I thought his most significant complaint was the one about the completely different programming model using intents -- the way the programs are modularized with control passing between them during execution during different lifecycle states.

Dealing with varying resolutions is kind of a pain but standard stuff on the PC. And if you want to be portable you can target the least common denominator of hardware components. But when one platform is so different in the way the program operates, it makes it very hard to have a common codebase among all the platforms you want to target.

Let me be explicit so you can finally stop making silly accusations:

1. I do not support suppression of ideas, either by governments who throw you in jail for questioning the Holocaust, or by religious groups who cut your head off for asking whether Mohammed was a pedophile for fucking a 7 year old girl, for example.
2. I think the world would be a vastly better place if there were no such thing as "truth" accepted by faith, i.e. religion.
3. I have nothing against Islam, per se, and have Muslims for friends and work with many of them every day. We have freely discussed religion many times, along with all the normal day-to-day stuff.
4. I have tried to help you to see outside your small categories that you've created to understand what is going on. You can continue repeating oil this, evil U.S. invaders that, but I'm asking you to sit down in a quiet place tonight and ask yourself what any of this has to do with the Phillipines, Kashmir, Bosnia, Sudan, or any of the other places around the world where RADICAL ISLAM (ahem, notice the exact verbiage here) is playing the nasty neighbor who wants everyone to play their way or else.

Islam is not the problem, as I have said many times; or at least no more a problem that any other irrational beliefs. They are no different than Christians or Jews in this regard, IMO. It's just that your university professors are not afraid to discuss the other Abrahamic religions openly and critically. They aren't likely to show up dead in the street as a result.

I think at this point you are intentionally conflating radical Islamic extremism with ordinary muslims so you can put me in some convenient bucket. Here in the U.S., the Christian right is attempting to prevent kids from learning current biological theory. I think it's despicable; however, no biology teacher or professor will stop their research or close their books because they are afraid. We don't have people in hiding, with round-the-clock police protection because of fear-mongering. Some western journalists even tried going to the extremists to hear their story, and probably many more would had not one of them gotten to play a starring role in his own beheading video found on the internet.

I don't really understand what drives people like you who refuse to read anything written by someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You would rather disparage her and pretend that her experience doesn't really count because she's not burning Bush in effigy or spitting on a U.S. flag, or something.

I forgot to address this statement in my initial response. However, it's too important to let pass because of the monumental ignorance implied therein. You really have no idea whatsoever who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is.

If you have any intellectual honesty in you at all, you should at least do yourself the favor of skimming this article. She's a truly admirable human being and overcame tremendous hardships simply in order to be true to her beliefs. In so doing, and trying to defend the rights of women to simply live their lives how they will, she comes under attack by both the extremists and liberals in the west who see her as "disturbing the hornet's next." And yet she remains positive - an amazing person.

If your worst offense against the extremists is posting a message to Slashdot defending them, I'm sure you will cease to have problems with like artists showing up dead in the street, or locked down under police protection for the rest of their lives. I just wonder where the others will escape to as the wave of capitulation continues.

I guess these kinds of things are always a joke for those who are accustomed to taking orders and falling into line nicely via self-censorship. I don't worry about freedom of expression for people like you. You probably will never have any worth defending. I worry that we'll never see, for example, Islamic studies in the United States that would dare to subject the Koran to higher criticism because of simple fear of pursuing an offensive line of intellectual inquiry.

Wow. I'm amazed how you managed to use so many words to say nothing at all in reponse to my post.

I'm not religious either. An atheist, in fact, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything said here, but you seem to think that's important to mention. And why is Saudi Arabia not in my crosshairs? I'm not sure what that question even means. Did I somehow give you the impression that they get a free pass from me despite being a breeding ground for the worst kind of hateful, bigoted thinking that passes in the name of religion? Nope. No idea what you're going on about there. Nobody is in my "crosshairs", I'm just concerned about the future of freedom when we're afraid to stand up for it without shame or apology.

What do the American oil companies have to do with Muslims going on murderous rampages across the globe after someone drew a cartoon? What does it have to do with Indians suffering Islamic extremist terror inside their borders? Or the Phillipines? Or the Netherlands? Or Somalia? Or Bosnia? Or Indonesia? Or Kurdistan? Or Nigeria? Or Sudan? Or Thailand? For Christ's sake, man (hehe), wake up and do a little research. This is not some great mystery that requires years of painstaking research. Radical Islam is wreaking havoc all over the globe. Peaceful coexistance is not in the nature of people like Bin Ladin and the underwear bomber. Lol... I always wanted to say "the underwear bomber" but haven't until just now!

It's not an America vs Islam thing. Even tolerant Muslim scholars fear for their lives for daring to publish critical studies of their faith or the life of Mohammed. And by critical, I mean formal literary study, not some kind of bashing. Do you even remember who Salman Rushdie is? He is marked for death for writing a work of fiction! You owe it to yourself to face the truth and not bury your head in the sand for the sake of some naive loyalty to a political position.

Actually, they have been breeding in both Jordan and Turkey and have made inroads into Egypt as well. The difference is the leaders there recognize it for what it is and are not afraid to use force against the poison within when it wells up. I know there were suicide bombings inside Jordan but I don't know about the others. Their leaders are effective because they don't bend over backward to cater to every demand of the extremists, to the extent that it happens in the even more liberal western nations.

So you're saying that the attempted train bombings and the relentless push for the imposition of Sharia law in England; and the murder of journalists and film makers in the Netherlands; and the public call for death of novelists who remain in hiding in order to stay alive - all this is the price of trying to work with others?

I'll recommend the same book to you, written by a formerly Muslim woman who grew up inside Islam and knows what it is really like in these countries. The most amazing thing about this woman is the optimism and positive emotion that comes through in her writing after everything she was subjected to. She lives in the west now since escaping so maybe you'll chalk this up to mere "western media" as well. <shrug>

Trade sanctions against Saudi Arabia? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? The men who did that were almost exclusively educated, priviledged young men from Saudi Arabia.

And I suppose the call for the death of Salman Rushdie, the film producers and cartoonists in the Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Al (a woman who had the independence of thought to dare leaving Islam), etc etc etc... all had to do with legitimate protest of trade sanctions or some such?!

You really need to read up a bit on who these people are. Listen to the ravings of their religious leaders on YouTube, listen to what they are preaching throughout much of Europe but especially in the Netherlands where their numbers are growing rapidly and where Sharia law is taking root. You really have no idea what these guys are about.

Compare the Danish cartoon incident

to, say, the Piss Christ

Read an insider's view of what's going on.

The information is out there and it's overwhelming. Research it a little and educate yourself. Don't take my word for it.

Well, if you've been watching the news at all for the last 5 years, it's pretty obvious that the goal of most of the radical Muslim groups is to make the West bow to Islam and to establish Shariah law everywhere as the law of the land. Just have a look at what is going on in England and especially the Netherlands to see how dangerous this is getting. There is no compromise with someone who is only interested in total domination rather than peaceful coexistence.

Sure... the book "The 5000 Year Leap" which the other guy said you should read to see if it changes your mind, or whether you'd continue to feed him your BS line (in his words).

Your answer said nothing at all substantive about the book or whether it, indeed, had the power to change your thinking (I suspect not). However, you merely focused on what some third party had to say about the book as if that was at all relevant to anything being discussed.

It's ok to hate Glen Beck. Just don't pretend it says anything about the author or his book. Oops,there goes my knee again... ;)

I'm tired and we're not getting anywhere. You can have the last response. Have a good day!

Actually I don't like Glen Beck. And you just go on repeating the same thing as if it somehow makes your fallacy a stronger resemblance of the truth.

Who really cares about Glen or what he thinks? You and the publisher, apparently. Does the author endorse Glen Beck? I have no idea. Does Glen's ringing endorsement prove anything, even that he read the book at all? No, it doesn't. The book stands or falls on its own merits, not on the basis of what some third party says about it.

Oh, a clue: this is just a trivial point of logic. I don't know if the book is worth a damn as I haven't read it. All I know is that the opinion of Beck is irrelevant. Why do you respect Beck's position of authority so much?

<quote>

<quote><p>Really?! Read the 5000 year leap, and then feed me that BS line.</p></quote>

<p>Given the fact that Glenn Beck seems to be the #1 tout for that book, I think you just proved my point.</p></quote>

I find this attitude somewhat depressing, especially when it gets moderated so highly as insightful. Sure, the author (or more likely the publisher) is trying to leverage the popularity of Beck to increase sales. However, what on earth does this have to do with the truth or value of the actual content? Sure, you can be skeptical, but you've gone way beyond that to the fallacy of guity by association. Nothing is proved here except that you hate Glen Beck.

I agree with you that MS Word is not a programming language. However, it seems to me that you are conflating the concept of a general purpose programming language with that of a programming environment that BAG is talking about. He specifically refers to "domain-relevant expression tools" as a description of the programming environment.

Expressing a domain concept can be as simple as drawing figures on the screen *for a drawing program*. A drawing DSL or a robotic control DSL, for example, is not intended to be used for writing "Hello, world" on the screen!

I think we all can agree that you should use the right tool for the task at hand. In this context, that means choosing the right level of abstraction. Trying to write a Facebook application in Assembly language is just silly. Is Facebook a general purpose programming language? Of course now. However, it certainly does provide a programming environment.

<quote><p>Now go try that again using an EDGE or CDMA network communications device.</p><p>Also, go try doing that basically with any cellphone-like device, which is what this is aimed for. You won't get the same response times, I assure you.</p><p>Remember, this OS is aimed at machines that load everything into RAM and cache to a micro-SD card or something, tops. No hard drives allowed, and no super fat-bandwidth pipe.</p><p>You'll be lucky to get the performance equivalent of a Pentium 3 sending data over a 56k modem, on average (cell provider's claimed network speed is rarely if ever actually realized by any of their customers in any location, burst speeds at best, and the really depends on signal interference and network traffic).</p></quote>

You obviously never even tried this. On a "cellphone-like device", the mobile interface is actually very fast. On a droid, Gmail is every bit as quick as on my laptop.

You know... it is possible that the Google algorithm was tweaked between the time he did his search and the time you did yours. I'm not defending the guy, he might be full of shit or not. I'm just saying it's a possibility, right?

What you say might have some basis in reality but I have to say it sounds like bullshit to me. Java could easily have provided for manual memory management without using direct pointers to memory in order to do so. Hypothetical allocation / deallocation methods could simply operate on references that may only have either a legal value or null (when deallocated or going out of scope on stack allocation).

If you bothered to do the slightest bit of research, Gosling himself says many times that it's for programmer convenience and to increase the robustness of applications. Pointer bugs are the bane of C and C++ programmers (yes, I've programmed in both for about 15 years and had my share of them as well). Gosling was shooting for something like C++ with all the hard bits removed.

Can you provide a reference for your claim that it has nothing to do with programmer convenience and is only about the Java security model?