Who would you suggest has the best build quality now, then? If you say Apple I will beat you silly with a chassis fan because I want to be able to have children, but anything else I'm genuinely curious to hear.
Battlefield Earth is on my list of worst books I've ever read. A list with maybe 5 others. It's BORING. Like half the book takes place AFTER the entire planet of bad guys is killed off. It reads like an economics textbook.
The SF is bland and unoriginal. The main character did no wrong-a perfect main character is not interesting.
The Illiad and the Odyssey was BORING. Like half the book takes place AFTER the fall of Troy. It reads like a history textbook.
If you think Johnny Goodboy Tyler was perfect you and I must have read a different book. Clever, yes, and well-liked by others, but he had his share of problems and mistakes. I found all the characterizations in the book to be indicative of a strong understanding of human nature and personalities.
Perhaps it is you who are boring, or maybe you were expecting a different story when you read the book, and you were disappointed that every single page didn't involve a space opera style alien shootout. Maybe you should stick with picture books. Like the kind with six cardboard pages that don't give you a chance to get bored.
Everyone's opinion of L. Ron Hubbard today is strongly colored by the fact that he went insane at some point and took a joke way too far (by inventing Scientology as part of a casual bet with Heinlein over who could invent the best religion). I hate Scientology and all other religious cults (i.e. "religions") as much as the next rational person, but unfortunately it makes people forget the fact that LRH was actually a very good writer back in the day, including science fiction. He was contemporaries and friends with other sci-fi greats like Heinlein. People judge him now based on the craziness of the Xenu story, but I believe he specifically made the basis of Scientology as totally nonsensical as possible to demonstrate how easy it is to get people to believe in totally nonsensical made-up crap. He was making a point, originally, but then ran off the tracks with it because so many people fell for it that he convinced himself it was real (or at least worth taking advantage of to bring himself money and power).
All that aside, and this has been mentioned before a couple of times in other sci-fi discussions, the man was fully capable of writing excellent stories. I was fortunate to read _Battlefield Earth_ long before I had ever heard of Scientology, and even though I've devoured Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, Dick, Zelazny, and many other great collections of sci-fi before and since, to this day decades later _Battlefield Earth_ remains one of my favorite sci-fi novels. There's just something about it. It's incredibly well thought out logistically and filled with fascinating concepts that I've never quite seen replicated in any other sci-fi I've ever read or seen since then. There's a sort of plans-within-plans scheming aspect that strongly reminds me of _Dune_ at times. It's also very long, much longer than your typical sci-fi novel, so it's got the space to tell a very detailed and satisfying saga-type story with lots of different well-written characters. There are many concepts and scenes from the book that just pop back into my head now and then because they were just so unique and interesting. Oh, and it's just plain fun. It's a grand adventure. (One of my favorite parts was the little gray lawyer guy with the upset stomach at the end. Hilarious.)
The movie of course is a horrible joke. I was actually kind of surprised that someone with that much money to play with and who supposedly worships LRH as part of his religion would thoroughly massacre such a great book. The movie ended up containing about 1% of what made the book so good. So don't let that stop you from reading the book. If someone really did justice to a movie adaptation it could easily be one of the best blockbuster trilogies ever made.
So anyway, if you've got the balls go get yourself a copy of _Battlefield Earth_ and read it. Then when people ask why you're reading crap by "that Scientology guy" you can set them straight. My vote is definitely for L. Ron Hubbard being one of the most underappreciated sci-fi writers today.
No offense but maybe your brain just fails to multitask.
No offense, but maybe you're a narcissistic, egotistical ignoramus who thinks he's some kind of ubermensch because he can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.
Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone. You use case might sometimes be just what the developer was thinking, others you will lose. On the 'other' platforms you just live with it, we have options. On my laptop the F7 key is silkscreened with display/panel in blue, meaning Fn+F7 is the approved way and what would work on the 'other' OS. So to make it easy to remember I bound CTRL-F7 to a script.
It examines the state of the dock and doesn't try to 'do the right thing' for anyone and everyone, it does exactly what [I] want for either state. With only a little more work (when I get a spare round tuit) I'll extend it to look at the VGA port and deal with the presence of a projector automagically. Yes I means I have to hit a hot key when the automatics do the wrong thing (almost every time) but it means I always get what I want and it beats filing bug reports that get closed WONTFIX when the distro goes out of support and just bitching about it being broken.
Seriously, WTF are you talking about? What is there to "live with" on other platforms? You connect an external display, it gets auto-detected, you choose the settings _you_ want to apply to that display, and you're done. Those settings get remembered and applied whenever you connect that display. In my experience this works fine on both Windows (at least Windows 7) and OS X. I fail to see how you can consider it a "strength" that the most modern Linux desktop environment can't even handle remembering your external display settings across reboots. That's nuts.
I gave up on being a full time desktop Linux user about a decade ago because of BS like this that I was constantly having to fight with. I had this funny idea that I could come back in five or ten years once Linux "matured" and simple things like this were worked out and standardized, and I would then have access to a true desktop nirvana experience. Ten years later I am sorely disappointed at the crap desktop Linux users are still putting up with, and amazed at the way major flaws are rationalized into strengths. Still writing and exchanging bash scripts to make your desktop work the way you want? Are you kidding me? Nothing seems to have actually advanced in the desktop Linux world in TEN YEARS, besides some surface eye candy. That's just sad. I was hoping for so much more from desktop Linux.
Oh well. At least Android is successful and Linux is still doing well on the server side of things.
Likelihood is of course a critical factor. Because the negatives - accidental shootings, children getting ahold of the guns, people using the gun when drunk or angry when if it wasn't so available at that instant they wouldn't have, mistaken identity, etc - are very real, so the likelyhood of that has to be weighed against any potential benefit.
I think you'll find that the likelihoods of such things are not nearly as high as you perceive them to be. And how about we attack the cultural problems that cause these issues, rather than the firearm for making it slightly easier for stupidity to have a bad outcome.
And yes, having 400 amateurs in a movie theater shooting in the dark, fog and chaos trying to hit some guy on the other side of the theater sounds a *lot* worse than the one guy shooting.
There's that lovely hyperbole again. Four HUNDRED armed people who have *no* experience with the firearm they are carrying ("amateurs"), all trying to shoot at someone "on the other side of the theater"? Wow. Now that *would* certainly be scary. Except there is no reality where such a bizarrely extreme situation would ever occur. In reality, in that crowded theater containing a couple hundred people or more, there might be something like 10 people who have a concealed carry permit and bothered to bring their firearm into the theater. Maybe 2 or 3 would be close enough to the shooter to feel like they could safely open fire and have a chance of hitting the guy. But what if it were only one? It would only take one bullet from that one person near the shooter hitting a critical spot to put that shooter down or at the very least slow him down enough to allow one or more people to escape who might not otherwise have escaped. Stopping the shooter could save a dozen lives, while a stray bullet is likely to only kill or injure one or two people, if it hits anyone at all.
The alternative, the automatic bloodbath of hundreds of people shooting at each other, where ANY additional firearm in the room will *unequivocally* make things *infinitely* worse, is a paranoid fantasy that has NO connection with reality whatsoever. It is utter nonsense. Are YOU crazy and irresponsible enough to start shooting wildly across a crowded theater in the dark if somebody hands you a gun? No? Then why on Earth would you assume that literally EVERYONE ELSE in the proximity of a firearm will suddenly turn into a total nut job? There is no evidence in the real world to back such a hyperbolic conclusion.
(You should sit in a quiet room and think about this very hard. The answer to why you hold this delusion is within you. The trick is seeing that it is a delusion.)
As much as it would be great to be able to prevent horrible events like this, it is important to remember that at some point we have to accept that a certain amount of evil has to be tolerated if we want to live in a free society. A locked down police state would likely not be a state worth living in.
Regardless, I offer my condoleances to the families affected by this horrible attack.
The problem is that even a locked down police state cannot prevent a crazy person from killing people. Unless you go to the absolute extreme of putting every individual in the country in a separate metal box and feeding them through a tube, there is absolutely no way to stop this sort of thing. It just might not be a gun, but there will always be hundreds of ways to kill people en masse if one gets the inclination to do so. Humans are *very* creative, and we live in societies that are just chock full of potentially dangerous objects and chemicals.
The only difference would be that we wouldn't have any freedoms anymore. Police states have never been nor will they ever be about keeping people "safe".
Your'e absolutely right. The entire audience should have been armed so that instead of one nutjob shooting there would also be tens or hundreds of people shooting wildly in all directions as they hear gunshots and see someone near them with a gun.
And all the bloodshed would have been avoided.
Or maybe everyone in the audience who feels responsible enough to obtain a concealed carry permit and purchase and carry a firearm might, oh, I don't know, NOT shoot wildly in all directions but actually wait until they could SEE the guy who's walking around actively SHOOTING people, and THEN they might aim carefully and shoot directly at the shooter, thus having AT LEAST a 50/50 chance of actually STOPPING the shooter. Which is a hell of a lot better than just sitting there and waiting until he kills everyone in the room.
Honestly, EVERY SINGLE FUCKING COMMENT from people like you (people opposed to concealed carry) goes to the absolute extreme of assuming--no, DECLARING WITH CERTAINTY that even a SINGLE other armed person is going to turn a... bloodbath... into a... multiple bloodbath?
I really don't f**king understand you people. It's already a fucking bloodbath! People who go to the trouble of carrying legal firearms for self defense DO NOT have the tendency of just randomly and blindly shooting in all directions! I don't know where you get this idea!
No. They don't. Seriously. Only crazy people shoot wildly in all directions at things they can't see. Because that would be f**king insane.
Show me ONE account in the real world of someone wielding a firearm in self defense (outside of a Hollywood movie) where they actually just started randomly firing in the dark in a crowded room. One!
Another incident I tend to bring up when this argument comes into play: During the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, there was a former US Marine who had been in combat in Iraq nearby with a gun in his pocket. He never even drew his weapon - he got behind cover, approached as closely as he could, waited until the shooter stopped to reload, and was part of the group that tackled him.
The idea that a more armed populace will prevent these kinds of massacres is just plain incorrect. It may serve other purposes, but it doesn't prevent a nutjob from attacking a crowd and killing a bunch of people.
Maybe he realized that he couldn't be accurate enough in that situation at that distance with his pistol to avoid possibly hitting bystanders. Sounds like he did the right thing under the circumstances.
That doesn't mean there aren't many other shooting situations where it's much easier to be able to shoot back and stop the attack. On the other hand, if the shooter is ALWAYS the ONLY one present who is armed, the result is always bad. At least if others are armed there is a chance THAT WOULD NOT OTHERWISE EXIST. You decry the idea of an armed populace yet you provide no alternative that would be better in any way.
One of the worst shooting incidents in recent times came on an army base.
Never been in the military, have you? Unless you're A) a military police officer on duty or B) about to go directly to the shooting range under supervision or C) about to actually go into battle (unlikely within the US), you will find yourself in SERIOUS, deep doo-doo if you are found to have any live rounds in your possession. You MIGHT have a firearm with you for training purposes, but those are often kept locked up as well and only issued from the armory when necessary. But without the ammunition they are only useful as clubs. So... what was your point again?
And I see to recall that a certain politician in Arizona was surrounded by gun-carrying people, for all the good it did her and the other victims around her.
You are absolutely right. What were those people thinking? They should have told her bodyguards to stay home that day. That way, everything would have turned out much better.
Wait... I don't... I'm so confused. Did you even *have* a point?
Just like and armed churchgoer stopped this attack
It wasn't an "armed churchgoer" as you misleadingly state. It was an off-duty police officer, trained in the use of lethal force.
When you start with untrained use of lethal force you get George Zimmerman shooting at Trayvon Martin.
Uh...
Was he... armed?
Was he... at, or going to, a church?
Sounds like an armed churchgoer to me.
Fortunately a lot of the people who are carrying concealed personal defense firearms are actually off-duty or retired law enforcement or military. It is not the case that ALL armed citizens are clueless amateurs. Even the ones who aren't cops typically spend a significant amount of time practicing how to use their firearm effectively and safely, because most people that choose to carry firearms really do understand that having a firearm is a heavy responsibility.
Oh, and I'm about 99.999% sure that Trayvon Martin would still be alive if he hadn't seen fit to get into a brawl in the middle of the night with someone who happened to be armed. I'm also absolutely certain there are thousands of off-duty or retired cops who might have also ended up shooting Mr. Martin had they been in the same circumstances. Cops are not magically immune to making mistakes in heated circumstances. It was a very unfortunate incident, but it does not serve to prove in any way that citizens who don't happen to be members of law enforcement shouldn't be allowed to carry firearms. Doesn't matter how much training is involved, when things go down sometimes people get shot even when it may not have been absolutely necessary by the definition of someone after the fact who wasn't there when it happened.
Third, the last thing we want in a shooting situation is six other people drawing guns and firing. That has a better chance of just adding to the body count rather than stopping the shooting.
This kind of statement is quite common from people who oppose firearms carry, but I have yet to see any sort of evidence why it would be true. Why exactly does it have a "better" chance of making the situation worse? The situation can hardly GET any worse! Several people shooting back at a gunman usually results in the gunman either stopping what he's doing, running away, or dying. I would think any of those outcomes would be preferable to everyone just sitting there continuing to get shot at by the gunman while waiting for the police to show up, even if someone does get hit by friendly fire. Maybe I'm crazy.
If the gunman could see through smoke and a gas mask well enough to be shooting people, then I would think those same people should be able to effectively shoot back without significantly endangering the rest of the people in the room. Again, maybe I'm crazy.
Would you rather A) be unarmed, or B) have a concealed pistol.
In short, would I want to spend every waking moment surrounded by people who are armed to the teeth for the highly unlikely offchance that I happen to be in a situation like this one at some point, and then hope that amateurs take him down without hitting even more innocent people in the smoke, darkness, and chaos?
I'll answer that with an unhesitating "no".
I'm not totally anti-self-defense-tools. For example, I think Iceland's anti-pepper-spray law goes too far, in that it's a pretty lousy weapon for committing crime with even compared with commonly available tools like a kitchen knife, and is pretty obviously only for self-defense, with non-lethal, non-permanent results. But do I want to live in a paranoia-society surrounded by heavily armed people at all times? No thank you!
I love how people who are opposed to firearms carry always seem to use wildly hyperbolic phrases like "armed to the teeth" and "paranoia-society surrounded by heavily armed people". How exactly does a personal self-defense handgun in a hidden pocket qualify as being "heavily armed"? Oh, and I always love this one: "Guns blazing," used to describe how apparently ANY private citizen will defend themselves with a firearm. As if any person who carries a self-defense firearm will ALWAYS whip out a full-auto MAC-10 with a 30-round clip and spray the room indiscriminately, no doubt killing as many innocent bystanders as possible. The evidence for this kind of thing occurring in the real world is of course non-existent. It doesn't even happen in Hollywood movies that way!
You fail to realize of course that most of the paranoia is your own. Let's see, you're stuck in a theater with someone who is ACTUALLY "heavily armed" with "guns blazing" trying to kill you, yet you are far more worried about someone with a defensive firearm ACCIDENTALLY shooting you while they're trying to stop the guy who is doing his best to kill everyone in the room ON PURPOSE. I don't think I will ever be able to understand this upside-down way of looking at things, as if you're actually in MORE danger from the people who might try to protect you. This is such a bizarre twisting of priorities and reality that I just can't fathom how it makes sense to anyone. It seems you'd rather be a [highly probably] victim of a violent attacker than a [possible but improbable] victim of accidental friendly-fire.
[What is this, I don't even... *bewildered face*]
Oh, and I also love how I always see people talk about how "likely" an event is to happen, rather than talking about how bad the consequences are. In most circumstances it's not "likely" that you'll be stung by a bee. But I'll bet if you were highly allergic to bee stings you'd make damn sure you carry your epi-pen with you at all times, and you'd train all your coworkers and friends on how to use it so that--in the unlikely event you do get stung--you won't, you know... DIE FROM IT.
The consequences of being in a theater when a raving lunatic breaks in and starts shooting people are possibly equally grave, and I guarantee there are only a couple ways of avoiding those consequences, the main one of which is to either be armed or for at least one other person in the same room with you to be armed. No, not "heavily armed" or "paranoid", just "armed". No hyperbole necessary. And people who carry self-defense firearms are also quite likely to not be "amateurs". Many spend a lot of time learning to use their firearm effectively and safely. Many are also retired or off-duty police or military. Shocking, I know. In other words, there is a good chance that ANY person near you who is armed will react quickly and shoot accurately, and perhaps save your life in the process.
If something is highly likely to kill you, I would think you'd want to take reasonable precautions to avoid it or survive it. But I guess I just live in a different reality. Maybe mine's the one
I tend to want to be able to type while I watch a video.
I don't want to click to raise to a window, it is pointless to do so, sometimes I want to toss back and forth between two very quickly.
Here is what I don't understand. If you're already typing, and you want to change focus between windows quickly, why aren't you using the keyboard? Whether you have to click or not, the mouse can't possibly be faster than the keyboard. I think a lot of people have never learned about the Command-Backtick keyboard shortcut in OS X, that cycles between windows/documents within a single application. Between Command-Tab and Command-Backtick I very rarely need to touch the mouse to do something as trivial as switching focus. It seems strange to me that so many Linux users, who should be more keyboard oriented, are so enamored of this focus-follows-mouse thing that it keeps them from using OS X. Not to mention the fact that FFM can't possibly be that useful unless every window you want to deal with is simultaneously visible on your screen, which seems an odd way to work. Most of my apps are maximized most of the time, so the mouse would be useless for switching focus.
The same goes for those who complain about not having a middle-click paste in OS X. I don't understand how pasting with the mouse could be faster than using the universal (in OS X) Command-X/C/V keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy and paste. I can select a URL with the mouse and then copy, tab or backtick, open a new browser tab, paste and hit return faster than you can say "Jehosephat!" Probably took me all of a couple of hours a decade ago for these keyboard shortcuts to become second nature.
My failed attempts to get the same convenience of consistent keyboard shortcuts in Linux that I found first in BeOS and then in OS X is one of the reasons I finally gave up on the Linux desktop. Trying to get KDE, GNOME, Tk, and other application frameworks to cooperate and use the same universal set of keyboard shortcuts was an exercise in futility. And of course because Linux is so strongly influenced by copying Windows, the primary meta key for keyboard shortcuts was always the Control key, which you have to contort your pinky to use, rather than the much more useful Alt or Command key under the thumb, which requires no such contortions. Even in Windows, I used Alt-F,S far more often than I ever used Control-S. And in several years of using Windows, that and Alt-Tab were really the only keyboard shortcuts I found useful. In OS X I have a dozen or more different simple keyboard shortcuts I use constantly every day without even thinking about it. For this reason alone I could never go back to using Windows or Linux. Linux also had a habit of changing established keyboard shortcuts periodically, when they should have been standardized across the board a couple of decades ago. On the Mac, they have been standardized for decades.
As a fairly technical user I tried really hard for years to get both Windows and various flavors of desktop Linux to behave the way I wanted, but the only desktop environment that has ever succeeded in getting the hell out of my way and letting me do what I want is OS X (and BeOS before that). Most of the objections I've seen from Linux users who don't like OS X have really amounted to not understanding how to use the built-in features of OS X efficiently.
Side note: Many of us BeOS "refugees" consider OS X to be the rightful inheritor of the nirvana that was BeOS. Is it perfect? Ha! Not hardly. But it's much, much closer than anything else I've ever encountered so far.
Of course, all of this is just my personal opinion. You are all entitled to your own.
Its odd, how in your gun toting utopia, the USA, which has regular gun massacres, I'm aware of very few - if *any* instances of one of the concealed carry heroes actually stopping a massacres by shooting the nutter.
Probably because they realise that when push comes to shove - they aren't John Wayne (who was a draft dodging coward anyway), but rather pants pissing blowhards hiding as best as they can.
The key word here is "aware". You are "aware" of very few instances of firearms being used in self defense.
As much as I hate the nuttiness of Fox News and the entire conservative field right now, there really is a strong liberal bias in the news media, specifically regarding firearms-related stories. Or maybe it's just that successful self-defense stories where no shots were fired are not sensational enough to sell papers. So you just don't read about these stories, because the are incredibly under-reported. Nevertheless, the last time I saw statistics (from the government) on self-defense with firearms there were nearly a million instances PER YEAR in the US. In the vast majority of instances there are no shots fired. The simple brandishing of a firearm in most cases either causes the miscreant(s) to surrender or to run for their lives. There really aren't that many cases of "gun battles" and there are vanishingly few cases where a firearm was used against the owner. (This last one is a huge FUD talking point always trotted out by anti-gun folks. They seem to believe that a firearm will ALWAYS be somehow taken away from the owner and used against them. This is of course complete nonsense.)
One of the main reasons you don't hear about legal gun owners stopping massacres is because your typical massacre occurs somewhere like a school campus or a workplace where (drumroll please) legal gun owners aren't allowed to carry their firearms! In many such places you have to literally lock your unloaded firearm in the trunk of your car. So nobody should be surprised when legal gun owners can't be helpful in such situations. The likelihood that a legal gun owner will be close by with an accessible firearm is quite low.
Personally, I am of the opinion that if we unified the concealed-carry laws nationwide and stopped making exceptions for so many different areas like college campuses, we would end up with a high enough concentration of legal gun owners in our society that we could actually have a chance of stopping rampaging lunatics from successfully continuing a massacre spree for three hours while the local cops try to find their ass with both hands. By "high enough concentration" I mean something like 5-10%. That means that one out of ten or twenty of the people around you would be able to help SAVE YOUR LIFE from a bad person trying to kill you. The current concentration is far lower, so you have to rely on the local police force in far too many situations, and it always takes time for them to arrive and "assess the situation".
Unfortunately this view is not shared by the anti-gun nuts who seem to believe that the mere presence of a firearm nearby will turn any human into a slobbering, murderous lunatic. Oh, except cops. Cops apparently get some sort of mystical "training" that makes them immune to the terrible psychological effects of carrying a firearm, keeping them from randomly whipping it out and shooting people during a casual argument.
Honestly, anti-gun zealots make about as much logical sense as young earth creationists.
She needs to hear the other point-of-view from someone she trusts and respects. Someone she will listen to and actually take it onboard when they tell her she's being pretty stupid and wasting her own time. Probably someone she works for at one of the sites she maintains. And if you locate someone, be nice. Real nice. I shouldn't need to say it, but distingush between Ms Schwager and her actions and also between her actions and these organisations. Point out how her idiocy is making them look bad.
Wade.
You are sooo wrong, sadly. This woman has gone far beyond being an idiot. Even an idiot at some point would know to just shut up. This is much worse. She is full-blown narcissistic paranoid-delusional loony-bin material. There is no person left on this planet that she will listen to, because EVERYONE who says anything negative to her or about her is automatically assumed to be in cahoots with the EEEVIL Sheriff Garcia. This includes all kinds of random internet people on Twitter, the commenters on the photographer's original article (the initial "lynch mob"), as well as the commenters on the PetaPixel article. According to her all of these random people are part of a conspiracy run by this Sheriff Garcia that she's trying to get rid of. If she ever finds out about Slashdot we'll all be included in the conspiracy too, I'm sure.
Even if you got the Christ-figure in this drama, her immaculately-conceived hero Louis Guthrie, to speak to her about this, it wouldn't make any difference. In fact, the next article on her blog afterward would be something like, "Guthrie Sells Soul to Garcia, Satan Wins!" And it will be yet another extensive, zig-zaggy, rambling diatribe about how the whole world is trying to destroy her (and by extension, how the world is trying to destroy the disabled children she has supposedly dedicated her life to serving).
This woman seriously needs to be put in a padded room and given some intense psychological help before she ends up living on the streets arguing with imaginary people. It may be as simple as a dose of lithium to even out a manic episode. I'd hate to think she's been this crazy her whole life and nobody's noticed, but that's not unheard of either. Witness Michelle Bachmann.
P.S. It's really interesting going through the comments on the PetaPixel article. With her odd writing style it's quite easy to identify the dozen or so comments she made in support of herself WHILE PRETENDING TO BE OTHER PEOPLE. Hint: She's the only one who keeps harping about Jay Lee (the photographer) "taking down her websites" and slipping in references to "Garcia". Oddly she never says a word against her beloved web host GoDaddy, the ones who actually took her sites down.
I guess the most interesting thing about this is that America isn't slowly going insane, as one might think. The religious nuts have just gotten louder and more obnoxious in the last several years, making it seem like they're taking over. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, but at least my perception that people are abandoning reason left and right in this country is incorrect. That's a good sign. I guess...
If the Apple Retina display is already beyond the point a human eye can resolve - what's more resolution going to get you?
Something that nobody seems to have brought up so far is that increased pixel density brings with it increased color saturation and contrast, which is a great thing for movies and photos as well as text display. This is already one of the draws of the new iPad, which is just barely a "retina" display by Apple's definition with a pixel density of just 264 ppi. Further increases in pixel density should continue to improve these color attributes on all devices. It's not the resolution increase per se but the reduction in the thickness of the lines separating the pixels that is a desirable thing.
We should also continue looking forward to the day when pixel density is so high that both text and objects can be scaled up or down to fit the device without introducing horrible pixelation effects. That day will only arrive when pixel densities on all devices are far beyond the range of human perception. Until then we are still stuck with making on-screen objects at a set pixel size in order to keep them from looking awful.
So I say let the device makers have a ball making high density displays. It can only be a good thing.
So you have faith that "eventually" there will be "evidence" to prove that the Bible is 100% correct about everything, but in the meantime no available evidence will ever sway your beliefs. Does that pretty much sum it up? Exactly how long is this "eventually" that you speak of? I have to wonder exactly what sort of evidence you believe will suddenly turn up to support your theories.
You believe yourself to be a rational person, but you are in fact not rational at all. Quite the opposite. Having an unshakeable faith in an idea that has no evidence whatsoever currently supporting it is completely irrational.
But if you haven't figured out by now that you're a fruit loop, you probably never will.
You say that to be funny, but in fact that is another of the many reasons that I always just tell people these days to buy a Mac. Since they only make a few different models of laptops and they don't change the form factor sometimes for years, there is an EXTENSIVE amount of really nice after market accessories available for Macs, including hard cases in various colors, tons of different "skins" and some very nice keyboard protector options. Great for protecting the laptop inside and out, and great for those who like to customize what their computer looks like. A few PC manufacturers sell colored laptops, mainly their cheap consumer models, but guess what? It will always be that color. With the cases and skins widely available for Macs, you can change your laptop's looks as often as you want, and keep the thing looking like new for years even in harsh environments like school/college.
Plus there's the fact that if we can learn to get our damn techie egos out of the way we might realize a couple of things. Firstly, the specs really don't matter much anymore unless you're doing something like hardcore gaming or video processing. Normal people never hit the limits of even low end processors and GPUs these days. Secondly, most non-techie people will actually prefer using Mac OS X, which is yet another reason to get her a Mac.
I'm glad I'm not the only one anymore who just plain got tired of trying to find a decent PC laptop out of the hundreds being marketed. You go to the Apple store and you just decide how big a screen you want, and whether you want an optical drive. That's pretty much it. No matter how anti-Apple you may be, you do have to wonder why there are so many people besides me who are answering this question with "Just buy a Mac."
She supports Newt. Clearly not Tea Party. But hey, it's fun to characterize an entire group of people based on the words and actions of a single tangentially related individual, isn't it? Makes you feel real superior. Awesome.
My bad. Allow me to sincerely apologize for mistaking one group of batshit crazy liberal-media-conspiracies-are-destroying-the-universe loons for a completely different batshit crazy liberal-media-conspiracies-are-destroying-the-universe loons. I can't imagine how I got so confused.
By the way, I was using "tea party" as a figure of speech, as in "crazy like the tea party", which is why it's hyphenated and uncapitalized. Not that it particularly matters. Nuts is nuts, no matter what side they're on or what they call themselves.
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Who would you suggest has the best build quality now, then? If you say Apple I will beat you silly with a chassis fan because I want to be able to have children, but anything else I'm genuinely curious to hear.
Nobody you'd want to hear about, apparently.
I think you meant: "Ermahgerd, errvelerrshun!"
I remember that Frank Herbert took part in that bet too, hence Dune having the religious theme. I forget which work Heinlein wrote as part of the bet.
Stranger in a Strange Land, of course. With Mike the Martian as Christ figure.
Battlefield Earth is on my list of worst books I've ever read. A list with maybe 5 others. It's BORING. Like half the book takes place AFTER the entire planet of bad guys is killed off. It reads like an economics textbook.
The SF is bland and unoriginal. The main character did no wrong-a perfect main character is not interesting.
The Illiad and the Odyssey was BORING. Like half the book takes place AFTER the fall of Troy. It reads like a history textbook.
If you think Johnny Goodboy Tyler was perfect you and I must have read a different book. Clever, yes, and well-liked by others, but he had his share of problems and mistakes. I found all the characterizations in the book to be indicative of a strong understanding of human nature and personalities.
Perhaps it is you who are boring, or maybe you were expecting a different story when you read the book, and you were disappointed that every single page didn't involve a space opera style alien shootout. Maybe you should stick with picture books. Like the kind with six cardboard pages that don't give you a chance to get bored.
Awww, snap! Oh, no you didn't!
Oh, yes. Yes I did.
Keep modding parent up, please.
Everyone's opinion of L. Ron Hubbard today is strongly colored by the fact that he went insane at some point and took a joke way too far (by inventing Scientology as part of a casual bet with Heinlein over who could invent the best religion). I hate Scientology and all other religious cults (i.e. "religions") as much as the next rational person, but unfortunately it makes people forget the fact that LRH was actually a very good writer back in the day, including science fiction. He was contemporaries and friends with other sci-fi greats like Heinlein. People judge him now based on the craziness of the Xenu story, but I believe he specifically made the basis of Scientology as totally nonsensical as possible to demonstrate how easy it is to get people to believe in totally nonsensical made-up crap. He was making a point, originally, but then ran off the tracks with it because so many people fell for it that he convinced himself it was real (or at least worth taking advantage of to bring himself money and power).
All that aside, and this has been mentioned before a couple of times in other sci-fi discussions, the man was fully capable of writing excellent stories. I was fortunate to read _Battlefield Earth_ long before I had ever heard of Scientology, and even though I've devoured Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, Dick, Zelazny, and many other great collections of sci-fi before and since, to this day decades later _Battlefield Earth_ remains one of my favorite sci-fi novels. There's just something about it. It's incredibly well thought out logistically and filled with fascinating concepts that I've never quite seen replicated in any other sci-fi I've ever read or seen since then. There's a sort of plans-within-plans scheming aspect that strongly reminds me of _Dune_ at times. It's also very long, much longer than your typical sci-fi novel, so it's got the space to tell a very detailed and satisfying saga-type story with lots of different well-written characters. There are many concepts and scenes from the book that just pop back into my head now and then because they were just so unique and interesting. Oh, and it's just plain fun. It's a grand adventure. (One of my favorite parts was the little gray lawyer guy with the upset stomach at the end. Hilarious.)
The movie of course is a horrible joke. I was actually kind of surprised that someone with that much money to play with and who supposedly worships LRH as part of his religion would thoroughly massacre such a great book. The movie ended up containing about 1% of what made the book so good. So don't let that stop you from reading the book. If someone really did justice to a movie adaptation it could easily be one of the best blockbuster trilogies ever made.
So anyway, if you've got the balls go get yourself a copy of _Battlefield Earth_ and read it. Then when people ask why you're reading crap by "that Scientology guy" you can set them straight. My vote is definitely for L. Ron Hubbard being one of the most underappreciated sci-fi writers today.
No offense but maybe your brain just fails to multitask.
No offense, but maybe you're a narcissistic, egotistical ignoramus who thinks he's some kind of ubermensch because he can walk and chew gum at the same time.
No offense.
Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.
Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone. You use case might sometimes be just what the developer was thinking, others you will lose. On the 'other' platforms you just live with it, we have options. On my laptop the F7 key is silkscreened with display/panel in blue, meaning Fn+F7 is the approved way and what would work on the 'other' OS. So to make it easy to remember I bound CTRL-F7 to a script.
It examines the state of the dock and doesn't try to 'do the right thing' for anyone and everyone, it does exactly what [I] want for either state. With only a little more work (when I get a spare round tuit) I'll extend it to look at the VGA port and deal with the presence of a projector automagically. Yes I means I have to hit a hot key when the automatics do the wrong thing (almost every time) but it means I always get what I want and it beats filing bug reports that get closed WONTFIX when the distro goes out of support and just bitching about it being broken.
Seriously, WTF are you talking about? What is there to "live with" on other platforms? You connect an external display, it gets auto-detected, you choose the settings _you_ want to apply to that display, and you're done. Those settings get remembered and applied whenever you connect that display. In my experience this works fine on both Windows (at least Windows 7) and OS X. I fail to see how you can consider it a "strength" that the most modern Linux desktop environment can't even handle remembering your external display settings across reboots. That's nuts.
I gave up on being a full time desktop Linux user about a decade ago because of BS like this that I was constantly having to fight with. I had this funny idea that I could come back in five or ten years once Linux "matured" and simple things like this were worked out and standardized, and I would then have access to a true desktop nirvana experience. Ten years later I am sorely disappointed at the crap desktop Linux users are still putting up with, and amazed at the way major flaws are rationalized into strengths. Still writing and exchanging bash scripts to make your desktop work the way you want? Are you kidding me? Nothing seems to have actually advanced in the desktop Linux world in TEN YEARS, besides some surface eye candy. That's just sad. I was hoping for so much more from desktop Linux.
Oh well. At least Android is successful and Linux is still doing well on the server side of things.
What's wrong, Amy? Did you swallow your phone again?
Likelihood is of course a critical factor. Because the negatives - accidental shootings, children getting ahold of the guns, people using the gun when drunk or angry when if it wasn't so available at that instant they wouldn't have, mistaken identity, etc - are very real, so the likelyhood of that has to be weighed against any potential benefit.
I think you'll find that the likelihoods of such things are not nearly as high as you perceive them to be. And how about we attack the cultural problems that cause these issues, rather than the firearm for making it slightly easier for stupidity to have a bad outcome.
And yes, having 400 amateurs in a movie theater shooting in the dark, fog and chaos trying to hit some guy on the other side of the theater sounds a *lot* worse than the one guy shooting.
There's that lovely hyperbole again. Four HUNDRED armed people who have *no* experience with the firearm they are carrying ("amateurs"), all trying to shoot at someone "on the other side of the theater"? Wow. Now that *would* certainly be scary. Except there is no reality where such a bizarrely extreme situation would ever occur. In reality, in that crowded theater containing a couple hundred people or more, there might be something like 10 people who have a concealed carry permit and bothered to bring their firearm into the theater. Maybe 2 or 3 would be close enough to the shooter to feel like they could safely open fire and have a chance of hitting the guy. But what if it were only one? It would only take one bullet from that one person near the shooter hitting a critical spot to put that shooter down or at the very least slow him down enough to allow one or more people to escape who might not otherwise have escaped. Stopping the shooter could save a dozen lives, while a stray bullet is likely to only kill or injure one or two people, if it hits anyone at all.
The alternative, the automatic bloodbath of hundreds of people shooting at each other, where ANY additional firearm in the room will *unequivocally* make things *infinitely* worse, is a paranoid fantasy that has NO connection with reality whatsoever. It is utter nonsense. Are YOU crazy and irresponsible enough to start shooting wildly across a crowded theater in the dark if somebody hands you a gun? No? Then why on Earth would you assume that literally EVERYONE ELSE in the proximity of a firearm will suddenly turn into a total nut job? There is no evidence in the real world to back such a hyperbolic conclusion.
(You should sit in a quiet room and think about this very hard. The answer to why you hold this delusion is within you. The trick is seeing that it is a delusion.)
As much as it would be great to be able to prevent horrible events like this, it is important to remember that at some point we have to accept that a certain amount of evil has to be tolerated if we want to live in a free society. A locked down police state would likely not be a state worth living in.
Regardless, I offer my condoleances to the families affected by this horrible attack.
The problem is that even a locked down police state cannot prevent a crazy person from killing people. Unless you go to the absolute extreme of putting every individual in the country in a separate metal box and feeding them through a tube, there is absolutely no way to stop this sort of thing. It just might not be a gun, but there will always be hundreds of ways to kill people en masse if one gets the inclination to do so. Humans are *very* creative, and we live in societies that are just chock full of potentially dangerous objects and chemicals.
The only difference would be that we wouldn't have any freedoms anymore. Police states have never been nor will they ever be about keeping people "safe".
Your'e absolutely right. The entire audience should have been armed so that instead of one nutjob shooting there would also be tens or hundreds of people shooting wildly in all directions as they hear gunshots and see someone near them with a gun.
And all the bloodshed would have been avoided.
Or maybe everyone in the audience who feels responsible enough to obtain a concealed carry permit and purchase and carry a firearm might, oh, I don't know, NOT shoot wildly in all directions but actually wait until they could SEE the guy who's walking around actively SHOOTING people, and THEN they might aim carefully and shoot directly at the shooter, thus having AT LEAST a 50/50 chance of actually STOPPING the shooter. Which is a hell of a lot better than just sitting there and waiting until he kills everyone in the room.
Honestly, EVERY SINGLE FUCKING COMMENT from people like you (people opposed to concealed carry) goes to the absolute extreme of assuming--no, DECLARING WITH CERTAINTY that even a SINGLE other armed person is going to turn a... bloodbath... into a... multiple bloodbath?
I really don't f**king understand you people. It's already a fucking bloodbath! People who go to the trouble of carrying legal firearms for self defense DO NOT have the tendency of just randomly and blindly shooting in all directions! I don't know where you get this idea!
No. They don't. Seriously. Only crazy people shoot wildly in all directions at things they can't see. Because that would be f**king insane.
Show me ONE account in the real world of someone wielding a firearm in self defense (outside of a Hollywood movie) where they actually just started randomly firing in the dark in a crowded room. One!
Gaaah! I don't know why I bother.
Another incident I tend to bring up when this argument comes into play: During the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, there was a former US Marine who had been in combat in Iraq nearby with a gun in his pocket. He never even drew his weapon - he got behind cover, approached as closely as he could, waited until the shooter stopped to reload, and was part of the group that tackled him.
The idea that a more armed populace will prevent these kinds of massacres is just plain incorrect. It may serve other purposes, but it doesn't prevent a nutjob from attacking a crowd and killing a bunch of people.
Maybe he realized that he couldn't be accurate enough in that situation at that distance with his pistol to avoid possibly hitting bystanders. Sounds like he did the right thing under the circumstances.
That doesn't mean there aren't many other shooting situations where it's much easier to be able to shoot back and stop the attack. On the other hand, if the shooter is ALWAYS the ONLY one present who is armed, the result is always bad. At least if others are armed there is a chance THAT WOULD NOT OTHERWISE EXIST. You decry the idea of an armed populace yet you provide no alternative that would be better in any way.
One of the worst shooting incidents in recent times came on an army base.
Never been in the military, have you? Unless you're A) a military police officer on duty or B) about to go directly to the shooting range under supervision or C) about to actually go into battle (unlikely within the US), you will find yourself in SERIOUS, deep doo-doo if you are found to have any live rounds in your possession. You MIGHT have a firearm with you for training purposes, but those are often kept locked up as well and only issued from the armory when necessary. But without the ammunition they are only useful as clubs. So... what was your point again?
And I see to recall that a certain politician in Arizona was surrounded by gun-carrying people, for all the good it did her and the other victims around her.
You are absolutely right. What were those people thinking? They should have told her bodyguards to stay home that day. That way, everything would have turned out much better.
Wait... I don't... I'm so confused. Did you even *have* a point?
Just like and armed churchgoer stopped this attack
It wasn't an "armed churchgoer" as you misleadingly state. It was an off-duty police officer, trained in the use of lethal force.
When you start with untrained use of lethal force you get George Zimmerman shooting at Trayvon Martin.
Uh...
Was he... armed?
Was he... at, or going to, a church?
Sounds like an armed churchgoer to me.
Fortunately a lot of the people who are carrying concealed personal defense firearms are actually off-duty or retired law enforcement or military. It is not the case that ALL armed citizens are clueless amateurs. Even the ones who aren't cops typically spend a significant amount of time practicing how to use their firearm effectively and safely, because most people that choose to carry firearms really do understand that having a firearm is a heavy responsibility.
Oh, and I'm about 99.999% sure that Trayvon Martin would still be alive if he hadn't seen fit to get into a brawl in the middle of the night with someone who happened to be armed. I'm also absolutely certain there are thousands of off-duty or retired cops who might have also ended up shooting Mr. Martin had they been in the same circumstances. Cops are not magically immune to making mistakes in heated circumstances. It was a very unfortunate incident, but it does not serve to prove in any way that citizens who don't happen to be members of law enforcement shouldn't be allowed to carry firearms. Doesn't matter how much training is involved, when things go down sometimes people get shot even when it may not have been absolutely necessary by the definition of someone after the fact who wasn't there when it happened.
Third, the last thing we want in a shooting situation is six other people drawing guns and firing. That has a better chance of just adding to the body count rather than stopping the shooting.
This kind of statement is quite common from people who oppose firearms carry, but I have yet to see any sort of evidence why it would be true. Why exactly does it have a "better" chance of making the situation worse? The situation can hardly GET any worse! Several people shooting back at a gunman usually results in the gunman either stopping what he's doing, running away, or dying. I would think any of those outcomes would be preferable to everyone just sitting there continuing to get shot at by the gunman while waiting for the police to show up, even if someone does get hit by friendly fire. Maybe I'm crazy.
If the gunman could see through smoke and a gas mask well enough to be shooting people, then I would think those same people should be able to effectively shoot back without significantly endangering the rest of the people in the room. Again, maybe I'm crazy.
In short, would I want to spend every waking moment surrounded by people who are armed to the teeth for the highly unlikely offchance that I happen to be in a situation like this one at some point, and then hope that amateurs take him down without hitting even more innocent people in the smoke, darkness, and chaos?
I'll answer that with an unhesitating "no".
I'm not totally anti-self-defense-tools. For example, I think Iceland's anti-pepper-spray law goes too far, in that it's a pretty lousy weapon for committing crime with even compared with commonly available tools like a kitchen knife, and is pretty obviously only for self-defense, with non-lethal, non-permanent results. But do I want to live in a paranoia-society surrounded by heavily armed people at all times? No thank you!
I love how people who are opposed to firearms carry always seem to use wildly hyperbolic phrases like "armed to the teeth" and "paranoia-society surrounded by heavily armed people". How exactly does a personal self-defense handgun in a hidden pocket qualify as being "heavily armed"? Oh, and I always love this one: "Guns blazing," used to describe how apparently ANY private citizen will defend themselves with a firearm. As if any person who carries a self-defense firearm will ALWAYS whip out a full-auto MAC-10 with a 30-round clip and spray the room indiscriminately, no doubt killing as many innocent bystanders as possible. The evidence for this kind of thing occurring in the real world is of course non-existent. It doesn't even happen in Hollywood movies that way!
You fail to realize of course that most of the paranoia is your own. Let's see, you're stuck in a theater with someone who is ACTUALLY "heavily armed" with "guns blazing" trying to kill you, yet you are far more worried about someone with a defensive firearm ACCIDENTALLY shooting you while they're trying to stop the guy who is doing his best to kill everyone in the room ON PURPOSE. I don't think I will ever be able to understand this upside-down way of looking at things, as if you're actually in MORE danger from the people who might try to protect you. This is such a bizarre twisting of priorities and reality that I just can't fathom how it makes sense to anyone. It seems you'd rather be a [highly probably] victim of a violent attacker than a [possible but improbable] victim of accidental friendly-fire.
[What is this, I don't even... *bewildered face*]
Oh, and I also love how I always see people talk about how "likely" an event is to happen, rather than talking about how bad the consequences are. In most circumstances it's not "likely" that you'll be stung by a bee. But I'll bet if you were highly allergic to bee stings you'd make damn sure you carry your epi-pen with you at all times, and you'd train all your coworkers and friends on how to use it so that--in the unlikely event you do get stung--you won't, you know... DIE FROM IT.
The consequences of being in a theater when a raving lunatic breaks in and starts shooting people are possibly equally grave, and I guarantee there are only a couple ways of avoiding those consequences, the main one of which is to either be armed or for at least one other person in the same room with you to be armed. No, not "heavily armed" or "paranoid", just "armed". No hyperbole necessary. And people who carry self-defense firearms are also quite likely to not be "amateurs". Many spend a lot of time learning to use their firearm effectively and safely. Many are also retired or off-duty police or military. Shocking, I know. In other words, there is a good chance that ANY person near you who is armed will react quickly and shoot accurately, and perhaps save your life in the process.
If something is highly likely to kill you, I would think you'd want to take reasonable precautions to avoid it or survive it. But I guess I just live in a different reality. Maybe mine's the one
So maybe you should bathe in it rather than drink it?
You say that to be funny, but... http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/accessories/5a65/
I tend to want to be able to type while I watch a video.
I don't want to click to raise to a window, it is pointless to do so, sometimes I want to toss back and forth between two very quickly.
Here is what I don't understand. If you're already typing, and you want to change focus between windows quickly, why aren't you using the keyboard? Whether you have to click or not, the mouse can't possibly be faster than the keyboard. I think a lot of people have never learned about the Command-Backtick keyboard shortcut in OS X, that cycles between windows/documents within a single application. Between Command-Tab and Command-Backtick I very rarely need to touch the mouse to do something as trivial as switching focus. It seems strange to me that so many Linux users, who should be more keyboard oriented, are so enamored of this focus-follows-mouse thing that it keeps them from using OS X. Not to mention the fact that FFM can't possibly be that useful unless every window you want to deal with is simultaneously visible on your screen, which seems an odd way to work. Most of my apps are maximized most of the time, so the mouse would be useless for switching focus.
The same goes for those who complain about not having a middle-click paste in OS X. I don't understand how pasting with the mouse could be faster than using the universal (in OS X) Command-X/C/V keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy and paste. I can select a URL with the mouse and then copy, tab or backtick, open a new browser tab, paste and hit return faster than you can say "Jehosephat!" Probably took me all of a couple of hours a decade ago for these keyboard shortcuts to become second nature.
My failed attempts to get the same convenience of consistent keyboard shortcuts in Linux that I found first in BeOS and then in OS X is one of the reasons I finally gave up on the Linux desktop. Trying to get KDE, GNOME, Tk, and other application frameworks to cooperate and use the same universal set of keyboard shortcuts was an exercise in futility. And of course because Linux is so strongly influenced by copying Windows, the primary meta key for keyboard shortcuts was always the Control key, which you have to contort your pinky to use, rather than the much more useful Alt or Command key under the thumb, which requires no such contortions. Even in Windows, I used Alt-F,S far more often than I ever used Control-S. And in several years of using Windows, that and Alt-Tab were really the only keyboard shortcuts I found useful. In OS X I have a dozen or more different simple keyboard shortcuts I use constantly every day without even thinking about it. For this reason alone I could never go back to using Windows or Linux. Linux also had a habit of changing established keyboard shortcuts periodically, when they should have been standardized across the board a couple of decades ago. On the Mac, they have been standardized for decades.
As a fairly technical user I tried really hard for years to get both Windows and various flavors of desktop Linux to behave the way I wanted, but the only desktop environment that has ever succeeded in getting the hell out of my way and letting me do what I want is OS X (and BeOS before that). Most of the objections I've seen from Linux users who don't like OS X have really amounted to not understanding how to use the built-in features of OS X efficiently.
Side note: Many of us BeOS "refugees" consider OS X to be the rightful inheritor of the nirvana that was BeOS. Is it perfect? Ha! Not hardly. But it's much, much closer than anything else I've ever encountered so far.
Of course, all of this is just my personal opinion. You are all entitled to your own.
Its odd, how in your gun toting utopia, the USA, which has regular gun massacres, I'm aware of very few - if *any* instances of one of the concealed carry heroes actually stopping a massacres by shooting the nutter.
Probably because they realise that when push comes to shove - they aren't John Wayne (who was a draft dodging coward anyway), but rather pants pissing blowhards hiding as best as they can.
The key word here is "aware". You are "aware" of very few instances of firearms being used in self defense.
As much as I hate the nuttiness of Fox News and the entire conservative field right now, there really is a strong liberal bias in the news media, specifically regarding firearms-related stories. Or maybe it's just that successful self-defense stories where no shots were fired are not sensational enough to sell papers. So you just don't read about these stories, because the are incredibly under-reported. Nevertheless, the last time I saw statistics (from the government) on self-defense with firearms there were nearly a million instances PER YEAR in the US. In the vast majority of instances there are no shots fired. The simple brandishing of a firearm in most cases either causes the miscreant(s) to surrender or to run for their lives. There really aren't that many cases of "gun battles" and there are vanishingly few cases where a firearm was used against the owner. (This last one is a huge FUD talking point always trotted out by anti-gun folks. They seem to believe that a firearm will ALWAYS be somehow taken away from the owner and used against them. This is of course complete nonsense.)
One of the main reasons you don't hear about legal gun owners stopping massacres is because your typical massacre occurs somewhere like a school campus or a workplace where (drumroll please) legal gun owners aren't allowed to carry their firearms! In many such places you have to literally lock your unloaded firearm in the trunk of your car. So nobody should be surprised when legal gun owners can't be helpful in such situations. The likelihood that a legal gun owner will be close by with an accessible firearm is quite low.
Personally, I am of the opinion that if we unified the concealed-carry laws nationwide and stopped making exceptions for so many different areas like college campuses, we would end up with a high enough concentration of legal gun owners in our society that we could actually have a chance of stopping rampaging lunatics from successfully continuing a massacre spree for three hours while the local cops try to find their ass with both hands. By "high enough concentration" I mean something like 5-10%. That means that one out of ten or twenty of the people around you would be able to help SAVE YOUR LIFE from a bad person trying to kill you. The current concentration is far lower, so you have to rely on the local police force in far too many situations, and it always takes time for them to arrive and "assess the situation".
Unfortunately this view is not shared by the anti-gun nuts who seem to believe that the mere presence of a firearm nearby will turn any human into a slobbering, murderous lunatic. Oh, except cops. Cops apparently get some sort of mystical "training" that makes them immune to the terrible psychological effects of carrying a firearm, keeping them from randomly whipping it out and shooting people during a casual argument.
Honestly, anti-gun zealots make about as much logical sense as young earth creationists.
She needs to hear the other point-of-view from someone she trusts and respects. Someone she will listen to and actually take it onboard when they tell her she's being pretty stupid and wasting her own time. Probably someone she works for at one of the sites she maintains. And if you locate someone, be nice. Real nice. I shouldn't need to say it, but distingush between Ms Schwager and her actions and also between her actions and these organisations. Point out how her idiocy is making them look bad.
Wade.
You are sooo wrong, sadly. This woman has gone far beyond being an idiot. Even an idiot at some point would know to just shut up. This is much worse. She is full-blown narcissistic paranoid-delusional loony-bin material. There is no person left on this planet that she will listen to, because EVERYONE who says anything negative to her or about her is automatically assumed to be in cahoots with the EEEVIL Sheriff Garcia. This includes all kinds of random internet people on Twitter, the commenters on the photographer's original article (the initial "lynch mob"), as well as the commenters on the PetaPixel article. According to her all of these random people are part of a conspiracy run by this Sheriff Garcia that she's trying to get rid of. If she ever finds out about Slashdot we'll all be included in the conspiracy too, I'm sure.
Even if you got the Christ-figure in this drama, her immaculately-conceived hero Louis Guthrie, to speak to her about this, it wouldn't make any difference. In fact, the next article on her blog afterward would be something like, "Guthrie Sells Soul to Garcia, Satan Wins!" And it will be yet another extensive, zig-zaggy, rambling diatribe about how the whole world is trying to destroy her (and by extension, how the world is trying to destroy the disabled children she has supposedly dedicated her life to serving).
This woman seriously needs to be put in a padded room and given some intense psychological help before she ends up living on the streets arguing with imaginary people. It may be as simple as a dose of lithium to even out a manic episode. I'd hate to think she's been this crazy her whole life and nobody's noticed, but that's not unheard of either. Witness Michelle Bachmann.
P.S. It's really interesting going through the comments on the PetaPixel article. With her odd writing style it's quite easy to identify the dozen or so comments she made in support of herself WHILE PRETENDING TO BE OTHER PEOPLE. Hint: She's the only one who keeps harping about Jay Lee (the photographer) "taking down her websites" and slipping in references to "Garcia". Oddly she never says a word against her beloved web host GoDaddy, the ones who actually took her sites down.
I guess the most interesting thing about this is that America isn't slowly going insane, as one might think. The religious nuts have just gotten louder and more obnoxious in the last several years, making it seem like they're taking over. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, but at least my perception that people are abandoning reason left and right in this country is incorrect. That's a good sign. I guess...
If the Apple Retina display is already beyond the point a human eye can resolve - what's more resolution going to get you?
Something that nobody seems to have brought up so far is that increased pixel density brings with it increased color saturation and contrast, which is a great thing for movies and photos as well as text display. This is already one of the draws of the new iPad, which is just barely a "retina" display by Apple's definition with a pixel density of just 264 ppi. Further increases in pixel density should continue to improve these color attributes on all devices. It's not the resolution increase per se but the reduction in the thickness of the lines separating the pixels that is a desirable thing.
We should also continue looking forward to the day when pixel density is so high that both text and objects can be scaled up or down to fit the device without introducing horrible pixelation effects. That day will only arrive when pixel densities on all devices are far beyond the range of human perception. Until then we are still stuck with making on-screen objects at a set pixel size in order to keep them from looking awful.
So I say let the device makers have a ball making high density displays. It can only be a good thing.
So you have faith that "eventually" there will be "evidence" to prove that the Bible is 100% correct about everything, but in the meantime no available evidence will ever sway your beliefs. Does that pretty much sum it up? Exactly how long is this "eventually" that you speak of? I have to wonder exactly what sort of evidence you believe will suddenly turn up to support your theories.
You believe yourself to be a rational person, but you are in fact not rational at all. Quite the opposite. Having an unshakeable faith in an idea that has no evidence whatsoever currently supporting it is completely irrational.
But if you haven't figured out by now that you're a fruit loop, you probably never will.
Get a pink one. She'll be happy.
You say that to be funny, but in fact that is another of the many reasons that I always just tell people these days to buy a Mac. Since they only make a few different models of laptops and they don't change the form factor sometimes for years, there is an EXTENSIVE amount of really nice after market accessories available for Macs, including hard cases in various colors, tons of different "skins" and some very nice keyboard protector options. Great for protecting the laptop inside and out, and great for those who like to customize what their computer looks like. A few PC manufacturers sell colored laptops, mainly their cheap consumer models, but guess what? It will always be that color. With the cases and skins widely available for Macs, you can change your laptop's looks as often as you want, and keep the thing looking like new for years even in harsh environments like school/college.
Plus there's the fact that if we can learn to get our damn techie egos out of the way we might realize a couple of things. Firstly, the specs really don't matter much anymore unless you're doing something like hardcore gaming or video processing. Normal people never hit the limits of even low end processors and GPUs these days. Secondly, most non-techie people will actually prefer using Mac OS X, which is yet another reason to get her a Mac.
I'm glad I'm not the only one anymore who just plain got tired of trying to find a decent PC laptop out of the hundreds being marketed. You go to the Apple store and you just decide how big a screen you want, and whether you want an optical drive. That's pretty much it. No matter how anti-Apple you may be, you do have to wonder why there are so many people besides me who are answering this question with "Just buy a Mac."
They're damn good computers. Period.
She supports Newt. Clearly not Tea Party. But hey, it's fun to characterize an entire group of people based on the words and actions of a single tangentially related individual, isn't it? Makes you feel real superior. Awesome.
My bad. Allow me to sincerely apologize for mistaking one group of batshit crazy liberal-media-conspiracies-are-destroying-the-universe loons for a completely different batshit crazy liberal-media-conspiracies-are-destroying-the-universe loons. I can't imagine how I got so confused.
By the way, I was using "tea party" as a figure of speech, as in "crazy like the tea party", which is why it's hyphenated and uncapitalized. Not that it particularly matters. Nuts is nuts, no matter what side they're on or what they call themselves.