You're thinking Star Trek. Real holograms are just insubstantial images. You may be able to talk to them, but you can't touch them. As for eating holographic food as in the aforementioned SciFi series, sorry, that's not holography. That's replicator technology.
I think the classic example of tunneling as an afterthought has to be the point on Route 1 in Philadelphia where it goes UNDER the subway. Now there was an engineering challenge.
Not that I'm running anybody down. I seem to recall the same kind of problem in SimCity 2000. Once those buildings are up, it really is a pain to put in a subway system.
You think this is just a get rich quick (again) scheme? I hope not, but you could be right. You'd think the venture capitalists would learn after a while though.;o) Makes one wonder where they got their money in the first place.
Hey, you wanna swim with the sharks, ya gotta learn a thing or three from them.
Seriously, though, if anybody's going to try to compete directly with M$ without a worldwide programmer network a la Gnulix, they have to do a bit of puffing, I would think. Considering the track record of the opposition, I fail to understand all the carping about Lindows' honesty. This is going to get down and dirty, as they say, and I wouldn't necessarily write these guys off yet. As for stealing the name, a real live Federal Court ruled that "Windows" was in the public domain and that M$ hadn't defended it as they had to if they seriously thought it was theirs. I suppose they are appealing, but I fail to see how anybody could consider it their property, I mean, Sun's Open Windows, for one example? You might as well try to trademark the word refrigerator.
As for AOL's reaction, I'd be more willing to believe that they're just scared of Big Bad Billy than that they're concerned with their reputation. If I were them, I'd be glad to see somebody try to help M$ on their way toward the fate of all one-product companies. I might even come right out and suggest that, well, nothing's been SIGNED yet, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to turn AOL/Netscape into an operating system. Make the Dragon of Redmond sweat a little.
Well, you have a lot of agreements nowadays that stipulate that they can change the terms of service. They do have to notify you, whether it says so in the agreement or not, otherwise they could raise the price to US $1000000 and take your first born child as collateral. Also, I'm no expert at this, but I would imagine there's something in basic English common law that says you can't force someone to buy something because he didn't specifically tell you he didn't want it. The clerk at the local Sam's Club: "Gee, Sir, you didn't specifically tell us you didn't want a metric ton of asparagus, so we're going to have to bill you for it after we deliver it to your house Railway Express." There's some point at which common sense takes precedence over legalistic idiocy.
As for them suing you in foreign court, I think we'd all like to know who these guys are so we can avoid them, though I suppose you'd be hesitant to tell us for fear of being sued for doing that! What losers.
I first ran into this notion in the sequel to James T. Culbertson's _The Minds of Robots_. The earlier book was quite interesting and threatened to actually solve some basic problems in the origins of consciousness. The sequel (I forget the title offhand) was a true pseudo-scientific excursion in which he presents this exact suggestion that depth perception results from the distance traveled by light rays reflecting off of an object. His earlier book relies on relativistic effects applied to signals traveling through the nervous system whose points of origin are light rays bouncing off of objects in external reality, so it wasn't a great leap for him. I doubt whether Culbertson actually invented the idea. It sounds like something out of the late Middle Ages, just prior to the Renaissance. Galileo shot most of those ideas to pieces, but some folks just never get the message.
I have been noticing for a while now that many corporate entities seem to think that their own private rules somehow take precedence over the general laws of the localities in which they operate. A quick example. My old ISP kept sending me a bill in the mail for a yearly subscription to their services that I had not used in months and had decided not to renew. I finally called up and asked them why they kept sending me a bill. Their reply was that THEIR POLICY was to renew subscriptions automatically (fortunately, they didn't have my credit card number or I would have had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get out from under them). To which I calmly replied that it was MY POLICY not to expect to be billed for items and services that I hadn't requested. The above mentioned attitude of the writers of user agreements that they can specify any old nonsense they want is just a special case of the general tendency of modern companies and institutions to try to write their own rules in complete disregard for the laws of the land. This goes for the ubiquitous rent-a-cops who parade around with guns pretending to be law enforcement officers.
My basic point was that people who have to make up words because they don't know a real word that means the same thing and then don't even come up with an invented word that actually means anything beyond a simple expression of displeasure for which the normal, verbal, equivalent would be a random obscenity don't have the intellectual acumen to be taken seriously.
As for your proficiency at setting up straw men, I would strongly suggest that in the future you consider responding to what I actually said, not what you find it easy to refute. Consider the old joke about the drunk and the lamp post: A guy walks up to a drunk crawling around on the ground in the middle of the night apparently looking for something. Guy asks the drunk what he's looking for. "Dropped my keys, Mister," says the drunk. "Did you drop them under the lamp post?" the guy responds. "No," says the drunk, "I dropped them over there," and points towards the wall of a building. "Then why are you looking under the lamp post?" "Light's better over here," answers the drunk.
Say what? The LIBRARY is "hosted" on school property. IT has index cards with "links" to books on South American revolutionary movements. At least I hope to Hell it does (how do you fight something you don't know anything about?). Where's the difference? You let these characters start telling you what you can link to you might as well let them tell you what you can read. Librarian: 'Gee, I know we have a book about evolution here somewhere but I just can't remember where. Go talk to the Campus Creationist Alliance. I think they may know where it is.'
But the real point is, if there were any violation of any law (any law that's legal under the constitution) then anybody linking to the same page would be guilty of a violation, including Google, and that's precisely what the Red Chinese are doing. Links are index entries. They're saying that you can find information on a particular subject at a particular place. That is their only function. That index card in the library isn't saying, here is a book that's right and you should believe what it says. It's simply saying, here is a book you can read and decide for yourself whether it is right or wrong. Someone may say to you, "there's a great book on the such-and-such movement in the library and it's right on, brother," but that's beside the point. The index card is neutral. That the leaders of a university can't get this simple concept through their reinforced concrete brains bodes very poorly for the future of education in this country and it bodes even worse for the process used to appoint the administrators of those universities.
And the really scary thing is, no outside individual even suggested there was any violation of the law. This is self censorship by officials of a university who should know better. Has everyone forgotten the Pentagon Papers case? The courts ruled that prior censorship was illegal. As William Burroughs once said, "a functioning police state needs no police," by which he presumably meant that if you get people scared enough and brain-washed enough they'll willingly give up their rights without the authorities having to spend any money doing it for them.
"But that's the area where Macs shine. With the whole iPhoto-iMovie thing. My PC using friend love the way they can bring their camera over and plug it into my Mac and ImageCapture opens and lets us download the photos. Two of them cant get Windows to see the camera, so I copy the images onto a CD for them."
My CD1000 puts the image directly onto a CD-R. I really couldn't see playing around with memory sticks or other high dollar plug-in memory. The CDs hold ~130 shots, which runs about a half cent apiece. And no having to carry a laptop around to free up memory in the camera. I made darn sure I had a handle on getting the images into the computer BEFORE I bought the camera. Apple is just taking advantage of the fact that most people don't plan ahead that well.
I'm not knocking Apple. They do what they do well. It's just not my cup of tea.
So next they will tell the students that Google is in violation of the Jingoism Act if they provide information on how to link to this website? How is this materially different from what the Red Chinese are doing? How is this different from them telling the school library they can't lend books about the FARC because it provides communications to the FARC? And this is an educational institution, an institution with a stake not only in free speech but in the very availability of information.
That the school administration can even conceive of a hyperlink as communications support under the Jingoism Act says something rather profound about the mentality of that administration. It says that they have so little disregard for their own function in society that they would throw away the rights of their students in an attempt to protect themselves from an imagined threat that any court outside of East Asia would toss out in an instant.
A hyperlink is like an index card in a library. It makes the retrieval of information easier. You could just as easily go to the stacks and find the section on South American revolutionary movements. Or ask the librarian where to find it. Do these actions also constitute an attempt to aide the communications of terrorists?
I know. I fell in love with the new cinema monitor. So much so that I went and ordered a flat panel from the same manufacturer. Couldn't quite figure out how to turn it on--they failed to include the part about waving a dead chicken over it in the manual--so I had to send it back. Looked great, though.;-)
And the transparent speakers are really cool too. Of course, I finally figured out that I could run my audio into my stereo and JBL Control Monitors and blow any silly "computer speakers" away. I'm beginning to think that computers exist in a whole different inertial frame from normal reality.
And yes, I realize that most high end audio/video/publishing stuff is done with Apples, though I think that's changing. I used to be a photoengraver and from what I've heard, they've all gone to Macs for the front end processes. But as an individual user who's not doing multimedia professionally and just likes to do some digital photography and editing now and then and maybe play with some graphics in Corel Draw, I just don't have the bucks for a fancy Apple system. Not that I couldn't afford it. I just dropped close to $3000 building my own system. I just don't see the bang for the buck with Apple. I think you're paying for the flash more than the substance.
"Businesspeople have tended to associate Linux with the charlatans of the Internet bubble and the flakes who seem to dominate its over-granolaed, Berkeley commune culture."
Does anyone here take seriously anything said by a publication that would actually print something like this? "Over-granolaed"? Is that even a word? Is that even a valid concept? How does one become "overgranolaed"? If you eat a lot of red meat, do you automatically become a good businessman? If this is the target audience for Linux adoption, it's obvious why it's been less than successful. These characters are congenital idiots.
God, do I really have to read the silly article?;-)
"That is why the presence of things that react together quickly shows that something is re-supplying the process, which means life. Unless you know something we don't?"
That's not exactly what it says:
"Solar radiation and lightning should produce large quantities of carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere, but instead it is scarce, as if something is removing it. They also found hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. These two gases react with each other, and so are never normally found together unless something is producing them."
The operant word is "should." They are postulating life on the basis of the absence of something they think "should" be there, or rather, even less convincingly, on the basis of their inability to detect something they think "should" be there.
As for the presence of gases that "normally" react together, one is tempted to ask, how are we defining normal? There is nothing particularly "normal" about Venus except to the extent that I have already suggested, that anything not subject to human intervention can be thought of as "natural." Venus is certainly not "normal" when compared to the Earth, and any suppositions regarding what SHOULD be happening there are premature at best.
The contradiction referred to in the subject line results from the supposition that the presence of life is somehow unnatural. I would remind you that what is normally thought of as a dichotomy, inorganic-organic, is actually part of a continuum: inorganic, organic, cybernetic,...,n. One could just as easily postulate the presence of any one of these terms in the vicinity of Venus if it is assumed that some chemical process or lack thereof indicates an unnatural (read not inorganic) condition. Despite the reference in the article to a "theory," this is in fact just a hypothesis. Any other hypothesis would have equal standing until subjected to some kind of experimentation. Appealing to William of Occam, one might more productively suggest that there is some chemical process going on in the atmosphere of Venus that we do not completely understand. Perhaps resulting from the presence of a chemical poison (the opposite of a catalyst) that we have not yet detected.
It appears that Apple is basically selling software that only runs on their equipment, with certain minor exceptions like Quicktime. So you have to go out and drop a wad of cash on their hardware in order to get the benefits of the fancy software. Nice scam.;-) Almost the absolute inverse of Billy Boy and M$.
There does seem to be a scientific predisposition toward treating life as anomalous rather than widespread and perfectly normal, all of which goes back to the theological underpinnings of European thought, i.e., God created life on Earth, which is the center of the universe, and therefore life anywhere else in the cosmos is heresy. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for violating this dictum. The confusion has its origins in assuming that because a certain set of chemicals have not been observed by our severely geographically limited species to occur in places where life is not present, that therefore these chemicals imply the presence of life on Venus. They could just as easily indicate that our observations have been distorted by viewing these processes almost exclusively through the filter of a rather lively (life-bearing) planet.
Again, life is seen as unusual, in that its products are assumed to be different from those produced by inorganic processes rather than the results of parallel organic and inorganic processes. Keep in mind that Venus is basically a huge pressure cooker. One might also be reminded that the primary difference claimed by the alchemists between their art and that of the chemists was the practice of slow cooking.
So the Apple OSX applications won't run under Darwin because they are specifically written for the Apple window manager as well as the underlying operating system? I've run into this with a laser artwork generator program that runs under Open Windows on a Sun computer but won't run under CDE.
No, I'm ignorant because what I read tends to be self-contradictory and not terribly authoritative, I suppose because the source is in fact closed and locked in a vault beneath Apple headquarters.
The real question is, are you a troll because of a genetic predisposition or have you contracted an infectious disease, in which case you should avoid any further contact with the healthy population?
Again, I'm showing my ignorance of everything Apple (I once tried to buy an Apple II but the salesman wouldn't let me touch it--he kept playing little tunes and telling me how much fun it was--obviously I don't buy anything I can't try first). I thought there was something in the open source rules that said, if you use this code you have to open source any modifications you make to it. But if they just added a special Apple GUI layer to it, wouldn't it be possible to add a different GUI and run everything Apple on the machine? Or is the real problem the Power PC chip? What would it take to convince OSX that your Pentium 4 was really a Motorola chip? Not that I'd ever actually attempt this...;-)
"There are gases there which are not naturally found together"
Well, let's see:
1) Venus is certainly a "natural" place--no industry or McDonalds or Republicans anywhere in sight.
2) The gases are found together in this place.
3) Conclusion: Gee, I guess those gases ARE found together "naturally." Could it be that the database of what is natural just isn't extensive enough? I think it comes down to the fact that putting your toes in the surf doesn't make you an expert in marine biology.
This is a serious question. If it sounds stupid, well, I can't be a genius at everything. To wit:
If Mac OSX is based on the free version of Berkeley BSD or some such, and I can put Free BSD or Net BSD or whatever it is on my Intel based IBM clone homebuilt, then why can't I put OSX on my IBM clone, even if I go out and actually purchase a nice box with pretty graphics at the local CompUSA?
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking Star Trek. Real holograms are just insubstantial images. You may be able to talk to them, but you can't touch them. As for eating holographic food as in the aforementioned SciFi series, sorry, that's not holography. That's replicator technology.
I think the classic example of tunneling as an afterthought has to be the point on Route 1 in Philadelphia where it goes UNDER the subway. Now there was an engineering challenge.
Not that I'm running anybody down. I seem to recall the same kind of problem in SimCity 2000. Once those buildings are up, it really is a pain to put in a subway system.
so I can short his company's stock!
You think this is just a get rich quick (again) scheme? I hope not, but you could be right. You'd think the venture capitalists would learn after a while though. ;o) Makes one wonder where they got their money in the first place.
Hey, you wanna swim with the sharks, ya gotta learn a thing or three from them.
Seriously, though, if anybody's going to try to compete directly with M$ without a worldwide programmer network a la Gnulix, they have to do a bit of puffing, I would think. Considering the track record of the opposition, I fail to understand all the carping about Lindows' honesty. This is going to get down and dirty, as they say, and I wouldn't necessarily write these guys off yet. As for stealing the name, a real live Federal Court ruled that "Windows" was in the public domain and that M$ hadn't defended it as they had to if they seriously thought it was theirs. I suppose they are appealing, but I fail to see how anybody could consider it their property, I mean, Sun's Open Windows, for one example? You might as well try to trademark the word refrigerator.
As for AOL's reaction, I'd be more willing to believe that they're just scared of Big Bad Billy than that they're concerned with their reputation. If I were them, I'd be glad to see somebody try to help M$ on their way toward the fate of all one-product companies. I might even come right out and suggest that, well, nothing's been SIGNED yet, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to turn AOL/Netscape into an operating system. Make the Dragon of Redmond sweat a little.
Well, you have a lot of agreements nowadays that stipulate that they can change the terms of service. They do have to notify you, whether it says so in the agreement or not, otherwise they could raise the price to US $1000000 and take your first born child as collateral. Also, I'm no expert at this, but I would imagine there's something in basic English common law that says you can't force someone to buy something because he didn't specifically tell you he didn't want it. The clerk at the local Sam's Club: "Gee, Sir, you didn't specifically tell us you didn't want a metric ton of asparagus, so we're going to have to bill you for it after we deliver it to your house Railway Express." There's some point at which common sense takes precedence over legalistic idiocy.
As for them suing you in foreign court, I think we'd all like to know who these guys are so we can avoid them, though I suppose you'd be hesitant to tell us for fear of being sued for doing that! What losers.
I first ran into this notion in the sequel to James T. Culbertson's _The Minds of Robots_. The earlier book was quite interesting and threatened to actually solve some basic problems in the origins of consciousness. The sequel (I forget the title offhand) was a true pseudo-scientific excursion in which he presents this exact suggestion that depth perception results from the distance traveled by light rays reflecting off of an object. His earlier book relies on relativistic effects applied to signals traveling through the nervous system whose points of origin are light rays bouncing off of objects in external reality, so it wasn't a great leap for him. I doubt whether Culbertson actually invented the idea. It sounds like something out of the late Middle Ages, just prior to the Renaissance. Galileo shot most of those ideas to pieces, but some folks just never get the message.
I have been noticing for a while now that many corporate entities seem to think that their own private rules somehow take precedence over the general laws of the localities in which they operate. A quick example. My old ISP kept sending me a bill in the mail for a yearly subscription to their services that I had not used in months and had decided not to renew. I finally called up and asked them why they kept sending me a bill. Their reply was that THEIR POLICY was to renew subscriptions automatically (fortunately, they didn't have my credit card number or I would have had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get out from under them). To which I calmly replied that it was MY POLICY not to expect to be billed for items and services that I hadn't requested. The above mentioned attitude of the writers of user agreements that they can specify any old nonsense they want is just a special case of the general tendency of modern companies and institutions to try to write their own rules in complete disregard for the laws of the land. This goes for the ubiquitous rent-a-cops who parade around with guns pretending to be law enforcement officers.
My basic point was that people who have to make up words because they don't know a real word that means the same thing and then don't even come up with an invented word that actually means anything beyond a simple expression of displeasure for which the normal, verbal, equivalent would be a random obscenity don't have the intellectual acumen to be taken seriously.
As for your proficiency at setting up straw men, I would strongly suggest that in the future you consider responding to what I actually said, not what you find it easy to refute. Consider the old joke about the drunk and the lamp post: A guy walks up to a drunk crawling around on the ground in the middle of the night apparently looking for something. Guy asks the drunk what he's looking for. "Dropped my keys, Mister," says the drunk. "Did you drop them under the lamp post?" the guy responds. "No," says the drunk, "I dropped them over there," and points towards the wall of a building. "Then why are you looking under the lamp post?" "Light's better over here," answers the drunk.
Say what? The LIBRARY is "hosted" on school property. IT has index cards with "links" to books on South American revolutionary movements. At least I hope to Hell it does (how do you fight something you don't know anything about?). Where's the difference? You let these characters start telling you what you can link to you might as well let them tell you what you can read. Librarian: 'Gee, I know we have a book about evolution here somewhere but I just can't remember where. Go talk to the Campus Creationist Alliance. I think they may know where it is.'
But the real point is, if there were any violation of any law (any law that's legal under the constitution) then anybody linking to the same page would be guilty of a violation, including Google, and that's precisely what the Red Chinese are doing. Links are index entries. They're saying that you can find information on a particular subject at a particular place. That is their only function. That index card in the library isn't saying, here is a book that's right and you should believe what it says. It's simply saying, here is a book you can read and decide for yourself whether it is right or wrong. Someone may say to you, "there's a great book on the such-and-such movement in the library and it's right on, brother," but that's beside the point. The index card is neutral. That the leaders of a university can't get this simple concept through their reinforced concrete brains bodes very poorly for the future of education in this country and it bodes even worse for the process used to appoint the administrators of those universities.
And the really scary thing is, no outside individual even suggested there was any violation of the law. This is self censorship by officials of a university who should know better. Has everyone forgotten the Pentagon Papers case? The courts ruled that prior censorship was illegal. As William Burroughs once said, "a functioning police state needs no police," by which he presumably meant that if you get people scared enough and brain-washed enough they'll willingly give up their rights without the authorities having to spend any money doing it for them.
Do you get the feeling these guys just don't want anybody doing anything they can't spy on?
"But that's the area where Macs shine. With the whole iPhoto-iMovie thing. My PC using friend love the way they can bring their camera over and plug it into my Mac and ImageCapture opens and lets us download the photos. Two of them cant get Windows to see the camera, so I copy the images onto a CD for them."
My CD1000 puts the image directly onto a CD-R. I really couldn't see playing around with memory sticks or other high dollar plug-in memory. The CDs hold ~130 shots, which runs about a half cent apiece. And no having to carry a laptop around to free up memory in the camera. I made darn sure I had a handle on getting the images into the computer BEFORE I bought the camera. Apple is just taking advantage of the fact that most people don't plan ahead that well.
I'm not knocking Apple. They do what they do well. It's just not my cup of tea.
So next they will tell the students that Google is in violation of the Jingoism Act if they provide information on how to link to this website? How is this materially different from what the Red Chinese are doing? How is this different from them telling the school library they can't lend books about the FARC because it provides communications to the FARC? And this is an educational institution, an institution with a stake not only in free speech but in the very availability of information.
That the school administration can even conceive of a hyperlink as communications support under the Jingoism Act says something rather profound about the mentality of that administration. It says that they have so little disregard for their own function in society that they would throw away the rights of their students in an attempt to protect themselves from an imagined threat that any court outside of East Asia would toss out in an instant.
A hyperlink is like an index card in a library. It makes the retrieval of information easier. You could just as easily go to the stacks and find the section on South American revolutionary movements. Or ask the librarian where to find it. Do these actions also constitute an attempt to aide the communications of terrorists?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I know. I fell in love with the new cinema monitor. So much so that I went and ordered a flat panel from the same manufacturer. Couldn't quite figure out how to turn it on--they failed to include the part about waving a dead chicken over it in the manual--so I had to send it back. Looked great, though. ;-)
And the transparent speakers are really cool too. Of course, I finally figured out that I could run my audio into my stereo and JBL Control Monitors and blow any silly "computer speakers" away. I'm beginning to think that computers exist in a whole different inertial frame from normal reality.
And yes, I realize that most high end audio/video/publishing stuff is done with Apples, though I think that's changing. I used to be a photoengraver and from what I've heard, they've all gone to Macs for the front end processes. But as an individual user who's not doing multimedia professionally and just likes to do some digital photography and editing now and then and maybe play with some graphics in Corel Draw, I just don't have the bucks for a fancy Apple system. Not that I couldn't afford it. I just dropped close to $3000 building my own system. I just don't see the bang for the buck with Apple. I think you're paying for the flash more than the substance.
Yummmm....just love that green algae.
"Businesspeople have tended to associate Linux with the charlatans of the Internet bubble and the flakes who seem to dominate its over-granolaed, Berkeley commune culture."
Does anyone here take seriously anything said by a publication that would actually print something like this? "Over-granolaed"? Is that even a word? Is that even a valid concept? How does one become "overgranolaed"? If you eat a lot of red meat, do you automatically become a good businessman? If this is the target audience for Linux adoption, it's obvious why it's been less than successful. These characters are congenital idiots.
But would anybody BUY those systems without the software? Heck, hardly anybody buys those systems even with the software! ;-)
God, do I really have to read the silly article? ;-)
"That is why the presence of things that react together quickly shows that something is re-supplying the process, which means life. Unless you know something we don't?"
That's not exactly what it says:
"Solar radiation and lightning should produce large quantities of carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere, but instead it is scarce, as if something is removing it. They also found hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. These two gases react with each other, and so are never normally found together unless something is producing them."
The operant word is "should." They are postulating life on the basis of the absence of something they think "should" be there, or rather, even less convincingly, on the basis of their inability to detect something they think "should" be there.
As for the presence of gases that "normally" react together, one is tempted to ask, how are we defining normal? There is nothing particularly "normal" about Venus except to the extent that I have already suggested, that anything not subject to human intervention can be thought of as "natural." Venus is certainly not "normal" when compared to the Earth, and any suppositions regarding what SHOULD be happening there are premature at best.
The contradiction referred to in the subject line results from the supposition that the presence of life is somehow unnatural. I would remind you that what is normally thought of as a dichotomy, inorganic-organic, is actually part of a continuum: inorganic, organic, cybernetic,...,n. One could just as easily postulate the presence of any one of these terms in the vicinity of Venus if it is assumed that some chemical process or lack thereof indicates an unnatural (read not inorganic) condition. Despite the reference in the article to a "theory," this is in fact just a hypothesis. Any other hypothesis would have equal standing until subjected to some kind of experimentation. Appealing to William of Occam, one might more productively suggest that there is some chemical process going on in the atmosphere of Venus that we do not completely understand. Perhaps resulting from the presence of a chemical poison (the opposite of a catalyst) that we have not yet detected.
Thanks. That clarifies matters nicely.
;-) Almost the absolute inverse of Billy Boy and M$.
It appears that Apple is basically selling software that only runs on their equipment, with certain minor exceptions like Quicktime. So you have to go out and drop a wad of cash on their hardware in order to get the benefits of the fancy software. Nice scam.
There does seem to be a scientific predisposition toward treating life as anomalous rather than widespread and perfectly normal, all of which goes back to the theological underpinnings of European thought, i.e., God created life on Earth, which is the center of the universe, and therefore life anywhere else in the cosmos is heresy. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for violating this dictum. The confusion has its origins in assuming that because a certain set of chemicals have not been observed by our severely geographically limited species to occur in places where life is not present, that therefore these chemicals imply the presence of life on Venus. They could just as easily indicate that our observations have been distorted by viewing these processes almost exclusively through the filter of a rather lively (life-bearing) planet.
Again, life is seen as unusual, in that its products are assumed to be different from those produced by inorganic processes rather than the results of parallel organic and inorganic processes. Keep in mind that Venus is basically a huge pressure cooker. One might also be reminded that the primary difference claimed by the alchemists between their art and that of the chemists was the practice of slow cooking.
So the Apple OSX applications won't run under Darwin because they are specifically written for the Apple window manager as well as the underlying operating system? I've run into this with a laser artwork generator program that runs under Open Windows on a Sun computer but won't run under CDE.
No, I'm ignorant because what I read tends to be self-contradictory and not terribly authoritative, I suppose because the source is in fact closed and locked in a vault beneath Apple headquarters.
The real question is, are you a troll because of a genetic predisposition or have you contracted an infectious disease, in which case you should avoid any further contact with the healthy population?
Again, I'm showing my ignorance of everything Apple (I once tried to buy an Apple II but the salesman wouldn't let me touch it--he kept playing little tunes and telling me how much fun it was--obviously I don't buy anything I can't try first). I thought there was something in the open source rules that said, if you use this code you have to open source any modifications you make to it. But if they just added a special Apple GUI layer to it, wouldn't it be possible to add a different GUI and run everything Apple on the machine? Or is the real problem the Power PC chip? What would it take to convince OSX that your Pentium 4 was really a Motorola chip? Not that I'd ever actually attempt this... ;-)
"There are gases there which are not naturally found together"
Well, let's see:
1) Venus is certainly a "natural" place--no industry or McDonalds or Republicans anywhere in sight.
2) The gases are found together in this place.
3) Conclusion: Gee, I guess those gases ARE found together "naturally." Could it be that the database of what is natural just isn't extensive enough? I think it comes down to the fact that putting your toes in the surf doesn't make you an expert in marine biology.
This is a serious question. If it sounds stupid, well, I can't be a genius at everything. To wit:
If Mac OSX is based on the free version of Berkeley BSD or some such, and I can put Free BSD or Net BSD or whatever it is on my Intel based IBM clone homebuilt, then why can't I put OSX on my IBM clone, even if I go out and actually purchase a nice box with pretty graphics at the local CompUSA?
What am I missing?