In their defense, your PC is pretty buggy. I saw that thing, you had like 5 different betas of.NET installed and "Antivirus 2009" kept asking me to upgrade. The Comet Cursor selection was pretty sweet though.
Most people, even if they don't believe their computer is malware-proof, can't be bothered to behave as if it isn't:)
I run a Windows domain at work (DCs are Server 2003, clients are all XP) and we do just fine. Some of my users are notorious for catching stuff. The AV and web filtering help out with that, but they both cost us money and time, and I still have to stay on top of everything.
At home, I talked my parents into picking up an iMac. They like it, and I am confident that at no point in that machines life will they be catching a virus...they're not hanging out at TPB, after all. So they're free to do whatever without worrying about that.
Certainly for a lot of it, but I wouldn't say most. Just from my own experience cleaning up people's PCs, a lot of it is IE-targeting drive-by malware. Obviously the number of Mac trojans like this one in the wild is much smaller than the number of similar Windows ones. That's a practical difference, not any kind of baked-in protection. You can call it security by obscurity if you want. But that situation isn't going to change for a long time, if ever.
As to whether MacOS is *theoretically* safer than Vista with UAC turned on and Firefox as default browser, I don't know. Probably not. I do enjoy not having to put up with two or three dialogs and a screen dimming every time I delete a shortcut from the start menu. If you can handle running an XP box and keeping it clean, there's your Windows solution. For people who can't be trusted to do so, as well as people who can't stand constantly being interrupted when doing mundane things like enabling Wi-Fi, there's OS X.
I hope we can honor our treaties in the future. But I don't hold my breath when it comes to such things.
I know that coal is sometimes mined from mountaintops as well. I don't know what percentage of that is or how it compares to uranium.
There are a lot of negatives when it comes to nuclear power but I am convinced that we needed to cut our carbon emissions yesterday, and power plants are the #1 source. We have over 100 functioning reactors (all operating safely), but they're getting older. I would have preferred that we kept building so we could make up for the eventual closings.
What I honestly think is going to happen is that we are going to see some well-meaning CCS programs in terms of taxes and/or incentives and subsidies. Then the coal industry is going to take advantage of loopholes or changes so that (a) they get to go on polluting, (b) the legislators will act like they did something (c) half of everyone will think we "fixed" climate change and the other half will say it was a myth in the first place. The more we can invest in alternatives to coal, rather than just giving the coal industry money for pretending to clean up, the better off we will be.
Now all we have to do is take a survey and make sure that it's the same "they" both times. Then global warming will be irrefutably proved wrong, and we'll all be able to rest easy.
I like how that article argues that nuclear plants are bad when it comes to greenhouse gases because you have to mine uranium, even though you have to mine coal as well. The difference of course is that afterward we burn the coal.
Then they say nuclear isn't sustainable because it's "seeing its role in the world's energy mix diminish". That's a prime example of begging the question, and they even spend the next seven paragraphs backing up this "argument".
Then there's this gem: "The nuclear industry argues that the problems in the former Soviet Union are different to those in developed countries, but the United States itself had a serious accident at Three Mile Island in 1979."
I expected the obligatory Chernobyl mention, but TMI and Chernobyl were night and day. Their transparent attempt to imply that the US has had its own "Chernobyl" despite the common knowledge that TMI-2 was contained is the most weasel-ish thing I've heard in a *long* time (and I watched an hour of Kent Hovind the other day). I'm inclined to view TMI's accident as an example of how far we've come and how much we learned from Chernobyl, and I'm far from unique in that assessment.
Friends of Earth (the authors) are dead-set against nuclear power. I'm not...I think we should go back to moving forward cautiously with it. It's not all "China Syndrome", there are benefits as well as risks. You can consider that my statement of my own bias. But even if I was as strongly against nuclear power as they were, I'd still hope to be intellectually honest enough to call that article out for being the complete mess that it is.
That's pretty optimistic. I was going to say, "it already has, and people are perfectly fine with ignoring that."
In any case it takes years to get a nuclear plant online, even if you account for the time the town and counties spend in meetings nitpicking every little thing in an attempt to derail the project.
If we want more nuclear plants in the future, we need to start negotiating them and building them today.
If you try to tell some gay people that they're gay because they made a choice, they'll claim it's genetic (thereby forestalling comments about their having made a bad choice.) If you try to tell them it's genetic, they get upset because they think you're saying their brains are defective
They will?
Why would they assume that you thought it was a defect?
When someone is wrong and someone is right, there is nothing to be gained by sitting on the fence eating popcorn.
Do you know what we do in this country?
We tell little kids that there's something wrong with them, that their bodies don't work correctly, that they're wired for sin. That the universe is home to a God whose power and intellect are immeasurably vast, but sometimes we chat with him and he says that if they do what is biologically natural for them, their relatively short life of "sin" will be paid for with an *eternity* of torture in a lake of fire "Sorry little gay dude, thems the breaks."
We tell consenting adults that they cannot marry, for no other reason that we just don't like it. (Lots of people don't like miscegenation either, but at least the courts know better.)
People are finally starting to wake up to how evil it is to treat other human beings like this. What you call groupthink, I call progress. What you call debate, I call false objectivity.
We are both thinking people who care about social issues. I'm sure I could kick a few back with you and enjoy the time spent. But you've asked us to put violent ignorance on a pedestal simply because it's the underdog. Maybe such underdogs are innovators...maybe progressive society is passing them by.
But forcing kids to feel existential shame about something that they can't control is violent. There is nothing that could happen that would turn otherwise straight people gay. Thus, there cannot be any sort of hidden agenda here. Nobody is trying to turn you or your kids gay.
And I understand what you're saying about under-qualified people hiding behind the "d" word, I really do. But it goes both ways: discrimination does exist, and it can force a person who is less qualified but straight to get a job over someone who is more qualified and gay. Especially in the professions you named.
There is at least one study showing that having older brothers increases the likelihood of a man being gay, regardless of whether or not the brothers live together.
I have seen a couple of different lines of reasoning. One is that it's due to an immune response that grows stronger with each pregnancy. The second is that said immune response is a way of putting a limit on the size of the heterosexual portion of the next generation, since only they (unaided) are capable of creating further offspring. I have also seen it said that this effect becomes stronger when food supplies dwindle, which would support the second theory somewhat.
I wish I could dig up an actual source on the second one, but here's an article mentioning the first:
It's crass to be talking about gayness as the side effect of an immune response, and for that I apologize to whoever might be reading. The important thing is that people know that there are established genetic factors. Calling it a "choice" is propaganda at best when biologists have plenty of data that says otherwise.
Then tolerance is bullshit. If you accept someone as fully human then you don't start drawing up lists of what they can and can't do as compared to "normal people".
The things that people do don't have to pass a "benefit to society" test. If they did, organized religion would have been outlawed as soon as civilizations realized that rule of law is a much more direct path to justice than stories about fire and brimstone.
I wonder why all those elephants, dogs, dolphins and cheetahs pretend to be gay, then? I mean, what's in it for them? It's not like they have jobs with health insurance or little Christian societies that need subverting.
"No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphids." - Petter Bockman
Actually, I think I know. It's because animals can't read the Bible!
Let's see him mod me to. Parent is links to a couple of citations backing up the GP's claim, which is that police departments can and do screen out high-IQ candidates.
What surprises me is that it's going on in Connecticut. Because I've dealt with my share of CT cops and frankly the screening isn't necessary, they're not going to discover any hidden geniuses among those guys.
Plus, plenty of good artists are non-RIAA. Artists like Bright Eyes, who supports himself rather well these days without them. He refuses to work with Ticketmaster as well. Why not support guys like that? They take a principled stand, and it benefits not only fans of music but other bands and the industry as a whole.
The idea that anyone who's anyone is with the RIAA is a myth, frankly, and it's one that the RIAA would like to continue. Don't be afraid to check out new music.
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In their defense, your PC is pretty buggy. I saw that thing, you had like 5 different betas of .NET installed and "Antivirus 2009" kept asking me to upgrade. The Comet Cursor selection was pretty sweet though.
MAC spoofing's been done for years, get yer facts straight there buddy.
That, and the fact that Aero slows them down so much.
That and the fact that there's really no excuse for being a jackass when you can write the stuff off.
All computer viruses are programs, but not all programs are viruses.
Although to be honest I'm alright with calling it a virus. Once the malware/adware/spyware ecosystem became so diverse, I stopped caring :)
Most people, even if they don't believe their computer is malware-proof, can't be bothered to behave as if it isn't :)
I run a Windows domain at work (DCs are Server 2003, clients are all XP) and we do just fine. Some of my users are notorious for catching stuff. The AV and web filtering help out with that, but they both cost us money and time, and I still have to stay on top of everything.
At home, I talked my parents into picking up an iMac. They like it, and I am confident that at no point in that machines life will they be catching a virus...they're not hanging out at TPB, after all. So they're free to do whatever without worrying about that.
Certainly for a lot of it, but I wouldn't say most. Just from my own experience cleaning up people's PCs, a lot of it is IE-targeting drive-by malware. Obviously the number of Mac trojans like this one in the wild is much smaller than the number of similar Windows ones. That's a practical difference, not any kind of baked-in protection. You can call it security by obscurity if you want. But that situation isn't going to change for a long time, if ever.
As to whether MacOS is *theoretically* safer than Vista with UAC turned on and Firefox as default browser, I don't know. Probably not. I do enjoy not having to put up with two or three dialogs and a screen dimming every time I delete a shortcut from the start menu. If you can handle running an XP box and keeping it clean, there's your Windows solution. For people who can't be trusted to do so, as well as people who can't stand constantly being interrupted when doing mundane things like enabling Wi-Fi, there's OS X.
You're right, that's heartbreaking.
I hope we can honor our treaties in the future. But I don't hold my breath when it comes to such things.
I know that coal is sometimes mined from mountaintops as well. I don't know what percentage of that is or how it compares to uranium.
There are a lot of negatives when it comes to nuclear power but I am convinced that we needed to cut our carbon emissions yesterday, and power plants are the #1 source. We have over 100 functioning reactors (all operating safely), but they're getting older. I would have preferred that we kept building so we could make up for the eventual closings.
What I honestly think is going to happen is that we are going to see some well-meaning CCS programs in terms of taxes and/or incentives and subsidies. Then the coal industry is going to take advantage of loopholes or changes so that (a) they get to go on polluting, (b) the legislators will act like they did something (c) half of everyone will think we "fixed" climate change and the other half will say it was a myth in the first place. The more we can invest in alternatives to coal, rather than just giving the coal industry money for pretending to clean up, the better off we will be.
Mod up (and wise up).
I get it. It's sort of like how prescription drugs are legal, and now nobody abuses those.
I don't suppose this new culture you talk about would revolve primarily around Christian rock bands, would it?
Now all we have to do is take a survey and make sure that it's the same "they" both times. Then global warming will be irrefutably proved wrong, and we'll all be able to rest easy.
If you say it's 360 degrees of change, it sounds like there's 160 more change going on.
No, corporate welfare is what the free market wants. A lobbyist told me so!
I like how that article argues that nuclear plants are bad when it comes to greenhouse gases because you have to mine uranium, even though you have to mine coal as well. The difference of course is that afterward we burn the coal.
Then they say nuclear isn't sustainable because it's "seeing its role in the world's energy mix diminish". That's a prime example of begging the question, and they even spend the next seven paragraphs backing up this "argument".
Then there's this gem: "The nuclear industry argues that the problems in the former Soviet Union are different to those in developed countries, but the United States itself had a serious accident at Three Mile Island in 1979."
I expected the obligatory Chernobyl mention, but TMI and Chernobyl were night and day. Their transparent attempt to imply that the US has had its own "Chernobyl" despite the common knowledge that TMI-2 was contained is the most weasel-ish thing I've heard in a *long* time (and I watched an hour of Kent Hovind the other day). I'm inclined to view TMI's accident as an example of how far we've come and how much we learned from Chernobyl, and I'm far from unique in that assessment.
Friends of Earth (the authors) are dead-set against nuclear power. I'm not...I think we should go back to moving forward cautiously with it. It's not all "China Syndrome", there are benefits as well as risks. You can consider that my statement of my own bias. But even if I was as strongly against nuclear power as they were, I'd still hope to be intellectually honest enough to call that article out for being the complete mess that it is.
That's pretty optimistic. I was going to say, "it already has, and people are perfectly fine with ignoring that."
In any case it takes years to get a nuclear plant online, even if you account for the time the town and counties spend in meetings nitpicking every little thing in an attempt to derail the project.
If we want more nuclear plants in the future, we need to start negotiating them and building them today.
If you try to tell some gay people that they're gay because they made a choice, they'll claim it's genetic (thereby forestalling comments about their having made a bad choice.) If you try to tell them it's genetic, they get upset because they think you're saying their brains are defective
They will?
Why would they assume that you thought it was a defect?
When someone is wrong and someone is right, there is nothing to be gained by sitting on the fence eating popcorn.
Do you know what we do in this country?
We tell little kids that there's something wrong with them, that their bodies don't work correctly, that they're wired for sin. That the universe is home to a God whose power and intellect are immeasurably vast, but sometimes we chat with him and he says that if they do what is biologically natural for them, their relatively short life of "sin" will be paid for with an *eternity* of torture in a lake of fire "Sorry little gay dude, thems the breaks."
We tell consenting adults that they cannot marry, for no other reason that we just don't like it. (Lots of people don't like miscegenation either, but at least the courts know better.)
People are finally starting to wake up to how evil it is to treat other human beings like this. What you call groupthink, I call progress. What you call debate, I call false objectivity.
We are both thinking people who care about social issues. I'm sure I could kick a few back with you and enjoy the time spent. But you've asked us to put violent ignorance on a pedestal simply because it's the underdog. Maybe such underdogs are innovators...maybe progressive society is passing them by.
But forcing kids to feel existential shame about something that they can't control is violent. There is nothing that could happen that would turn otherwise straight people gay. Thus, there cannot be any sort of hidden agenda here. Nobody is trying to turn you or your kids gay.
And I understand what you're saying about under-qualified people hiding behind the "d" word, I really do. But it goes both ways: discrimination does exist, and it can force a person who is less qualified but straight to get a job over someone who is more qualified and gay. Especially in the professions you named.
That's because it's hard to emulate a tall guy when you're short.
There is at least one study showing that having older brothers increases the likelihood of a man being gay, regardless of whether or not the brothers live together.
I have seen a couple of different lines of reasoning. One is that it's due to an immune response that grows stronger with each pregnancy. The second is that said immune response is a way of putting a limit on the size of the heterosexual portion of the next generation, since only they (unaided) are capable of creating further offspring. I have also seen it said that this effect becomes stronger when food supplies dwindle, which would support the second theory somewhat.
I wish I could dig up an actual source on the second one, but here's an article mentioning the first:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2006/06/26/brothers-gay.html
It's crass to be talking about gayness as the side effect of an immune response, and for that I apologize to whoever might be reading. The important thing is that people know that there are established genetic factors. Calling it a "choice" is propaganda at best when biologists have plenty of data that says otherwise.
Then tolerance is bullshit. If you accept someone as fully human then you don't start drawing up lists of what they can and can't do as compared to "normal people".
The things that people do don't have to pass a "benefit to society" test. If they did, organized religion would have been outlawed as soon as civilizations realized that rule of law is a much more direct path to justice than stories about fire and brimstone.
I wonder why all those elephants, dogs, dolphins and cheetahs pretend to be gay, then? I mean, what's in it for them? It's not like they have jobs with health insurance or little Christian societies that need subverting.
"No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphids." - Petter Bockman
Actually, I think I know. It's because animals can't read the Bible!
"mod me too" sorry but the internet is rotting my brain
Gotta love modding for censorship purposes.
Let's see him mod me to. Parent is links to a couple of citations backing up the GP's claim, which is that police departments can and do screen out high-IQ candidates.
What surprises me is that it's going on in Connecticut. Because I've dealt with my share of CT cops and frankly the screening isn't necessary, they're not going to discover any hidden geniuses among those guys.
Plus, plenty of good artists are non-RIAA. Artists like Bright Eyes, who supports himself rather well these days without them. He refuses to work with Ticketmaster as well. Why not support guys like that? They take a principled stand, and it benefits not only fans of music but other bands and the industry as a whole.
The idea that anyone who's anyone is with the RIAA is a myth, frankly, and it's one that the RIAA would like to continue. Don't be afraid to check out new music.