People don't know the cause of school shootings, so they're trying to chip away at the methods used to achieve them. Banning guns, video games, heavy metal, etc. all fit into this in that people perceive these as being contributing factors to why people shoot up schools.
What's much more troubling than the fact that once in a while someone decides to shoot up a school is the fact that such a rare event seems to deserve much more attention than the fact that people murder other people every day because they're in a different tribe or have something the murderer wants. Is it because we can all relate to the movations of violent gangsters and thieves but not to those of lone gunmen in mass shootings?
How many laws did Lanza break before even firing a shot in Sandyhook?
he murdered his mother, stole her guns, used guns in the commission of a crime, premeditated the murder, had guns on school property, and broke into school property, yet he was not apprehended for any of those crimes.
All of that is true, but more importantly, the lone gunman on a rampage scenario is extremely rare. As terrible as the deaths at each event like Sandy Hook are, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the ways most people die violently. The perpetrator of those murders even made sure he couldn't do the same again. Preventing all future events which bear some resemblance to that one is not possible and the effort would be better spent on combating gang violence, unnecessary wars and car accidents.
A while back I was looking at an advertisement for a medication used to treat people with a bladder problem. In the fine print it said that in clinical trials, 79% of the people who took this medication reported an improvement in their bladder problem, compared to 49% who reported an improvement after taking a placebo. Half the people who took a placebo claimed they got better.
These must be the same people who believe that vinyl LPs " have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack"
Indeed, the placebo effect is well documented in scientific studies. What's really crazy is that in health and music experience, sometimes perception is reality. Maybe we should just let the "audiophiles" remain blissfully ignorant while we spend much less money listening to CDs and FLACs.
Are generally found to be distortion and a roll off of high frequencies when one bothers to take apart the actual music reproduction.
Some people have become accustomed to these artifacts and so prefer them.
The only real antidote is to go to live music performances to hear what they really sound like.
I'd recommend that for people used to modern pop recordings too. I think many would be shocked to hear what they are missing in the horribly compressed and otherwise doctored up recordings that are sold today.
By definition, anything that differs between the original sound recording and the reproduction is distortion of some kind. As you say, some people consider certain kinds of distortion desirable. What the "audiophiles" that prefer vinyl don't seem to understand is that the distortion they desire doesn't have to come from the playback device any more. It would work just as well to run everything through a turntable during mastering and digitize the result for a high quality, dynamic medium like CD. Then, they could get the same "warm" distortion every time they play the recording rather than having it degrade over time.
Hey, if you ever have a chance to go to a FreeBSD con of some sort, you will see a lot of Mac hardware. Take a closer look and you see they are not running MacOS, but rather FreeBSD. Might want to roll up the window and get a good look at the world, and not just a snapshot.
Note: no vulgar language was used in this post.
I'm running GNU/Linux on Mac hardware. That does not mean that everything works as it should. In particular, the hybrid graphics and resume from suspend do not. Can you offer any evidence that more hardware in Macs would work correctly with BSD than Linux? Since support for new and unusual hardware is generally behind in BSD compared to Linux, I think that's very unlikely.
You might want to reexamine your acceptance of the myth that OSX is BSD inside. Can you find any examples of Apple contributing drivers for their hardware to any BSD in recent years? Given the huge amount of time and effort it took to get a working GNU/Linux system on a 2011 Mac Book Pro (older hardware is generally better), I would never recommend that someone choose new Mac hardware to run anything other than OSX.
You already have FreeBSD safe hardware. Linux is great, but FreeBSD would be easier for a Mac user. Personally, I would suggest Debian if you want Linux.
WTF does "FreeBSD safe hardware" mean? Are you saying the funky Intel/AMD hybrid video, Broadcom Wifi chip and optical drive in my work-provided Mac Book Pro that didn't initially work with Linux would have worked with FreeBSD? I might consider that possibility if Apple had any kind of history of contributing to projects they don't have to. I agree that either Debian or FreeBSD or any other Free and Open Source OS is a superior choice to OSX if it does what you need.
I think they are saying, that in a couple small tests, many cultures, particularly less wealthy or more family oriented cultures, react differently than Americans, and therefore Americans make incredibly bad case studies.
If you'd actually read TFA, you'd have come across this:
As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
Of course, I have no way of confirming that their experimental procedures were rigorous and I'm skeptical about their conclusions but my analytical Western brain can easily discern that your guess about the conclusions of the researchers is wrong by simply reading TFA.
As far as gun loving rednecks, that's just a small, overly-vocal part of our community. Every community has the small group of overly vocal nut-jobs that makes them look bad. Hell, yours has you, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people talking about databases don't know the difference between the relational model and SQL. They can't understand that limitations of SQL and SQL databases are not necessarily limitations of the relational model. They don't realize that certain features of SQL databases such as ACID have absolutely nothing to do with the relational model. It's very often unclear whether "NoSQL" is a reaction against SQL, the relational model, or features of many SQL databases such as ACID. If designers and users are confused about what they're rejecting, how can they be expected to choose something better?
I can partly understand why so many don't understand the difference between SQL and the relational model because like them, I'm done almost nothing with the relational model without using SQL. Travis Brown seems to think that hierarchical data is incompatible with the relational model. I suspect that his confusion results from the fact that working with hierarchical data via SQL is often cumbersome, though entirely possible. Though having SQL is far better than no relational language, it's a terrible, ugly language that badly needs to be replaced with something better. Why do so many "NoSQL" proponents seem bent on discarding the advantages of the relational data model while trying to come up with a language or API better than SQL?
From the summary: [quote]The bovines can defecate nine to 16 times daily, creating big hygiene problems on dairy and beef farms[/quote]
Farmers are interested in two things above all the rest: costs and production. So my guess is that it's not about hygiene, but about lowering costs. Although mildly interesting from a science point of view, this research is of course mainly to lower costs and then I think to myself: divine bovine, please shit where you stand.
You can't separate hygiene and business concerns. Farmers can't sell milk that makes people sick or tastes like shit. They are very concerned with hygiene.
I love when the headline question is answered right there in the summary.
I'm pretty sure the answer is that it's possible to potty train a cow, but not practical for commercial use, a distinction the headline glosses over. The summary says past techniques "have proven ineffective or impractical for wide use." This implies that some techniques worked, but were not practical. Probably, they just required too much time and effort.
I think this blog post is only the beginning of the conversation. Hopefully, the invitation for discussion of details results in something constructive.
According to the author, Opera should spend their time and money to fix old edge-case bugs in WebKit, but he shouldn't have any obligation to contribute patches himself.
Sorry sir, but that's not how open-source development should work. If you're going to spend time rebuilding your own codebase, evaluating whether a ton of old workarounds are still necessary because of missing "half-line fix[es]", you should consider spending some of that time contributing such simple patches upstream to improve the situation. With IE, that was never an option, but it is with WebKit. In an open-source stack, the only workarounds that should be accepted as the regular course of business are ones that are prohibitively difficult to implement in the dependency, or where the patches have been submitted and rejected.
So, by your reasoning, Opera, Apple and Google should all contribute workarounds for their respective browsers to jQuery as well? Methvin seems to have his own high profile Free and Open Source project to sink his time into so expecting him to contribute fixes to Webkit isn't any more reasonable than expecting Webkit authors to contribute fixes to jQuery. While people from either project contributing directly to the other may happen, it's probably not usually the best use of either side's time.
This is not a case of one guy scratching his own itch but of one very popular software package spending an inordinate amount of development time working around bugs in another. There are actually standards that govern the behaviors at issue. It is possible to determine whether a particular problem indicates a bug in the Javascript code running in the browser or in the browser itself. Hopefully this won't turn into a flame war or some other kind of hostilities, but feedback from Javascript developers to web browser authors and vice-versa can help move both sides toward better standads compliance.
I still want to see three viable rendering engines competing in the browser world - and that's what we currently have.
I know there are a few people who live and die with Opera, but it didn't have enough market share to make any meaningful difference - its switch to WebKit is irrelevant to most of us.
I also have never cared about Opera as a web developer. However, the fact that they will now contribute to one of the three major engines, having a history of caring about web standards may end up being good for everyone.
I hate to say it but web developers need to stop using "frameworks" and "libraries" to do simple things.
There's so many websites that load jQuery or TinyMCE for no good reason other than the developer was lazy.
I code everything by hand, if it doesn't work in some browser, then that browser's implementation is broken. There should be no need to write against jQuery and assume that the underlying browser isn't braindead or futureproof. If you're writing against the standards for HTML5, CSS3 and the DOM, then you're better off writing your own code. If you're just a code monkey who can be replaced at a moments notice, then by all means write against stupid frameworks so that you're easily replaced.
You obviously relish saying the above. However, the fact that many developers misuse jQuery is not a valid argument against jQuery itself any more than the fact that buffer overflows are rampant is argument against C or the fact that so many people write entire business applications in spreadsheets is an argument against the existence of spreadsheets.
Your argument also entirely misses the point, which is that Javascript code, whether in a widely used library or something you wrote just for your site, must frequently accommodate non-standard behavior from one browser or another. If you write a lot of standalone Javascript, you have either done this yourself or your site does not work as expected for many people. The fact that the jQuery developers have put a great deal of work into this problem is a good reason to use it so that you don't spend an inordinate amount of time doing it for every script you write.
If you read TFA (haha!) make sure to scroll down to the comment of Pater Kasting (Chrome dev).
BTW, it was bit hard to find this, partly because it wasn't clear which of the two TFAs you were referring to (it's the first link to Methvin's blog post), so here's the response:
I'm a Chromium developer. It's not clear from your blog post: are the majority of the bugs you're complaining about things that are still broken on the WebKit trunk? Or things that you have to hack around because of the number of out-of-date WebKit-based UAs? If the former, are there bugs on file at bugs.webkit.org?
I ask this because we spend a lot of time fixing bugs in each release, and if there are major problems we're missing, then I'd like to ensure they get triaged and investigated properly. But the complaint you write here isn't really actionable, because it's short on details.
Feel free to ping me directly -- pkasting@google.com -- and I will try to ensure someone takes a look at your issues.
Indeed, this seems like a very worthwhile discussion. Methvin's post does use the example of a long-standing bug in Chromium itself which someone at Opera apparently just submitted a fix for. It's also possible that many of the bugs JQuery must work around have been fixed in Chromium but users of the library are slow to update. It looks like there is great potential for useful discussion that can lead to improvements if two people involved with both sides of the issue are involved.
You could argue C gives you all the rope you need as well.
I keep asking myself "what language should I learn that's accepted everywhere, doesn't have to be compiled for a particular processor, and has a truly cross platform UI". Javascript is it, with C coming in a heavily qualified second, Java most 3rd except for that fruit company (and I know Java, but hate it passionately).
While you're correct about the universality of Javascript, you seem very confused about the rest. Unless you're using one of the very rare C interpreters or doing something else extremely odd like compiling C to Java bytecode, C doesn't belong in the list at all. Java could be the second in line given your constraints. JREs with GUIs do in fact exist for all PC OSes if not all mobile platforms. The fact that you don't like the Java language doesn't give you the right to ignore reality.
BTW, there are many language implementations for the JVM so you don't have to use Java itself to get the benefits of cross-platform execution and universal GUI. Actually, the same is true of Javascript, since there are now many compilers and translators for a wide variety of languages that allow you to run code in a browser.
The "application" in question is an INI file. The format was popularized by Microsoft, which has long provided a library and API for reading it. Whenever I need to read such a file, I use the Python standard library's implementation. It's such a simple format that it has doubtlessly been implemented dozens if not hundreds of times in many languages. I think it's pretty unlikely that BleachBit relies on any code from Piriform to parse these files.
You seem to have missed the part where the files in question come from winapp2.com, not Piriform. The fact that the same files can be imported by CCleaner or BitBleach in no way gives either Piriform or the authors of BitBleach power over the other. That's like saying that because both LibreOffice and MS Word can open a document downloaded from Joe Blow's web site, LibreOffice is doing something against Microsoft. Not even Microsoft has made such a ludicrous claim.
Artificial scarcity is designed to keep prices up and screw consumers.
Tell me again how this lovely free market reaches optimal solutions and we all pay less? Someone has just patented a way to make us pay more for no other reason that corporate profit seeking.
Patents are not part of a free market. They are government-granted monopolies.
There are certainly many examples of remarkable individual animals taught (by humans) to do things their species is not observed to do in the wild. There are also plenty of humans incapable of normal adult human comprehension and communication (including children obviously). When animals start trying to communicate with humans using symbolic languages they invented, even if they are much simpler than a human language, we can talk about putting them in a similar category of sentience or sapience.
The original question was about Christianity being human-centric, which it certainly is. This makes sense since it is based on God's communication with humans. I have no doubt that he communicates with all beings of his creation in a way that is appropriate to their intelligence and perception. Just because we don't know how God speaks to dogs or centipedes doesn't mean it can't happen.
Christianity is very species centric. That is, according to Christian beliefs humans are allegedly the center of the universe and a focus of God's concern. With the modern realization that humans and the earth are not at the center of anything how does a Christian handle the obvious species centricity of Christianity.
We don't know of any other sentient species yet. If we meet some, we might find that God had a very different way of revealing himself and interacting with them. Read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra for a Science Fiction take on this idea. Keep in mind that they were written a long time ago, so their portrayals of Mars and Venus, the planets they are supposed to take place on don't match what we know now very well.
It will never happen because the hero worship that is going to sell this movie would die if people knew the real Steve Jobs. You know the guy that stole other peoples ideas, actively suppressed worker wages, humiliated employees and random people he met, screwed over Steve Jobs, refused his own daughter for years, tore apart people's life work, disrespected other companies intellectual property and then started World War P.
At least Jobs didn't discriminate in the screwing over.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I have a problem with a cop's ability to judge the quality of research as "PhD quality."
Yeah, we just need an actual PhD to judge the Connecticut cop's work "n00b quality". Problem solved!
People don't know the cause of school shootings, so they're trying to chip away at the methods used to achieve them. Banning guns, video games, heavy metal, etc. all fit into this in that people perceive these as being contributing factors to why people shoot up schools.
What's much more troubling than the fact that once in a while someone decides to shoot up a school is the fact that such a rare event seems to deserve much more attention than the fact that people murder other people every day because they're in a different tribe or have something the murderer wants. Is it because we can all relate to the movations of violent gangsters and thieves but not to those of lone gunmen in mass shootings?
How many laws did Lanza break before even firing a shot in Sandyhook?
he murdered his mother, stole her guns, used guns in the commission of a crime, premeditated the murder, had guns on school property, and broke into school property, yet he was not apprehended for any of those crimes.
All of that is true, but more importantly, the lone gunman on a rampage scenario is extremely rare. As terrible as the deaths at each event like Sandy Hook are, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the ways most people die violently. The perpetrator of those murders even made sure he couldn't do the same again. Preventing all future events which bear some resemblance to that one is not possible and the effort would be better spent on combating gang violence, unnecessary wars and car accidents.
A while back I was looking at an advertisement for a medication used to treat people with a bladder problem. In the fine print it said that in clinical trials, 79% of the people who took this medication reported an improvement in their bladder problem, compared to 49% who reported an improvement after taking a placebo. Half the people who took a placebo claimed they got better.
These must be the same people who believe that vinyl LPs " have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack"
Indeed, the placebo effect is well documented in scientific studies. What's really crazy is that in health and music experience, sometimes perception is reality. Maybe we should just let the "audiophiles" remain blissfully ignorant while we spend much less money listening to CDs and FLACs.
Are generally found to be distortion and a roll off of high frequencies when one bothers to take apart the actual music reproduction.
Some people have become accustomed to these artifacts and so prefer them.
The only real antidote is to go to live music performances to hear what they really sound like.
I'd recommend that for people used to modern pop recordings too. I think many would be shocked to hear what they are missing in the horribly compressed and otherwise doctored up recordings that are sold today.
By definition, anything that differs between the original sound recording and the reproduction is distortion of some kind. As you say, some people consider certain kinds of distortion desirable. What the "audiophiles" that prefer vinyl don't seem to understand is that the distortion they desire doesn't have to come from the playback device any more. It would work just as well to run everything through a turntable during mastering and digitize the result for a high quality, dynamic medium like CD. Then, they could get the same "warm" distortion every time they play the recording rather than having it degrade over time.
Hey, if you ever have a chance to go to a FreeBSD con of some sort, you will see a lot of Mac hardware. Take a closer look and you see they are not running MacOS, but rather FreeBSD. Might want to roll up the window and get a good look at the world, and not just a snapshot.
Note: no vulgar language was used in this post.
I'm running GNU/Linux on Mac hardware. That does not mean that everything works as it should. In particular, the hybrid graphics and resume from suspend do not. Can you offer any evidence that more hardware in Macs would work correctly with BSD than Linux? Since support for new and unusual hardware is generally behind in BSD compared to Linux, I think that's very unlikely.
You might want to reexamine your acceptance of the myth that OSX is BSD inside. Can you find any examples of Apple contributing drivers for their hardware to any BSD in recent years? Given the huge amount of time and effort it took to get a working GNU/Linux system on a 2011 Mac Book Pro (older hardware is generally better), I would never recommend that someone choose new Mac hardware to run anything other than OSX.
You already have FreeBSD safe hardware. Linux is great, but FreeBSD would be easier for a Mac user. Personally, I would suggest Debian if you want Linux.
WTF does "FreeBSD safe hardware" mean? Are you saying the funky Intel/AMD hybrid video, Broadcom Wifi chip and optical drive in my work-provided Mac Book Pro that didn't initially work with Linux would have worked with FreeBSD? I might consider that possibility if Apple had any kind of history of contributing to projects they don't have to. I agree that either Debian or FreeBSD or any other Free and Open Source OS is a superior choice to OSX if it does what you need.
I think they are saying, that in a couple small tests, many cultures, particularly less wealthy or more family oriented cultures, react differently than Americans, and therefore Americans make incredibly bad case studies.
If you'd actually read TFA, you'd have come across this:
Of course, I have no way of confirming that their experimental procedures were rigorous and I'm skeptical about their conclusions but my analytical Western brain can easily discern that your guess about the conclusions of the researchers is wrong by simply reading TFA.
As far as gun loving rednecks, that's just a small, overly-vocal part of our community. Every community has the small group of overly vocal nut-jobs that makes them look bad. Hell, yours has you, doesn't it?
Don't forget the holier-than-thou progressives.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people talking about databases don't know the difference between the relational model and SQL. They can't understand that limitations of SQL and SQL databases are not necessarily limitations of the relational model. They don't realize that certain features of SQL databases such as ACID have absolutely nothing to do with the relational model. It's very often unclear whether "NoSQL" is a reaction against SQL, the relational model, or features of many SQL databases such as ACID. If designers and users are confused about what they're rejecting, how can they be expected to choose something better?
I can partly understand why so many don't understand the difference between SQL and the relational model because like them, I'm done almost nothing with the relational model without using SQL. Travis Brown seems to think that hierarchical data is incompatible with the relational model. I suspect that his confusion results from the fact that working with hierarchical data via SQL is often cumbersome, though entirely possible. Though having SQL is far better than no relational language, it's a terrible, ugly language that badly needs to be replaced with something better. Why do so many "NoSQL" proponents seem bent on discarding the advantages of the relational data model while trying to come up with a language or API better than SQL?
From the summary: [quote]The bovines can defecate nine to 16 times daily, creating big hygiene problems on dairy and beef farms[/quote]
Farmers are interested in two things above all the rest: costs and production. So my guess is that it's not about hygiene, but about lowering costs. Although mildly interesting from a science point of view, this research is of course mainly to lower costs and then I think to myself: divine bovine, please shit where you stand.
You can't separate hygiene and business concerns. Farmers can't sell milk that makes people sick or tastes like shit. They are very concerned with hygiene.
I love when the headline question is answered right there in the summary.
I'm pretty sure the answer is that it's possible to potty train a cow, but not practical for commercial use, a distinction the headline glosses over. The summary says past techniques "have proven ineffective or impractical for wide use." This implies that some techniques worked, but were not practical. Probably, they just required too much time and effort.
I think this blog post is only the beginning of the conversation. Hopefully, the invitation for discussion of details results in something constructive.
According to the author, Opera should spend their time and money to fix old edge-case bugs in WebKit, but he shouldn't have any obligation to contribute patches himself.
Sorry sir, but that's not how open-source development should work. If you're going to spend time rebuilding your own codebase, evaluating whether a ton of old workarounds are still necessary because of missing "half-line fix[es]", you should consider spending some of that time contributing such simple patches upstream to improve the situation. With IE, that was never an option, but it is with WebKit. In an open-source stack, the only workarounds that should be accepted as the regular course of business are ones that are prohibitively difficult to implement in the dependency, or where the patches have been submitted and rejected.
So, by your reasoning, Opera, Apple and Google should all contribute workarounds for their respective browsers to jQuery as well? Methvin seems to have his own high profile Free and Open Source project to sink his time into so expecting him to contribute fixes to Webkit isn't any more reasonable than expecting Webkit authors to contribute fixes to jQuery. While people from either project contributing directly to the other may happen, it's probably not usually the best use of either side's time.
This is not a case of one guy scratching his own itch but of one very popular software package spending an inordinate amount of development time working around bugs in another. There are actually standards that govern the behaviors at issue. It is possible to determine whether a particular problem indicates a bug in the Javascript code running in the browser or in the browser itself. Hopefully this won't turn into a flame war or some other kind of hostilities, but feedback from Javascript developers to web browser authors and vice-versa can help move both sides toward better standads compliance.
I still want to see three viable rendering engines competing in the browser world - and that's what we currently have.
I know there are a few people who live and die with Opera, but it didn't have enough market share to make any meaningful difference - its switch to WebKit is irrelevant to most of us.
I also have never cared about Opera as a web developer. However, the fact that they will now contribute to one of the three major engines, having a history of caring about web standards may end up being good for everyone.
I hate to say it but web developers need to stop using "frameworks" and "libraries" to do simple things.
There's so many websites that load jQuery or TinyMCE for no good reason other than the developer was lazy.
I code everything by hand, if it doesn't work in some browser, then that browser's implementation is broken. There should be no need to write against jQuery and assume that the underlying browser isn't braindead or futureproof. If you're writing against the standards for HTML5, CSS3 and the DOM, then you're better off writing your own code. If you're just a code monkey who can be replaced at a moments notice, then by all means write against stupid frameworks so that you're easily replaced.
You obviously relish saying the above. However, the fact that many developers misuse jQuery is not a valid argument against jQuery itself any more than the fact that buffer overflows are rampant is argument against C or the fact that so many people write entire business applications in spreadsheets is an argument against the existence of spreadsheets.
Your argument also entirely misses the point, which is that Javascript code, whether in a widely used library or something you wrote just for your site, must frequently accommodate non-standard behavior from one browser or another. If you write a lot of standalone Javascript, you have either done this yourself or your site does not work as expected for many people. The fact that the jQuery developers have put a great deal of work into this problem is a good reason to use it so that you don't spend an inordinate amount of time doing it for every script you write.
If you read TFA (haha!) make sure to scroll down to the comment of Pater Kasting (Chrome dev).
BTW, it was bit hard to find this, partly because it wasn't clear which of the two TFAs you were referring to (it's the first link to Methvin's blog post), so here's the response:
Indeed, this seems like a very worthwhile discussion. Methvin's post does use the example of a long-standing bug in Chromium itself which someone at Opera apparently just submitted a fix for. It's also possible that many of the bugs JQuery must work around have been fixed in Chromium but users of the library are slow to update. It looks like there is great potential for useful discussion that can lead to improvements if two people involved with both sides of the issue are involved.
a hardware-accelerated console
Why?
Because the current one is butt slow on anything higher than VGA resolution.
You could argue C gives you all the rope you need as well.
I keep asking myself "what language should I learn that's accepted everywhere, doesn't have to be compiled for a particular processor, and has a truly cross platform UI". Javascript is it, with C coming in a heavily qualified second, Java most 3rd except for that fruit company (and I know Java, but hate it passionately).
While you're correct about the universality of Javascript, you seem very confused about the rest. Unless you're using one of the very rare C interpreters or doing something else extremely odd like compiling C to Java bytecode, C doesn't belong in the list at all. Java could be the second in line given your constraints. JREs with GUIs do in fact exist for all PC OSes if not all mobile platforms. The fact that you don't like the Java language doesn't give you the right to ignore reality.
BTW, there are many language implementations for the JVM so you don't have to use Java itself to get the benefits of cross-platform execution and universal GUI. Actually, the same is true of Javascript, since there are now many compilers and translators for a wide variety of languages that allow you to run code in a browser.
The "application" in question is an INI file. The format was popularized by Microsoft, which has long provided a library and API for reading it. Whenever I need to read such a file, I use the Python standard library's implementation. It's such a simple format that it has doubtlessly been implemented dozens if not hundreds of times in many languages. I think it's pretty unlikely that BleachBit relies on any code from Piriform to parse these files.
You seem to have missed the part where the files in question come from winapp2.com, not Piriform. The fact that the same files can be imported by CCleaner or BitBleach in no way gives either Piriform or the authors of BitBleach power over the other. That's like saying that because both LibreOffice and MS Word can open a document downloaded from Joe Blow's web site, LibreOffice is doing something against Microsoft. Not even Microsoft has made such a ludicrous claim.
Artificial scarcity is designed to keep prices up and screw consumers.
Tell me again how this lovely free market reaches optimal solutions and we all pay less? Someone has just patented a way to make us pay more for no other reason that corporate profit seeking.
Patents are not part of a free market. They are government-granted monopolies.
There are certainly many examples of remarkable individual animals taught (by humans) to do things their species is not observed to do in the wild. There are also plenty of humans incapable of normal adult human comprehension and communication (including children obviously). When animals start trying to communicate with humans using symbolic languages they invented, even if they are much simpler than a human language, we can talk about putting them in a similar category of sentience or sapience.
The original question was about Christianity being human-centric, which it certainly is. This makes sense since it is based on God's communication with humans. I have no doubt that he communicates with all beings of his creation in a way that is appropriate to their intelligence and perception. Just because we don't know how God speaks to dogs or centipedes doesn't mean it can't happen.
Christianity is very species centric. That is, according to Christian beliefs humans are allegedly the center of the universe and a focus of God's concern. With the modern realization that humans and the earth are not at the center of anything how does a Christian handle the obvious species centricity of Christianity.
We don't know of any other sentient species yet. If we meet some, we might find that God had a very different way of revealing himself and interacting with them. Read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra for a Science Fiction take on this idea. Keep in mind that they were written a long time ago, so their portrayals of Mars and Venus, the planets they are supposed to take place on don't match what we know now very well.
It will never happen because the hero worship that is going to sell this movie would die if people knew the real Steve Jobs. You know the guy that stole other peoples ideas, actively suppressed worker wages, humiliated employees and random people he met, screwed over Steve Jobs, refused his own daughter for years, tore apart people's life work, disrespected other companies intellectual property and then started World War P.
At least Jobs didn't discriminate in the screwing over.