This is also backed up by the fact that we have 3-color vision, which you need to see ripe fruit, where as hunters like cats and dogs see in black and white.
This is a common misconception, but false. Most mammals are dichromats: they have two different color receptors, with peak sensitivity at green and blue wavelengths. We have three, with peak sensitivity at yellow, green, and blue (the yellow receptor is commonly referred to as "red" because it is the only receptor capable of responding to long wavelengths and therefore essential for the perception of the color red, but it's actually most sensitive to yellow).
So most mammals are color blind in the same sense that the average color-blind person is -- they have reduced color discrimination relative to us, but that doesn't mean they see in black and white.
Ok, it turns out that the filesystem is mounted at the root rather than under/Volumes, and that I can indeed move the mount point around. The zfs command seems to mostly work, but I got a couple of kernel panics while playing with it (most recently from trying to destroy a snapshot). So, while the fact that ZFS is coming is very exciting, I don't really think it's worth messing with at the moment. It's far too flaky to trust with any meaningful data, so beyond a "cool, it's going to work eventually!" there's not much else to do with it.
In this forum they duiscuss build 9A326 and ZFS. Some posters mention, that you can choose ZFS but it doesn't work (yet) and/or that you can't install OS X on it.
I'm running 9A326, and I can confirm that while ZFS does indeed show up, it basically doesn't work at all. It's possible to (if the planets are properly aligned) format a partition ZFS, but it's incredibly unreliable -- I've gotten hangs, kernel panics, long delays trying to mount the drive, and reports that the drive is unreadable. It shows up on my desktop (with a folder icon rather than a volume icon), and it won't let even my Admin account modify it without authenticating. The filesystem doesn't show up under/Volumes, the physical disk no longer shows up under/dev... the list goes on.
But at least when I copy data into the "folder", it's unquestionably ending up on my ZFS-formatted external hard drive, so at least that much works. However, it's as far as I can tell pretty much impossible to "really" use due to the permissions issues. Some actions, like deleting files, don't give me the chance to authenticate, they just tell me I don't have sufficient permissions. Normally I'd just use the command line, where I can sudo, but because the drive doesn't show up under/Volumes, I don't know how to access it from the command line. I haven't yet tried using the zfs utility to specify a mount point for it, but I did verify that zfs' man page specifies a default mount point of/Volumes/<fs>, so it should already be there.
Of course, none of this should be taken as a complaint against Apple. They never said, even in the developer seed notes, that ZFS was working yet, so it's hardly surprising that it's so broken at the moment. I have no doubt that it will be rock-solid by the time Leopard ships, and I can't wait. Honestly ZFS is the most important new feature in Leopard from my perspective... and if they just get Time Machine working with ZFS snapshots (instead of separate copies as it does today) then I am in OS nirvana.
Apple's attitude towards many FOSS standards vacillates between indifference and hostility.
For example, they view X11 as a dead end and want to actively convert people to using Cocoa; hence, Apple's X11 support sucks and they have no interest in making it better.
You mean Quartz, not Cocoa. And Quartz is unarguably far more powerful than X11 as well as faster; I think they're absolutely correct in promoting it over X11. I'm not sure what "sucks" about their X11 support, as it certainly seems to work just fine on my system.
OpenDoc compatibility would be natural for Pages and Keynote, but I suspect apart from being a lot of work, they don't want it: Microsoft Word matters commercially, and they likely view OpenDoc as supporting FOSS competition (since NeoOffice is actually quite sweet on MacOS).
People still use OpenDoc? Wow. I rather thought it was an experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong.
As for ext3, I think there are two reasons. First, using ZFS, Apple has a feature-list advantage over ext3 (never mind that that doesn't translate into any real world advantages).
Are you seriously -- SERIOUSLY -- suggesting that ZFS has no real-world advantages over ext3? That crosses the line from "Linux advocate" into "bat-shit insane".
Second, I think Apple really doesn't want to make it easy for people two switch between OS X and Linux; despite the bluster, they must recognize that Linux is a serious alternative to OS X, in particular given the current and upcoming releases of Gnome and KDE.
Yep. I'm sure Apple is quaking in fear at the threat of Gnome and KDE. You nailed it.
In a nutshell, the company just isn't committed to FOSS, they are just using FOSS when they see a short-term business advantage.
Apple is the only organization that has managed to make Unix completely appealing and usable to average non-technical users. Yes, they chose to use a better graphics library than X11, and a better (also open-source!) filesystem than ext3 -- and good riddance on both counts, I say. Why all the hostility?
Yes, that's the typical Apple solution: you can sort of use it, but if you really want to use it, you have to commit to using OS X. It's not a good proposition.
The GP is talking about how to (partially) use a Sun-created filesystem under Linux; why are you bringing Apple into it?
Since I'm running Safari, let me use that as an example. Here is the complete set of menu items which do not have shortcuts (not counting dynamic ones such as my history and open windows):
Import Bookmarks... Export Bookmarks... Check Spelling as You Type Customize Address Bar... Zoom Bring All to Front
That's it. You'll note that not a single one of those is something you need to do frequently. And that's pretty consistent with every other Mac application I use. In general, they have shortcuts for every single commonly used menu item, and those shortcuts are far more consistent than are Windows'.
For instance, when using an unfamiliar Windows program I have to spend a moment trying to figure out where the damned program keeps its settings. Is it under the File menu? Edit? Tools? Is it named Preferences? Or Settings? Or Configuration? Or (in the case of IE) Internet Options? In MacOS, the menu is always in the same place (under the <program name> menu), always has the same name (Preferences), and always has the same shortcut (Cmd-,). Sure, it's a little thing. But every time I have to spend ten seconds trying to find a damned program's settings under Windows, it makes me appreciate MacOS a little bit more.
However, I'll give you one example that drove me insane (and I apologize if I'm not spouting 100% truth. I gave up the Mac over a year and a half ago, so I don't remember every particular) was that I couldn't tab through all fields either in dialogs or web pages. I seem to remember in particular dropdown boxes being a problem. Maybe it was radio buttons. Not sure, but my point was I prefer not to use the mouse when what I'm concentrating on is keyboard-centric such as writing a document or a slashdot reply.
By default, Macs don't allow full keyboard navigation -- you can't access the menu bar or most non-textual controls using keyboard commands. I presume that the reason for this is that novices don't use keyboard navigation in the first place and get confused when they accidentally trigger it (I've personally seen people accidentally hit "Alt" while typing, thereby putting focus on the menu bar, and then getting ridiculously confused about what happens when they continue typing).
To turn on full keyboard navigation, open Keyboard Shortcuts (under System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse) and turn on "Full Keyboard Access". This pane also lists all of the shortcuts you can use while full keyboard access is on, such as ^F2 to focus the menu bar. The ^F1 shortcut can also be used to toggle Full Keyboard Access on or off without having to go into System Preferences.
I'm not going to waste time debunking each of your poorly informed points. You can look them up on the web on your own time. But I'll say one thing, and that's that saying a historical record from antiquity is inaccurate because it was written mere decades after the fact puts the existence of nearly every historical figure into doubt.
I'd love to know why my points are "poorly informed" -- a quick web search revealed mounds of support for them. And the only point you bothered to make is, of course, meaningless. I'm not suggesting that "a historical record from antiquity is inaccurate because it was written mere decades after the fact". I'm taking issue with the very idea that the gospels constitute a "historical record", as you put it, in the first place.
Does every ancient writing constitute a "historical record"? Are Zeus and Beowulf and Horus all real figures, just because there are writings about them? Or should we use rational thought and realize the simple fact that the writings are obviously fictional in nature probably means that they shouldn't be taken seriously? If I wrote a story about a man performing miracles and rising from the dead today, you (quite rightly) wouldn't take it seriously. So why do people believe a handful of anonymous stories from two thousands years ago with similarly incredible claims? (I say "anonymous" because, as most Bible scholars agree, the authorship of the gospels is unknown. The attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are apocryphal.)
I am absolutely 100% serious when I say that if J.K. Rowling had lived two thousand years earlier, we would now be arguing about whether Harry Potter really lived or not. Jesus was not real. There is no historical (meaning non-fictional) evidence to support the idea that he lived, and the stories of his life are too similar to earlier myths to credibly claim coincidence.
Oh, I see, you are saying that buying pennies and melting them down and selling the scrap at a profit at taxpayer expense isn't 'fraudulent intent'?
I disagree, I stipulate this scenario is already covered under the existing law, making a profit off selling currency as scrap is deffinately fraudulent.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
How can it possibly be fraudulent if there is no deception involved? (And considering there is no need for deception, I don't see why it would become involved.)
Seriously, if you can pull a 2 cents per nickel profit by selling it as materials then why doesn't the government recall the current nickels (replace them with something cheaper to make) then melt them down 20,000,000,000 nickels X $0.02 cents profit per coin = $400,000,000 (minus of course the cost of the recall and the costs of converting the coins into raw materials)
You're ignoring supply and demand. Doing this would hugely increase the supply of the metals without affecting the demand, and would therefore decrease the value of the metal -- possibly to the point where this would be a money-losing proposition.
Most atheists "believe in Jesus". The evidence of his existence is diverse and compelling. Whether he was the Son of God or a 1st-century L. Ron Hubbard or somewhere in-between is the point of contention.
Diverse and compelling? Such as? There is extremely little evidence of the existence of Jesus as a historical figure. The only documents which describe him were written decades after his death, and are obviously unrealistic (unless you view rising from the dead, walking on water, and transforming water into wine as "realistic").
Furthermore, and most damning, is this: let me describe someone for you. He was fathered by God and born of a virgin mother. He performed miracles, including turning water into wine. He died and rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven, liberating mankind. Am I talking about Jesus? Nope, Dionysus. The mythological life of Jesus was obviously inspired by a number of other savior figures, including Osiris, Mithras, and Dionysus (and in fact ancient historians used the names Dionysus and Osiris interchangeably, indicating that Dionysus himself was inspired by Osiris). If you actually do the research, the number of parallels between these myths is staggering. So staggering, in fact, that early church fathers denounced the stories of Dionysus as having been spread by the Devil in order to cast doubt on Jesus, the true fulfiller of prophecy.
"For when they say that Dionysus arose again and ascended to heaven, is it not evidence the devil has imitated the prophecy?" - Justin Martyr, church father, circa 150AD
The point is that there is essentially no evidence for Jesus as a historical figure, and much evidence that he is an adaptation of earlier myths -- a newer and gentler Dionysus, if you will. Likewise, the myth of Noah was clearly inspired by earlier myths -- in one story, Utnapishtim survived a great flood sent by God to destroy everything on earth by building a great ark to save himself and representative members of each species of animal. Christian mythology did not arise ex nihilo, but is in many (perhaps most) cases just an evolution of earlier stories. It's interesting and it's important from a historical standpoint, but I'm hoping that at some point we can finally admit that we just made the whole mess up.
Like the any grammar nazi here, a geography nazi would bring up this:
Can we please call the river by its true name: the Long River?
This mistake of taking the name of a small part of the river (Yangtze) and using that name for the whole river has been compounded by nearly every English-language atlas and reference book. But it's still wrong.
The river's name is, by definition, whatever people choose to call it. If the vast majority of English-langage maps, textbooks, and people refer to the river as the Yangtze River, then its English name is the Yangtze River. Lots of things are named different things in different languages, and the fact that the Chinese (I gather) refer to the river by a different name is irrelevant.
The Germans refer to their country as "Deutschland" (or, more formally "Bundesrepublik Deutschland") but I don't imagine you harangue people for using the name "Germany" instead. Or do you?
The only way to get out of the inverse square law is either to use coherent sources like lasers...
That is incorrect -- lasers follow the normal inverse-square law, just as all other EMF emissions do. To avoid this, you would have to have a laser beam which doesn't spread out, and of course such a thing is impossible under the laws of physics. All laser beams spread out over distance.
The reason we sometimes say that laser beams don't follow the inverse square law is a bit of handwaving with respect to human vision. Suppose you have a tiny pinpoint beam of light entering your pupil. 100% of the beam's energy enters your eye. Suppose you now stand farther away that the beam is twice as wide upon entering your eye. The beam is now twice as wide, but it's still much smaller than your pupil, so 100% of the beam's energy is still entering your eye. The inverse-square law is fully in effect, but it (in a sense) doesn't matter because, due to your comparatively huge pupils, it isn't helping to reduce the amount of energy entering your eye. At a significant distance, where the beam is large relative to your pupil, the inverse-square law is much more apparent with respect to laser beams.
That's a ridiculous argument. So just because the source HD broadcast is free, cable companies shouldn't be permitted to charge for the fact that they have used their time, money, and equipment to pipe it into your house?
By the same logic I suppose it should be illegal to charge money for, say, liquid oxygen? After all the oxygen was completely free to begin with -- all that the manufacturer had to do was buy some expensive refrigeration equipment, pay for an awful lot of electrical power, and pay for the labor to operate the equipment and store and transport the resulting liquid oxygen. But hey, the raw materal was free, so how dare those greedy bastards seek money for providing a service!
The main reason that lawnmower engines are so incredibly dirty is that they are two-stroke engines. Two-stroke engines are inherently evil -- they burn dirty and emit huge quantities of unburnt fuel -- but they have a higher power-to-weight ratio and therefore see use where a small, powerful engine is required. It has a lot more to do with the engine design than it does the size. As for the pollution controls in cars, don't forget that car engines have to deal with an incredibly wide range of ever-changing speeds and power requirements. It's quite difficult to build an efficient engine which operates across such a wide range of speeds, but a simple engine driving a generator can operate at precisely one speed with a fixed load and can therefore be optimized for its precise requirements.
Further. the researchers in TFA are not building a piston-driven engine at all, they are building a gas-turbine engine. While it's difficult to speculate on the efficiency at this point (the thing doesn't even exist!), I would expect it to be relatively clean.
This is our solar system, and that makes it different than any other solar system.
Especially since, technically speaking, it is the only solar system. "Solar system" by definition means the star Sol (which most people refer to as "the Sun") and the bodies in orbit around it. Any other star and its orbiting bodies would be a "star system".
On any halfway decent equipment, yes. I've tried it with my Macs, and they are perfectly happy to use a straight-through cable in situations where a crossover used to be required.
...the quote "...I happen to think we won't be able to rely on experiment to resolve this problem." while only one man's opinion, sounds a lot like _faith_
Nonsense. If it were faith, he would have complete confidence that his belief was correct even in the face of obvious contraevidence, and no amount of persuasion could convince him otherwise.
I've argued with people that have faith in ridiculous pseudosciences like psychic predictions. I can explain the effects in terms of cold reading, confirmation bias and so forth until I'm blue in the face, and never even get an "Well, I guess it's possible she was faking it...". True faith in something is literally delusional -- it absolutely doesn't matter how little evidence there is for it, and how much evidence there is against it, the person is going to believe it anyway.
That's a hell of a lot different than "I happen to think...".
(It's worth pointing out, of course, that even a ridiculous pseudoscience like psychic prediction has a hell of a lot more experimental and historical evidence going for it than any religion does...)
Just FYI, it is quite likely that Fermat didn't actually have a proof for his own theorem. Fermat eventually published a proof for the case of n=4 -- and why on earth would he do that if he a proof for all n>2?
It's much more likely that he believed he had a proof, scribbled a note to that effect, and later realized that his proof was flawed. This is quite plausible, as there are several ways to seemingly prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but which in fact contain subtle flaws.
Well, I guess that settles it then. We're moving on. And since we're on the subject, "its" and "it's" are now interchangeable, "ur" is now a legitimate spelling of "your" (or "you're", since they're interchangeable as well), and "nucluler" is now a real word.
I realize you meant this as a joke, but there's quite a bit of truth here. The distinction between "it's" and "its" is indeed being erased, and quite probably in another few decades we will settle on just one form. We used to distinguish between "you" and "ye", after all, and prior to that "thou" and "thee" -- and we decided that the distinction didn't add enough to be worthwhile, and now just say "you". Likewise "whom" is on its way out -- in fifty years it will seem every bit as archaic as "thee".
"ur" vs. "your" is a different beast, as the people writing that are well aware of its incorrectness and would use the word "your" in a different context. Nothing says that that won't change, though; many words which originally began as slang are perfectly correct modern English.
"nucular" is, I would argue, an acceptable pronunciation of the word. It's no worse than the mangling that other words go through in various regional dialects. Fortunately nobody spells it that way...
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
You are, of course, incorrect. "Begs the question" used to refer to a specific kind of logical fallacy. But the usage of this idiom has changed, and it is now a synonym for "raises the question", which can also in some (very rare) contexts refer to a specific kind of logical fallacy.
Arguing that you are right and common usage is wrong is like arguing that LASER, RADAR, and SCUBA should be written in all caps (they're acronyms, after all!), "e-mail" should be hyphenated, and a "computer" is a person who performs calculations by hand. The usage of these words, along with the phrase "begs the question", have changed, and it's time to accept that and move on. You might as well argue that we should all go back to speaking Old English -- it's simply not going to happen.
There is no way that plan will pan out. There's a reason that people choose consoles over computers: they are a known, stable hardware platform which is easy for developers to target, and thus every game works reliably. The second you start allowing significantly different versions of the consoles to exist, you run into compatibility issues, users being unclear which version of the console a given game will work on, developers being unwilling to take advantage of the hardware in order to avoid alienating users, and a host of other issues.
Limited, carefully-controlled upgrades can succeed (e.g. memory expansion for N64), but so far has only worked when distributed as a pack-in in a popular game. Significant console upgrades (e.g. every upgrade ever released for the Genesis) have all failed in the marketplace, for the reasons described above.
Sony owned the market. The PS3 was a guaranteed success. A license to print money. And now they seem fixated on painting a target on their feet, merrily humming away, completely ignoring what their potential customers actually want. Nintendo could easily leverage this into a return to first place in the market, if they play their cards right.
Slashdot Mirror
This is also backed up by the fact that we have 3-color vision, which you need to see ripe fruit, where as hunters like cats and dogs see in black and white.
This is a common misconception, but false. Most mammals are dichromats: they have two different color receptors, with peak sensitivity at green and blue wavelengths. We have three, with peak sensitivity at yellow, green, and blue (the yellow receptor is commonly referred to as "red" because it is the only receptor capable of responding to long wavelengths and therefore essential for the perception of the color red, but it's actually most sensitive to yellow).
So most mammals are color blind in the same sense that the average color-blind person is -- they have reduced color discrimination relative to us, but that doesn't mean they see in black and white.
Hell, I can create a web browser that will render Acid2 correctly in five minutes.
Step 1: Retrieve Acid2 HTML
Step 2: Completely ignore it and display a screen shot of the correct rendering
Ok, it turns out that the filesystem is mounted at the root rather than under /Volumes, and that I can indeed move the mount point around. The zfs command seems to mostly work, but I got a couple of kernel panics while playing with it (most recently from trying to destroy a snapshot). So, while the fact that ZFS is coming is very exciting, I don't really think it's worth messing with at the moment. It's far too flaky to trust with any meaningful data, so beyond a "cool, it's going to work eventually!" there's not much else to do with it.
In this forum they duiscuss build 9A326 and ZFS. Some posters mention, that you can choose ZFS but it doesn't work (yet) and/or that you can't install OS X on it.
/Volumes, the physical disk no longer shows up under /dev... the list goes on.
/Volumes, I don't know how to access it from the command line. I haven't yet tried using the zfs utility to specify a mount point for it, but I did verify that zfs' man page specifies a default mount point of /Volumes/<fs>, so it should already be there.
I'm running 9A326, and I can confirm that while ZFS does indeed show up, it basically doesn't work at all. It's possible to (if the planets are properly aligned) format a partition ZFS, but it's incredibly unreliable -- I've gotten hangs, kernel panics, long delays trying to mount the drive, and reports that the drive is unreadable. It shows up on my desktop (with a folder icon rather than a volume icon), and it won't let even my Admin account modify it without authenticating. The filesystem doesn't show up under
But at least when I copy data into the "folder", it's unquestionably ending up on my ZFS-formatted external hard drive, so at least that much works. However, it's as far as I can tell pretty much impossible to "really" use due to the permissions issues. Some actions, like deleting files, don't give me the chance to authenticate, they just tell me I don't have sufficient permissions. Normally I'd just use the command line, where I can sudo, but because the drive doesn't show up under
Of course, none of this should be taken as a complaint against Apple. They never said, even in the developer seed notes, that ZFS was working yet, so it's hardly surprising that it's so broken at the moment. I have no doubt that it will be rock-solid by the time Leopard ships, and I can't wait. Honestly ZFS is the most important new feature in Leopard from my perspective... and if they just get Time Machine working with ZFS snapshots (instead of separate copies as it does today) then I am in OS nirvana.
Apple's attitude towards many FOSS standards vacillates between indifference and hostility.
For example, they view X11 as a dead end and want to actively convert people to using Cocoa; hence, Apple's X11 support sucks and they have no interest in making it better.
You mean Quartz, not Cocoa. And Quartz is unarguably far more powerful than X11 as well as faster; I think they're absolutely correct in promoting it over X11. I'm not sure what "sucks" about their X11 support, as it certainly seems to work just fine on my system.
OpenDoc compatibility would be natural for Pages and Keynote, but I suspect apart from being a lot of work, they don't want it: Microsoft Word matters commercially, and they likely view OpenDoc as supporting FOSS competition (since NeoOffice is actually quite sweet on MacOS).
People still use OpenDoc? Wow. I rather thought it was an experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong.
As for ext3, I think there are two reasons. First, using ZFS, Apple has a feature-list advantage over ext3 (never mind that that doesn't translate into any real world advantages).
Are you seriously -- SERIOUSLY -- suggesting that ZFS has no real-world advantages over ext3? That crosses the line from "Linux advocate" into "bat-shit insane".
Second, I think Apple really doesn't want to make it easy for people two switch between OS X and Linux; despite the bluster, they must recognize that Linux is a serious alternative to OS X, in particular given the current and upcoming releases of Gnome and KDE.
Yep. I'm sure Apple is quaking in fear at the threat of Gnome and KDE. You nailed it.
In a nutshell, the company just isn't committed to FOSS, they are just using FOSS when they see a short-term business advantage.
Apple is the only organization that has managed to make Unix completely appealing and usable to average non-technical users. Yes, they chose to use a better graphics library than X11, and a better (also open-source!) filesystem than ext3 -- and good riddance on both counts, I say. Why all the hostility?
Yes, that's the typical Apple solution: you can sort of use it, but if you really want to use it, you have to commit to using OS X. It's not a good proposition.
The GP is talking about how to (partially) use a Sun-created filesystem under Linux; why are you bringing Apple into it?
Since I'm running Safari, let me use that as an example. Here is the complete set of menu items which do not have shortcuts (not counting dynamic ones such as my history and open windows):
Import Bookmarks...
Export Bookmarks...
Check Spelling as You Type
Customize Address Bar...
Zoom
Bring All to Front
That's it. You'll note that not a single one of those is something you need to do frequently. And that's pretty consistent with every other Mac application I use. In general, they have shortcuts for every single commonly used menu item, and those shortcuts are far more consistent than are Windows'.
For instance, when using an unfamiliar Windows program I have to spend a moment trying to figure out where the damned program keeps its settings. Is it under the File menu? Edit? Tools? Is it named Preferences? Or Settings? Or Configuration? Or (in the case of IE) Internet Options? In MacOS, the menu is always in the same place (under the <program name> menu), always has the same name (Preferences), and always has the same shortcut (Cmd-,). Sure, it's a little thing. But every time I have to spend ten seconds trying to find a damned program's settings under Windows, it makes me appreciate MacOS a little bit more.
However, I'll give you one example that drove me insane (and I apologize if I'm not spouting 100% truth. I gave up the Mac over a year and a half ago, so I don't remember every particular) was that I couldn't tab through all fields either in dialogs or web pages. I seem to remember in particular dropdown boxes being a problem. Maybe it was radio buttons. Not sure, but my point was I prefer not to use the mouse when what I'm concentrating on is keyboard-centric such as writing a document or a slashdot reply.
By default, Macs don't allow full keyboard navigation -- you can't access the menu bar or most non-textual controls using keyboard commands. I presume that the reason for this is that novices don't use keyboard navigation in the first place and get confused when they accidentally trigger it (I've personally seen people accidentally hit "Alt" while typing, thereby putting focus on the menu bar, and then getting ridiculously confused about what happens when they continue typing).
To turn on full keyboard navigation, open Keyboard Shortcuts (under System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse) and turn on "Full Keyboard Access". This pane also lists all of the shortcuts you can use while full keyboard access is on, such as ^F2 to focus the menu bar. The ^F1 shortcut can also be used to toggle Full Keyboard Access on or off without having to go into System Preferences.
I'm not going to waste time debunking each of your poorly informed points. You can look them up on the web on your own time. But I'll say one thing, and that's that saying a historical record from antiquity is inaccurate because it was written mere decades after the fact puts the existence of nearly every historical figure into doubt.
I'd love to know why my points are "poorly informed" -- a quick web search revealed mounds of support for them. And the only point you bothered to make is, of course, meaningless. I'm not suggesting that "a historical record from antiquity is inaccurate because it was written mere decades after the fact". I'm taking issue with the very idea that the gospels constitute a "historical record", as you put it, in the first place.
Does every ancient writing constitute a "historical record"? Are Zeus and Beowulf and Horus all real figures, just because there are writings about them? Or should we use rational thought and realize the simple fact that the writings are obviously fictional in nature probably means that they shouldn't be taken seriously? If I wrote a story about a man performing miracles and rising from the dead today, you (quite rightly) wouldn't take it seriously. So why do people believe a handful of anonymous stories from two thousands years ago with similarly incredible claims? (I say "anonymous" because, as most Bible scholars agree, the authorship of the gospels is unknown. The attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are apocryphal.)
I am absolutely 100% serious when I say that if J.K. Rowling had lived two thousand years earlier, we would now be arguing about whether Harry Potter really lived or not. Jesus was not real. There is no historical (meaning non-fictional) evidence to support the idea that he lived, and the stories of his life are too similar to earlier myths to credibly claim coincidence.
Oh, I see, you are saying that buying pennies and melting them down and selling the scrap at a profit at taxpayer expense isn't 'fraudulent intent'?
I disagree, I stipulate this scenario is already covered under the existing law, making a profit off selling currency as scrap is deffinately fraudulent.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
How can it possibly be fraudulent if there is no deception involved? (And considering there is no need for deception, I don't see why it would become involved.)
Seriously, if you can pull a 2 cents per nickel profit by selling it as materials then why doesn't the government recall the current nickels (replace them with something cheaper to make) then melt them down 20,000,000,000 nickels X $0.02 cents profit per coin = $400,000,000 (minus of course the cost of the recall and the costs of converting the coins into raw materials)
You're ignoring supply and demand. Doing this would hugely increase the supply of the metals without affecting the demand, and would therefore decrease the value of the metal -- possibly to the point where this would be a money-losing proposition.
Most atheists "believe in Jesus". The evidence of his existence is diverse and compelling. Whether he was the Son of God or a 1st-century L. Ron Hubbard or somewhere in-between is the point of contention.
Diverse and compelling? Such as? There is extremely little evidence of the existence of Jesus as a historical figure. The only documents which describe him were written decades after his death, and are obviously unrealistic (unless you view rising from the dead, walking on water, and transforming water into wine as "realistic").
Furthermore, and most damning, is this: let me describe someone for you. He was fathered by God and born of a virgin mother. He performed miracles, including turning water into wine. He died and rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven, liberating mankind. Am I talking about Jesus? Nope, Dionysus. The mythological life of Jesus was obviously inspired by a number of other savior figures, including Osiris, Mithras, and Dionysus (and in fact ancient historians used the names Dionysus and Osiris interchangeably, indicating that Dionysus himself was inspired by Osiris). If you actually do the research, the number of parallels between these myths is staggering. So staggering, in fact, that early church fathers denounced the stories of Dionysus as having been spread by the Devil in order to cast doubt on Jesus, the true fulfiller of prophecy.
"For when they say that Dionysus arose again and ascended to heaven, is it not evidence the devil has imitated the prophecy?"
- Justin Martyr, church father, circa 150AD
The point is that there is essentially no evidence for Jesus as a historical figure, and much evidence that he is an adaptation of earlier myths -- a newer and gentler Dionysus, if you will. Likewise, the myth of Noah was clearly inspired by earlier myths -- in one story, Utnapishtim survived a great flood sent by God to destroy everything on earth by building a great ark to save himself and representative members of each species of animal. Christian mythology did not arise ex nihilo, but is in many (perhaps most) cases just an evolution of earlier stories. It's interesting and it's important from a historical standpoint, but I'm hoping that at some point we can finally admit that we just made the whole mess up.
Like the any grammar nazi here, a geography nazi would bring up this:
Can we please call the river by its true name: the Long River?
This mistake of taking the name of a small part of the river (Yangtze) and using that name for the whole river has been compounded by nearly every English-language atlas and reference book. But it's still wrong.
The river's name is, by definition, whatever people choose to call it. If the vast majority of English-langage maps, textbooks, and people refer to the river as the Yangtze River, then its English name is the Yangtze River. Lots of things are named different things in different languages, and the fact that the Chinese (I gather) refer to the river by a different name is irrelevant.
The Germans refer to their country as "Deutschland" (or, more formally "Bundesrepublik Deutschland") but I don't imagine you harangue people for using the name "Germany" instead. Or do you?
Best one I've ever seen -- and I swear upon all that is holy that I'm not making this up -- my nephew visited a urologist named Dr. Weiner.
So you're holding a grudge against Apple for something that happened... what, 20 years ago? Seriously? All because a salesmen mislead you?
Wow, if I held a 20-year grudge anytime a salesman told me something inaccurate, I wouldn't be able to buy anything.
The only way to get out of the inverse square law is either to use coherent sources like lasers...
That is incorrect -- lasers follow the normal inverse-square law, just as all other EMF emissions do. To avoid this, you would have to have a laser beam which doesn't spread out, and of course such a thing is impossible under the laws of physics. All laser beams spread out over distance.
The reason we sometimes say that laser beams don't follow the inverse square law is a bit of handwaving with respect to human vision. Suppose you have a tiny pinpoint beam of light entering your pupil. 100% of the beam's energy enters your eye. Suppose you now stand farther away that the beam is twice as wide upon entering your eye. The beam is now twice as wide, but it's still much smaller than your pupil, so 100% of the beam's energy is still entering your eye. The inverse-square law is fully in effect, but it (in a sense) doesn't matter because, due to your comparatively huge pupils, it isn't helping to reduce the amount of energy entering your eye. At a significant distance, where the beam is large relative to your pupil, the inverse-square law is much more apparent with respect to laser beams.
That's a ridiculous argument. So just because the source HD broadcast is free, cable companies shouldn't be permitted to charge for the fact that they have used their time, money, and equipment to pipe it into your house?
By the same logic I suppose it should be illegal to charge money for, say, liquid oxygen? After all the oxygen was completely free to begin with -- all that the manufacturer had to do was buy some expensive refrigeration equipment, pay for an awful lot of electrical power, and pay for the labor to operate the equipment and store and transport the resulting liquid oxygen. But hey, the raw materal was free, so how dare those greedy bastards seek money for providing a service!
The main reason that lawnmower engines are so incredibly dirty is that they are two-stroke engines. Two-stroke engines are inherently evil -- they burn dirty and emit huge quantities of unburnt fuel -- but they have a higher power-to-weight ratio and therefore see use where a small, powerful engine is required. It has a lot more to do with the engine design than it does the size. As for the pollution controls in cars, don't forget that car engines have to deal with an incredibly wide range of ever-changing speeds and power requirements. It's quite difficult to build an efficient engine which operates across such a wide range of speeds, but a simple engine driving a generator can operate at precisely one speed with a fixed load and can therefore be optimized for its precise requirements.
Further. the researchers in TFA are not building a piston-driven engine at all, they are building a gas-turbine engine. While it's difficult to speculate on the efficiency at this point (the thing doesn't even exist!), I would expect it to be relatively clean.
This is our solar system, and that makes it different than any other solar system.
Especially since, technically speaking, it is the only solar system. "Solar system" by definition means the star Sol (which most people refer to as "the Sun") and the bodies in orbit around it. Any other star and its orbiting bodies would be a "star system".
Is this true?
On any halfway decent equipment, yes. I've tried it with my Macs, and they are perfectly happy to use a straight-through cable in situations where a crossover used to be required.
...the quote "...I happen to think we won't be able to rely on experiment to resolve this problem." while only one man's opinion, sounds a lot like _faith_
Nonsense. If it were faith, he would have complete confidence that his belief was correct even in the face of obvious contraevidence, and no amount of persuasion could convince him otherwise.
I've argued with people that have faith in ridiculous pseudosciences like psychic predictions. I can explain the effects in terms of cold reading, confirmation bias and so forth until I'm blue in the face, and never even get an "Well, I guess it's possible she was faking it...". True faith in something is literally delusional -- it absolutely doesn't matter how little evidence there is for it, and how much evidence there is against it, the person is going to believe it anyway.
That's a hell of a lot different than "I happen to think...".
(It's worth pointing out, of course, that even a ridiculous pseudoscience like psychic prediction has a hell of a lot more experimental and historical evidence going for it than any religion does...)
Just FYI, it is quite likely that Fermat didn't actually have a proof for his own theorem. Fermat eventually published a proof for the case of n=4 -- and why on earth would he do that if he a proof for all n>2?
It's much more likely that he believed he had a proof, scribbled a note to that effect, and later realized that his proof was flawed. This is quite plausible, as there are several ways to seemingly prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but which in fact contain subtle flaws.
Well, I guess that settles it then. We're moving on. And since we're on the subject, "its" and "it's" are now interchangeable, "ur" is now a legitimate spelling of "your" (or "you're", since they're interchangeable as well), and "nucluler" is now a real word.
I realize you meant this as a joke, but there's quite a bit of truth here. The distinction between "it's" and "its" is indeed being erased, and quite probably in another few decades we will settle on just one form. We used to distinguish between "you" and "ye", after all, and prior to that "thou" and "thee" -- and we decided that the distinction didn't add enough to be worthwhile, and now just say "you". Likewise "whom" is on its way out -- in fifty years it will seem every bit as archaic as "thee".
"ur" vs. "your" is a different beast, as the people writing that are well aware of its incorrectness and would use the word "your" in a different context. Nothing says that that won't change, though; many words which originally began as slang are perfectly correct modern English.
"nucular" is, I would argue, an acceptable pronunciation of the word. It's no worse than the mangling that other words go through in various regional dialects. Fortunately nobody spells it that way...
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
You are, of course, incorrect. "Begs the question" used to refer to a specific kind of logical fallacy. But the usage of this idiom has changed, and it is now a synonym for "raises the question", which can also in some (very rare) contexts refer to a specific kind of logical fallacy.
Arguing that you are right and common usage is wrong is like arguing that LASER, RADAR, and SCUBA should be written in all caps (they're acronyms, after all!), "e-mail" should be hyphenated, and a "computer" is a person who performs calculations by hand. The usage of these words, along with the phrase "begs the question", have changed, and it's time to accept that and move on. You might as well argue that we should all go back to speaking Old English -- it's simply not going to happen.
There is no way that plan will pan out. There's a reason that people choose consoles over computers: they are a known, stable hardware platform which is easy for developers to target, and thus every game works reliably. The second you start allowing significantly different versions of the consoles to exist, you run into compatibility issues, users being unclear which version of the console a given game will work on, developers being unwilling to take advantage of the hardware in order to avoid alienating users, and a host of other issues.
Limited, carefully-controlled upgrades can succeed (e.g. memory expansion for N64), but so far has only worked when distributed as a pack-in in a popular game. Significant console upgrades (e.g. every upgrade ever released for the Genesis) have all failed in the marketplace, for the reasons described above.
Sony owned the market. The PS3 was a guaranteed success. A license to print money. And now they seem fixated on painting a target on their feet, merrily humming away, completely ignoring what their potential customers actually want. Nintendo could easily leverage this into a return to first place in the market, if they play their cards right.