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... and I may bring you a pony. Or I may not.

Stating that something "may" do something, without additional qualifiers, is really no statement at all.

"Simply" maybe not, but "accidents" happen to people all the time...

again, you have no argument, just an empty personal attack. you haven't touched anything i said not even once, so my argument still stands

don't you want to say something in life? you think petty pointless personal attacks will get you anywhere on subject matter like this?

man you alex jones herp derps are fucking retarded

because wires don't follow political boundaries

your fiber is our fiber and visa versa. it's all bound up. a message you send from Vancouver to Halifax may/ probably crosses the border into the USA

and If i am in Chicago and i send a message to Anchorage, that goes through Canada

Canadian and American data is intertwined

and our authorities coordinate and cooperate in managing that in ways that would make both Americans and Canadians uncomfortable if you don't want eyes from another jurisdiction seeing our data

Because if you go with Object Pascal, you're going to be constantly confusing your stringtypes and endianness. Pascal's a great teaching language (first thing I had formal training in), but since nobody's using it for modern deployment, the only thing you're really going to be able to transition to is Delphi.

Pre-C++11 is a nightmare, as it does so many things wrong OO-wise that I wouldn't really call it object oriented at all. 11+ begins to get more sane, and might be worth learning.

But if you do ObjectiveC, you can significantly add to the percentage of developers who can build for GNUStep :D

Indeed -- learn LISP. Lambda variables, recursion, all atoms being true objects. Then you can redefine the language to pretend to be any of the other HLLs out there.

Problem is, all the lessons that were learned with LISP have since been forgotten and are doomed to be made again and again.

Shame you burned any mod points you might have posting this

what does that mean? serious question

my argument: valid moral and logical point that you do not consider

your response: empty insults

exactly

you didn't make any arguments against what i said, you just threw empty insults

that's an intellectually dishonest person's way of conceding a point

so you're welcome for the education

grow and learn

thank you

stupidity makes me angry

Does the iTunes Terms of Service, to which users presumably agreed, specify that Apple may add (or remove) things to (from) your device that you did not request and/or w/o your specific consent? If so, then your analogy holds (at least technically) else it doesn't.

I suspect that people got bent out of shape because either Apple wasn't really allowed to do this sort of thing, or people didn't realize Apple actually was allowed to.

Not theft, but how about "breaking and entering"? Apple entered (violated) people's personal space w/o permission.

Image, instead, that Apple broke into people's houses and left a physical copy of the U2 album on dining room table. How do you think you / everyone would feel about that? While you might argue that digitally pushing the album out isn't really the same thing, it kind of is. Apple entered (violated) people's personal space w/o permission.

warring european states leapfrogged india, middle east, china technologically and started the colonial era instead of india, middle east, and china, exactly because they were warring states

if india or china or the middle east's internal make up was fierce rivalries lasting many centuries between small proud states, then india, china, or the middle east would have been colonizing europe with more advanced technology

now, europe is united under one political umbrella

and before the warring states period, it was tiny tribes increasingly united due to external warlike forces (rome, huns, mongols, etc)

meaning the trajectory of history of clear: always conflict, but conflict between increasingly larger groups

now it is united europe versus india, china (middle east is still fragmented)

that's progress, and that's real

and in the future, after we contact someone out there or they contact us, humanity will quickly unite behind a single banner, and war and rivalry will continue, but earth versus someone else. the trajectory of history preserved

btw, star trek was never peaceful

in star trek we have peaceful allies (vulcans, etc), but we also have warring neighbors who would gladly destroy us: romulans and klingons (whom always seemed to me to be symbolizing china, and ussr, respectively)

and the episodes were also always full of totally new unforeseen horrible dangers. no episode was "hi strangers, we come in peace, and everything is wonderful, the end"

so star trek is nothing but the stories from the age of exploration, the colonial era, and the cold war era, repackaged

my thought on the future and optimism is this:

when we meet someone out there, we will unite as one planet, and war with them

because: peace is stagnation, like india and china before being visited by europeans from the high seas. therefore if we become a peaceful united planet BEFORE meeting someone else, we will be stagnant technologically, and we will be devoured. like india or china in the colonial era

and if another planet was entirely peaceful, they would never have gone into space to meet us, they would have stagnated. and so we will meet them first, and colonize them like india or china or the aztecs or incans

in this way, i'm glad russia is pissing us off. we need to destroy and colonize russia, as china will most certainly do with siberia. split russia between europe and china. and advance technologically to preserve our fighting spirit in this way. and we will do this most certainly because russia is a belligerent, and weak, asshole

if there is no scramble, there is no reason to advance

but scramble we will