rumored free, online Office app could cripple Microsoft. Sure, once again, no revenue, but more text ads.
And, anyone who's seen Googlezon knows that Google and Amazon are not competing. :-D
Once again, don't eat my soul.Despite generally being stubborn, Microsoft does bend when it's in its benefit. Remember t3h "glory days" of Windows 95? They were pushing their own communications standard incompatible with TCP/IP. However, when they were getting left out in the cold, they adopted TCP/IP and shipped it with Windows.
My point is that Microsoft's primary source of income is Microsoft Office, as Office promotes Windows. Nice synergies. Open-sourcing something would vastly increase the number of the masses using the software (as opposed to charging great $money). As soon as it becomes cost effective Microsoft will support OPEN SOURCE, if only to increase the distribution of one of their OS or Office platforms.
<THE POINT> Microsoft will do all it can to benefit open source, as soon as its profitable. And that will be the golden age of open source, because when its profitable for Microsoft it will be profitable for all companies and damned near everything will be open source.
Ever think that all open-sourcey people might just be scared of the Windows API? :-D
Oh, and I am a proud Microsoft Zealot, although don't have anything against Linux. Let the best OS and the best coders win.
LOL, so was mine. I assume that all people here are kidding/joking until proven otherwise. I mean, really, who could like open source! :-D
What was that, Addain? I thought that code in and of itself was neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Lollercost, here I was thinking it was just human-readable instructions to a interpreter/compiler. I suppose closed source might be evil, insofar that "they" (the man, or men? Penguins, maybe.... shift+1) would force only evil source to close itself...
But then again, you could just be a zealot nerd (not affiliated with myself, of course) who believes that anyone trying to make money is somehow evil. This is worse than when you commies flouridated our water to weaken our resolve and corrupt our youth. >.<
I'm sorry. If Bill Gates molestered you when you were young, I shouldn't mock your psychological trauma. </flame>
Anyway..... I still don't get the "holy-war" thing. The instant MICRO$OFT Windows stops being worth $money++, people will stop paying $money and get Linux, or whatever alternatives there are. I mean, it would be a great day for both camps to admit that Windows is a good desktop OS and that Linux runs servers goodly. Then the healing could begin. Heck, if both Windows and Linux camps keep acting so extreme, everyone may just get pissed off and buy a Mac.... And then I'd have to hunt you down. :-D I have my own holy war against Apple to wage....
By the way, can anyone tell me if the W3C deprecated the <flame> tag for some kinda stylesheet? I'd like to know for future rants, 'k thx
Please don't eat my soul <3 moderators
- Hydrogen sucks. As of yet, we lack a good source of hydrogen, meaning it has to be refined from another source. The energy for this refinement would have to come from traditional fuel sources
,meaning approximately the same quantity of fuel would be burned anyway.
- Hybrids suck. In fact, hybrid cars are so expensive that it takes YEARS to recover the purchase cost in gas savings. The instant they become more cost effective is the same instant that they do something meaningful other than allow auto manufacturers to tap a niche market.
- Solar power is cool for small applications, like creating hot water and a warm indoor environment. Solar-powered cars have not yet been practical in any way, shape, or form.
- Good luck with the nuclear car, the geothermal car, the ocean-currents car (boat?), the hydroelectric car(disposable boat?), etc., etc.
:-D
As for the companies listed, aren't most of them (near) bankruptcy? GM's bonds are rated as "junk," for example, and they've posted a loss of ~$4 billion, give or take. (Remember, $4 billion has a lot of zeroes.) How are they going to subsidize an ill-fated green movement? And isn't the SUV's newfound lack of popularity a sign of such a green movement? If anyone has a more practical "green movement" I'd love to hear it. I admit that I haven't kept up on the bleeding-edge green technology, so I'd be very appreciative of hearing of any advance towards a comercially-viable solution I am ignorant of. Please don't eat my soul.