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1. microsoft already enjoys lock-in at most universities and private colleges. shit like outlook and sharepoint has unfortunately shoved years of well-maintained unix to the roadside in an effort for universities to seem more cutting edge. protracted multi-month outages (ahem, University of Kentucky) requiring expensive consultants drive alongside patch tuesday now in the race to time best wasted.
2. 90% of the engineering labs, the ones we slashdotters fondly pine for, are sadly Microsft lock stock and barrel. each desltop basically exists as a $500 PuTTY workstation.

id be willing to guess microsoft is trying to reduce the amount of apple on campus. in the arm and in the backpack of millions of students rests the most egregious chunk of the student loan, the macbook. Microsoft wants that few inches of space so badly they can taste the sweat off steves greasy forehead, but theyve failed catastrophically in the past and if history is any indicator, this will just serve to ever cement microsoft as the spreadsheet king. the Zune was a godless abortion, the netbook was an underpowered way to piss off university hackers, and the tablets are about the only thing left until you realize apple has been doing it better for years. Now we're going for the laptops...and its worth noting most $college macbooks run XP or 7 so as to comply with university requirements for courseware. Make no mistake however, they roll back over to mac whenever theres a party and someone needs to fire up a jukebox playlist fitting for kegstands.

making college kids beg wont work. at the end of the day sure, theyre accustomed to it with their parents but microsoft doesnt represent anything they inherently need that they cant already download off bittorrent or use a lab for. victory has defeated you microsoft, your ubiquity is the titration point at which college students simply dont care about your products. they all know windows, they all use it, but there is no fundamental 'want' or drive you can possibly conjure up that will spur kids to fall to their knees the way steve jobs could get them to.

The sooner those Godless slant eyed pieces of unethical amoral shit
are turned into dust, the better.

Kill them all.

I dunno, affecting some place as Godless as Texas seems about right.

No siree. Ain't non prime numbers at all here in North Carolina since we done banned them. Ain't no angels felled out of the sky, ain't no computers breakin', and my cousin's kisses never tasted sweeter. Prime numbers are a godless socialist conspiracy against Jedus and mah wallet.

There is a Catholic joke in here somewhere.

Ok....
MoveOn are a bunch of godless atheists destroying America, so of course they're not getting molested.

-

I am a godless liberal, and a gun owner, and even if I weren't I would find this stuff interesting because of the legal ramifications for 3d printing. I think 3d printing is pretty important, especially since it is now coming with reasonable range.

Why don't you just not read the stories you don't want to read, instead of whining? It would be easier for everyone.

DISCLAIMER: I am a godless liberal in some respects, so I might be biased...but this is becoming like bitcoin, guys. A 3D printed gun is cool to me as a demonstration of the advanced state of the technology, but we don't need a story of even little happening with TEH 3D PRONTED GUNNS (GUBERMIENT, etc).

Slashdot has become awash with political crap. Let's return to a site for nerds, stuff that matters. Not stuff that rallies the libertarians and the collectivists, okay?

BTW, would Poland have objected so much if the Germans asked them to join in a crusade against the Godless Communists on their Eastern border, instead of what happened?

Actually Ribbentrop proposed that Poland joins anti-soviet pact during meeting with ambassador Lipski on 24 Oct 1938 . It was of course declined.

I was born, raised, and educated in the USA, and I never heard this "U.S. Defender of Freedom" thing. We stayed out of WWII because large portions of the US wanted to avoid a repeat of WWI, just as the Oxford Student Debating Society solemnly resolved that there was no reason whatsoever to die for King Or Country just a year or two before Churchill and Co. shamed poor Chamberlain into demanding that Germany not invade Poland or suffer Britain's (and France's) wrath. After Japan attacked, we might have known that Germany needed to be included in the war but Germany was nice enough to declare war on us, before we had to try to convince Congress to declare war on a previously non-belligerent power just because we didn't like them.

We did not declare war on the Vichy regime because we thought that nominal neutrality might work better (and we decided to treat them as if they were the Ghetto Councils that the Nazis set up before they liquidated the Ghettos, ie in charge like Holly Genarro in Die Hard). We "knew" about the death camps, but no one believed the reports because they were made by commy-symps and Jews, and the idea of killing your best and smartest workers was too absurd, just as the Red Cross was notified of the Katryn Forest massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets, but they didn't believe it because the Germans reported it.

Face it, pre-emptive war, even against a righteous target, has lost a bit of its luster in the last decade. If the USA *did* decide to do something about NK, large portions of the world, including Europe, would complain about US Cowboy Diplomacy and Warmongering.

BTW, would Poland have objected so much if the Germans asked them to join in a crusade against the Godless Communists on their Eastern border, instead of what happened?

He's just pointing out that "lees ethical" is a comparison.

So, less ethical than who or what?
You seem to acknowledge that it's not the USA, with it's faults and all.
Such an acknowledgment would actually recognize the original poster's ethics comment as a strawman.

Cause... If it's not USA and China ethics we're comparing, tossing in ethics is a meaningless digression in a form of a generalization that borders on chauvinist propaganda on one side and racism on the other.
"Chinese have fewer ethics! BAM! We've beaten them on the moral battlefield already!"

A strawman if I ever saw one.
Though, in OP's defense, probably an unconscious one.
Heck, his post is actually praising Chinese an prophesying them as winners or at least on the same level as the USA, in some imaginary battle.

It's just that Chinese have been memed into that position of inherently lower morality through centuries of sinophobic propaganda.
They've been yellow peril and godless commies for generations (and if that doesn't mean they have no morals...).
It's perfectly understandable that they are also nothing but thieves and copiers of other people's tech and makers of cheap junk practically incapable of creativity.
And that they would fight harder and with fewer ethics - i.e. fight dirty.

What exactly is the non-racist explanation for that lack of proportionality?

The BB gun kid was excercising his American right to hold arms; The science student was engaged in an act of Godless, materialist alchemy.

> We can look at the etymology to arrive at the "correct" answer, no "atheist union" needed.

Unfortunately, that doesn't help, because it comes from the Greek a- (without, not) + theos (god) which means "godless." So, you can interpret it as "atheos + ism" or "a + theism." The question is, is the godlessness by choice? You could count people in categories 2, 3, and 4 as "godless" if they have no belief or knowledge of god(s).

Alternatively, if you interpret "atheism" as "atheos" + ism, it would be a belief system about the nonexistence of god(s), which only covers sense 2.

Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.

The word "theist" is derived from the word for god and means someone who believes in one or more gods. The prefix "a" means "not" and an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist ...

It looks that way doesn't it, but its not. The word actually comes from the ancient greek word "atheos" (latin spelling obviously), which means "godless". Which found its way into French as "athée", and then into English as "atheist". "Theist" actually shows up nearly 100 years after "atheist". There is a stange bit of trivia that can win a bar bet or two.

The "a" in "atheos" is a prefix in the ancient greek, but it means negation or absence. "Theos" means god, not a believer in a god. So "atheos" means against god or without god.

In any case, the definition is one of rejection or disbelief, not doubt. In other words a conclusion has been formed.

The word "gnostic" derives from the word for knowledge and refers to a set of beliefs about "knowability" which is more a branch of philosophy than religion.

Except in a discussion regarding the existence of God, where it is clear what knowability is referring to.

Words like "agnostic" and "religious" have a context. Have you never heard the word "religious" used in a discussion unrelated to deities, for example with respect to highly enthusiastic Mac or Linux fans?

Then used that breach to hack everything else. Since I could not determine what had been hacked/changed on the church blog, (user accounts wee created that I did not create!) I wiped it, deleted all the databases and started from scratch. So it isn't just crappy blogs - although if you happen to be a godless nerd you may think my church blog is crappy anyway....

Exactly. Sounds like a 14-year-old on a power trip. No worries, there will be a few companies that may hire him as a white hat. That is, if he's smart enough to evade the law long enough.

And the blog I run is for my church. He said he did not know how this happened. Someone hacked a blog running an unpatched Drupal blog. This is what he said, anyway. Then used that breach to hack everything else. Since I could not determine what had been hacked/changed on the church blog, (user accounts wee created that I did not create!) I wiped it, deleted all the databases and started from scratch. So it isn't just crappy blogs - although if you happen to be a godless nerd you may think my church blog is crappy anyway.... B-) I support your right to be a godless nerd.

Are you really blaming the FDA for doing what they were told by elected officials chasing the extreme (and IMHO Godless) end of the "Christian" vote?

The answer was "Of course" with an explanation why. A couple of posts later you wrote:

I should never have used a metaphor in a discussion with someone that pretends to be mentally retarded enough to take it literally :(

Oh look, petty name calling.

All I can say is that if you want discussion rather than "petty high school debate", then don't be the source of the problem.

As to the adversarial nature of this "discussion", it's worth noting the large number of people who just tell me what is self-evidently right. I'm far from perfect here, but it's not that common to see an actual "discussion" here. It's more common to see people just dump whatever opinions they think are true.

Way back when, "seven of five" posted this:

Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them. Otherwise, they're just mooching off the public good. If it's too much to ask, they can move to some godforsaken island and fend for themselves. Libertarianism cuts both ways --- if you don't want to pay for the FDA, fine, but don't complain when your family members die from tainted medicine.

I was originally responding to the unwarranted assumption that the FDA saved lives. This is not a frivolous argument by me. There are blogs that speak of increasing costs and declining innovation in drug research over the past few decades.

It's reasonable to address one of the big factors causing that. Namely, regulatory agencies like the FDA which place a higher priority on safety of medical treatments than on the health of the people who would need those treatments.

This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.

Second that. Though it's not just zombies.

Plagues, both natural and manmade, are a staple of apocalyptic fiction. Current craze is zombies, but they're a recent (and effective) retelling of a very old meme.

Stop me if you've read this one: "PLAGUENAME a (virus/bacteria/prion/plot device) created by (godless researchers/actual god(s)/mother nature/snidley whiplash) swept the globe after (accident/outbreak in the third world/contrived event) killing (millions/billions/everyone but our heroes), and turning our cities into haunting graveyards". When you can make a mad libs version of what is essentially the same story, it's officially become a cliche.

Now, reality time. The worst plagues in recent history were the 1918 flu epidemic and the HIV pandemic, while the worst in ancient history were the black death and smallpox. These are the killers that the cliche above sprung out of. They set the bar.

They aren't even close to apocalyptic. Especially not on a global scale. Even a pathogenic perfect storm is at worst a regional catastrophe.

Is this any surprise? Fiction always takes things further than reality. If the world conformed to our fantasies, we'd have moon cities twenty years ago. Reality is a huge letdown sometimes. Not that that stops people from believing; you could probably make a killing by selling lunar real estate with the promise that it'll be ready in twenty years.

So you get people who think that yes, it really is possible to bring about the end of the human race via pathogen. And those same people will look at something like the 2001 anthrax attack and think the sky is falling, while reality being what it is, the total death toll for that was single digit. The article is pandering to that mindset.

Are you really blaming the FDA for doing what they were told by elected officials chasing the extreme (and IMHO Godless) end of the "Christian" vote?

I understood your context, I was biting at the hook to invalidate these common claims by using the same vehicle from which they are often derived, rather than asking for the scientific evidence to support their claim. Asking for proof only seems to stoke the embers of discontent, and invariably the claimant proclaims the proof-seeker as godless. In their eyes, one may believe in creationism or evolution and never the two shall meet. Educating people with such claims to theories and ideas that align biblical metaphor with observable science allows them to self-invalidate the claims through alternative logical conclusions.

I'm an atheist myself, but I don't set out to convince anybody else to be one, so I don't bother to try to prove my viewpoint to anybody.

That's because you're not an asshole.

There are evangelical atheists who are on a crusade to spread their Godless worldview to others and they tend to use confrontation and ridicule as their means, when those don't work they resort to shunning.

I'm a believer but it's not my place to convince you of something that there is no proof for. I walk a fine line with my children, Their mother is a Christian and if I HAD to put a label on my beliefs, I'm a Pagan so I don't preach to them and when they ask me religious questions I preface my answers with "I believe...". What it comes down to is what we choose to believe, be it because of experience, circumstance or conscious decision. Demanding proof of something that can not be proved is like demanding that someone prove to you that their favorite color is the best possible color.

LK