Now if the costs were set to a more reasonable level (to cover cost of initial production, reproducing and distributing plus epsilon)
So.... like government cost plus contracts? How do you even determine cost per album when it depends on albums sold - which you don't know until after you've sold them. First comes the price, then come the sales. Are you going to back charge everyone $1000 for buying a flopped album? Or do you only get to lose money, never profit?
and if all the artists were paid a reasonable amount (instead of the current rampant cheating)
Reasonable to who? You want a government imposed pay grade? Union tariffs?
and if the DRM had been throttled back (so that games/DVDs were useable once again),
Aye. But the rest is just some communist utopia, the charge what the market will bear and artists have plenty choice to go independent, it's not society's fault they're signing themselves into crappy contracts because a major label took interest.
To date, I haven't met a single company that went for Vista but they discovered most compatibility issues then, so the upgrade to Win7 went smooth. Your company is late to the party, even for having thousands of employees. That said there's no pressing hurry to get off XP and I expect it'll be even less to get off Win7.
As a former fencer, I completely agree on the fight quality. During the lightsaber battles in the original three movies, the actors' movements were relatively slow and often didn't actually threaten their opponents.
On the other hand, they didn't stop using the Force and become sword fighters with flashy swords. I mean they could stop blaster shots with those, so why aren't the light saber battles lightning fast? I always felt that Jedi vs Sith was a battle of minds as much as swords, like two mind readers trying to surprise each other where the rules are different and where the obvious moves are anticipated moves so they do no good. I'm not saying the sword play was great, I'm just saying I'm not sure it'd make the movies any better to me if they'd been master swordsmen. At least my mind made up a perfectly good explanation of why they spend most their duels doing silly and flashy moves.
Linus is a great guy and all but he's not a lawyer and there's 5000-20000 contributors with standing to sue if he relicences without their consent and you can be sure many of those rights would be bought up by SCO-like companies. In any case the lead maintainers are all against it, so they haven't made any serious effort to see if it's even feasible. Most likely you'd need to strip it back down to the core and bring systems back online very, very slowly ripping out all code of people that can't be reached or won't relicence. Even if you found some legal theory in some jurisdiction that'd let you do it any other way, it'd be a copyright infringement and legally toxic in the rest of the world.
Claiming that Facebook caused your divorce is like claiming the telephone caused your divorce when you heard your wife using it to cheat on you
Not even that, friends reporting spouseâ(TM)s behavior over Facebook is equivalent to them calling you, except you don't subpoena the phone company for that. This is like measuring how many times the word "called" appeared in court documents, then concluding 78% of divorces involved a telephone. Well duuuuuuh.
Why? What is it about GPLv3 that would have dissuaded Google from using Linux?
The ability to license Android to control-freak companies that don't want you to be able to root your phone? Because the GPLv3 requires that it includes all the information to install your own modified version, no more "our signed binaries only".
And suppose two weeks later you found out you had a fatal sexually transmitted disease? Or if you were female, that you were pregnant? We protect the young from adults who would manipulate them for sexual gratification because they don't fully understand enough to protect themselves.
You could teach a five year old the "no glove, no love" rule. It's not to protect them from STDs, it's not to protect them from pregnancy, it's to protect them from sex as such. There's a lot of good arguments for that, but that we couldn't teach them how to use a condom isn't one of them.
We support the government because of a barrel of a gun. We support corporations based on mutual gain.
If you count "You're in a desert and we've chased away every water seller in the next 100 miles. We offer water under our water use license agreement (WULA). Would you like to make a deal?" as voluntary and of mutual gain. I'd like a few more options than opting out civilized society and being tied on hands and feet by strings attached to everything.
Look, ask some of the people who has lived in a country with a civil war, a proper bloody one with armed guerrilla groups and government troops shooting it out what it was like. It's not just that you pick up your gun and go to war and you either win or die. There's chaos, mayhem, terror, looting, raping and plundering - there's no rule of law, no redress of grievances, suspected collaborators and rebels are detained and punished with little to no due process. Okay you might feel your rights are boiling away like frog in warming water, but for a time - a very long time, in some cases - you're likely to have none as desperation takes both those in power and those fighting to change it.
That is why the average person is generally very opposed to a civil war, no matter how righteous the cause. Revolutions only happen when large groups of the people can get behind something, whether it's oppressive taxes (no taxation without representation), mass unemployment (Nazi Germany, hello Godwin), mass starvation (Soviet revolution) or something like that. Not because a handful of people may be taken by the secret police and disappear. That's never been enough for a revolution, not before and not now. All those that whine about the public apathy don't realize how far people were pushed in the past, before the revolution came.
It has to be bad. Not just a little bad, but so bad that a good number of people is willing to sacrifice anything and everything because it can't get worse. And a population that desperately yearns for change, a small number of discontents in a population that has their bread and circus will go nowhere. Make a little show on how they cleared the Occupy Wall Street movement, but they didn't exactly have the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. And even that wasn't enough to trigger a revolution. To be honest, I suspect that during an actual civil war 90% of the gun nuts will be hauled up in their property protecting it from looters, not out fighting any revolutionary war. Not really that ready to sacrifice everything after all.
Nope. That doesn't mean rattling your sabers didn't have an effect. Nobody launched a single nuke during the Cold War, but both the explicit and implicit threats obviously had a huge effect. They don't really want to go nuclear any more than anyone wanted WWIII.
The handicap spots are full of assholes now, how do you think it'd be without penalties? Are shops going to piss off their customers with huge fines for their "dick move"? No. All that would happen is that all the healthy people would get to park a little closer (remember, distance fans out in a circle - there's a lot more spots in a 50 feet radius than a 20 feet radius) and handicapped people would be shit out of luck. Either hang in front of the closest spots waiting for one to clear - and those who need extra space for a wheelchair ramp would never get the double spot they need - or park far out with most everybody else. Those people are going to hurt more, perhaps make a condition worse and in the worst case say I can't get to the shop on my own, I need aid of some sort. And those costs are coming back to you either in form of more government programs or higher health insurance, the extra costs are getting passed to you. Enabling people to take care of themselves it usually one the of the best things you can do, both for them and you.
While that's certainly a change of career, he won't be writing much if any of the code he's talking about. If what he wants is a hands-on job, a hands-off job is a pretty poor substitute. Some of the most annoying and useless managers are those who don't understand their job and still try to be a coder.
The sales engineers I know spend most of their time trying to figure out how they are actually going to do what the sales rep just sold to the client.
Really? Usually that's the problem of the people who actually deliver. In my experience the sales engineers are those making "smoke and mirrors" demos and scripts for the sales reps, ignoring all the practical issues of making it work in a real company. They're heavily into the nuts and bolts of the software and how to configure and tweak it, they've just chosen the dark side of the force. I don't know anyone with "sales" in their title that touch it after the sale has been made.
There's a million different reasons to refuse any one job application, you won't know the real reason unless they choose to tell you. Maybe if you can prove systematic bias over a large number of hires in a large company then maybe, but even that is very hard to do. Trying to "quantify" applicants so you can prove they're doing age discrimination is doomed to fail, the public sector here in Norway has a system like that. What it in practice means is that formal qualifications like job title and duration count far more than actual performance and personal fit for the job. People have sued - and won - because they've had a year or two longer formal experience and so have been "discriminated" against. There's a reason most the good people stay away, because you're never going to overtake anybody.
The very few times I've heard about private industry being more efficient in something have been cases where the public sector has been systematically sabotaged first
Unfortunately large parts of the public sector is sabotaged by itself. You give a public institution a mandate and some funding. Now no matter how inefficient and poorly thought out their process and systems are, the ill effects are shifted onto the receivers and the blame put on lack of funding. Why didn't this poor disabled old lady get her disability benefit? Why because she's stuck in the bureaucracy and there's a backlog because there's no funding. Why wasn't this child followed up and taken into care? Because the CPS didn't have enough funding to follow up her case. Once you have some of these horror cases hitting the media, public opinion will demand that they get better funded even though that's not the real problem.
The only time you see significant effort to innovate in the public sector is when they really get the thumbscrews on and say "We're dead broke and need to cut costs, find a way to work more effectively or people are getting fired". And that does not happen very often in the public sector, the sand in the machinery is very heavily protected. My experience has been that performance isn't nearly as much rewarded in the public sector, seniority and formal qualifications much more. That naturally leads to the brightest heads going to the public sector, while the less than average go to the public sector. The new boss of our office (60 people) is still in his 30s, he'd never ever gotten that job in the public sector. Most bright people that I know that's tried it there have become very frustrated over all the dead weight they're carrying that's still paid as much as themselves.
The people I know that do stick around is there mainly for the safety, we implemented a system for a public institution where we had start date and the earliest workers had 40+ years of work history. If you're so reasonably competent, it's work for life. It's not going to be great pay, but you almost never work more than regular hours unless you want to and there's relatively little stress. Because so much is based on how long you've been there you're likely to move up the pay scale and qualify for more senior jobs at an okay, but not great pace. There's so many things that are different that I don't think the public sector will ever really compete with the private sector.
Apparently ISPs would rather take the risk and be exposed (liable) for what its customers do in exchange for the freedoms (and abuses) that come with NOT being common carriers.
Actually, they got that one covered under USC 17512. And being a common carrier doesn't really imply net neutrality - common carriers can absolutely charge different rates depending on destination, if you want that it should probably be explicitly applied to information services. In short, it's not really a great fit.
"earth-like" != twin earth. Some of the planets we've discovered are definitively more earth-like than Jupiter-like. Besides, we have very limited knowledge on what's essential to life. No magnetic field fine, could it be that life here on Earth hasn't bothered with developing radiation resistance because there's practically no radiation? If you drop a lion in the Arctic it's going to die, why hasn't it evolved cold resistance? Because it didn't need to, but a polar bear did. Maybe you can compensate for having a solar wind blowing away the atmosphere with a higher gravity, denser gases, whatever. We don't know, but since we only know about ourselves we're looking for planets as close to our own as possible.
Sure journalists exhaust it, but if you have 2 white people and 20 black people you might say those white people look "like" each other no matter how unlike they are. Then as you find more people to compare to you start looking at height, weight, face, hair, eyecolor and find people more and more alike. Sure, the ideal thing would be finding a drop-in replacement, where we could say this would be exactly like living in [Sahara - Siberia] and we're far from that. But we are closing in, even if journalists shout earth-like at every occasion to generate page hits this year's "like" is closer than last year's "like".
For that reason, I'd probably have to agree with the court and state that nothing prevents Congress, as the legislative branch, from absolving or nullifying previous criminal behavior by legislation.
So far that's fine but Congress should not be able to absolve breaking the constitution without amending the constitution. So if your fourth amendment rights were violated, Congress shouldn't have the power to pass a regular law granting immunity to those who broke it. In that case you might as well use the constitution as toilet paper.
That's not really a very good point, because it only needs to be good enough for them not to pick a conventional confrontation. Being ten times that overwhelming for a fight they're not going to pick anyway doesn't help. You don't need stealth bombers and smart missiles to beat these insurgents to a pulp, Cold War era warfare would do just fine. A much better point is that high-tech equipment does help in all other parts of the operation like patrolling and intelligence gathering and inflicting less collateral damage, not just that the guns are big enough when you know where to point them.
When it's time for me to go, I'm going out kicking and screaming with every bionic body part science has to offer.
And while you're busy researching every option to prolong your life and recovering from bionic implant surgery other people will be busy living. And when you die like everybody else you may have won on quantity but not on quality. I don't live nearly as healthy as I should if I was trying to maximize my life span, I'd eat less junk, exercise more, drink less alcohol and whatnot. It's not like I party like the sun won't rise in the morning either, but it's a balance between living in the present and not screwing up my future too much. And shit still happens to people, quote me statistics but there's no guarantee I personally won't be the one dying some disease or injury or whatnot. Every time I get in a car I take a little extra risk I might die in a car accident, but you can't stop living to stop dying. So when I get there on my deathbed I hope I can say it's been fun while it lasted, peace out.
I think he's going for the "or dig really, really far and you'll come out on the other side" alternative. Which works even less in the abstract sense than the literal one.
No. You clearly have not done price comparisons, either recently, or ever. I did one just today, for someone essentially making the same claim as you, in another thread on this same story. Apple computers are very consistently around 90 to 100% more expensive than a typical PC with identical components. It can vary as much as 50-150%, but the disparity is usually greater the higher up the price scale you go.
Looking at apple.no, the Mac Mini is 4790 NOK. The closest thing I find with a Core i5 at my price check is "Acer Aspire X3990 i5-2300 8GB" for 5278 NOK. The disparity is that if I just want some box I can get a "MSI Wind Box DE500" for 1759 NOK, sure it's a crappy Atom but it's also 1/3rd of the cost. Same if you for any reason have to step up from the iMac, suddenly the cheapest is an insanely expensive Mac Pro. If you happen to need exactly the base model Apple is delivering they're not bad. Their upgrades are way overprices though, combined with the gaps in the lineup it can get really, really expensive to find a Mac replacement for your needs.
He did it because mankind was reaching the heavens and "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them!" Why that was considered a bad thing is not mentioned (pride?).
Well he didn't like them getting knowledge in the Garden of Eden either. Ignorant and mostly harmless, that's how he likes his creations. The whole old testament is mostly vicious, the New Testament is a complete change of character.
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Now if the costs were set to a more reasonable level (to cover cost of initial production, reproducing and distributing plus epsilon)
So.... like government cost plus contracts? How do you even determine cost per album when it depends on albums sold - which you don't know until after you've sold them. First comes the price, then come the sales. Are you going to back charge everyone $1000 for buying a flopped album? Or do you only get to lose money, never profit?
and if all the artists were paid a reasonable amount (instead of the current rampant cheating)
Reasonable to who? You want a government imposed pay grade? Union tariffs?
and if the DRM had been throttled back (so that games/DVDs were useable once again),
Aye. But the rest is just some communist utopia, the charge what the market will bear and artists have plenty choice to go independent, it's not society's fault they're signing themselves into crappy contracts because a major label took interest.
To date, I haven't met a single company that went for Vista but they discovered most compatibility issues then, so the upgrade to Win7 went smooth. Your company is late to the party, even for having thousands of employees. That said there's no pressing hurry to get off XP and I expect it'll be even less to get off Win7.
As a former fencer, I completely agree on the fight quality. During the lightsaber battles in the original three movies, the actors' movements were relatively slow and often didn't actually threaten their opponents.
On the other hand, they didn't stop using the Force and become sword fighters with flashy swords. I mean they could stop blaster shots with those, so why aren't the light saber battles lightning fast? I always felt that Jedi vs Sith was a battle of minds as much as swords, like two mind readers trying to surprise each other where the rules are different and where the obvious moves are anticipated moves so they do no good. I'm not saying the sword play was great, I'm just saying I'm not sure it'd make the movies any better to me if they'd been master swordsmen. At least my mind made up a perfectly good explanation of why they spend most their duels doing silly and flashy moves.
Linus is a great guy and all but he's not a lawyer and there's 5000-20000 contributors with standing to sue if he relicences without their consent and you can be sure many of those rights would be bought up by SCO-like companies. In any case the lead maintainers are all against it, so they haven't made any serious effort to see if it's even feasible. Most likely you'd need to strip it back down to the core and bring systems back online very, very slowly ripping out all code of people that can't be reached or won't relicence. Even if you found some legal theory in some jurisdiction that'd let you do it any other way, it'd be a copyright infringement and legally toxic in the rest of the world.
Claiming that Facebook caused your divorce is like claiming the telephone caused your divorce when you heard your wife using it to cheat on you
Not even that, friends reporting spouseâ(TM)s behavior over Facebook is equivalent to them calling you, except you don't subpoena the phone company for that. This is like measuring how many times the word "called" appeared in court documents, then concluding 78% of divorces involved a telephone. Well duuuuuuh.
Why? What is it about GPLv3 that would have dissuaded Google from using Linux?
The ability to license Android to control-freak companies that don't want you to be able to root your phone? Because the GPLv3 requires that it includes all the information to install your own modified version, no more "our signed binaries only".
And suppose two weeks later you found out you had a fatal sexually transmitted disease? Or if you were female, that you were pregnant? We protect the young from adults who would manipulate them for sexual gratification because they don't fully understand enough to protect themselves.
You could teach a five year old the "no glove, no love" rule. It's not to protect them from STDs, it's not to protect them from pregnancy, it's to protect them from sex as such. There's a lot of good arguments for that, but that we couldn't teach them how to use a condom isn't one of them.
We support the government because of a barrel of a gun. We support corporations based on mutual gain.
If you count "You're in a desert and we've chased away every water seller in the next 100 miles. We offer water under our water use license agreement (WULA). Would you like to make a deal?" as voluntary and of mutual gain. I'd like a few more options than opting out civilized society and being tied on hands and feet by strings attached to everything.
Look, ask some of the people who has lived in a country with a civil war, a proper bloody one with armed guerrilla groups and government troops shooting it out what it was like. It's not just that you pick up your gun and go to war and you either win or die. There's chaos, mayhem, terror, looting, raping and plundering - there's no rule of law, no redress of grievances, suspected collaborators and rebels are detained and punished with little to no due process. Okay you might feel your rights are boiling away like frog in warming water, but for a time - a very long time, in some cases - you're likely to have none as desperation takes both those in power and those fighting to change it.
That is why the average person is generally very opposed to a civil war, no matter how righteous the cause. Revolutions only happen when large groups of the people can get behind something, whether it's oppressive taxes (no taxation without representation), mass unemployment (Nazi Germany, hello Godwin), mass starvation (Soviet revolution) or something like that. Not because a handful of people may be taken by the secret police and disappear. That's never been enough for a revolution, not before and not now. All those that whine about the public apathy don't realize how far people were pushed in the past, before the revolution came.
It has to be bad. Not just a little bad, but so bad that a good number of people is willing to sacrifice anything and everything because it can't get worse. And a population that desperately yearns for change, a small number of discontents in a population that has their bread and circus will go nowhere. Make a little show on how they cleared the Occupy Wall Street movement, but they didn't exactly have the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. And even that wasn't enough to trigger a revolution. To be honest, I suspect that during an actual civil war 90% of the gun nuts will be hauled up in their property protecting it from looters, not out fighting any revolutionary war. Not really that ready to sacrifice everything after all.
Nope. That doesn't mean rattling your sabers didn't have an effect. Nobody launched a single nuke during the Cold War, but both the explicit and implicit threats obviously had a huge effect. They don't really want to go nuclear any more than anyone wanted WWIII.
The handicap spots are full of assholes now, how do you think it'd be without penalties? Are shops going to piss off their customers with huge fines for their "dick move"? No. All that would happen is that all the healthy people would get to park a little closer (remember, distance fans out in a circle - there's a lot more spots in a 50 feet radius than a 20 feet radius) and handicapped people would be shit out of luck. Either hang in front of the closest spots waiting for one to clear - and those who need extra space for a wheelchair ramp would never get the double spot they need - or park far out with most everybody else. Those people are going to hurt more, perhaps make a condition worse and in the worst case say I can't get to the shop on my own, I need aid of some sort. And those costs are coming back to you either in form of more government programs or higher health insurance, the extra costs are getting passed to you. Enabling people to take care of themselves it usually one the of the best things you can do, both for them and you.
You're jumping to conclusions. No electronic tag = attendant notified = attendant checks it out, a fine isn't automatically issued.
While that's certainly a change of career, he won't be writing much if any of the code he's talking about. If what he wants is a hands-on job, a hands-off job is a pretty poor substitute. Some of the most annoying and useless managers are those who don't understand their job and still try to be a coder.
The sales engineers I know spend most of their time trying to figure out how they are actually going to do what the sales rep just sold to the client.
Really? Usually that's the problem of the people who actually deliver. In my experience the sales engineers are those making "smoke and mirrors" demos and scripts for the sales reps, ignoring all the practical issues of making it work in a real company. They're heavily into the nuts and bolts of the software and how to configure and tweak it, they've just chosen the dark side of the force. I don't know anyone with "sales" in their title that touch it after the sale has been made.
There's a million different reasons to refuse any one job application, you won't know the real reason unless they choose to tell you. Maybe if you can prove systematic bias over a large number of hires in a large company then maybe, but even that is very hard to do. Trying to "quantify" applicants so you can prove they're doing age discrimination is doomed to fail, the public sector here in Norway has a system like that. What it in practice means is that formal qualifications like job title and duration count far more than actual performance and personal fit for the job. People have sued - and won - because they've had a year or two longer formal experience and so have been "discriminated" against. There's a reason most the good people stay away, because you're never going to overtake anybody.
Just dont espect to get an honest answer.
If it's the US we're talking about, expect to get the answer least likely to qualify for a lawsuit.
The very few times I've heard about private industry being more efficient in something have been cases where the public sector has been systematically sabotaged first
Unfortunately large parts of the public sector is sabotaged by itself. You give a public institution a mandate and some funding. Now no matter how inefficient and poorly thought out their process and systems are, the ill effects are shifted onto the receivers and the blame put on lack of funding. Why didn't this poor disabled old lady get her disability benefit? Why because she's stuck in the bureaucracy and there's a backlog because there's no funding. Why wasn't this child followed up and taken into care? Because the CPS didn't have enough funding to follow up her case. Once you have some of these horror cases hitting the media, public opinion will demand that they get better funded even though that's not the real problem.
The only time you see significant effort to innovate in the public sector is when they really get the thumbscrews on and say "We're dead broke and need to cut costs, find a way to work more effectively or people are getting fired". And that does not happen very often in the public sector, the sand in the machinery is very heavily protected. My experience has been that performance isn't nearly as much rewarded in the public sector, seniority and formal qualifications much more. That naturally leads to the brightest heads going to the public sector, while the less than average go to the public sector. The new boss of our office (60 people) is still in his 30s, he'd never ever gotten that job in the public sector. Most bright people that I know that's tried it there have become very frustrated over all the dead weight they're carrying that's still paid as much as themselves.
The people I know that do stick around is there mainly for the safety, we implemented a system for a public institution where we had start date and the earliest workers had 40+ years of work history. If you're so reasonably competent, it's work for life. It's not going to be great pay, but you almost never work more than regular hours unless you want to and there's relatively little stress. Because so much is based on how long you've been there you're likely to move up the pay scale and qualify for more senior jobs at an okay, but not great pace. There's so many things that are different that I don't think the public sector will ever really compete with the private sector.
Apparently ISPs would rather take the risk and be exposed (liable) for what its customers do in exchange for the freedoms (and abuses) that come with NOT being common carriers.
Actually, they got that one covered under USC 17512. And being a common carrier doesn't really imply net neutrality - common carriers can absolutely charge different rates depending on destination, if you want that it should probably be explicitly applied to information services. In short, it's not really a great fit.
"earth-like" != twin earth. Some of the planets we've discovered are definitively more earth-like than Jupiter-like. Besides, we have very limited knowledge on what's essential to life. No magnetic field fine, could it be that life here on Earth hasn't bothered with developing radiation resistance because there's practically no radiation? If you drop a lion in the Arctic it's going to die, why hasn't it evolved cold resistance? Because it didn't need to, but a polar bear did. Maybe you can compensate for having a solar wind blowing away the atmosphere with a higher gravity, denser gases, whatever. We don't know, but since we only know about ourselves we're looking for planets as close to our own as possible.
Sure journalists exhaust it, but if you have 2 white people and 20 black people you might say those white people look "like" each other no matter how unlike they are. Then as you find more people to compare to you start looking at height, weight, face, hair, eyecolor and find people more and more alike. Sure, the ideal thing would be finding a drop-in replacement, where we could say this would be exactly like living in [Sahara - Siberia] and we're far from that. But we are closing in, even if journalists shout earth-like at every occasion to generate page hits this year's "like" is closer than last year's "like".
For that reason, I'd probably have to agree with the court and state that nothing prevents Congress, as the legislative branch, from absolving or nullifying previous criminal behavior by legislation.
So far that's fine but Congress should not be able to absolve breaking the constitution without amending the constitution. So if your fourth amendment rights were violated, Congress shouldn't have the power to pass a regular law granting immunity to those who broke it. In that case you might as well use the constitution as toilet paper.
That's not really a very good point, because it only needs to be good enough for them not to pick a conventional confrontation. Being ten times that overwhelming for a fight they're not going to pick anyway doesn't help. You don't need stealth bombers and smart missiles to beat these insurgents to a pulp, Cold War era warfare would do just fine. A much better point is that high-tech equipment does help in all other parts of the operation like patrolling and intelligence gathering and inflicting less collateral damage, not just that the guns are big enough when you know where to point them.
When it's time for me to go, I'm going out kicking and screaming with every bionic body part science has to offer.
And while you're busy researching every option to prolong your life and recovering from bionic implant surgery other people will be busy living. And when you die like everybody else you may have won on quantity but not on quality. I don't live nearly as healthy as I should if I was trying to maximize my life span, I'd eat less junk, exercise more, drink less alcohol and whatnot. It's not like I party like the sun won't rise in the morning either, but it's a balance between living in the present and not screwing up my future too much. And shit still happens to people, quote me statistics but there's no guarantee I personally won't be the one dying some disease or injury or whatnot. Every time I get in a car I take a little extra risk I might die in a car accident, but you can't stop living to stop dying. So when I get there on my deathbed I hope I can say it's been fun while it lasted, peace out.
I think he's going for the "or dig really, really far and you'll come out on the other side" alternative. Which works even less in the abstract sense than the literal one.
No. You clearly have not done price comparisons, either recently, or ever. I did one just today, for someone essentially making the same claim as you, in another thread on this same story. Apple computers are very consistently around 90 to 100% more expensive than a typical PC with identical components. It can vary as much as 50-150%, but the disparity is usually greater the higher up the price scale you go.
Looking at apple.no, the Mac Mini is 4790 NOK. The closest thing I find with a Core i5 at my price check is "Acer Aspire X3990 i5-2300 8GB" for 5278 NOK. The disparity is that if I just want some box I can get a "MSI Wind Box DE500" for 1759 NOK, sure it's a crappy Atom but it's also 1/3rd of the cost. Same if you for any reason have to step up from the iMac, suddenly the cheapest is an insanely expensive Mac Pro. If you happen to need exactly the base model Apple is delivering they're not bad. Their upgrades are way overprices though, combined with the gaps in the lineup it can get really, really expensive to find a Mac replacement for your needs.
He did it because mankind was reaching the heavens and "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them!" Why that was considered a bad thing is not mentioned (pride?).
Well he didn't like them getting knowledge in the Garden of Eden either. Ignorant and mostly harmless, that's how he likes his creations. The whole old testament is mostly vicious, the New Testament is a complete change of character.