The "moral superior" attitude comes from paying someone who actually deserves it, as opposed to paying the MAFIAA who create nothing themselves and charge 5 times what something is actually worth, while passing on next to nothing to the people who actually did the work.
I'll gladly pay an artist if his work deserves it, but I'll be damned if I help enable the abusive greedy behavior of the content cartels. They can go fuck themselves.
You DO realize that noone is obligated to create entertainment for you for the price you demand, right? Reading your post one gets the idea that you feel yourself entitled to entertainment.
They have that power, but Congress CAN authorize military force without declaring war. It has done so many times in the past, and I am not aware of a consitutional requirement that all military action be formally authorized by an explicit declaration of war.
Afghanistan and Iraq WERE authorized, though not by declarations of war. The difference is that if war were declared, the executive gets all sorts of nasty powers, and noone much wants that.
I think there would be some other people somewhat upset if you just dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on what are now tiny black bricks useless to you.
Not if your budget is of the "use it or lose it" sort, and you needed to spend several hundred thousand dollars to meet your budget anyways.
Im almost CERTAIN that these sites are required to disclose what they gather and how they use said data. If only facebook complied and had some kind of policy...
Ill note that their policy (same as basically every other policy out there) indicates that they will keep data for at least 90 days after deletion, and do not guarentee a time of deletion.
What should be illegal (not really) is people using a free service and then complaining that they dont like how it functions. What the heck do you THINK youre signing up for when you use an advertising supported social networking site known for data collection? That theyre trying to take a loss on you?
A customer of mine's internet contract was ending in november, so we ordered Verizon Business DSL. Tech was set for November 15 (or something) to install the DSL line. Didnt show. 2 weeks later, shows up, and leaves because "noone was available for the install". Meanwhile, we still dont have internet. Internet was finally installed mid december. For our trouble, we also received a bill for November service (which we noticably did not have).
A year later, the verizon speeds were running into big issues-- total throughput was down in the ISDN range (128-256kbits). Verizon insisted it was due to the location and how far we were from the office-- never mind that we had had service there for a year with only minor issues. Several techs (5+) later, internet is still incredibly intermittent; we eventually had to set up a secondary line (over 3g) to get us by until we could switch to Comcast. Through all of this-- not being able to receive email, barely useable browsing-- verizon only offered a credit (for service we no longer wished to have), not a refund. Their customer service was utterly apathetic when I indicated that, unfortunately, we were likely going to have to move to comcast because of the situation.
Several other customers had similar issues (all over the DC metro area)-- poor speeds all of a sudden, verizon insists its because of the location, despite service having been mostly fine until it occurs. Techs missing appointments, unsatisfactory resolutions ("well, this is how it is now-- learn to live with 512kbits"), and never a refund
My quite old father just moved onto verizon business FIOS, after assurance that the bill would be around $150/mo. For the past 6 months, each month the bill statement indicated a balance of $400+. Each month I call in, they apologize, indicate that the bundle was incorrectly applied, correct it, and our bill is lowered to the (still less than ideal) ~$200. Each month, the issue crops up again. One wonders how many customers experience this issue (a casual survey of friends indicates this isnt unique) and dont bother to fight it.
Another company was on verizon DSL on a contract, and at Verizon's suggestion we moved to Verizon FIOS. The next month we got hit with a massive termination fee for DSL. I believe it was eventually removed, but I understand from the finance department that various similar issues (wierd charges, them being unable to fully remove the DSL service from the bill, etc) happen each month, with noone able to explain why or how to fix it. I believe we eventually cancelled all service with them because it was costing too much in administrative costs to deal with their nonsense.
Another customer on Verizon T1 (in western Va)-- about 100 meters from a Verizon office-- was having packet loss issues. Verizon insisted it was on our end. After days of arguing, I stuck a script on a local server which ran various tracerts, and clearly showed packet loss and latency spikes well into Verizon's side of things, with flawless routing up till then. After being transferred to "tier 2", they agreed it was their issue, immediately saw an issue on their device, and fixed it in about 5 minutes-- this after days (or weeks?) of arguing about how it was our fault.
And of course, theres the fact that FIOS has terrible latency when compared to Comcast or basically anyone else, DSL has terrible reliability, and their unionized workers seem to think its clever to run around snipping fiber lines
I could go on and on-- issues of having to argue with verizon about things that are CLEARLY on their end, unreliable DSL, random outages that they dont acknowledge (due to union strikes)-- but I think that sums it up. Their internet service is mediocre for what its supposed to be (how is Comcast's coax internet achieving half the latency of fiber? does Verizon route through Malaysia?), their billing stinks, and their customer support ranges from helpful to awful. That theyre unionized to boot just makes things worse.
I basically will not recommend verizon to anyone at this point unless there is a good reason they cannot take another ISP.
Im not saying the chances are 50/50, im saying that applying statistical language to something like that has never made sense to me and I continue to not understand what it might signify.
Regarding your aside, I have a number of reasons why I believe, although there is more to my belief than that. To be clear, I cannot remember not believing in a deity, though for the majority of my life I only acknowledged it superficially. But in the last few years, while treating that belief with more significance, I have also challenged it over and over from different angles, and it remains to my mind the best explanation for what we have now.
For instance, I have never been satisfied with the half answers about cognition and meta-cognition, and about how in-animate molecules could be "aware" in the way we seem to be. I understand that there are attempts to demonstrate them as purely chemical functions, but awareness of the sort we seem to have would not be "necessary" for our bodies to perform as the chemical interactions dictate. Additionally, as I understand things, a purely materialistic view of reality would seem to dicatate that at their lowest level, all of reality-- including our thoughts!-- are random, only achieving some semblance of order when viewed from a higher level; this of course raises the question, if all of our thoughts are only seemingly "intelligent", and are in fact the random occurrences, why even bother with rational discussion?
For another, a naturalistic world view tends to espouse, again and again, the idea that man can perfect himself, and that bad people are the anomaly: if only we can get this aspect or that correct, everything will be gravy. But time and again it fails, seemingly because of our inherent nature. You can see quotes and observations from men throughout the ages observing this. It seems to me that if you have two theories, and one continually makes correct predictions while the other makes incorrect predictions, you put more stock in the one that is correct more often.
There are many other reasons why I believe what I believe. I will not deny that there is a part of me that wants to believe what I do; but there are also parts that do not want it to be true (being told that you are inherently bad, or that you must suppress this inclination or that is not what my nature tends towards!). I do not think this speaks for or against the reality of truth, however.
As to your suggestion about how religion starts, that is one of the more curious things about Christianity, and another hard to explain thing if it were all hogwash. Prior to Jesus of Nazareth's crucifixion, he had a number of followers; post capture and crucifixion, they all scattered and many denied they knew him. Yet several days later they all claimed to have seen him, and became incredibly open about their discipleship to him, which resulted in stonings, rejection, persecution, etc. One would ask what caused this behavior, if there were nothing to it. I dont think it was "random thoughts popping into their heads", when the choice was renouncing their faith or death by unpleasant means.
At least netflix' customer support right now is good (call them, and see how long it takes to reach someone-- likely under 45 seconds); can you imagine what billing and support will turn into if Verizon gets its mitts on them?
but there is a very high likelihood that all the ones people on Earth believe in are made up.
I should clarify where my unease with that language of "likelihood" rests: speaking of whether or not it is "likely" (absent any data) that there is a black hole 120 parsecs away in a direct line with polaris, makes no sense in my mind. You have no data to verify or refute it, and it either "is" or "is not". Statistics dont really come into play when discussing the existence or lack thereof of something unless you have empirical data about it. Further, even if you could show that 99 beliefs about deities were wrong, that gives you still no usable data in determining whether that last deity exists-- its like flipping a coin heads 99 times in a row and thinking you somehow can predict with high accuracy what the next 10 flips will be (assuming they are truly random flips).
So, let's recap: LL: you would be hard pressed to show me a belief in the Bible or Torah that encourages bad behavior TS: teaching kids creationism LL: baseless and unfounded accusation of fallacy AC: concrete example of why "teaching kids creationism" is an exponent of belief that encourages bad behaviour LL: ah, but there are zillion reasons for bad behaviour
No, and I have a sinking feeling that most of your remarks, like this one, have forgotten what the actual discussion. I have highlighted where your error is; your attempt at selective quoting was a good one however. All of your examples are notably absent from the Bible.
Additionally, I brought up those "zillions of reasons" to show that, not only is it NOT based in the bible, it is also not a distinctly Christian thing at all. You might as well blame christianity for the prevalence of liars: It likewise is an example of something that is neither commended in the bible nor is distinctly christian.
You are begging some serious questions here, I notice. 1 - you're assuming that it is the content of creationism that is the most delectable. It isn't. It is the implicit resistance to discourse and scrutiny that is the most harmful
That is neither what you stated as your complaint, nor what I responded to. Your complaint was "teaching creationism in school", not "suppression of this fact or that".
Reading over your post, you seem to be equivocating and creating a moving target. We start discussing one thing (for example, whether such notions are in the Bible), and all of a sudden your post discusses whether Christians are subject to certain vices (which I explicitly agreed with in my original post). Its kind of a hopeless argument when you cant even agree on what it is you are discussing.
Case in point:
No, please re-read yourself. You did not ask for a written word....
Allow me to clarify all the confusion by ONCE AGAIN referring to the original post, with helpful emphasis:
At the end of the day, you would be hard pressed to show me a belief in the Torah or Bible that actually encourages bad behavior, especially the Christian understanding of the bible.
Last I checked, both the Torah and Bible qualified as "written word".
you slithering back from "belief" into "written word" is another attempt at moving the goalposts.
Looks like the goalposts are precisely where they started, to me. Try hitting that "parent" button a few times to clarify things.
RE the Quran and other such complaints, you seem to keep assuming that when I say one thing (discussing what the religious texts say) that I mean another (what people sometimes think they mean). It doesnt help you win an argument, it just makes the discussion an impossible mess.
The closest you came to addressing my point was your mention of Sura 9:5, which is unfortunately out of context: As wikipedia notes, that is referencing a specific conquest, not a general command, and once again the earlier link to wikipedia notes that there is NO general, wide-scale exhortation to kill unbelievers in the Quran. I would perhaps be willing to concede this point, however, since it is apparently debated by scholars, and is regardless not the point I was originally making-- it was unwise to comment on the Quran in the context I did, especially when they DO have writings which ARE more militant in nature.
It's not as bad, but similar to how many Christians have made Christ on the Cross an object of worship.
Basically anything can be made into an idol. As Calvin noted, "From this we may gather that man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”
Even that article notes that that word indicates a "marriageable" girl. If you have read the OT (particularly the narrative of Amnon's rape of Tamar), you would know that in that culture a non-virgin would have been referred to as "unmarriageable" (hence the necessity of Absalom taking Tamar into his household, and her distress above and beyond the violation).
If you prefer a NT example, you would also note Joseph's initial intention upon finding out about Mary's supposed infidelity.
Yea, dont ever use the KJV in an argument or discussion unless it is about the style of writing from the 16 and 17th centuries. It introduces all the problems you get when you translate from one language to another (greek to old english) and from thence to a third language (modern english). Its even worse with the KJV because most people assume its "normal english", when the usages of many words are totally different.
Theres absolutely no reason other than sentimentality, tradition, etc (which could be good reasons, as long as you understand what it is you are reading) not to use a modern translation like the ESV, RSV, NASB, NIV, etc-- they all use (mostly) the same sources and are 99.99% in agreement with each other, simply preferring different wording.
The one area where KJV IS better is that in that version of english there are separate versions for the singular "you" (thee, thou) and the plural "you" (you), whereas modern english makes no such distinction. In most cases context is sufficient, but there are times where it is ambiguous and one is forced to refer either to the KJV or the original greek / hebrew to determine whether singular or plural was intended.
Trying to do NTFS recovery from linux has NEVER ended well for me, unless it involved backing data up with ddrescue. Stick with Microsoft's tools, theres a reason so few (if any?) linux tools are capable of dealing with NTFS corruption. Plug the drive into a second computer and do chkdsk/v/f/r on it, in my experience it is VERY unlikely that it will not make things better (if at all possible).
The real problem here is that there is a large gap between what the two types of drives (cheaply) hold and"normal users" are likely to fall somewhere in between.
Quoted for truth.
I have many friends who could possibly do with just 60GB; but I also have a lot of friends who have 100GB+ of baby photos and movies. How smart would it be to suggest a SSD to one of my friends knowing that it may be a matter of short while before they too are filling their tiny SSD with baby photos?
Suggesting anything less than 160GB for a friend seems like taking a gamble, unless I know a lot about their usage patterns.
If its truly frivilous, the judge can decide that hes had enough of the shenanigans, award attorney fees (which in a drawn out fight can be quite high), throw in contempt of court damages, etc. It can also open the door for countersuing for "SLAPP" tactics, and a lawyer who does this too much can be disbarred.
Our system allows a lot of crap through, but you really dont want to piss the judges off with trivial crap no matter who you are, because they can hit back very hard.
Wait, wait wait. So if there are lots of people who only have a algebra-2-level understanding of mathematics, and TI makes a calculator that allows them to accomplish the tasks they want without knowing more--up to and including Calculus-- somehow TI is doing a bad thing here?
Im not aware of any MS Office certifications (though I guess they could exist?), but the ribbon makes a ton of sense when you stop trying to figure out "which menu was that function under, and what tab does that correspond to", and simply ask "what am I trying to do".
Rather than having to dig around to figure out where mail merge is now, I can just ask "what am I trying to do", and hey, theres mailings. Ribbon makes a lot more sense once you throw out your understanding of the complicated heirarchy of menus, and just take the Ribbon at face value. These days, when someone asks me "how do I do X" where X is a little-used function of Office, I dont have to dig around, and it takes me all of about 3 minutes to find it.
Slashdot Mirror
The "moral superior" attitude comes from paying someone who actually deserves it, as opposed to paying the MAFIAA who create nothing themselves and charge 5 times what something is actually worth, while passing on next to nothing to the people who actually did the work.
I'll gladly pay an artist if his work deserves it, but I'll be damned if I help enable the abusive greedy behavior of the content cartels. They can go fuck themselves.
You DO realize that noone is obligated to create entertainment for you for the price you demand, right? Reading your post one gets the idea that you feel yourself entitled to entertainment.
Good thing theyre based in the US, then, huh? Maybe folks in europe shouldnt be visiting the site if its illegal.
They have that power, but Congress CAN authorize military force without declaring war. It has done so many times in the past, and I am not aware of a consitutional requirement that all military action be formally authorized by an explicit declaration of war.
Afghanistan and Iraq WERE authorized, though not by declarations of war. The difference is that if war were declared, the executive gets all sorts of nasty powers, and noone much wants that.
I think there would be some other people somewhat upset if you just dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on what are now tiny black bricks useless to you.
Not if your budget is of the "use it or lose it" sort, and you needed to spend several hundred thousand dollars to meet your budget anyways.
If they are like any organisation I've worked for, they over write the tapes.
Except that their privacy policy makes it explicitly clear that they do not do that just because you deleted your account.
But when I have a reasonable expectation for something to be deleted forever
Not when their data usage policy spells out when it ISNT deleted, and gives no guarentees.
Im almost CERTAIN that these sites are required to disclose what they gather and how they use said data. If only facebook complied and had some kind of policy...
Ill note that their policy (same as basically every other policy out there) indicates that they will keep data for at least 90 days after deletion, and do not guarentee a time of deletion.
What should be illegal (not really) is people using a free service and then complaining that they dont like how it functions. What the heck do you THINK youre signing up for when you use an advertising supported social networking site known for data collection? That theyre trying to take a loss on you?
My complaint list for verizon is as follows:
I could go on and on-- issues of having to argue with verizon about things that are CLEARLY on their end, unreliable DSL, random outages that they dont acknowledge (due to union strikes)-- but I think that sums it up. Their internet service is mediocre for what its supposed to be (how is Comcast's coax internet achieving half the latency of fiber? does Verizon route through Malaysia?), their billing stinks, and their customer support ranges from helpful to awful. That theyre unionized to boot just makes things worse.
I basically will not recommend verizon to anyone at this point unless there is a good reason they cannot take another ISP.
Im not saying the chances are 50/50, im saying that applying statistical language to something like that has never made sense to me and I continue to not understand what it might signify.
Regarding your aside, I have a number of reasons why I believe, although there is more to my belief than that. To be clear, I cannot remember not believing in a deity, though for the majority of my life I only acknowledged it superficially. But in the last few years, while treating that belief with more significance, I have also challenged it over and over from different angles, and it remains to my mind the best explanation for what we have now.
For instance, I have never been satisfied with the half answers about cognition and meta-cognition, and about how in-animate molecules could be "aware" in the way we seem to be. I understand that there are attempts to demonstrate them as purely chemical functions, but awareness of the sort we seem to have would not be "necessary" for our bodies to perform as the chemical interactions dictate. Additionally, as I understand things, a purely materialistic view of reality would seem to dicatate that at their lowest level, all of reality-- including our thoughts!-- are random, only achieving some semblance of order when viewed from a higher level; this of course raises the question, if all of our thoughts are only seemingly "intelligent", and are in fact the random occurrences, why even bother with rational discussion?
For another, a naturalistic world view tends to espouse, again and again, the idea that man can perfect himself, and that bad people are the anomaly: if only we can get this aspect or that correct, everything will be gravy. But time and again it fails, seemingly because of our inherent nature. You can see quotes and observations from men throughout the ages observing this. It seems to me that if you have two theories, and one continually makes correct predictions while the other makes incorrect predictions, you put more stock in the one that is correct more often.
There are many other reasons why I believe what I believe. I will not deny that there is a part of me that wants to believe what I do; but there are also parts that do not want it to be true (being told that you are inherently bad, or that you must suppress this inclination or that is not what my nature tends towards!). I do not think this speaks for or against the reality of truth, however.
As to your suggestion about how religion starts, that is one of the more curious things about Christianity, and another hard to explain thing if it were all hogwash. Prior to Jesus of Nazareth's crucifixion, he had a number of followers; post capture and crucifixion, they all scattered and many denied they knew him. Yet several days later they all claimed to have seen him, and became incredibly open about their discipleship to him, which resulted in stonings, rejection, persecution, etc. One would ask what caused this behavior, if there were nothing to it. I dont think it was "random thoughts popping into their heads", when the choice was renouncing their faith or death by unpleasant means.
At least netflix' customer support right now is good (call them, and see how long it takes to reach someone-- likely under 45 seconds); can you imagine what billing and support will turn into if Verizon gets its mitts on them?
but there is a very high likelihood that all the ones people on Earth believe in are made up.
I should clarify where my unease with that language of "likelihood" rests: speaking of whether or not it is "likely" (absent any data) that there is a black hole 120 parsecs away in a direct line with polaris, makes no sense in my mind. You have no data to verify or refute it, and it either "is" or "is not". Statistics dont really come into play when discussing the existence or lack thereof of something unless you have empirical data about it. Further, even if you could show that 99 beliefs about deities were wrong, that gives you still no usable data in determining whether that last deity exists-- its like flipping a coin heads 99 times in a row and thinking you somehow can predict with high accuracy what the next 10 flips will be (assuming they are truly random flips).
Wall of text is wall of text....
So, let's recap:
LL: you would be hard pressed to show me a belief in the Bible or Torah that encourages bad behavior
TS: teaching kids creationism
LL: baseless and unfounded accusation of fallacy
AC: concrete example of why "teaching kids creationism" is an exponent of belief that encourages bad behaviour
LL: ah, but there are zillion reasons for bad behaviour
No, and I have a sinking feeling that most of your remarks, like this one, have forgotten what the actual discussion. I have highlighted where your error is; your attempt at selective quoting was a good one however. All of your examples are notably absent from the Bible.
Additionally, I brought up those "zillions of reasons" to show that, not only is it NOT based in the bible, it is also not a distinctly Christian thing at all. You might as well blame christianity for the prevalence of liars: It likewise is an example of something that is neither commended in the bible nor is distinctly christian.
You are begging some serious questions here, I notice.
1 - you're assuming that it is the content of creationism that is the most delectable. It isn't. It is the implicit resistance to discourse and scrutiny that is the most harmful
That is neither what you stated as your complaint, nor what I responded to. Your complaint was "teaching creationism in school", not "suppression of this fact or that".
Reading over your post, you seem to be equivocating and creating a moving target. We start discussing one thing (for example, whether such notions are in the Bible), and all of a sudden your post discusses whether Christians are subject to certain vices (which I explicitly agreed with in my original post). Its kind of a hopeless argument when you cant even agree on what it is you are discussing.
Case in point:
No, please re-read yourself. You did not ask for a written word....
Allow me to clarify all the confusion by ONCE AGAIN referring to the original post, with helpful emphasis:
At the end of the day, you would be hard pressed to show me a belief in the Torah or Bible that actually encourages bad behavior, especially the Christian understanding of the bible.
Last I checked, both the Torah and Bible qualified as "written word".
you slithering back from "belief" into "written word" is another attempt at moving the goalposts.
Looks like the goalposts are precisely where they started, to me. Try hitting that "parent" button a few times to clarify things.
RE the Quran and other such complaints, you seem to keep assuming that when I say one thing (discussing what the religious texts say) that I mean another (what people sometimes think they mean). It doesnt help you win an argument, it just makes the discussion an impossible mess.
The closest you came to addressing my point was your mention of Sura 9:5, which is unfortunately out of context: As wikipedia notes, that is referencing a specific conquest, not a general command, and once again the earlier link to wikipedia notes that there is NO general, wide-scale exhortation to kill unbelievers in the Quran. I would perhaps be willing to concede this point, however, since it is apparently debated by scholars, and is regardless not the point I was originally making-- it was unwise to comment on the Quran in the context I did, especially when they DO have writings which ARE more militant in nature.
Or haven't you noticed the large number that dislike the ribbon?
The danger of hanging out on slashdot to the exclusion of the real world is that you begin to believe a vocal minority represents the majority.
It's not as bad, but similar to how many Christians have made Christ on the Cross an object of worship.
Basically anything can be made into an idol. As Calvin noted, "From this we may gather that man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”
Even that article notes that that word indicates a "marriageable" girl. If you have read the OT (particularly the narrative of Amnon's rape of Tamar), you would know that in that culture a non-virgin would have been referred to as "unmarriageable" (hence the necessity of Absalom taking Tamar into his household, and her distress above and beyond the violation).
If you prefer a NT example, you would also note Joseph's initial intention upon finding out about Mary's supposed infidelity.
Yea, dont ever use the KJV in an argument or discussion unless it is about the style of writing from the 16 and 17th centuries. It introduces all the problems you get when you translate from one language to another (greek to old english) and from thence to a third language (modern english). Its even worse with the KJV because most people assume its "normal english", when the usages of many words are totally different.
Theres absolutely no reason other than sentimentality, tradition, etc (which could be good reasons, as long as you understand what it is you are reading) not to use a modern translation like the ESV, RSV, NASB, NIV, etc-- they all use (mostly) the same sources and are 99.99% in agreement with each other, simply preferring different wording.
The one area where KJV IS better is that in that version of english there are separate versions for the singular "you" (thee, thou) and the plural "you" (you), whereas modern english makes no such distinction. In most cases context is sufficient, but there are times where it is ambiguous and one is forced to refer either to the KJV or the original greek / hebrew to determine whether singular or plural was intended.
Many lawyers will fight that drawn out fight for you if they expect that there will be an eventual payout-- which can get into the tens of millions
Trying to do NTFS recovery from linux has NEVER ended well for me, unless it involved backing data up with ddrescue. Stick with Microsoft's tools, theres a reason so few (if any?) linux tools are capable of dealing with NTFS corruption. Plug the drive into a second computer and do chkdsk /v /f /r on it, in my experience it is VERY unlikely that it will not make things better (if at all possible).
The real problem here is that there is a large gap between what the two types of drives (cheaply) hold and"normal users" are likely to fall somewhere in between.
Quoted for truth.
I have many friends who could possibly do with just 60GB; but I also have a lot of friends who have 100GB+ of baby photos and movies. How smart would it be to suggest a SSD to one of my friends knowing that it may be a matter of short while before they too are filling their tiny SSD with baby photos?
Suggesting anything less than 160GB for a friend seems like taking a gamble, unless I know a lot about their usage patterns.
"Never trust a man who cites statistics, especially when he's talking about me." - Thomas Jefferson
"Dont listen to parent, hes only a naysayer." - Ben Franklin
If its truly frivilous, the judge can decide that hes had enough of the shenanigans, award attorney fees (which in a drawn out fight can be quite high), throw in contempt of court damages, etc. It can also open the door for countersuing for "SLAPP" tactics, and a lawyer who does this too much can be disbarred.
Our system allows a lot of crap through, but you really dont want to piss the judges off with trivial crap no matter who you are, because they can hit back very hard.
What part of "free service", "no SLAs", "no guarantees", "use at your own risk", ad naseum do you not understand?
Wait, wait wait. So if there are lots of people who only have a algebra-2-level understanding of mathematics, and TI makes a calculator that allows them to accomplish the tasks they want without knowing more--up to and including Calculus-- somehow TI is doing a bad thing here?
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"EnableBalloonTips"=dword:00000000
See, THIS is why Linux will NEVER get mainstream adop..... whats that, thats a registry entry? Carry on.
Im not aware of any MS Office certifications (though I guess they could exist?), but the ribbon makes a ton of sense when you stop trying to figure out "which menu was that function under, and what tab does that correspond to", and simply ask "what am I trying to do".
Rather than having to dig around to figure out where mail merge is now, I can just ask "what am I trying to do", and hey, theres mailings. Ribbon makes a lot more sense once you throw out your understanding of the complicated heirarchy of menus, and just take the Ribbon at face value. These days, when someone asks me "how do I do X" where X is a little-used function of Office, I dont have to dig around, and it takes me all of about 3 minutes to find it.