IN fact, every mac user I've seen who uses a mouse uses a typical multi-button optical mouse, or other exotic device. Almost nobody uses the stock 1 button mouse.
I doubt these are average Mac users. In my experience (IT manager for a university department, probably still half Mac users) virtually nobody uses anything but the standard mouse. I'm about the only person who does, and even then I had to redeploy the mouse to another machine and go back to one of the crappy old round iMac mice:(
Thanks for the links (and to Foxwell too)! That's pretty convincing. I am an airship historian in a minor way myself (although the Hindenburg is outside my period), and I've been bandying the Bain theory around whenever somebody mentioned the Hindenburg fire (as they inevitably did when I said I was studying airships). I did worry about the obvious agenda behind the theory, and also why lightning hadn't been a problem. Now I see I should have worried more... thanks again.
Well, as Voltaire's is a witty saying, it also proves nothing:)
Occam's razor is merely common sense. If you have two explanations which explain the observed data equally well, choose the simplest. Why choose the more complex explanation? It doesn't explain anything that the simpler one cannot, and you are just making life unnecessarily harder.
1. I don't have a precommittment to naturalism - as though I were born into it somehow. I consciously committed to it, because it's the most successful way we have to understand the Universe.
2. Even if science is never able to account for "everything", why is that any reason to believe that God exists? That's the whole point of the "god of the gaps" thing (and it's NOT a strawman, by the way, it's precisely the argument you presented).
If they do claim to know these things, then it inevitably falls outside of what is testable, falsifiable, and reproducible, so it's no longer science, and they're playing their own "Science of the gaps" game, trusting that a falsifiable naturalistic explanation will come along in time.
And you're trusting that it won't. Given that the trend has overwhelmingly been the other way, it's pretty clear where the smart money is.
Given your precommitment to naturalism, does the supernatural not exist, or is it merely not important? (You'll probably ignore this question)
As the great Dana Scully once said, "Nothing happens
in contradiction to nature; only in contradiction to what we know of it." Anything labelled "supernatural" is either bogus or insufficiently well known. So no, I don't believe that the supernatural exists. Should I?
I don't really see how that stacks up. First of all, I'm not looking for God to explain anything, and while some people might be, I think that many see it in quite the opposite way. There are things that we don't understand yet, and also things that are impossible for us to understand as we are now. And that's OK.
Isn't that precisely what God explains for you? The stuff you don't understand - it's all down to God, he made it happen or it's part of his plan, and so it's OK if it doesn't make sense to us?
If God doesn't explain anything for you, then why believe in him? You have no need of that hypothesis.
As others have noted, some good has come from it. In Sri Lanka (and probably other places), enemies are now working together for common good. God loves that sort of thing! I'm sure a lot of survivors in the region are now more aware of the frailty of life and are more open to God's message.
Gee thanks for the tsunami, God, what a swell guy you are! Can't wait for your next massacre of innocents to help spread the Good Word.
Sorry, but your God is nobody I'd invite into my house, let alone worship.
Quibbling over the percentages aside, the problem is that the "unknown" keeps shrinking. And where the equivalent of your "intelligent design guy" would once have said "clouds, huh, can't explain them can you? Obviously God makes them", now we can explain them using non-supernatural science. God of the gaps. You don't want to be arguing this, trust me.
There's no doubt that the standard big bang model doesn't work as well as it used to. But it's now merely a starting point. The most important features of the model - that it explains the microwave background, the recession of galaxies, and elemental abundances - are still good reasons for thinking that reality will turn out to have something very like a big bang, even if it is rather weirder (branes and suchlike). The big bang is here to stay - it's the standard, simplistic big bang model which is in trouble.
PS There is no way I am going to read a book with "Akashic Field" in the title, leastways not without laughing.
Bain is wrong. The covering was not anything like rocket fuel because the powdered aluminum and powdered iron were not mixed together; they were applied in separate layers. When ignited, both authentic samples of the treated covering, and replicated material, burn quite slowly and not spectacularly at all.
Well now, whether or not you are right would depend upon what you think "fascism" means - because there's no way that fascism as practiced by Hitler and Mussolini would have "save[d] the earth from ourselves". Fascism is the very opposite of a long-term sustainable system.
Well, no, the point is that she isn't very worried about him getting run over etc, which is a more likely eventuality than his train being blown up my terrorists.
If you are going to be a pedantic smart-arse, you should at least be RIGHT. "Series" is singular as well as plural, so there is nothing wrong with the OPs statement as it stands. But that's beside the point, because you clearly knew what was meant anyway.
I agree, when I heard that Freeman was going to be Arthur Dent I was reassured: it seemed that the producers "got" Hitchhikers. To a lesser degree, same with Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, from what I've seen I think he can nail the role of a terminally hip spaced out ex-galactic president.
Well, yeah, and there's also the fact that nobody uses radar to discover these things anyway. It's all done with mirrors - that is to say, optical telescopes.
Nasa's concrete mission for the moon was to get there in case we needed to launch missles off of it at Russia, before ICBM's were developed.
That's just silly. Firstly, the early space rockets were ICBMs - Atlas, SS4, etc. Secondly, why would you want to launch missiles from the Moon when it would take days for them to reach their targets?
Firstly, what does this have to do with my post? Do you not understand simple mathematics?
Secondly, why should I care what a right-wing website reports about the views of a sociologist, a lawyer and an MBA about global warming, none of whom has any relevent scientific expertise?
Thanks to globalization putting pollution limits on national boundries is insane.
Insane? How else would you do it? Virtually all CO2 generated by human activity comes from within some national border or other, therefore if every country limited their CO2 emissions, limitation of global CO2 emissions follows.
China in particular, as a developing country, gets a free pass in Kyoto and it is the worlds biggest up and comer in the pollution arena.
Arrrgh, why does this get repeated every frigging time a greenhouse story comes up on slashdot? China has ratified Kyoto, and in ca. 2015 will become an Annex 1 country, at which point it will be required to limit CO2 emissions like the other developed countries. So when will the US be doing that? Will we instead see Chinese industry moving to the US to escape onerous CO2 emission laws?
Of course - no doubt the UN's black helicopters and those mysterious foreign troops stationed all over the US will be part of this too. Why do you people buy into this FUD? Kyoto is just another international treaty, the US is party to dozens of them already. Yes, by signing up to a treaty your country is limiting its own freedom to some degree. So what? Restricting your CO2 emissions does not mean the King of England is about to come back (or whatever it is that you fear so much). This is such an obvious scare tactic, but people just as obviously fall for it. Why?
I live in a cold climate. When I hear talk about global warming I say "Bring it on!".
Hey, that's a great basis for global policy: do whatever makes 0111 1110 happy - it's not like anybody else matters! Is there some mailing list for world leaders that we can post this suggestion to?
Slashdot Mirror
That's an excellent point, easy to forget for us young'uns. Maybe Microsoft should be going down Apple's path, to facilitate the use of 1-button mice!
I doubt these are average Mac users. In my experience (IT manager for a university department, probably still half Mac users) virtually nobody uses anything but the standard mouse. I'm about the only person who does, and even then I had to redeploy the mouse to another machine and go back to one of the crappy old round iMac mice :(
17 years ago? In 1988? On the web? How? (Do I have enough question marks in this post?)
USA! USA! And there are so many other countries with Arctic coastlines too. Like Norway ... and, um ... well, that's it really.
I assume you're British ... the rest of the English-speaking world calls private schools "private schools" :)
Thanks for the links (and to Foxwell too)! That's pretty convincing. I am an airship historian in a minor way myself (although the Hindenburg is outside my period), and I've been bandying the Bain theory around whenever somebody mentioned the Hindenburg fire (as they inevitably did when I said I was studying airships). I did worry about the obvious agenda behind the theory, and also why lightning hadn't been a problem. Now I see I should have worried more ... thanks again.
Hmmm, that one's worth pondering some more I think ...
Occam's razor is merely common sense. If you have two explanations which explain the observed data equally well, choose the simplest. Why choose the more complex explanation? It doesn't explain anything that the simpler one cannot, and you are just making life unnecessarily harder.
1. I don't have a precommittment to naturalism - as though I were born into it somehow. I consciously committed to it, because it's the most successful way we have to understand the Universe.
2. Even if science is never able to account for "everything", why is that any reason to believe that God exists? That's the whole point of the "god of the gaps" thing (and it's NOT a strawman, by the way, it's precisely the argument you presented).
And you're trusting that it won't. Given that the trend has overwhelmingly been the other way, it's pretty clear where the smart money is.
Given your precommitment to naturalism, does the supernatural not exist, or is it merely not important? (You'll probably ignore this question)
As the great Dana Scully once said, "Nothing happens in contradiction to nature; only in contradiction to what we know of it." Anything labelled "supernatural" is either bogus or insufficiently well known. So no, I don't believe that the supernatural exists. Should I?
Isn't that precisely what God explains for you? The stuff you don't understand - it's all down to God, he made it happen or it's part of his plan, and so it's OK if it doesn't make sense to us?
If God doesn't explain anything for you, then why believe in him? You have no need of that hypothesis.
Gee thanks for the tsunami, God, what a swell guy you are! Can't wait for your next massacre of innocents to help spread the Good Word.
Sorry, but your God is nobody I'd invite into my house, let alone worship.
Quibbling over the percentages aside, the problem is that the "unknown" keeps shrinking. And where the equivalent of your "intelligent design guy" would once have said "clouds, huh, can't explain them can you? Obviously God makes them", now we can explain them using non-supernatural science. God of the gaps. You don't want to be arguing this, trust me.
PS There is no way I am going to read a book with "Akashic Field" in the title, leastways not without laughing.
Source?
Well now, whether or not you are right would depend upon what you think "fascism" means - because there's no way that fascism as practiced by Hitler and Mussolini would have "save[d] the earth from ourselves". Fascism is the very opposite of a long-term sustainable system.
Well, no, the point is that she isn't very worried about him getting run over etc, which is a more likely eventuality than his train being blown up my terrorists.
If you are going to be a pedantic smart-arse, you should at least be RIGHT. "Series" is singular as well as plural, so there is nothing wrong with the OPs statement as it stands. But that's beside the point, because you clearly knew what was meant anyway.
I agree, when I heard that Freeman was going to be Arthur Dent I was reassured: it seemed that the producers "got" Hitchhikers. To a lesser degree, same with Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, from what I've seen I think he can nail the role of a terminally hip spaced out ex-galactic president.
Well, yeah, and there's also the fact that nobody uses radar to discover these things anyway. It's all done with mirrors - that is to say, optical telescopes.
That's just silly. Firstly, the early space rockets were ICBMs - Atlas, SS4, etc. Secondly, why would you want to launch missiles from the Moon when it would take days for them to reach their targets?
Secondly, why should I care what a right-wing website reports about the views of a sociologist, a lawyer and an MBA about global warming, none of whom has any relevent scientific expertise?
Insane? How else would you do it? Virtually all CO2 generated by human activity comes from within some national border or other, therefore if every country limited their CO2 emissions, limitation of global CO2 emissions follows.
China in particular, as a developing country, gets a free pass in Kyoto and it is the worlds biggest up and comer in the pollution arena.
Arrrgh, why does this get repeated every frigging time a greenhouse story comes up on slashdot? China has ratified Kyoto, and in ca. 2015 will become an Annex 1 country, at which point it will be required to limit CO2 emissions like the other developed countries. So when will the US be doing that? Will we instead see Chinese industry moving to the US to escape onerous CO2 emission laws?
Of course - no doubt the UN's black helicopters and those mysterious foreign troops stationed all over the US will be part of this too. Why do you people buy into this FUD? Kyoto is just another international treaty, the US is party to dozens of them already. Yes, by signing up to a treaty your country is limiting its own freedom to some degree. So what? Restricting your CO2 emissions does not mean the King of England is about to come back (or whatever it is that you fear so much). This is such an obvious scare tactic, but people just as obviously fall for it. Why?
Hey, that's a great basis for global policy: do whatever makes 0111 1110 happy - it's not like anybody else matters! Is there some mailing list for world leaders that we can post this suggestion to?