Politics in a democracy is hanging on the sentiments of the majority. Now realize that this majority would be well over 100 years old when you can reach 500 years. Now imagine how slowly any political change can happen when the average voter is so fully entrenched in his stance that you need a major earthquake to move him.
This oft-quoted sentiment is bullshit.
Six years ago, had you even heard of Gay Marriage as an issue? No? Today it's already happening in at least one state. Do you think this change in voting trends happened entirely because of old people dying off and new ones being born... in just six years? Didn't think so.
Women's Suffrage became an issue and then a reality within just a few years. Similarly the end of slavery. Every major change happened in less than a generation - typically within five to fifteen years. The birth/death cycle is not a major part of it.
Cultural trends do in fact affect the people who are already alive, and human beings are not born with their political beliefs graven in stone.
I sympathize with your plight. But I'd ask you to try to design a system that works for kids with IQ 65 and kids with IQ 131... and the majority of kids with IQ near 100, all on the extremely limited budget that we have. Personalized attention costs a ton of money: I recently heard that the special ed programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serve 7% of the student population, already consume nearly 50% of the district's financial resources.
Trying to expand any system to provide tailored education exactly fitted to every student's needs would require immensely greater resources than voters are willing to provide.
I'm not saying there aren't things we could do - eliminating the testing-driven NCLB initiatives would be a good start - but I don't think this problem is completely fixable until Americans are willing to prioritize education quite a bit higher in the budget.
Um, seriously. Between the plutocratic Republicans and the spineless Democrats who won't stand up to them, Candidate Puppy might get my vote from a reasoned perspective. He can't do further harm!
(Sorry, I'm grumpy because Sen. Feinstein just sent a response to my letter about the FISA "retroactive immunity" bill... explaining why she supports it. You see, it's important because it prevents future presidents from spying on Americans without a warrant. Why the spineless democrats absolutely refuse to take Bush to task for flaunting our laws just completely escapes me.)
Yes, what the USA has now is not nearly as bad as the brutal dictatorships and "communist" totalitarian regimes many billions of others have lived under.
That does not mean it's logically inconsistent to be disappointed with the fact that BushCo is so much worse than better governments we've had in the past.
Ahhh, the moral higher ground. Because if you are intelligent, you must be a caring pacifist, obviously. [/irony]
Classic straw man statement. Didn't you notice that I specifically mentioned awareness that many don't agree with me?
Plus, caring about moral rightness does not make one necessarily a pacifist. I am quite definitely not a pacifist.
If your government is sooo evil, perhaps you should emigrate? Or, dunno, start a revolution? Or perhaps vote for someone else?
And now you're making a really sad reductio ad absurdum argument. Or maybe you're just snarking without a lot of real thought.
There are levels of immoral government shenanigans that would turn me off of working for DARPA, and there are levels of same that would drive me to supporting revolution. They are not the same, and we have reached one, but are still quite far from the other.
I certainly do vote for (and donate to, and campaign for) people who oppose the current administration.
There is a point where I would emigrate and even a point where I would take up arms - we are quite a long ways from that.
Yes, but the perceived moral superiority of one's state has a lot to do with people's willingness to support it. I would most happily have applied my talents to supporting US military technology efforts during WWII or even the cold war, when the US really did appear to be under existential threat.
But in today's world, it looks to many of us more like our government has been picking wars they wanted to have and seeking justification afterwards... even changing the justifications when old ones become obsolute. They use sleazy legal loopholes ("Guantanamo is outside the US, and therefore does not qualify for us legal jurisdiction") to barely meet the letter of the law while grossly violating the spirit of international treaties that specify how moral nations ought to behave. And so I can't feel justified in supporting that effort technologically.
Recent US military antics have leveraged the population's fear of from an attack that killed 3000 people to initiate a war with an unrelated country that has now resulted in the death of nearly a million people... far more, per year, than ever died under the "horrible" dictator previously mismanaging said country.
I know there are people who feel differently than I about these events - but many also feel the same or similarly. I am no pacifist, but I feel like my current government uses kindergarten logic internationally in ways that cost millions of human lives.
That alone is plenty to keep me out of DARPA, and I suspect it is for many others as well.
If there were a real external threat, I'd be supporting my nation's efforts to fight it as would any other good patriot. Right now, the greatest threat is from within.
Please give some examples of Economics failing. Econ 101 is a basic over view of the easiest to understand principles of Economics and generally they hold true as is.
Simple example: Name-brand OTC drugs (like Advil) tremendously outsell generics that have identical effects but cost less. So much for supply and demand.
Another example: Images of attractive people in advertising cause a product to sell more than ugly people or advertising without images. Clearly, people's purchase decision is made on something other than rational analysis of the product's benefits. If people were fully rational, advertising would not work at all beyond making people aware of a new product. But clearly, advertising works, and it does so by emotionally influencing people's purchasing tendencies.
Another example: By any rational analysis, people should save like crazy for retirement wherever there are tax benefits, because they won't be able to earn after they retire. Instead, people buy large TVs and almost nobody saves for retirement.
Another example: if people were rational, nobody would EVER use payday loans that charge 30% interest rates. Yet such businesses are wildly successful and a huge fraction of the population uses them.
How many more do you want? It is well established (scientifically!), that most people's economic decisions, most of the time, are not fully rational. This is why Econ 101 principles rarely model the real world with any significant accuracy.
Entry level Economics will tell you that if there was a better place to be working they would take the better job since people are rational. You know, I actually agree with you that the jobs US companies create overseas are usually good for those economies and for those workers, even if they look bad for us. As shitty as they look they are often better jobs than the other options those people have.
BUT, your claim that the take-home lesson of Economics 101 is that people are rational is ludicrous. People are clearly not rational in their economic decision-making, and this is why so many of the principles of Economics 101 fail in the real world.
I tried learning rails from Agile Web Development with Rails first, and I found that AWDwR has a huge deficiency: it frequently fails to explain the fundamental Ruby concepts and structures that it's using. (For example, I remember typing in the:symbol syntax for several chapters without having any idea what it actually was.).
RailsSpace, OTOH, does a really good job of stopping to explain each new concept, tool, or syntax in a sidebar; as a coder who didn't already know Ruby I found I was able to learn Rails much faster after I switched to RS.
I think RS suffers from a poorly-chosen name: because of the name, folks assume it is only about social networks. In fact it's a good basic tutorial to Rails that just happens to use a social networking site as the working example.
(Full disclosure; I know one of the authors of RailsSpace personally and have done contract work for him in the past.)
What this will do is reduce the amount of dark matter that is necessary to explain the observed gravitational effects.
Dark matter is theorized to exist because galaxies behave gravitationally as if they have more mass than we can account for based on the light we see; dark matter makes up the difference. Since this result demonstrates that there is more light-emitting matter than we previously believed, it explains a slightly larger proportion of the observed gravity. Hence, a slightly smaller amount of dark matter exists than previously believed.
It's not remotely enough of an increase to explain away all of the missing mass. IIRC there is a lot more dark matter than luminous matter, so an increase of 20% in the amount of luminous matter will only make a small difference.
You just solved a problem for me that had been unanswered the several times I'd asked it on forums, gone ignored in numerous IRC sessions, and was apparently unfindable in the documentation.
I have used Joomla on a number of sites, but I find it can be very frustrating to use. There are lots of aspects that either aren't configurable, or are difficult to configure, and the documentation is poor.
One example is the way articles are laid out: the top article in any list is full-width, and then subsequent ones are in two columns. This is the default, and if it can be changed I've been unable to find the tool to change it. So if, for example, you just want articles to stack vertically like every other blog in the world, and stay full-width, it's either impossible or very non-obvious how to change that from the admin interface.
I will grant that 1.5 is a dramatic improvement from earlier 1.x; a number of complaints I had about plugins and extensibility have been fixed, and some of the new dynamic and AJAXy interfaces are very handy and slick.
Code written for Windows 95/NT (back in 1996) still works today on the Windows platform. 12 years later.
See, this is BS. A huge amount of my work in the last two years was compensating for stuff written for Windows 95 or even Windows 98 that doesn't work on XP, much less Vista. Sometimes even when the API technically supports it, on a *practical* level things become useless because too much about the OS or UI has changed.
Old software mysteriously crashes because the video driver won't mesh. Or documents will generate but look fucked up because all the fonts have changed. Or maybe it can't talk to USB and only supports parallel ports. Or contemporary printers won't understand it. Or it can't function in a modern TCP environment. Progress breaks old software and no amount of Microsoft trying to keep around legacy API baggage will ever fix that.
How much stuff written 12 years ago have you actually used in a production environment on modern machines with a modern copy of Windows?
The backwards compatibility is not necessary, anyway, because most people who really need old software can and do run it on old hardware and old OS's, as well. They don't upgrade to new hardware and run old software, because they know from experience their stuff will break despite microsoft's efforts.
It's simply to question why any real work is being done on rendering engines when we seem to long have passed the point of diminishing returns.
Because people keep spending money to buy the new tech. It sells. There's money in it. No other reason is necessary for the companies to want to improve. (There may be other reasons, but that one is sufficient.)
Speaking from personal experience. I was on Modafinil for quite a while for medical reasons (I have sleep apnea). I was even, for a while, enrolled in a drug study for the upcoming "sequel" drug Armodafinil (which is cute pharma-name for R-modafinil, a single-enantiomer formulation of the same compound). I never found its supposed "stimulant" effects to be particularly convincing - I wasn't sure it was having an effect.
But it definitiely did have a side effect on my mood. I found that I became panicky and frantic very easily. I spent a lot of nights upset and worried that I wasn't getting anywhere before I finally realized what was causing it. It definitely did not improve my academic output.
Incidentally, the listed side effects of modafinil do include nervousness (7%) and anxiety (5%) and at lower levels agitation, confusion, and emotional lability (all 1%). All those numbers are significantly above placebo.
Nobody ever thinks they're going to be one of the 1% or 5%, but obviously it happens to some or the numbers wouldn't be there.
has less side effects when compared in side by side studies with caffeine. Actually, I've seen studies that showed the opposite. And combined with the cost, at least one study I recommended argued that caffeine is a better drug for people with excessive daytime sleepiness than modafinil - similar side effect profile, dramatically cheaper.
If people looked at driving as a cooperative effort - try and let everyone drive at the speed they want to - then everyone ends having a lot smoother journey. If everyone only acts in their own interests it all gets a bit more stressful and scary.
I've always thought that traffic is basically one massive game of Prisoner's Delimma. Defecting (swerving lanes, cutting people off) can gain you a bit of time relative to traffic, but only at the cost of slowing overall traffic down. The more people do it, the worse the congestion becomes for everyone.
Yep. I used to be able to (for example) reliably use just the letters "en" to bring up a wikipedia url, which I could then edit to go to the page I wanted, even if it was one I had never visited before. That doesn't work at all anymore since "en" matches thousands of URLs mid-word.
And since the new list has two lines per entry, it's MUCH slower to scan through visually. Highly annoying.
The most common way I used to use the old URL bar is to type just "en" and let it fill out the rest of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/, delete the something, and type in whatever noun it is I'm interested in.
When I'm looking up a new wikipedia page - something I haven't visited before - this is MUCH faster than typing out the whole URL or going to the front of wikipedia, typing a name, and hitting "go to" or search. In fact, I periodically visit the wikipedia page for the letter "A" just so there's a short wiki URL near the top of my hit list. This means a new wikipedia page in a tab is only:
CMD-t for a new tab
"en", down arrow, end, backspace
{type name of subject}.
That's only seven keystrokes plus the name of the page for a new wikipedia page I've never visited before, plus no use of the mouse. It takes about half a second total. I do this far more often than I revisit an old wikipedia page. And even when I want to that, I just type "en" and then arrow down through the list of hits.
The awesomebar totally screws this up, because the letters "en" match thousands of other things in my history since they will now match mid-word. Moreover, since it shows two lines per entry with little bolds and underlines everywhere, it's much slower to scan visually, and much slower to draw on the screen on my 2-year-old powermac G5.
I hate the new "awesombar". It's cluttered and slow and much less useful to me. I wish I could turn it off! I'm actually sticking with FF2 for the time being, despite the horrible, annoying and unresolved FF2 Macintosh Window Snapback bug, just because the awesombar slows down my workflow too much.
You have to deal with the financial and tactical quandaries of supplying private military force to questionable wars in unstable parts of the world, but also cope with employee attrition and manage the moral quandaries and public outrage that comes with being a mercenary organization. The more questionable the conflict, the better the pay!
The only thing that could allow us to use Acid3 features faster is if Microsoft gets IE8 to pass (instead of waiting for IE9) and getting its users to upgrade to IE8 faster than they're upgrading to IE7. Unless they do, it doesn't make a bit of difference how fast Safari and Opera or even Firefox release browsers that pass.
Word to that. Until IE uses it and people upgrade, web designers can't use the features. Given that I wasted 2 hours today on a problem with javascript code that works fine in Firefox, Opera, and Safari but breaks in IE6 and *sometimes* in IE7, this article was basically just depressing for me.
Resellers are free to raise prices; lowering prices would lead to losses and that is not illegal nor prohibited by Apple either.
Yes, Apple does prohibit lowering prices by reseller. Apple publishes an MAP (minimum advertised price) for all of its products, and will revoke the license from any Apple reseller who undercuts the MAP. The MAP is the same price that the Apple store (online or brick and mortar) markets the product.
This is why Apple products are identically priced no matter where you buy them. Within a country, that is; they set different MAPs for different countries.
Religion is a way of passing down millennia of hard-learned lessons in a way that leaves no room for argument.
You're a pretty clear thinker and have a decent grasp of some of the effects of religion, but I think you're incorrect in this statement, which presents this as the raison d'etre of religion... in reality it's a side effect or a use of a pre-existing structure. Religion does not exist for this functions, it was just co-opted to serve that role in some cases. It exists, instead, because of basic genetic and evolved tendencies of human psychology.
I strongly, strongly recommend you look up and read "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. I think you'd get a lot out of it - I'd say I learned more from that book than from any other five or six books I've read in the last decade.
Slashdot Mirror
This oft-quoted sentiment is bullshit.
Six years ago, had you even heard of Gay Marriage as an issue? No? Today it's already happening in at least one state. Do you think this change in voting trends happened entirely because of old people dying off and new ones being born ... in just six years? Didn't think so.
Women's Suffrage became an issue and then a reality within just a few years. Similarly the end of slavery. Every major change happened in less than a generation - typically within five to fifteen years. The birth/death cycle is not a major part of it.
Cultural trends do in fact affect the people who are already alive, and human beings are not born with their political beliefs graven in stone.
I sympathize with your plight. But I'd ask you to try to design a system that works for kids with IQ 65 and kids with IQ 131 ... and the majority of kids with IQ near 100, all on the extremely limited budget that we have. Personalized attention costs a ton of money: I recently heard that the special ed programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serve 7% of the student population, already consume nearly 50% of the district's financial resources.
Trying to expand any system to provide tailored education exactly fitted to every student's needs would require immensely greater resources than voters are willing to provide.
I'm not saying there aren't things we could do - eliminating the testing-driven NCLB initiatives would be a good start - but I don't think this problem is completely fixable until Americans are willing to prioritize education quite a bit higher in the budget.
Um, seriously. Between the plutocratic Republicans and the spineless Democrats who won't stand up to them, Candidate Puppy might get my vote from a reasoned perspective. He can't do further harm!
(Sorry, I'm grumpy because Sen. Feinstein just sent a response to my letter about the FISA "retroactive immunity" bill ... explaining why she supports it. You see, it's important because it prevents future presidents from spying on Americans without a warrant. Why the spineless democrats absolutely refuse to take Bush to task for flaunting our laws just completely escapes me.)
Yes, what the USA has now is not nearly as bad as the brutal dictatorships and "communist" totalitarian regimes many billions of others have lived under.
That does not mean it's logically inconsistent to be disappointed with the fact that BushCo is so much worse than better governments we've had in the past.
Classic straw man statement. Didn't you notice that I specifically mentioned awareness that many don't agree with me?
Plus, caring about moral rightness does not make one necessarily a pacifist. I am quite definitely not a pacifist.
And now you're making a really sad reductio ad absurdum argument. Or maybe you're just snarking without a lot of real thought.
There are levels of immoral government shenanigans that would turn me off of working for DARPA, and there are levels of same that would drive me to supporting revolution. They are not the same, and we have reached one, but are still quite far from the other.
I certainly do vote for (and donate to, and campaign for) people who oppose the current administration.
There is a point where I would emigrate and even a point where I would take up arms - we are quite a long ways from that.
Yes, but the perceived moral superiority of one's state has a lot to do with people's willingness to support it. I would most happily have applied my talents to supporting US military technology efforts during WWII or even the cold war, when the US really did appear to be under existential threat.
But in today's world, it looks to many of us more like our government has been picking wars they wanted to have and seeking justification afterwards
Recent US military antics have leveraged the population's fear of from an attack that killed 3000 people to initiate a war with an unrelated country that has now resulted in the death of nearly a million people
I know there are people who feel differently than I about these events - but many also feel the same or similarly. I am no pacifist, but I feel like my current government uses kindergarten logic internationally in ways that cost millions of human lives.
That alone is plenty to keep me out of DARPA, and I suspect it is for many others as well.
If there were a real external threat, I'd be supporting my nation's efforts to fight it as would any other good patriot. Right now, the greatest threat is from within.
Please give some examples of Economics failing. Econ 101 is a basic over view of the easiest to understand principles of Economics and generally they hold true as is.
Simple example: Name-brand OTC drugs (like Advil) tremendously outsell generics that have identical effects but cost less. So much for supply and demand.
Another example: Images of attractive people in advertising cause a product to sell more than ugly people or advertising without images. Clearly, people's purchase decision is made on something other than rational analysis of the product's benefits. If people were fully rational, advertising would not work at all beyond making people aware of a new product. But clearly, advertising works, and it does so by emotionally influencing people's purchasing tendencies.
Another example: By any rational analysis, people should save like crazy for retirement wherever there are tax benefits, because they won't be able to earn after they retire. Instead, people buy large TVs and almost nobody saves for retirement.
Another example: if people were rational, nobody would EVER use payday loans that charge 30% interest rates. Yet such businesses are wildly successful and a huge fraction of the population uses them.
How many more do you want? It is well established (scientifically!), that most people's economic decisions, most of the time, are not fully rational. This is why Econ 101 principles rarely model the real world with any significant accuracy.
BUT, your claim that the take-home lesson of Economics 101 is that people are rational is ludicrous. People are clearly not rational in their economic decision-making, and this is why so many of the principles of Economics 101 fail in the real world.
But you wanted your name on your post, so you had to log in. IOW, you had to identify yourself
+1 made of win!
I will second RailsSpace.
:symbol syntax for several chapters without having any idea what it actually was.).
I tried learning rails from Agile Web Development with Rails first, and I found that AWDwR has a huge deficiency: it frequently fails to explain the fundamental Ruby concepts and structures that it's using. (For example, I remember typing in the
RailsSpace, OTOH, does a really good job of stopping to explain each new concept, tool, or syntax in a sidebar; as a coder who didn't already know Ruby I found I was able to learn Rails much faster after I switched to RS.
I think RS suffers from a poorly-chosen name: because of the name, folks assume it is only about social networks. In fact it's a good basic tutorial to Rails that just happens to use a social networking site as the working example.
(Full disclosure; I know one of the authors of RailsSpace personally and have done contract work for him in the past.)
What this will do is reduce the amount of dark matter that is necessary to explain the observed gravitational effects.
Dark matter is theorized to exist because galaxies behave gravitationally as if they have more mass than we can account for based on the light we see; dark matter makes up the difference. Since this result demonstrates that there is more light-emitting matter than we previously believed, it explains a slightly larger proportion of the observed gravity. Hence, a slightly smaller amount of dark matter exists than previously believed.
It's not remotely enough of an increase to explain away all of the missing mass. IIRC there is a lot more dark matter than luminous matter, so an increase of 20% in the amount of luminous matter will only make a small difference.
Why on earth would I shoot the messenger?
You just solved a problem for me that had been unanswered the several times I'd asked it on forums, gone ignored in numerous IRC sessions, and was apparently unfindable in the documentation.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I have used Joomla on a number of sites, but I find it can be very frustrating to use. There are lots of aspects that either aren't configurable, or are difficult to configure, and the documentation is poor.
One example is the way articles are laid out: the top article in any list is full-width, and then subsequent ones are in two columns. This is the default, and if it can be changed I've been unable to find the tool to change it. So if, for example, you just want articles to stack vertically like every other blog in the world, and stay full-width, it's either impossible or very non-obvious how to change that from the admin interface.
I will grant that 1.5 is a dramatic improvement from earlier 1.x; a number of complaints I had about plugins and extensibility have been fixed, and some of the new dynamic and AJAXy interfaces are very handy and slick.
See, this is BS. A huge amount of my work in the last two years was compensating for stuff written for Windows 95 or even Windows 98 that doesn't work on XP, much less Vista. Sometimes even when the API technically supports it, on a *practical* level things become useless because too much about the OS or UI has changed.
Old software mysteriously crashes because the video driver won't mesh. Or documents will generate but look fucked up because all the fonts have changed. Or maybe it can't talk to USB and only supports parallel ports. Or contemporary printers won't understand it. Or it can't function in a modern TCP environment. Progress breaks old software and no amount of Microsoft trying to keep around legacy API baggage will ever fix that.
How much stuff written 12 years ago have you actually used in a production environment on modern machines with a modern copy of Windows?
The backwards compatibility is not necessary, anyway, because most people who really need old software can and do run it on old hardware and old OS's, as well. They don't upgrade to new hardware and run old software, because they know from experience their stuff will break despite microsoft's efforts.
Because people keep spending money to buy the new tech. It sells. There's money in it. No other reason is necessary for the companies to want to improve. (There may be other reasons, but that one is sufficient.)
But it definitiely did have a side effect on my mood. I found that I became panicky and frantic very easily. I spent a lot of nights upset and worried that I wasn't getting anywhere before I finally realized what was causing it. It definitely did not improve my academic output.
Incidentally, the listed side effects of modafinil do include nervousness (7%) and anxiety (5%) and at lower levels agitation, confusion, and emotional lability (all 1%). All those numbers are significantly above placebo.
Nobody ever thinks they're going to be one of the 1% or 5%, but obviously it happens to some or the numbers wouldn't be there. has less side effects when compared in side by side studies with caffeine. Actually, I've seen studies that showed the opposite. And combined with the cost, at least one study I recommended argued that caffeine is a better drug for people with excessive daytime sleepiness than modafinil - similar side effect profile, dramatically cheaper.
I've always thought that traffic is basically one massive game of Prisoner's Delimma. Defecting (swerving lanes, cutting people off) can gain you a bit of time relative to traffic, but only at the cost of slowing overall traffic down. The more people do it, the worse the congestion becomes for everyone.
Yep. I used to be able to (for example) reliably use just the letters "en" to bring up a wikipedia url, which I could then edit to go to the page I wanted, even if it was one I had never visited before. That doesn't work at all anymore since "en" matches thousands of URLs mid-word.
And since the new list has two lines per entry, it's MUCH slower to scan through visually. Highly annoying.
When I'm looking up a new wikipedia page - something I haven't visited before - this is MUCH faster than typing out the whole URL or going to the front of wikipedia, typing a name, and hitting "go to" or search. In fact, I periodically visit the wikipedia page for the letter "A" just so there's a short wiki URL near the top of my hit list. This means a new wikipedia page in a tab is only:
That's only seven keystrokes plus the name of the page for a new wikipedia page I've never visited before, plus no use of the mouse. It takes about half a second total. I do this far more often than I revisit an old wikipedia page. And even when I want to that, I just type "en" and then arrow down through the list of hits.
The awesomebar totally screws this up, because the letters "en" match thousands of other things in my history since they will now match mid-word. Moreover, since it shows two lines per entry with little bolds and underlines everywhere, it's much slower to scan visually, and much slower to draw on the screen on my 2-year-old powermac G5.
I hate the new "awesombar". It's cluttered and slow and much less useful to me. I wish I could turn it off! I'm actually sticking with FF2 for the time being, despite the horrible, annoying and unresolved FF2 Macintosh Window Snapback bug, just because the awesombar slows down my workflow too much.
Totally! You'd be in charge of managing the operations and finances of a mercenary outfit, like Executive Outcomes, Inc. or Blackwater.
You have to deal with the financial and tactical quandaries of supplying private military force to questionable wars in unstable parts of the world, but also cope with employee attrition and manage the moral quandaries and public outrage that comes with being a mercenary organization. The more questionable the conflict, the better the pay!
Word to that. Until IE uses it and people upgrade, web designers can't use the features. Given that I wasted 2 hours today on a problem with javascript code that works fine in Firefox, Opera, and Safari but breaks in IE6 and *sometimes* in IE7, this article was basically just depressing for me.
Yes, Apple does prohibit lowering prices by reseller. Apple publishes an MAP (minimum advertised price) for all of its products, and will revoke the license from any Apple reseller who undercuts the MAP. The MAP is the same price that the Apple store (online or brick and mortar) markets the product.
This is why Apple products are identically priced no matter where you buy them. Within a country, that is; they set different MAPs for different countries.
You're a pretty clear thinker and have a decent grasp of some of the effects of religion, but I think you're incorrect in this statement, which presents this as the raison d'etre of religion
I strongly, strongly recommend you look up and read "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. I think you'd get a lot out of it - I'd say I learned more from that book than from any other five or six books I've read in the last decade.
I use Eclipse and NetBeans daily. They are vastly superior to all other IDE's I've used, including Visual Studio and XCode.