He will continue to rule for as long as the people of Zimbabwe do not rise up and thrown the bum out.

And they are far less likely to do that if the only voice of reform is painted as a western puppet and a traitor.

But yeah, you're right, I'm sure wikileaks is completely innocent... they can't *possibly* fuck up.

do we blame the woman and her short dress for her being raped?
do we blame the parents and their inattentiveness for their child being molested?

BadAnalogyGuy? Is that you?

Do we blame the best friend who tells the stalker where their victim is living? Yes.
Do we blame the reporter for telling the mafia where the witness under protection is? Absolutely.

Wikileaks exposed information actively damaging those fighting for reform in Zimbabwe. Only a blind, idiot apologist would try and excuse those actions. Just say it: Wikileaks fucked up. You can do it.

NO. WRONG.

Wrong how? WikiLeaks leaked private communications between a force for reform in Zimbabwe and western nations. Those communications may have irreparably damaged efforts at reform by giving Mugabe and his thugs material to discredit reformers.

It seems blatantly obvious that the actions of wikileaks are to blame here. Yes, I understand, you want to believe wikileaks is pure as the driven snow and immune from all blame. But guess what? This is a *perfect* example of how *some* politics *does* need to go on behind closed doors, and that *some* amount of secrecy is, in fact, necessary.

it's a shame that no-one criticising wikileaks realises that mugabe is an insane criminal and murderer who will take advantage of *anything*.

I'm sure they're quite aware of that. But how does that excuse wikileaks from handing a gun and some ammunition to said insane criminal?

Seriously, you apologists baffle me. Why can't you just admit that wikileaks, to put it succinctly, fucked up?

it takes wikileaks reporting to expose mugabe by "triggering" him to act out his true (insane) nature, for the world to observe how inappropriate a leader he really is.

Oh, yes yes, no one realized that before... jackass.

This isn't about the world and what they think of Mugabe. This is about Mugabe's actions as a dictator within his nation. The man can now, quite legitimately, demonstrate that those people fighting for reform in Zimbabwe were, in fact, *supportive* of sanctions that have hurt the Zimbabwean people. Are those sanctions ultimately necessary? Sadly, yes. But now those reformers look like tools of the west, and Mugabe can use that to attack the voices of reform as traitors. That helps no one but Mugabe.

In short, you're a naive, apologist twat. Grow up. The world is a lot more complex than it might appear from your mom's basement.

Yes, that's certainly worked out well in the past. I'm sure if you look back at history, every time a tyrant was killed, a really nice guy rose up to take his place...

Huh, I'll be damned, I didn't realize that existed (probably because I've never played with LINQ). I'm also not sure how I feel about it, but it's certainly... interesting. It also seems like a very niche feature, unless I'm missing something (specifically, it appears said feature is primarily used in LINQ as a mechanism for returning rows from a query).

Certainly type inference seems *far* more useful, to me, in the context of generics and lambdas (and certainly *not* limited to just LINQ). But being a (very poor) functional programming guy, that's probably just my own bias showing.

I assume you meant anonymous delegates, and in particular, the deliciously terse-yet-expressive new (well, to me... my company *just* switched to VS 2k10, with its new compiler, in the last couple months) lambda syntax, that manages to make things like List.Find() not totally suck...

Hah, didn't notice the author of the post, just the (intentionally) dumbass response. My bad. :)

Oh BS.

Python's type checking is done at run-time, which is why it's so horrible (though it's better than the weak typing as present in Perl and Javascript... PS, I like both of those languages for various reasons, I just hate weak typing).

Type inference as present in C#, Haskell, Ocaml, and others, is done at compile time, and so is perfectly safe. It just means the programmer can spend less time casting things, which is a huge pain in the ass in a strictly type language like C#, particularly when you throw generics and lambdas into the mix.

"Guessing"? Try rigorous type inference.

Type inference is how languages like Haskell and Ocaml work, and no one seems to think they're "awful". You still get rigorous compile-time type checking, but with less horrible explicit casting and variable type declarations, which is *damn* nice when you're dealing with generics or lambdas.

So redact those bits.

Why is that so hard?

Note, I'm not actually of the opinion that we're all entitled to this information... Manning's lawyers certainly are, but we aren't. No, the real question we should be asking is, why the hell is Manning's right to due process being violated? All these facts should be brought to light an a courtroom, and yet rumour has it the man has been locked up in solitary for the past four months.

The Left doesn't use "fiscal responsibility" as a talking point in their campaigns, and used it as a defining component of their party platform. When they start doing that, you might have a point. Until then, the Republicans are the abject hypocrites, here.

Yes, you're right, No True Scotsman would believe such things...

Amazing, though... evidently virtually the entire Republican caucus is Republican In Name Only. Which begs the question, who's the real RINO, here?

I was copying source from magazines well before Stallman started spewing his hot air out.

Ah, so you weren't spending thousands of dollars on compilers for mainframes? You weren't using closed operating systems on closed hardware? It was all open source roses and daisies and everyone was happy and contented?

Wait, no, it wasn't like that at all.

Yes, there was software that was free. RMS and the FSF populared the capital-F capital-S term "Free Software", codified in the GPL. Later, after the FSF and the GPL had been around for a decade or more, the term Open Source, capital-O capital-S, was created as an alternative to capital-F capital-S Free Software.

I know, you old fogeys like to forget context, and prefer to remember your lovely days entering BASIC source into your trash-80. But that ignores the real context which triggered RMS to begin his work on the GPL and the FSF, and the subsequent work on OSS that followed.

What the fuck kind of crack are you on, AC?

BUT, even if you cut the ENTIRE military budget, it is only a drop in the bucket

A *drop in the bucket*? Are you fucking *kidding* me? Try 23% of the entire budget. Social Security and Medicaid make up another 40%.

"probably programs that are pork"... please, what a fucking understatement.

But that's *not the point*. My point is that US Republicans are against cutting *any of these programs*, as they're important to their precious base (lest we forget that wonderful right-wing refrain, "Keep the government out of my Medicare!"). But at the same time, they're against raising taxes. Well, guess what? They gotta make a choice, or they gotta quit bitching about budget deficits.

Nonsense. Free != copyleft, and the FSF never claimed it was.
OSS really was about convincing the suits to use free software.

What? RMS and the FSF have *always* pushed the view that "Free" == copyleft/libre/speech/etc. That's their entire raison d'etre, ffs.

Seriously, what alternate dimension are you from?

As an aside, that's *not bad*. In fact, it's a very good thing. After all, Stallman, the GPL, and the FSF revolutionized the way people viewed free software. But the "Open Source" definition *does* have a place and a purpose.