At the time the advantage was that you needed only to assuage one deity, and did not risk offending each by acknowledging jurisdiction of another, or a dozen others. There were direct financial consequences, too: how many priesthoods must you support? (Arguably these are two restatements of the same problem.) Polytheism makes for a very complicated life. Arguably that’s a big part of the appeal of occultism among the idle rich — life seems too predictable without it.

It’s amusing how many centuries it took to settle on the “died for our sins” line. It seems to me that any of the other early contenders could easily have won out, but for unspecifiable fluctuations of the ectoplasmic ether.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

Note that there generally isn’t a person in charge. There are several people, which makes it easier to ignore patch pings, especially for complicated patches.

Forcing the person in charge to step up if he doesn’t want a change to go in (rather than staying mute) would probably be more productive in the case of some subsystems (the Ada front-end comes to mind). It would either increase the number of approved patches or at least improve communication and feedback.

Stepanov has said that if he were starting over, STL components would have no public named member functions at all. Before template function overloading that wasn’t possible, but then they were added after it was too late to take out the member functions.

I wasn’t clear on the Gaza thing. Of course we didn’t expect Gaza to turn into Paris in a year. But we did hoped they would WANT to. And it was a big issue here between the right and left political wings. Right-wing people claimed that by leaving Gaza it will turn into a violent, Hamas state. Left-wing people had a different vision: they hoped that without any further land claims, the Palestinian in Gaza will put their guns down and instead think of building a state. This dream was shattered. Listen to them - now they really think they are closer than even to destroy Israel and gain control of the complete territory. They see our peace attempts as a weakness.

No logic problem here. Israel’s political map is splitted (roughly) fifty fifty. half right, half left. Actually after the GAZA failure people are going right a bit. Anyway, such a split has huge support for settlements. Even if it’s 30%, it’s still “a lot of Israelis”. Nevertheless, if a real oppurtunity would come, people will vote for peace. Just like they voted for evacuating Sinai (in exchange for peace with Egypt), S. Lebanon (in hope the hezbollah will put down its weapons once they will be left out of land claims), GAZA,.. So - deep inside - people know that the vast majority of settlements will be evacuated one day…

I think I got the newlines better this time. Have a good weekend !

I think that if Israel just waits, it will lose in the end. That would be unfortunate. I touched on that in my original blog entry.

The expectation that Gaza would simply clean itself up in a couple of years was wildly unrealistic. Did people really think that? Gaza did not and does not have a functioning independent economy. It is entirely dependent on Israel, and Israel remains in complete control of its borders which precludes developing any other possibilities. It will take many years to change that even under good circumstances.

I simply don’t believe that simultaneously a lot of Israelis support expanding settlements and that “everybody” also believes that they will be evacuated eventually. That defies both logic and common sense.