The cancer can impinge on vital structures like nerves and result in loss of sensation or loss of function or rarely death. The vast majority of cases can be successfully treated before serious complications occur.
Death isn't the only consequence of not treating this cancer, and the page doesn't seem to discuss patient outcomes without treatment anyway. The rest of the GP's post was not irrelevant, but yours nearly is.
You get the Moriarty story arc as a bonus and each individual episode is decent to very good. It might be too holodeck-heavy, but that's Barclay.
I never personally liked The Dauphin, probably because the plot was so Wesley-heavy and there was no secondary tech plot to relieve my dislike. In Theory is a very interesting episode. It might be good to preface it with a more standard Data-heavy episode, like 4x11 Data's Day (which has the O'Brien's marriage as a secondary plot and isn't very hard-core science-fiction-y).
My guide to the six Star Trek series is below. If you've ever wanted to watch a few episodes of a series and stop there, pick some from the relevant "best of show" list. They're all independent episodes that require essentially no back story (though caring about the characters always helps), unless otherwise noted. The NxM numbers indicate season and episode.
The Animated Series (TAS): terrible for adults; decent for kids (or maybe nostalgia if you saw it as a kid). One real season. * Best of show: 1x02 Yesteryear. * Worst of show: 1x05 More Tribbles, More Troubles. * Most surreal moment in all of Star Trek: Midway through 1x04 The Lorelei Signal, Scotty sings Welsh ballads while the Enterprise slowly orbits. The scene drags on for 37 seconds.
Voyager (VOY): seasons 1 and 2 are terrible. Again it slowly amps up until 6 and 7 are pretty universally good. Lots of good 2-parters. Fun fact: Captain
Yes to Animorphs--a thousand times yes; they're the perfect answer to this question.
* They're short, ~120 pages in large font. Very short chapters make for easy stopping points all over the place.
* They're made for kids his age and up. No big vocab requirement or overly complex plots. The main characters are all in middle school so you can identify with them.
* They're basically for boys. Reliably two major battle sequences per book, ray guns, space ships, alien monsters.... Girls probably like them fine too, but when I was growing up with them it was all guys who read them.
* There's like 60 of them to foster an interest in sci-fi.
* Many schools and public libraries should have lots of them, and they're new enough that they're still really cheap used, like around $200 for the entire series.
* Various life lessons like accepting people's differences, not everything is black and white, can't judge a book by its cover, etc.
I've actually reread the bulk of the series as an adult. I imagine if you were to read the stories to him you'd find them easily bearable and perhaps even enjoyable. (I don't have kids, but I can only imagine the horror parents must sometimes go through when reading/watching garbage with their kids.) There's also a fair amount of comic relief that's good at any age.
Alrighty. After looking into it a little more, it seems the strongly self-interacting dark matter idea isn't terribly popular for a variety of reasons. The paper's suggestion that dark matter is so similar to regular matter is rather strange in that context.
Not a dumb question at all. If you're actually interested in discussing this sort of thing, one place to go is PhysicsForums. Here's a thread and paper on this topic. The general consensus is that annihilation events should be visible if a lot of the universe were made out of antimatter, but we don't seem to find any. (My very very unpolished view is that matter and antimatter were produced in slightly differing amounts for some reason during the universe's formation and the vast majority of both annihilated each other over time, leaving only a sliver of leftover, regular matter.)
Just a minor note: Einstein won his Nobel for his work on the photoelectric effect (which ironically helped launch the quantum theory he distrusted the rest of his life), not for relativity. I'm not sure if you meant to imply that or not.
Care to cite a source to that effect? It's a very strong statement. The paper specifically says the mirror matter interacts with itself in ways exactly analogous to regular matter:
There may exist a hidden parallel gauge sector that exactly copies the pattern of ordinary gauge sector. Then all particles: the electron e, proton p, neutron n etc., should have invisible twins: e', p', n', etc. which are sterile to our strong and electroweak interactions (SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1)) but have their own gauge interactions (SU(3)' x SU(2)' x U(1)') with exactly the same couplings.
and it also says that mirror matter is a good candidate for dark matter:
Mirror matter can be a viable candidate for dark matter
Unless you have something particularly compelling, I'm going to go with the pros on this one and call BS on your statement.
"Duh" is right, since almost everyone thought it was Israel and possibly the US anyway. (I'm sorry, but your post is hardly insightful.)
Various old, mostly highly modded/. comments to that effect:
1. I'd bet the malware was developed either in Israel or the USA...probably Israel with USA support. 2. The Iran fixation suggests two possible suspects- Israel and the United States. [...] Flame is primarily concerned with countries that are either enemies or potential enemies of Israel... That strongly suggests Israel as the culprit. 3....would tend to prove the point that it was Israel. 4. If that's true, it is another pretty large piece of evidence in favor of Israeli authorship. 5. So, who made Flame? USA made Flame.
In my brief search I didn't see a single person contending that it wasn't Israel and/or the US, though I imagine a few exist.
You continue to spout uninformed garbage. Please stop. As I mentioned in my other reply to you, gay men do not have "60 times higher rates of AIDS". You can find such figures amongst despicable anti-gay propaganda, but it's not true--such figures are often taken from gay men in STD clinics, which is obviously unfair, and it completely ignores the African HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is predominantly heterosexual. In fair studies, gay men are perhaps somewhat more promiscuous than straight men (though not by a ton), while gay women are significantly less promiscuous. I won't take the time to discuss the other points you raised in this vein. As always, you've ignored the inconvenient lesbians.
Speaking of lesbians, there is strong evidence from decades of research that lesbian couples raise children of the same (possibly slightly better) "quality" as children raised by straight couples. Gay male studies are much further behind for some reason; no conclusions can be drawn yet. I know a very common argument in the anti-gay community is that straight couples offer a better environment for children than gay couples, but it's simply not true, at least for lesbians. Single parents of any orientation provide a worse environment, on average, than a two-parent household, but straight couples and lesbians are equivalent. By the way, this leads me to a societal benefit for recognizing gay couples: they can raise children more effectively than single people and so should be encouraged to do so, particularly through adoption, and the various legal and social benefits of marriage do encourage that.
But the "lifelong convenant [sic] between man and woman for starting a family and begetting children" aspect has remained for millennia.
That is again simply false. Marriage has been a way to seal contracts and treaties for those millennia, independent of necessarily "starting" a family (a family could already have been started with further wives tacked on for political reasons, for instance). There is some evidence for ancient same-sex marriage in various cultures, though it's spotty. Finally, there are several traditions providing for purposefully temporary marriage, which I will assume you did not mean when you said "family". The definition of marriage is a complicated issue for anthropologists to debate; stating whatever random crap comes to your mind is unhelpful and bound to be woefully oversimplified.
The polygamous marriage discussion is a rabbit trail, but no, I do not see anything fundamentally wrong with a man marrying his father. In almost any real case it would be horrible, but what if, for instance, a man donates sperm to a sperm bank, the child is born and raised completely independent of him, both the father and child are gay, and the two end up meeting without knowing they were related. Why shouldn't they marry? Because of the result of a genetic test they might never even take?
I don't remember offering any positive arguments
I said "argument", not "positive argument". You appear to have arbitrarily decided positive arguments were what I was discussing, when that was not the case. Your proof by contradiction (Latin does not impress me, by the way) was a poor argument, as I pointed out, since it didn't handle the mixed-race marriage case. I hope it's disconcerting to you that even when you tried to be very careful you still screwed up. It would be for me.
You make a good point about "denying" rights vs. forcing others to do something with respect to anti-discrimination laws. I have mixed feelings on such laws (I only mentioned workplace discrimination originally, not "bed and breakfast" discrimination). While I don't believe it's right to discriminate against same-sex (or mixed-race, etc.) couples at a bed and breakfast, I'm not sure it should be illegal. I do not know what the law says about such situations; I was under the impression that not-for-profits can discriminate for any reason they wish, perhaps unless they accep
Your model doesn't match my experience, where non-religious people can have highly developed morals (often with more solid reasoning than "the book said it's bad"). I do not believe your other assertions.
That said, religion is almost certainly the result of evolution, so it makes sense that primitive religious societies tend to do better than non-religious ones. Of course from this perspective the theological content of the religions is irrelevant. Modern society differs so much from what we presumably evolved in that the comparison may no longer be apt (the GP's link supports this conclusion).
Yes and no. Your link refers to mirror matter based only on parity symmetry while I believe the paper at hand is more general. The arXiv preprint discusses this at the start:
Concerns about parity are irrelevant for our following discussions: they extend to a parallel sector (or sectors) of any chirality. Nevertheless, in the following we shall name the twin particles from the `primed' parallel sector as mirror particles.
To set things up, imagine stepping through a mirror and doing some physics experiments. You would expect everything to work out the same as before so long as "left" and "right" were reversed (...along the axis normal to the mirror...). That turns out not to be the case, which was surprising--some decades ago a few experiments with relatively exotic particles didn't work out as expected (brief history here). Thus matter "through the mirror" and "before the mirror" are distinguishable. It's possible that matter through the mirror exists in our before-the-mirror universe, though it shouldn't interact much with the matter we're used to because the force-carrying particles need to be mirrored as well which ends up leaving only gravitational interactions. As you may have guessed, this is a potential candidate for dark matter. The lack of electromagnetic interactions would prevent distant mirror matter from being seen, and the lack of strong or weak interactions would nix many lab tests (like those that detect neutrinos, which are detected by their weak interactions).
My (poor) understanding of the paper is that they consider an essentially arbitrary parallel universe with wimpy interactions with our own universe (except gravitationally), not necessarily just one created by parity changes. In particular they focus on transitions of neutrons from our universe to the parallel one and use such transitions to explain an anomalous dependence on magnetic field direction in a previous experiment.
As usual, caution is the best plan. The authors call for more experiments, and I'm sure there are numerous explanations for their results that don't require (IMO) spooky transitions between parallel universes.
I was trying not to reply to you again, but that article is silly enough I had to discuss it at least in part.
...“It gets better,” campaign, the purpose of which is to encourage confused and troubled teenagers to ‘come out’ and experiment with homosexuality.
That's a straw-man created by a purposeful mischaracterization. The videos could replace "gay" with "black" with no essential change. The project has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with providing figures who accept you when you don't feel like anyone around you does. Try growing up gay in conservative land.
...Savage’s message that being gay... is cool.
Another straw-man. Savage would never encourage truly straight people to be gay. Not that I agree with him on everything either, but that's another issue.
...[something] has been implicit in pro-gay education from the beginning, namely that it is stridently anti-Christian.
Yet more straw-men. There are many Christians who accept homosexuality, either personally (eg. a majority of American Catholics) or theologically (eg. American Episcopals). While I confess I do not know what "pro-gay education" means precisely, some of the aforementioned Christians are highly pro-gay and educate others on their views. A prominent example that comes to mind is the (gay, Christian) author of Box Turtle Bulletin.
...[while some say they are] ‘born that way’ and can’t change, there is no scientific evidence that to back up these assertions,[1]
[1]'s third reference says, "Family and twin studies have provided evidence for a genetic component to male sexual orientation" and "Twin studies consistently show that male sexual orientation is moderately heritable", which flat-out contradicts the statement it's meant to support. But of course, cherry-picking and misrepresenting research serves the author's purpose, and from the straw-men above they have no qualms with lies. Regardless, no study will ever convince me that I chose to be gay. It's been inconvenient, to say the least: finding an amazing girl to say "I love you" to yet having absolutely zero sexual or romantic desire for her was... extremely unfortunate. I like dudes and am "meant" to be with them, nothing more or less.
...and plenty of evidence that SSA is rooted in early negative experiences[2]
[2] refers to a paper by George Rekers, of various gay scandals fame, most notably saying a rentboy was "lifting his luggage". I will not analyze it further because of the obvious conflict of interest.
...and that change is possible.[3]
[3] refers to an analysis of the Spitzer ex-gay studies, which have been criticized in depth and at length elsewhere (google it if you're interested; I won't write up my own version). I myself do not deny that change is possible, but I contend that it is extraordinarily rare. Ex-gay ministries are often unclear about it, but "change" usually just means celibacy and not heterosexuality (I can provide references if needed, though again it's easy to google). I imagine the same would be true of straight people--a very, very small fraction of "thoroughly straight" people could be turned gay with the right therapy and motivations--but I'm not aware of anyone trying this.
MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.[5]
[5] (a reputable CDC report) supports the statistics immediately preceding this, but does not contain this particular statistic. Extrapolating from the report's 2% estimate of the fraction of the population that is MSM (meaning 4% of the male population that is MSM) the 61% of
While I generally agree with you, "freedom to be who they are... [is a] basic human right" isn't a terribly complete argument. Murderers should not have the freedom to be who they are; clearly being who you are is not a basic human right. Add the requirement that the actions don't hurt others and you still have problems--straight people then shouldn't have children since they'll inevitably get hurt and die. How you justify giving gay people the right not to lose their jobs just because they're gay is a complicated philosophical question. Of course, the same is true with "gay" replaced by "black" or "male" or what-have-you.
My own view is that permissiveness is the only philosophically tenable position. One should only deny someone else the ability to do something when the first person has "good cause" (which is unfortunately nebulous). For instance, I'm unsure of my stance on abortion--do I think the baby is a person, and if so when, and if so what does that mean since they're clearly not a usual person? And if a child is a person, do I think an adult chimp with much more intelligence than a human infant is a person too?
If I consider preserving the baby's life as "good cause", I'm probably required logically to consider chimp killing murder, which seems at least odd, but not absurd. If I don't consider preserving the baby's life as "good cause", I'm forced to allow the value of a person to vary as they age, from nothing (or not high) to very high. But what makes that value increase? Does a mentally handicapped person's value decrease, or an asshole's? When is the moment that a person's value is high enough to institute penalties for killing them?
My general permissiveness doctrine even has trouble with sodomy, which I personally want very strongly to be acceptable. (I should perhaps mention that, because of the straight/gay ratio, anal sex is in absolute terms performed by more straight men than gay men.) Still, HIV spreads faster through anal sex than any other kind of sex, which does real and lasting harm to society; is that "good cause" to outlaw it? Among people who practice safe sex, not at all, but among the rest? Should it be illegal to infect someone with certain STD's? I do not know.
Sorry for the philosophical ramblings. I usually don't indulge that whim since it leads to lots of interesting but almost unanswerable questions.
I'm sorry to hear that. I haven't lived in such a ridiculous place myself. "The most glaring" was too strong; I should have said, "The first... that comes to mind."
Marriage has been redefined often throughout history. The US redefined marriage less than a century ago to allow interracial marriage--by your reasoning, we should have continued not allowing a black man to marry a white woman. That's preposterous, hopefully to both of us. For you to suggest the "whole homosexual militancy" (what does that even mean?) "is devoid of rational arguments" when your own arguments are so woefully inadequate is very annoying and somewhat depressing.
I have to admit, I have no idea what's wrong with polygamous marriage. It's prominently featured in the Bible (not negatively either--I hope you don't bring up Leah/Rachel, where the fault clearly wasn't polygamy but dishonesty) and has been legal or encouraged in many societies through the years. Forcing a young bride to marry an old man is certainly wrong, but why would I want to prevent eg. four loving adults from pooling resources? It's not for me, but that's irrelevant. Incestuous (straight) marriage has a good chance of producing genetically disabled children, which is a bad enough thing that society has an interest in preventing it, so I am provisionally alright with banning incestuous marriage on those grounds--though making incestuous child-making illegal is more direct and preferable. I have nothing against incestuous gay marriage, by the way--well, I find it distasteful, but again who am I to deny them when I have no real reason to do so? "Ick" doesn't count.
I want to reiterate how poor your arguments have been: a few seconds' thought uncovers major holes, you appear truly uninformed, and you also ignored the vast majority of my post. You may simply be trolling, but I've decided to assume not just in case. Given how truly terrible your discussion so far has been, it would be best for you to keep your mouth shut (or the textual equivalent) on this issue until you have something of value to contribute. (Please don't think I'm singling you out because you oppose my view; gay marriage supporters are often no better.)
I would argue that "the change is approached from a very different angle" is self evident
Agreed. I also agree that one would expect selective breeding and GM to differ in the ways you suggest, though at the risk of sounding like a broken record what one expects is not always what one gets, and different people can expect different things. Still, I consider it likely enough not to seriously argue the point.
But we have millions of years of data/evidence that would seem to suggest that evolution does not produce harmful things like this (tens fo thousands for agriculture) and in particular when you have a good interdependency going on that one of them does not just evolve and kill the other (and by extension itself). Evolution seems to work quite well, and if it screws up and unbalances entire ecosystems at times then I am surprised I have never heard of it.
I don't agree; evolution can be wildly unsafe. The black plague comes to mind as an example. In Europe, it proved too deadly--it killed off its population too much and essentially wiped itself out. Presumably a particularly deadly strain happened to evolve. Bacteria and viruses with long-term success are typically either extremely prevalent but not very deadly (chicken pox, common cold) or not very prevalent but very deadly (HIV, ebola). It's at least conceivable that some of the mysterious civilization disappearances in history were caused by pathogens that accidentally became too deadly or prevalent and burned themselves out.
Still, evolution and selective breeding are not the same. Even in dogs, selective breeding is far from unharmful--for instance, American Staffordshire Terriers have a wide range of inherited disorders. I imagine selective breeding of plants can encourage more uniformly good traits since we don't care morally about the "bad" experiments, and I suspect plant evolution is not even remotely as dangerous as pathogen evolution, but I'm not at all an expert.
In the case at hand, I'm far, far more inclined to believe scientists who have studied GMO for years calling for the experiment to continue than to believe whatever special interest groups decide it's bad, especially if that decision is based purely on plausible but non-scientific arguments.
P.S. I reread my first post and found the tone more hostile than it should have been. Thanks for ignoring that.
That's remarkably ignorant. In the US, the most glaring unfinished goal is marriage equality. A small fraction of states offer same-sex marriage and a few offer all-but-the-word-marriage civil unions. The rest (about half) offer varying degrees of no recognition whatsoever to some limited recognition. The federal government offers no recognition whatsoever, so for instance gay couples cannot file joint federal tax returns, even if they live in a state which recognizes same sex marriage.
Gay adoption is another patchwork of unfinished legal crap in the US. From Lambda Legal,
About half of all states permit second-parent adoptions by the unmarried partner of an existing legal parent, while in a handful of states courts have ruled these adoptions not permissible under state laws. This leaves parents in many states legally unrecognized or severely disadvantaged in court fights with ex-spouses, ex-partners or other relatives.
I could also discuss workplace discrimination, bullying, and general societal attitudes towards homosexuality. To be fair, that latter point has improved very considerably in recent years, at least in the US.
More generally, my and I think many gay people's ultimate goal is societal apathy towards homosexuality--I want people to think of homosexuality in the same terms as having green eyes. I want activism to be completely unnecessary and for opponents to stop caring. When you strip away the layers of religious doctrine and social tradition, being gay really isn't a big deal. Let us marry and adopt just like every other couple and stop singling us out. If that goal is unreasonable, I would love to know why. (It may be unrealistic, but that's not the same thing.) (The same applies to the other groups in the LGBT... alphabet soup.)
I'm sorry, but do you have any hard data whatsoever? Everything you've said is at best somewhat believable conjecture otherwise. I can do the same thing and reach the opposite conclusion:
"There are inherent problems with traditional selective breeding. Compared to genetic modification, it creates a very different plant internally and has many side effects, not all of them good. To take just one example, over time plants adapt to insects in their environment and create specific natural pesticides for themselves. Breeding together several strains of a certain plant increases the offspring's insect resistance by overproducing each of the parent strains' natural pesticides. It can take many years for subtle developmental problems caused by the consumption of so-called 'supercharged' insecticides to appear in humans. Genetic modification, on the other hand, produces carefully controlled, surgical changes that can be calibrated for safety. Only well-tested non-harmful natural insecticides are added to the genome by genetic modification, making the process much safer than traditional selective breeding."
Honestly, it's ridiculously easy to make this shit up. It's hard to get scientifically valid evidence to back up your positions. I understand the GMO issue is large and contentious, and it's easy to make up good-sounding scientifically invalid arguments, but still, we don't need more people just spouting whatever crap pops into their heads. The same is true for a huge number of today's arguments by the way: autism and vaccines, (anti-)gay marriage, climate change.... And if you ask for evidence, I can provide some:).
If I've misread you and you do have good evidence, I apologize in advance.
Your threshold for what constitutes multitasking seems unnecessarily high. Decreased skill at individual tasks is irrelevant to what qualifies as multitasking for me, so long as it doesn't decrease to zero. I am indeed worse in some ways at thinking about complex math problems while playing the piano, but so what? It often helps me see an approach I was missing because I was focusing too much on the line of reasoning I had been pursuing. Many times I've been playing, gotten new insight into a problem, and then stopped playing to pursue the math completely. In any case, I never said multitasking was efficient or inefficient, just that it exists (the context of my post was someone saying, "No one can multi-task. Only switch between single tasks.").
You seem to arbitrarily group related tasks into meta-tasks and I'm not sure why. I define tasks as things that can be done independently and use different parts of my brain (the second half is unfortunately hard to make explicit). A person can play the piano without evaluating their performance (for instance, by wearing ear plugs) or the reverse (eg. by listening to a recording of themselves). A person playing while evaluating is doing more things at once. The tasks are related, but I don't care. The two actions use different parts of my brain and can be done independently of each other so they're different tasks to me.
You seem to want multitasking to be difficult. Walking and talking at the same time without running into things is indeed multitasking by any definition I can think of that doesn't have arbitrary difficulty or complexity requirements. Your version may more accurately be termed something like "efficient, complex multitasking".
Finally, please don't project yourself on me so much. Our experiences are somewhat different, and I suspect I'm significantly better at "efficient, complex multitasking" (which I'll leave implicitly defined). As I mentioned with juggling while doing other activities, I vary the pattern. That's not "autopilot"; there's a small amount of independent thought required--the muscle movements themselves probably do qualify as being on "autopilot", for what that's worth. As an example, while revising this post, I just found myself doing an odd low amplitude, high speed pattern, which was momentarily surprising since I found out about it from the particularly loud sound the balls made while slapping against my hands. The revising part and the juggling part of my conscious mind had briefly diverged, though both were doing independent, creative things, not just regurgitating past actions by rote.
You're being ridiculous. Everyone except you calls VB6 object-oriented (eg. the Wikipedia article; the Tiobe (Visual) Basic page). "Seriously, you can go away and have a cup of coffee before a decent sized.Net application starts up"--that's just completely untrue, the difference is measured in seconds between comparable programs. "The companies who have prompted Microsoft to do this don't go anywhere near the Tiobe index... are the silent majority"--I thought MS couldn't be bothered to figure out their customer's needs. They must be a talkative silent majority.
I could go on, but I won't since you're not worth the time. Moron.
That's because of our "Homo NoMo" telethon. Every day I'm surrounded by dedicated young men working their phones, sweating for hours on end under hot stage lights--they're so good with their jobs, so giving. Lady Gaga's concerts are mostly supported by the ticket in the gay welcome basket I mentioned before (the "fruit basket", if you will). I'm sure her popularity will be plummeting any day now too.
...fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net... the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all... The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible... No one cares about.Net applications
You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.
(1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.
(2) VB6 has no class library to speak of--you had to write your own routine or hack together a ListBox to sort a string array. That should be a couple lines of code. Forget hash tables, queues, etc.--you have to implement it all yourself or find somebody else's random crap, which is wildly inefficient. The.NET class library is very good and is a huge potential "appreciable benefit" to upgrading.
(3).NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times,.NET is worse there). Which wins depends on precisely what you're doing. For math-heavy problems,.NET is often much faster. But honestly, why the hell do you care about the speed (/memory use/whatever you meant by "overhead") of VB6 apps? It's almost always irrelevant in light of user input delays.
(5).NET is not even remotely dead, so no "fatal mistake" was made.
(6) Lots of people care about.NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.
(7) You'll be able to create.NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work. Your backend will be mostly to entirely reusable, so you won't have to "rewrite everything".
(8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.
You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support; Microsoft's chances of getting a significant mobile presence are slim. You came close to the truth behind the continued success of VB6: people don't want to learn new systems and some people are stuck maintaining old ones that are too difficult to convert. Most of your points are garbage though.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously he's busy :)
I read the Wikipedia page too. It says in part
The cancer can impinge on vital structures like nerves and result in loss of sensation or loss of function or rarely death. The vast majority of cases can be successfully treated before serious complications occur.
Death isn't the only consequence of not treating this cancer, and the page doesn't seem to discuss patient outcomes without treatment anyway. The rest of the GP's post was not irrelevant, but yours nearly is.
Ah, I love The Nth Degree. I always liked the Barclay episodes. Come to think of it, one could make a good tour of TNG out of a Barclay marathon:
* 2x03 Elementary, Dear Data (he's not in this), 3x21 Hollow Pursuits, 4x19 The Nth Degree, 6x02 Realm of Fear, 6x12 Ship in a Bottle, 7x19 Genesis
You get the Moriarty story arc as a bonus and each individual episode is decent to very good. It might be too holodeck-heavy, but that's Barclay.
I never personally liked The Dauphin, probably because the plot was so Wesley-heavy and there was no secondary tech plot to relieve my dislike. In Theory is a very interesting episode. It might be good to preface it with a more standard Data-heavy episode, like 4x11 Data's Day (which has the O'Brien's marriage as a secondary plot and isn't very hard-core science-fiction-y).
Sex Trek: In Her Eyes
or
Sex Trek: Enter Guys*
But what about TAS? Sex Trek: The Animated Orgies?
*The gay guy in me likes the second one the best, but you people are mostly straight so I put the hetero one first.
My guide to the six Star Trek series is below. If you've ever wanted to watch a few episodes of a series and stop there, pick some from the relevant "best of show" list. They're all independent episodes that require essentially no back story (though caring about the characters always helps), unless otherwise noted. The NxM numbers indicate season and episode.
The Original Series (TOS): quality varied wildly. Season 2 was the best; season 3 was largely weird.
* Best of show: 1x28 The City on the Edge of Forever; 2x05 Amok Time; 2x10 Mirror Mirror; 1x08 Balance of Terror.
* Worst of show: 3x06 Spock's Brain.
The Animated Series (TAS): terrible for adults; decent for kids (or maybe nostalgia if you saw it as a kid). One real season.
* Best of show: 1x02 Yesteryear.
* Worst of show: 1x05 More Tribbles, More Troubles.
* Most surreal moment in all of Star Trek: Midway through 1x04 The Lorelei Signal, Scotty sings Welsh ballads while the Enterprise slowly orbits. The scene drags on for 37 seconds.
The Next Generation (TNG): season 1 is terrible. 2 and 3 are hit-and-miss. 4-7 are quite good, with 6 and 7 being almost universally good.
* Best of show: 5x25 The Inner Light; 2x16 Q Who?; 3x26 The Best of Both Worlds; 6x15 Tapestry; 3x15 Yesterday's Enterprise. The series finale, 7x25 All Good Things..., is also quite good and has no "spoilers".
* Worst of show: 2x22 Shades of Grey (clip show); 2x12 The Royale; Wesley's part in 1x03 The Naked Now (also Wesley's most annoying part period).
Deep Space 9 (DS9): season 1 is terrible with the notable exception of Duet. 2 is a marked improvement (for instance, Siddig learns to act). 3 and 4 are sometimes hit-and-miss. Seasons 5-7 are excellent if you like space opera.
* Best of show: 1x19 Duet; 5x06 Trials and Tribble-ations (excellent if you've seen the TOS episode!); 4x03 The Visitor; 4x08 Little Green Men--these are each essentially independent episodes. 6x19 In The Pale Moonlight, 6x06 Sacrifice of Angels, and the series finale 7x25 What You Leave Behind are all excellent as well, but they're part of the Dominion War story arc and should really be watched starting from, say, 4x26 Broken Link.
* Worst of show: 5x07 Let He Who Is Without Sin....
Voyager (VOY): seasons 1 and 2 are terrible. Again it slowly amps up until 6 and 7 are pretty universally good. Lots of good 2-parters. Fun fact: Captain
Yes to Animorphs--a thousand times yes; they're the perfect answer to this question.
* They're short, ~120 pages in large font. Very short chapters make for easy stopping points all over the place.
* They're made for kids his age and up. No big vocab requirement or overly complex plots. The main characters are all in middle school so you can identify with them.
* They're basically for boys. Reliably two major battle sequences per book, ray guns, space ships, alien monsters.... Girls probably like them fine too, but when I was growing up with them it was all guys who read them.
* There's like 60 of them to foster an interest in sci-fi.
* Many schools and public libraries should have lots of them, and they're new enough that they're still really cheap used, like around $200 for the entire series.
* Various life lessons like accepting people's differences, not everything is black and white, can't judge a book by its cover, etc.
I've actually reread the bulk of the series as an adult. I imagine if you were to read the stories to him you'd find them easily bearable and perhaps even enjoyable. (I don't have kids, but I can only imagine the horror parents must sometimes go through when reading/watching garbage with their kids.) There's also a fair amount of comic relief that's good at any age.
Alrighty. After looking into it a little more, it seems the strongly self-interacting dark matter idea isn't terribly popular for a variety of reasons. The paper's suggestion that dark matter is so similar to regular matter is rather strange in that context.
Not a dumb question at all. If you're actually interested in discussing this sort of thing, one place to go is PhysicsForums. Here's a thread and paper on this topic. The general consensus is that annihilation events should be visible if a lot of the universe were made out of antimatter, but we don't seem to find any. (My very very unpolished view is that matter and antimatter were produced in slightly differing amounts for some reason during the universe's formation and the vast majority of both annihilated each other over time, leaving only a sliver of leftover, regular matter.)
Just a minor note: Einstein won his Nobel for his work on the photoelectric effect (which ironically helped launch the quantum theory he distrusted the rest of his life), not for relativity. I'm not sure if you meant to imply that or not.
dark matter... also doesn't interact with itself.
Care to cite a source to that effect? It's a very strong statement. The paper specifically says the mirror matter interacts with itself in ways exactly analogous to regular matter:
There may exist a hidden parallel gauge sector that exactly copies the pattern of ordinary gauge sector. Then all particles: the electron e, proton p, neutron n etc., should have invisible twins: e', p', n', etc. which are sterile to our strong and electroweak interactions (SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1)) but have their own gauge interactions (SU(3)' x SU(2)' x U(1)') with exactly the same couplings.
and it also says that mirror matter is a good candidate for dark matter:
Mirror matter can be a viable candidate for dark matter
Unless you have something particularly compelling, I'm going to go with the pros on this one and call BS on your statement.
"Duh" is right, since almost everyone thought it was Israel and possibly the US anyway. (I'm sorry, but your post is hardly insightful.)
Various old, mostly highly modded /. comments to that effect:
1. I'd bet the malware was developed either in Israel or the USA...probably Israel with USA support. ...would tend to prove the point that it was Israel.
2. The Iran fixation suggests two possible suspects- Israel and the United States. [...] Flame is primarily concerned with countries that are either enemies or potential enemies of Israel... That strongly suggests Israel as the culprit.
3.
4. If that's true, it is another pretty large piece of evidence in favor of Israeli authorship.
5. So, who made Flame? USA made Flame.
In my brief search I didn't see a single person contending that it wasn't Israel and/or the US, though I imagine a few exist.
Sources:
1; 2; 3; 4; 5.
You continue to spout uninformed garbage. Please stop. As I mentioned in my other reply to you, gay men do not have "60 times higher rates of AIDS". You can find such figures amongst despicable anti-gay propaganda, but it's not true--such figures are often taken from gay men in STD clinics, which is obviously unfair, and it completely ignores the African HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is predominantly heterosexual. In fair studies, gay men are perhaps somewhat more promiscuous than straight men (though not by a ton), while gay women are significantly less promiscuous. I won't take the time to discuss the other points you raised in this vein. As always, you've ignored the inconvenient lesbians.
Speaking of lesbians, there is strong evidence from decades of research that lesbian couples raise children of the same (possibly slightly better) "quality" as children raised by straight couples. Gay male studies are much further behind for some reason; no conclusions can be drawn yet. I know a very common argument in the anti-gay community is that straight couples offer a better environment for children than gay couples, but it's simply not true, at least for lesbians. Single parents of any orientation provide a worse environment, on average, than a two-parent household, but straight couples and lesbians are equivalent. By the way, this leads me to a societal benefit for recognizing gay couples: they can raise children more effectively than single people and so should be encouraged to do so, particularly through adoption, and the various legal and social benefits of marriage do encourage that.
But the "lifelong convenant [sic] between man and woman for starting a family and begetting children" aspect has remained for millennia.
That is again simply false. Marriage has been a way to seal contracts and treaties for those millennia, independent of necessarily "starting" a family (a family could already have been started with further wives tacked on for political reasons, for instance). There is some evidence for ancient same-sex marriage in various cultures, though it's spotty. Finally, there are several traditions providing for purposefully temporary marriage, which I will assume you did not mean when you said "family". The definition of marriage is a complicated issue for anthropologists to debate; stating whatever random crap comes to your mind is unhelpful and bound to be woefully oversimplified.
The polygamous marriage discussion is a rabbit trail, but no, I do not see anything fundamentally wrong with a man marrying his father. In almost any real case it would be horrible, but what if, for instance, a man donates sperm to a sperm bank, the child is born and raised completely independent of him, both the father and child are gay, and the two end up meeting without knowing they were related. Why shouldn't they marry? Because of the result of a genetic test they might never even take?
I don't remember offering any positive arguments
I said "argument", not "positive argument". You appear to have arbitrarily decided positive arguments were what I was discussing, when that was not the case. Your proof by contradiction (Latin does not impress me, by the way) was a poor argument, as I pointed out, since it didn't handle the mixed-race marriage case. I hope it's disconcerting to you that even when you tried to be very careful you still screwed up. It would be for me.
You make a good point about "denying" rights vs. forcing others to do something with respect to anti-discrimination laws. I have mixed feelings on such laws (I only mentioned workplace discrimination originally, not "bed and breakfast" discrimination). While I don't believe it's right to discriminate against same-sex (or mixed-race, etc.) couples at a bed and breakfast, I'm not sure it should be illegal. I do not know what the law says about such situations; I was under the impression that not-for-profits can discriminate for any reason they wish, perhaps unless they accep
Your model doesn't match my experience, where non-religious people can have highly developed morals (often with more solid reasoning than "the book said it's bad"). I do not believe your other assertions.
That said, religion is almost certainly the result of evolution, so it makes sense that primitive religious societies tend to do better than non-religious ones. Of course from this perspective the theological content of the religions is irrelevant. Modern society differs so much from what we presumably evolved in that the comparison may no longer be apt (the GP's link supports this conclusion).
Yes and no. Your link refers to mirror matter based only on parity symmetry while I believe the paper at hand is more general. The arXiv preprint discusses this at the start:
Concerns about parity are irrelevant for our following discussions: they extend to a parallel sector (or sectors) of any chirality. Nevertheless, in the following we shall name the twin particles from the `primed' parallel sector as mirror particles.
To set things up, imagine stepping through a mirror and doing some physics experiments. You would expect everything to work out the same as before so long as "left" and "right" were reversed (...along the axis normal to the mirror...). That turns out not to be the case, which was surprising--some decades ago a few experiments with relatively exotic particles didn't work out as expected (brief history here). Thus matter "through the mirror" and "before the mirror" are distinguishable. It's possible that matter through the mirror exists in our before-the-mirror universe, though it shouldn't interact much with the matter we're used to because the force-carrying particles need to be mirrored as well which ends up leaving only gravitational interactions. As you may have guessed, this is a potential candidate for dark matter. The lack of electromagnetic interactions would prevent distant mirror matter from being seen, and the lack of strong or weak interactions would nix many lab tests (like those that detect neutrinos, which are detected by their weak interactions).
My (poor) understanding of the paper is that they consider an essentially arbitrary parallel universe with wimpy interactions with our own universe (except gravitationally), not necessarily just one created by parity changes. In particular they focus on transitions of neutrons from our universe to the parallel one and use such transitions to explain an anomalous dependence on magnetic field direction in a previous experiment.
As usual, caution is the best plan. The authors call for more experiments, and I'm sure there are numerous explanations for their results that don't require (IMO) spooky transitions between parallel universes.
I was trying not to reply to you again, but that article is silly enough I had to discuss it at least in part.
That's a straw-man created by a purposeful mischaracterization. The videos could replace "gay" with "black" with no essential change. The project has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with providing figures who accept you when you don't feel like anyone around you does. Try growing up gay in conservative land.
Another straw-man. Savage would never encourage truly straight people to be gay. Not that I agree with him on everything either, but that's another issue.
Yet more straw-men. There are many Christians who accept homosexuality, either personally (eg. a majority of American Catholics) or theologically (eg. American Episcopals). While I confess I do not know what "pro-gay education" means precisely, some of the aforementioned Christians are highly pro-gay and educate others on their views. A prominent example that comes to mind is the (gay, Christian) author of Box Turtle Bulletin.
[1]'s third reference says, "Family and twin studies have provided evidence for a genetic component to male sexual orientation" and "Twin studies consistently show that male sexual orientation is moderately heritable", which flat-out contradicts the statement it's meant to support. But of course, cherry-picking and misrepresenting research serves the author's purpose, and from the straw-men above they have no qualms with lies. Regardless, no study will ever convince me that I chose to be gay. It's been inconvenient, to say the least: finding an amazing girl to say "I love you" to yet having absolutely zero sexual or romantic desire for her was... extremely unfortunate. I like dudes and am "meant" to be with them, nothing more or less.
[2] refers to a paper by George Rekers, of various gay scandals fame, most notably saying a rentboy was "lifting his luggage". I will not analyze it further because of the obvious conflict of interest.
[3] refers to an analysis of the Spitzer ex-gay studies, which have been criticized in depth and at length elsewhere (google it if you're interested; I won't write up my own version). I myself do not deny that change is possible, but I contend that it is extraordinarily rare. Ex-gay ministries are often unclear about it, but "change" usually just means celibacy and not heterosexuality (I can provide references if needed, though again it's easy to google). I imagine the same would be true of straight people--a very, very small fraction of "thoroughly straight" people could be turned gay with the right therapy and motivations--but I'm not aware of anyone trying this.
MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.[5]
[5] (a reputable CDC report) supports the statistics immediately preceding this, but does not contain this particular statistic. Extrapolating from the report's 2% estimate of the fraction of the population that is MSM (meaning 4% of the male population that is MSM) the 61% of
While I generally agree with you, "freedom to be who they are ... [is a] basic human right" isn't a terribly complete argument. Murderers should not have the freedom to be who they are; clearly being who you are is not a basic human right. Add the requirement that the actions don't hurt others and you still have problems--straight people then shouldn't have children since they'll inevitably get hurt and die. How you justify giving gay people the right not to lose their jobs just because they're gay is a complicated philosophical question. Of course, the same is true with "gay" replaced by "black" or "male" or what-have-you.
My own view is that permissiveness is the only philosophically tenable position. One should only deny someone else the ability to do something when the first person has "good cause" (which is unfortunately nebulous). For instance, I'm unsure of my stance on abortion--do I think the baby is a person, and if so when, and if so what does that mean since they're clearly not a usual person? And if a child is a person, do I think an adult chimp with much more intelligence than a human infant is a person too?
If I consider preserving the baby's life as "good cause", I'm probably required logically to consider chimp killing murder, which seems at least odd, but not absurd.
If I don't consider preserving the baby's life as "good cause", I'm forced to allow the value of a person to vary as they age, from nothing (or not high) to very high. But what makes that value increase? Does a mentally handicapped person's value decrease, or an asshole's? When is the moment that a person's value is high enough to institute penalties for killing them?
My general permissiveness doctrine even has trouble with sodomy, which I personally want very strongly to be acceptable. (I should perhaps mention that, because of the straight/gay ratio, anal sex is in absolute terms performed by more straight men than gay men.) Still, HIV spreads faster through anal sex than any other kind of sex, which does real and lasting harm to society; is that "good cause" to outlaw it? Among people who practice safe sex, not at all, but among the rest? Should it be illegal to infect someone with certain STD's? I do not know.
Sorry for the philosophical ramblings. I usually don't indulge that whim since it leads to lots of interesting but almost unanswerable questions.
I'm sorry to hear that. I haven't lived in such a ridiculous place myself. "The most glaring" was too strong; I should have said, "The first ... that comes to mind."
(Sorry for the late reply, family medical stuff.)
Marriage has been redefined often throughout history. The US redefined marriage less than a century ago to allow interracial marriage--by your reasoning, we should have continued not allowing a black man to marry a white woman. That's preposterous, hopefully to both of us. For you to suggest the "whole homosexual militancy" (what does that even mean?) "is devoid of rational arguments" when your own arguments are so woefully inadequate is very annoying and somewhat depressing.
I have to admit, I have no idea what's wrong with polygamous marriage. It's prominently featured in the Bible (not negatively either--I hope you don't bring up Leah/Rachel, where the fault clearly wasn't polygamy but dishonesty) and has been legal or encouraged in many societies through the years. Forcing a young bride to marry an old man is certainly wrong, but why would I want to prevent eg. four loving adults from pooling resources? It's not for me, but that's irrelevant. Incestuous (straight) marriage has a good chance of producing genetically disabled children, which is a bad enough thing that society has an interest in preventing it, so I am provisionally alright with banning incestuous marriage on those grounds--though making incestuous child-making illegal is more direct and preferable. I have nothing against incestuous gay marriage, by the way--well, I find it distasteful, but again who am I to deny them when I have no real reason to do so? "Ick" doesn't count.
I want to reiterate how poor your arguments have been: a few seconds' thought uncovers major holes, you appear truly uninformed, and you also ignored the vast majority of my post. You may simply be trolling, but I've decided to assume not just in case. Given how truly terrible your discussion so far has been, it would be best for you to keep your mouth shut (or the textual equivalent) on this issue until you have something of value to contribute. (Please don't think I'm singling you out because you oppose my view; gay marriage supporters are often no better.)
I would argue that "the change is approached from a very different angle" is self evident
Agreed. I also agree that one would expect selective breeding and GM to differ in the ways you suggest, though at the risk of sounding like a broken record what one expects is not always what one gets, and different people can expect different things. Still, I consider it likely enough not to seriously argue the point.
But we have millions of years of data/evidence that would seem to suggest that evolution does not produce harmful things like this (tens fo thousands for agriculture) and in particular when you have a good interdependency going on that one of them does not just evolve and kill the other (and by extension itself). Evolution seems to work quite well, and if it screws up and unbalances entire ecosystems at times then I am surprised I have never heard of it.
I don't agree; evolution can be wildly unsafe. The black plague comes to mind as an example. In Europe, it proved too deadly--it killed off its population too much and essentially wiped itself out. Presumably a particularly deadly strain happened to evolve. Bacteria and viruses with long-term success are typically either extremely prevalent but not very deadly (chicken pox, common cold) or not very prevalent but very deadly (HIV, ebola). It's at least conceivable that some of the mysterious civilization disappearances in history were caused by pathogens that accidentally became too deadly or prevalent and burned themselves out.
Still, evolution and selective breeding are not the same. Even in dogs, selective breeding is far from unharmful--for instance, American Staffordshire Terriers have a wide range of inherited disorders. I imagine selective breeding of plants can encourage more uniformly good traits since we don't care morally about the "bad" experiments, and I suspect plant evolution is not even remotely as dangerous as pathogen evolution, but I'm not at all an expert.
In the case at hand, I'm far, far more inclined to believe scientists who have studied GMO for years calling for the experiment to continue than to believe whatever special interest groups decide it's bad, especially if that decision is based purely on plausible but non-scientific arguments.
P.S. I reread my first post and found the tone more hostile than it should have been. Thanks for ignoring that.
That's remarkably ignorant. In the US, the most glaring unfinished goal is marriage equality. A small fraction of states offer same-sex marriage and a few offer all-but-the-word-marriage civil unions. The rest (about half) offer varying degrees of no recognition whatsoever to some limited recognition. The federal government offers no recognition whatsoever, so for instance gay couples cannot file joint federal tax returns, even if they live in a state which recognizes same sex marriage.
Gay adoption is another patchwork of unfinished legal crap in the US. From Lambda Legal,
About half of all states permit second-parent adoptions by the unmarried partner of an existing legal parent, while in a handful of states courts have ruled these adoptions not permissible under state laws. This leaves parents in many states legally unrecognized or severely disadvantaged in court fights with ex-spouses, ex-partners or other relatives.
I could also discuss workplace discrimination, bullying, and general societal attitudes towards homosexuality. To be fair, that latter point has improved very considerably in recent years, at least in the US.
More generally, my and I think many gay people's ultimate goal is societal apathy towards homosexuality--I want people to think of homosexuality in the same terms as having green eyes. I want activism to be completely unnecessary and for opponents to stop caring. When you strip away the layers of religious doctrine and social tradition, being gay really isn't a big deal. Let us marry and adopt just like every other couple and stop singling us out. If that goal is unreasonable, I would love to know why. (It may be unrealistic, but that's not the same thing.) (The same applies to the other groups in the LGBT... alphabet soup.)
I'm sorry, but do you have any hard data whatsoever? Everything you've said is at best somewhat believable conjecture otherwise. I can do the same thing and reach the opposite conclusion:
"There are inherent problems with traditional selective breeding. Compared to genetic modification, it creates a very different plant internally and has many side effects, not all of them good. To take just one example, over time plants adapt to insects in their environment and create specific natural pesticides for themselves. Breeding together several strains of a certain plant increases the offspring's insect resistance by overproducing each of the parent strains' natural pesticides. It can take many years for subtle developmental problems caused by the consumption of so-called 'supercharged' insecticides to appear in humans. Genetic modification, on the other hand, produces carefully controlled, surgical changes that can be calibrated for safety. Only well-tested non-harmful natural insecticides are added to the genome by genetic modification, making the process much safer than traditional selective breeding."
Honestly, it's ridiculously easy to make this shit up. It's hard to get scientifically valid evidence to back up your positions. I understand the GMO issue is large and contentious, and it's easy to make up good-sounding scientifically invalid arguments, but still, we don't need more people just spouting whatever crap pops into their heads. The same is true for a huge number of today's arguments by the way: autism and vaccines, (anti-)gay marriage, climate change.... And if you ask for evidence, I can provide some :).
If I've misread you and you do have good evidence, I apologize in advance.
Your threshold for what constitutes multitasking seems unnecessarily high. Decreased skill at individual tasks is irrelevant to what qualifies as multitasking for me, so long as it doesn't decrease to zero. I am indeed worse in some ways at thinking about complex math problems while playing the piano, but so what? It often helps me see an approach I was missing because I was focusing too much on the line of reasoning I had been pursuing. Many times I've been playing, gotten new insight into a problem, and then stopped playing to pursue the math completely. In any case, I never said multitasking was efficient or inefficient, just that it exists (the context of my post was someone saying, "No one can multi-task. Only switch between single tasks.").
You seem to arbitrarily group related tasks into meta-tasks and I'm not sure why. I define tasks as things that can be done independently and use different parts of my brain (the second half is unfortunately hard to make explicit). A person can play the piano without evaluating their performance (for instance, by wearing ear plugs) or the reverse (eg. by listening to a recording of themselves). A person playing while evaluating is doing more things at once. The tasks are related, but I don't care. The two actions use different parts of my brain and can be done independently of each other so they're different tasks to me.
You seem to want multitasking to be difficult. Walking and talking at the same time without running into things is indeed multitasking by any definition I can think of that doesn't have arbitrary difficulty or complexity requirements. Your version may more accurately be termed something like "efficient, complex multitasking".
Finally, please don't project yourself on me so much. Our experiences are somewhat different, and I suspect I'm significantly better at "efficient, complex multitasking" (which I'll leave implicitly defined). As I mentioned with juggling while doing other activities, I vary the pattern. That's not "autopilot"; there's a small amount of independent thought required--the muscle movements themselves probably do qualify as being on "autopilot", for what that's worth. As an example, while revising this post, I just found myself doing an odd low amplitude, high speed pattern, which was momentarily surprising since I found out about it from the particularly loud sound the balls made while slapping against my hands. The revising part and the juggling part of my conscious mind had briefly diverged, though both were doing independent, creative things, not just regurgitating past actions by rote.
You're being ridiculous. Everyone except you calls VB6 object-oriented (eg. the Wikipedia article; the Tiobe (Visual) Basic page). "Seriously, you can go away and have a cup of coffee before a decent sized .Net application starts up"--that's just completely untrue, the difference is measured in seconds between comparable programs. "The companies who have prompted Microsoft to do this don't go anywhere near the Tiobe index ... are the silent majority"--I thought MS couldn't be bothered to figure out their customer's needs. They must be a talkative silent majority.
I could go on, but I won't since you're not worth the time. Moron.
Madonna is in decline
That's because of our "Homo NoMo" telethon. Every day I'm surrounded by dedicated young men working their phones, sweating for hours on end under hot stage lights--they're so good with their jobs, so giving. Lady Gaga's concerts are mostly supported by the ticket in the gay welcome basket I mentioned before (the "fruit basket", if you will). I'm sure her popularity will be plummeting any day now too.
...fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net ... the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all ... The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible ... No one cares about .Net applications
You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.
(1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout. .NET class library is very good and is a huge potential "appreciable benefit" to upgrading. .NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times, .NET is worse there). Which wins depends on precisely what you're doing. For math-heavy problems, .NET is often much faster. But honestly, why the hell do you care about the speed (/memory use/whatever you meant by "overhead") of VB6 apps? It's almost always irrelevant in light of user input delays.
(2) VB6 has no class library to speak of--you had to write your own routine or hack together a ListBox to sort a string array. That should be a couple lines of code. Forget hash tables, queues, etc.--you have to implement it all yourself or find somebody else's random crap, which is wildly inefficient. The
(3)
(5) .NET is not even remotely dead, so no "fatal mistake" was made. .NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance. .NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work. Your backend will be mostly to entirely reusable, so you won't have to "rewrite everything".
(6) Lots of people care about
(7) You'll be able to create
(8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.
You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support; Microsoft's chances of getting a significant mobile presence are slim. You came close to the truth behind the continued success of VB6: people don't want to learn new systems and some people are stuck maintaining old ones that are too difficult to convert. Most of your points are garbage though.