Your argument is essentially "I'm not responding to what you're saying, but other people 'on your side' are unreasonable, therefore there's just nothing to be discussed?

FWIW, I agree that there's a lot of zealotry around, and it's hard to have a reasonable conversation.

I was a Mac guy in college in the mid-90s, I was the main Mac support guy for the helpdesk of a very large university. I contributed chapters to several books on Mac programming. Then Apple decided to kill the clone manufacturers. Then they released some OS upgrades that didn't support existing hardware (partly to leave behind the clone manufacturers, but I had a legitimate powerbook that wasn't very old). Many fervent Mac supporters (including myself) got a lot more quiet, and our next purchase was not an Apple computer. This was one reason that they effectively disappeared as a viable option for several years.

It's all well and good for a company to make money any way they can within certain boundaries. When a company starts to reach a certain size, they start to dominate the market. This is IMHO when people really need to express their opinions about how the company does business. There are many barriers to entry for a company trying to enter this market, not least of which is perception. If you insist that open software isn't important to people, you're helping to make it true.

-t.

I don't think the GP was really trolling, and I think some of your econ 101 is a bit off.

They're buying T-bills. The impact of this is to drive up the value of the dollar relative to the Yuan, and also it keeps US interest rates low. From the standpoint of "we have borrowed lots of money", yes, they are 'propping up' the US economy. From the standpoint of "US businesses are competing in a worldwide market against Chinese businesses", no, they are very much not helping the US economy. They are making dollars more expensive for global customers. It is an effective tariff on US businesses overseas.

There's a difference between "this is what would make sense" and "this is what is happening". The GP's sense of civil unrest is not just invented. While the Chinese Govt may want to keep the populace happy, in fact the divide between rich and poor is growing greater, and the social gap between rural and urban is increasing. Their govt is full of nepotism and cronyism, and people are becoming more aware and unhappy about it. Add that to increasing pollution and demographic issues from their historic policies - they have many problems on their horizon.

Not saying that these problems are guaranteed to end up the way the GP stated, just saying, the GP isn't necessarily the complete idiot you are portraying.

-t.

I totally agree. I watched the youtube video (is WTFYV the equivalent of RTFA?), and I was kind of impressed. Although the demo shows an interaction with a bunch of buttons, the real power is the image recognition. She showed how with one command each you can script the two of the fundamental interactions you have with images on the screen: click it, or wait for it to appear. The fuzzy visual recognition algorithms are a huge plus. If you wanted to script something in your room using a web-cam, this is basically how to do it with trivial coding.

I think of this as an equivalent to something like sql. There's a domain in which you'd like to impose logical structure (relational data / images), and you generally use the language to great effect in conjunction with another programming language. If I had to write a scheduled task for my laptop that needed for me to be on the VPN, I'd much rather use something like this to handle the connection rather than trying to figure out how the VPN API works.

-t.

Why was this given insightful? It's just a two-part snarky comment by an AC.

The first part of the comment is just an ad hominem argument, with nothing specific to back it up. In regards to the second part, I agree that Drake's equation is oversimplified, but unless you have specific things to say about it, there's no better estimate out there.

-t.

Well if "special place" is another word for "prison", then why not? I don't know where you got the genetic testing part, though. If the defendant chose to use his genetics as a defense, then yes, s/he will have to submit to testing to make that case. If it is found that the genetics defense is reasonable, then yes, I think the defendant should be able to plead for a less-harsh environment, as long as it can be shown that a future incidence is being prevented.

That last part isn't as tricky as you might think. We already have separate jails for white collar criminals, and they're sociopaths. Why not do the same thing for someone who honestly doesn't want to be a monster?

-t.

Is that really the politically correct party line? I believe the socially liberal viewpoint is that
    a) capital punishment is wrong
    b) mental retardation is a defense
Both of which would say that a brain scan of a criminal defendant would indeed carry weight against the death penalty.

It sounds to me like you're using logic to extrapolate a political position. Your experience may vary, but I find that no existing political party is logically consistent, so you can't extrapolate.

Just my two cents,

-t.

Good point, but they're actually two separate animals. The ability to script applets came after the fact, and it's really an additional library, not the language itself.

-t.

Shift-F10 also is a right-click, context menu is redundant.

-t.

I think you don't get it. The problem with casually accepting jokes that stereotype is that people ARE influenced by such things. You're saying that you're making a joke based on a generalization and that nobody intelligent takes those jokes seriously. The problem is that many of those generalizations are based on extremely deep seated problems. It's the difference between joking about a good friend's mother being ugly, or joking that she has breast cancer and probably isn't going to make it.

Many of the stereotypes of black Americans were literally created, they didn't just arrive as observations. An enslaved population will naturally be considered unworthy, inferior, unintelligent, lazy, surly, 'uppity', overly-sensitive, etc. But how does a man stand up for himself and get recognized as an individual with all of that baggage, when the stereotypes keep getting reinforced? It's one thing when the stereotypes are about a people who have their own distinct homeland and groups, but black Americans are in a place where they always feel like outsiders. Consider that your friend who is ok with such jokes may just tolerate them because he considers it the price of your friendship.

-t.

"well, they haven't exactly sent any patches"

Untrue. RTFA.

-t.

Another previous comment said this as well.

If you actually read TFA, they are on the "lines of code contributed" list at .8%. Also, there's another list of 'sign-off patches', in which they are second only to Red Hat.

Linus is not even on the "lines of code contributed" list, but he is on the "sign-off patches" list.

-t.

FUD much?
Since you're currently at +5 Insightful, I have to point out that they're actually on the list, the poster above cut it off at 1%, they're .8%.

Also from TFA, there's another list of companies that do sign-off patches. Google is at 10.5% on that list, behind only Red Hat, above Novell, Intel, and IBM.

To put it in perspective, the list doesn't include Linus on the list of contributors (he doesn't make the cut), but it does list him on the sign-off patches list.

Just FYI,

-t.

Ethnic make-up of Switzerland:
German 65%, French 18%, Italian 10%, Romansch 1%, other 6%

-t.

I don't think Switzerland's 'foreigners' from France or Germany really disprove my point.

-t.

No common consensus is a source of societal decay? Really?

You remind me of my French friends, who talk endlessly about the superiority of their society. Yeah, it's great if you were born there and have white skin like most of your lily-white population. There is so little social mobility, you basically have to be born at a certain level, with rare exceptions. If you are born without property, you aren't going to get it.

My country (USA) is only a few hundred years old, but we've already gone through more social upheaval than most of Europe combined, in my personal opinion. You can point your finger at our failures all you want, but the fact that we've got such a heterogeneous population is our greatest strength, and we've earned it with a Civil War, endless struggles and compromises between immigrant populations, and thousands of civil-rights struggles. The moment you have increased immigration, let's see how enlightened you really are. Our 'nuts' on both sides aren't completely wrong, and the fact that we have such disparate opinions being shouted all the time, while it isn't efficient or convenient, that's why we have such great results over the long period. We are a dynamic country. Good luck being stale.

-t.