derleth

> the idea that government is the sole entity that can be relied upon to solve it, as claimed earlier post

I presented my argument wrong. My position is that the government is the only entity that can be relied upon to solve it entirely, not the only one that can be relied upon to help solve it. Private entities are too small to institute the broad changes needed to solve this, as has been demonstrated in the past, when they had the chance and failed.

My complaint was against the people who are convinced that the government must not be involved in any of this at all, because Socialism Is Evil.

> But what actually happened? The government was shut down briefly, then all went back to as it was. The GOP looked like even bigger fools.

The GOP only looks foolish to the people who were against it to begin with. They look like Brave Freedom Fighters to the people who voted them in, and will vote for them again in 2014, simply because they stood up to the Black Muslim Fascist Socialist (who is Black, by the way).

> Yes, but my belief (clearly not argued well, I concede) is that many times things get halted because the majority has, for political reasons, decided to acquiesce, not because they lack the means to overcome the resistance of the minority.

If the non-Tea-Party majority of the GOP in the House decided to risk being primaried en masse they could, indeed, kill the Ted Cruz contingent. I agree with you there, sure. But that's an extremely hard road to follow; it's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, something right out of a game theory textbook, and politicians are trained to be risk-averse. (Which, in other scenarios, can be a good thing.)

> even if the government, in the abstract, has the means to accomplish something in practice they cannot be relied on to do it, because of political self-interest (including, for example, being beholden to their campaign financial sources)

And here is where I disagree with the Libertarians (including the Tea Party, which are Libertarian on this issue): The Libertarians say that if the government isn't perfect, it can never be part of the solution. I say that if the government isn't perfect, it's time to improve the government.

> ".NET applications only run (officially)" -- what's that even mean?

If MS feels threatened by Mono, it changes its runtime and kills interoperability. From that point on, Mono is playing catch-up and who knows what happens to the users caught in the middle.

> The government has shown that it, too, cannot be relied upon to solve it.

Except governments in other countries have a better solution for it than the US government does. Denmark, for example, has a very low homelessness rate:

http://www.english.umd.edu/interpolations/3466

Here's some more statistics on homelessness. You'll need to divide by population to get percentages, which are the only useful way to present this data:

http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statist...

As for the rest of your post: I'm not saying it's a majority yelling "Socialism". I'm saying it's a minority which has the power to, for example, shut down the government by blocking certain legislation because they think a health care plan created by the Heritage Foundation is Socialism.

So:

> When the government wants to spend money on something it seems to find a way.

Not if a minority within the government has found a way to rig the game such that it can make the rest of the party in control of the House of Representatives terrified of being primaried unless they back Ted Cruz.

Our system is full of checks and balances to prevent a majority from running roughshod over all of the minorities. The converse to that is that you do need broad (near-universal, by comparison to some other systems) support, or at least broad acquiescence, to institute major change. A well-positioned minority can halt things, even to the point of disaster, by digging in its heels far enough.

> but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation?

The problem is that you'll never get everyone to agree that the government needs to be involved in fixing the situation, even though there is no other entity which can be relied upon to solve it.

It's gone from being politics to being religion: Socialism is Evil. It isn't just bad policy, it's Evil and therefore must not be compromised with, for all the same reasons you don't compromise with Satan Himself. The people who believe that will spin stories about how private groups will step up to solve all of the problems, even though they never have in the past, simply to prevent Evil, which they call Socialism.

> So, yes, according to the theocratic alternative, the one who has the right to further restrict our freedom may not even exist.

Except in every theocracy, this isn't how it works. The people who have the right to further restrict your freedom damn well do exist, and will kill you if you say they don't have that right.

> Google threw the gauntlet when it took a billion dollar investment into a mobile OS and gave it away for free.

Seeing as how MS sold Xbox consoles at a loss so they could sell expensive games, I doubt MS has much of a leg to stand on with this claim. Apparently, the Xbox One is the first Xbox to be sold at a profit or break-even from day one; this was such a bold move that Forbes devoted a whole column to it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/06/microsoft...

(Other articles indicate that most consoles are sold at a loss. I'm picking on MS because it was mentioned in the article as a party to this suit.)

> can contain a backslash in a multibyte character

This is potentially confusing but, ultimately, fine. The problem is slash (byte 0x2f, in ASCII '/') in multibyte characters.

Your character set's control character is another character set's perfectly normal printable character.

As for making the kernel enforce a single character set for the filesystem: No. No. No. Put another way: No.

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html

From Al Viro:

    Bullshit.  It has _nothing_ to characters, wide or not.  For system filenames
    are opaque.  The only things that have special meanings are:
            octet 0x2f ('/') splits the pathname into components
            "." as a component has a special meaning
            ".." as a component has a special meaning.
    That's it.  The rest is never interpreted by the kernel.

> into the dustbin

The irony being that this is one of the worst kind of cliches, proving that Orwell had no idea what he was talking about.

> Pascal is a pretty good pseudocode..

Pascal is pretty much directly derived from early dialects of Algol, which is where most modern programming language syntaxes derive; it's the original block-structured syntax, as opposed to line-structured assembly and early FORTRAN and the fully-bracketed Lisp syntax (which is also block-structured if you indent it sanely).

He's lucky he had an 80-column card! ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_80-Column_Text_Card

> JAVA

Why did you spell it in all-caps here?

I'm pretty certain I don't have a soul, either.

Osama bin Laden's war aim, which he himself stated, was to get US soldiers out of Saudi Arabia. He's dead, and there are still US soldiers in Saudi Arabia. I'd say he lost.

What happened in the US after 9/11 was wrong, but to claim it as a victory for bin Laden is incoherent. Bin Laden never cared what conditions in the US were like.

> I do not rely on /dev/null.

> I make my own null character devices as I need them.

Why? Is there ever a reason to have more than one file on your system which acts as a /dev/null?

Only if you have JS enabled. Which means they went to explicit trouble to make their site not work without JS, which never ceases to amaze me.

> By replacing boy/girl/child with "person"? Humanism.

Obviously idiotic.

Because it's important for us to root out sexism where we find it, for the same reasons we pull up any obnoxious weed. The fact it wasn't intentional makes it all the more obnoxious.

> schools are always going to teach and require the status quo.

Rephrase this: "Schools are always going to teach and require the mathematics that most people use, especially given that most people are going into fields where math is a tool, not an end in itself."

A different example of this is how Nonstandard Analysis remains 'nonstandard' even though it was essentially how both Newton and Leibniz originally imagined calculus: Until Robinson showed how to put infinitesimals on a rigorous footing, the only axiomitization of calculus involved epsilon-delta proofs and so that became, and still remains, the standard form of analysis.

Now, most people learning calculus will never need to know how it came to be, but axioms give a structure to guide thinking, and that is why they're taught to non-mathematicians. The precise axioms which are chosen is of somewhat secondary importance compared to the habit of mind formed by internalizing some axiom system and learning to think on that basis at least some of the time.

It would be nice if I could find a non-OSX download on that page.

Why get a nice car and customize it when you know you'll eventually have to drive someone else's shitbox Ford Focus? Your seat warmer and ergonomic gearshift handle will help you not a whit in that testament to True Detroit Steel.

> It's supposed to be the art of taking away until nothing unnecessary left.

Except if I can't understand your use case, none of the complexity related to it is needed, so it's all excess and must be removed. After all, we have a Model T, so why do we need a Ford Focus? They both move you along under engine power.

In other words, a lot of engineers seem to have a Procrustean Bed and a deep need to cut problems down to size in the name of cutting solutions down to size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

You'd think that McAfee developers would be smart enough to hard-code a list of essential system files into their AV such that it will at least prompt you to get an install disk so it can replace them instead of just deleting them if it suspects they're infected.

For bonus points, make the software realize that even if the file on the CD looks infected, it isn't actually infected, so make that file's SHA-256 sum a 'known good' profile. (If the file on the actual install CD really is infected, that falls into the category of "Problems The AV Can't Solve". At that point, the OS itself is controlled by Malign Forces Working To Destroy You and the game is over.)

For extra special bonus points, code compressed copies of those essential files into the AV software itself, so they can be replaced on the fly without prompting anyone. They can be updated along with the malware profile data, if they ever need to be.

Every language has grammar by definition. We're just trying to discover it.

It's like the laws of physics: We have laws which seem to work, but we know they're not the whole story, so we observe more of what happens and try to bring our laws into harmony with the actual underlying laws.

> An SUV is not necessary in the winter.

Assuming you live in Europe. It's different in the US.

> I'm a a big fan of The Black Knight

"It's only a flesh wound!"

> I'm quite sick of the trend that things have to be dumbed down for the average user so that things look "slick."

This has been one of the primary complaints about the One Macintosh Way since the first Mac proved that 1984 was going to be like Nineteen Eighty-Four and its largest competition was systems built around command lines, such as the Apple ][ and Commodore 64. It's never hurt Apple yet, and their durable majorities in coffeeshops and design hausen don't look eager to abandon them over it now.

> At least, there, you have the option to get rid of GDM and Mutter, install OpenBox, and be merry.

You... you understand that Linux has more than one GUI! Are you a god?

If the requirements don't change and the domain really is well-known, why are you writing new software? Why isn't there pre-existing software you can reuse?

> Why port the Linux kernel to Lisp?

For many of the same reasons people started writing OS kernels in C rather than assembly: Less scut work, wrong code looks wrong more often, and more opportunity for code reuse.

Other reasons include being able to provide a higher-level API, which only kinda happened with the move to C. A Lisp API would enable things like system-level garbage collection and possibly things like a single-address-space OS where the kernel is responsible for fine-grained memory protection and multiprocessing becomes as cheap as multithreading without becoming as unsafe as multithreading.

But that wouldn't be Linux anymore, I suppose; it would be a Linux-compatible system with extended features beyond what the C kernel provides. On the other hand, is Linux 3.11 the same as Linux 1.0 or is it merely mostly-compatible with Linux 1.0?

In Montana, depending on the season, looking out the window can be a really lousy way to gauge the temperature. When the temperature can swing more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a day, it can easily mean the difference between needing a jacket or not.