Is a ~$300 high-tech item really a show off item? I mean, we're at the point now where pretty much anywhere in the country (and excepting fast food), a dinner for a family of 4 costs a minimum of $50, and probably a good bit higher. I'm not calling $300 pocket change, but I'm not sure it gets you into "rich asshole" territory either! (Hypocrisy alert, if I knew someone dropped $300 on a namebrand purse or some shit like that, I would call it a show off item!)
for them, they can afford to throw it out each year or two. they could care less how much it costs; its a hipster show-off item and apple full well knows it.
Most of the people I have met with Apple watches actually were road warriors---people who travel constantly for work. One guy liked it because he always stays at Starwoods and he can unlock his room via the watch. Another liked hers because she got so many text messages for work that she filtered the Watch to only get family messages, so she didn't have to constantly be pulling her phone out of her purse whenever it dinged. etc. Most of the other users I've met just seem to use it like a glorified FitBit. I actually have not seen or met a single hipster-type wearing one!
Full disclosure, I don't have one and don't particularly want on, but I don't think your characterizations are remotely accurate--they seem more driven by your own imagination of what a gross characterization of an Apple user is!
Warranty is not the same as AppleCare. The two year pro-rated number was the closest approximation I could come up with. Not perfect, but a rough ballpark.
I just checked too, and I thought actually putting some numbers down would be informative, rather than just making statements without any backing data. What computer are you talking about that costs $649 baseline (I didn't see anything like that on a quick look on the Apple store).
Germany, Baseline Silver MacBook (Apple.com/de/): €1449 United States, Baseline Silver MacBook (Apple.com): $1299 UK, Baseline Silver Macbook (Apple.com/uk/): £1049 (a lot more flux than normal in this price, due to Brexit and unusually low USD.GBP exchange rates)
Cost of AppleCare = $129 for 3 years. Cost per year then is $43, so two years of warranty would be an added $86.
DE €1449 -> $1600. Minus 19% VAT = $1,344. Plus two years of AppleCare ($86) = $1430 UK £1049 -> $1395. Minus 20% VAT = $1162. Plus two years of AppleCare ($86) = $1248
US $1299. Plus full 3 years of AppleCare ($129) = $1428. Two dollars difference from what what I estimated as the DE price breakdown.
So the German price in Euros seems pretty darn close to me! Did I miss anything?
My only question is---if Trump is so racist, sexist, and prone to violent reactions--why hasn't that popped up in his past? Discrimination lawsuits? Sexual harassment cases? Workplace violence or intimidation? Anything like that? I mean everything that comes out about him basically makes him seem like a mild-mannered Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg... As far a celebrity children, his don't seem particularly bad nor attention-seeking (which IMHO speaks well for him).
I disabled the learning portion of the Nest after less than a year of using. I now just use it as a dumb thermostat (with away mode) that I can control from my cellphone. Blergh.
European freight trains carry a tiny percentage of European freight (even more so electric freight trains), especially vis-a-vis the United States. That's the point. (Though I would wonder about the grid and power distribution efficiencies.)
No, actually you missed the point. Here's what I wrote (emphasis added):
As we've seen over the last year, there's no such thing as clean diesel, and diesel trucks are notoriously dirty (not to mention clogging up highways, causing accidents, etc.)
My reference to diesel was to talk about Europe's much greater reliance on diesel TRUCKING for moving freight.
I think you're right. This is one of the areas where the US is greener than Europe.
A much greater percentage of freight in America is carried by train than that carried by train in Europe. European trains are largely passenger, while US trains are largely freight (I've read that less than 10% of European freight is carried by train, versus 40%+ for the US). As we've seen over the last year, there's no such thing as clean diesel, and diesel trucks are notoriously dirty (not to mention clogging up highways, causing accidents, etc.)
I've read a few of your posts just now and the bitterness and despair really makes me cringe--Sounds like you've been burned by some bad companies. I personally can't relate (my work experiences are very different), and I don't work in tech. Care to share any details about the types of job you've experienced? Tech, IT, etc?
What made it run out so poorly for the South was being attacked by a different country. Don't you know about the War of Northern Aggression?
In all seriousness, slavery had to end and, IMHO it would have ended, if perhaps on a slightly longer timeframe, anyway--soon Slavery had ended pretty much everywhere else, and economic and political pressures would have forced it to end in the south. Maybe things would have been nicer for the South and the North if they had peacefully split. Maybe not. Hard to say.
It's a truism that statists and those whose well-being is embedded in the apparatus of the state will always favor expansive government power. It's why the elites always favor greater centralized authority and are anti Scottish independence, Catalonian independence, Brexit, etc. What skin does Obama have in the Brexit game?
How is a consumer economy supposed to work given a robotic workforce?
You better be prepared to have a much larger welfare state.
Honestly, I think we need a much smaller society. Big business (profits$$), left-wing groups (votes), and politicians of all stripes (easy economic growth) have pushed open borders and mass immigration for years. Immigration is easy economic growth. But what matters to most people is not aggregate economic growth, it's individual growth.
I view the US as being in a position like a high-end university. We can, in essence, take in anybody we want to. I remember you posted that you were a UC undergrad (I got a grad degree from UC). UC maintains its unique culture and high-degree of excellence because it can select who it wants. If UC suddenly allowed in hundreds of people for the wrong reason, UC would change for the worse. Well, I'm utterly convinced that a robotic future is coming. I'm convinced that within my lifetime, most farm harvesting will be done by robots. (As a side note, imagine a a swarm of tiny agricultural bots that could zap insects without widespread spraying of pesticides--talk about organic.) I thin a lot of driver/transportation jobs will disappear. We've already seen a lot of high-skill/high-training jobs like lawyers disappear over the last decade, though that owes more to sites like LegalZoom.com and RocketLawyers.com than robotics. Doctors are next.
The US does not need lots of low-skill, low-education workers. I fully admit to being purely a pragmatist and not very empathetic the others here, but I do worry about what happens when the need for a lot of low-skill labor dries up.
As I said before, it's not that different societies can have different ideals of beauty or "sexiness", it's that what is "sexy" is almost always exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. That's what's programmed into us. Interest in phalluses, pudenda, butts, and breasts, is pretty much universal. (Straight male primates are interested in other males' penises too, FWIW.)
No, interest in breasts is not a uniquely western thing (see Kama Sutra, see ancient Chinese figurines and art, medieval Persian art, etc.), for the obvious reason that stimulation of breasts produces an erotic response.
Amongst humans, breast size, penis size, and butt size have all been sexuality selected for. That's evolution for you.
Which is biologically wrong, as the semen of the first one is killing the semen of the following ones. Humans have three kinds of sperms, sperms that fertilize the egg, sperms that build a cocoon like buffer in front of the womb to prevent "enemy sperms" to get in and killer sperms that actively hunt "enemy sperms".
Getting aroused like that much more likely leads to orgies in a tribe like society where everyone has sex with his/her spouse when some one started it.
Interesting, I've never read that speculation (well, other than in Clan of the Cave Bears--the sequels at least) nor read about any precedent in any extant human societies. Could be logical. Give the above belief about the physical structure of the penis, I would still be more inclined to go with the "ready for action" theory.
Sexual animals frequently evolve exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics (peacock? Plenty of primate examples, etc). Butts and breasts are the two most common exaggerated traits in humans. My point is not that all humans find the exact same traits attractive but rather that it's programmed into us to be drawn towards these exaggerated traits.
I heard an interesting talk the other day in which the speaker speculated that human males get aroused watching other people have sex because, evolutionarily, men who are ready to spring into action after another male are more likely to procreate successfully. (The physical structure of the penis seeming to be especially good at scooping semen out.)
The physical tab key has meant "move the output location to the next field" for a hundred years or so. The idea of a "literal tab character" was always goofy - an ASCII legacy like form-feed, bell, ENQ etc. I don't want to tab key to type an actual 0x09 character any more than I want the PageDown key to type an actual 0x0C character, or the backspace key to type an actual 0x08 character.
I'm not sure that's quite right.
The origin of tab keys is from typewriters where there were physical gears that controlled where the carriage stopped. When you pressed tab, the carriage would be moved to the next tab stop (wherever you set that). Tab is short for "tabulate" because this functionality was primarily useful for tabular data--columns of numbers, etc.
So, similar in concept to "next field" but different too.
Why not just delete the delete button from the keyboard? Many other 'meta-keys' have disappeared in order to dumb-down the keyboard. Keyboards used to have both backspace and delete, which did two slightly different things. Now my Macbook pro only has a delete button that acts like backspace (not delete), no home/end keys, and all sorts of other missing keys. So, just fucking delete the delete button too. Just like the 'Forward' and 'Refresh' buttons in Firefox. Dumb everything down for the people who do nothing but watch videos on their computers. And before you say, 'Those keys were removed to keep the keyboards small for smaller laptops'... ever hear of modifier keys like fcn, control, alt?
I'm not entirely sure I'm reading your message correctly, but on an Apple keyboard: Fn+Up = Page Up Fn+Down = Page Down Fn+Backspace (labeled as "delete") = Del Fn+Left arrow = Home Fn+Right arrow = End Fn+Enter = Return (is it vice versa??) Fn+Esc = Break
And just some other useful: Option+Up = cursor to beginning of line, or if at beginning of line, up one line Option+Down = cursor to end of line, or if at end of line, down one line Option+Left arrow = move cursor left one word Option+Right arrow = move cursor right one word
If you're new to Mac OS, shortcut keys and modifier keys are really big. Try dragging with various modifier keys, clicking on the desktop with various modifier keys (e.g. Option+Click on desktop hides the current active program windows, same as Cmd+H), check out Application and system menus while holding down Option, etc.
Sure, religious conversions almost always follow tribal, caste, racial, social, or economics (or some combination!) divisions.
I'm by no means an expert on the West African jihads, but I don't think you can just boil them down to a proxy for tribal conflict. There were certainly economic motivations as well--the slave trade was huge in, e.g., Sokoto. From what I do know, though, you would be very hard-pressed to make the case that those jihads were not driven by a desire to spread Islam.
As a counter example, in India today, many Muslims are the descendants of Muslims (Arabs, Turks, Persians, and others who invaded the subcontinent at various times). Many Muslims who are converts (or rather, whose family converted at some point in history) came from the lowest castes of Hinduism. The same thing goes with Christianity (minus the descendants of invaders). Many--if not the majority--of Indian Christians in India today came from low castes. Another interesting phenomena in Indian Christianity is that 50-60 years ago, across most of India (and ignoring areas like Kerala), almost all ministers and priests would have been of Western descent. Today, that's rate, and almost all religious organizations, etc., are run indigenously.
In India, many Muslims and Christians alike converted to their new religious precisely because their new religion was seen as more egalitarian.
Here's a fascinating article I read recently that illustrates the point:
Isn't that also the agenda of Christianity and every other fanatical missionary religion in human history?
With some historical differences.
Both Islam and Christianity are spreading religions. That is, it's a tenet of faith that it's a good thing to spread the faith by conversion. One can compare this to, e.g., Judaism.
Christianity has been spread by both force and by missionary activity. The earliest conversions were almost entirely underground and "bottom up." Many later conversions were "top down". Today it's pretty much universally agreed that conversion cannot be forced and must be personal. Even the most imperialist missionaries of the the 18th and 19th centuries were almost always essentially aid workers as well (building schools, hospitals, etc). Yes, they did have an ulterior motive!
Islam has also been spread by both force and by missionary activity (See the relatively peaceful spread of Islam in e.g. Malaysia and Indonesia). Unlike Christianity, the early and most rapid spread of Islam followed pretty much exactly with the Arab conquest of North Africa through Central Asia, southern Europe through Africa. Islam has historically been linked much more tightly to political apparatus than Christianity--I like to think of it in terms of Islam being a "triumphalist" religion (winning battles and expanding rapidly in the time of Muhammad) versus Christianity as underground of subversive religion--spreading underground through conversion (think even today, the house churches in China). The climax of Islam is Muhammad receiving revelations from god and winning. The climax of Christianity is Jesus being executed for his beliefs and actions. Quite a difference!
Islam has also been much more concerned that Muslims live in Islamic controlled states--not that the polities necessarily have to be 100% Muslim. This is Marshall Hodgson's term "Islamdom." The sphere of the world controlled by Islamic political powers and largely Islamicate (his term, again) in terms of culture, but that may not even be majority Muslim in terms of faith of the population! So historians think that it may have been the 18th century before a majority of Egyptians were Muslim, for instance (after over a millennium of Islamic rule).
In terms of that interesting word jihad, that's widely debated. Some would argue that jihad is never about conversion. I don't believe that. For recent examples, see for instance the area of Afghanistan formerly known as Kafiristan (Lands of the Unbelievers) and now known as Nuristan (Land of Enlightenment) after a jihad of forced conversion in the 1890s. See also the jihads of forced conversion in West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. Or, for the matter, the stealing of Nigerian Christian girls and their forced conversion in Nigeria today.
So, that all boils down to, do Christianity and Islam both have as its agenda to "take over the world?" Yes and no:-) I would say that Islamic theology has long had a greater interest in Islamic institutions being in political control than has Christian theology. IMHO, that's one of the reasons Europe was able to overcome religion and secular humanism, the age of reason, and all that good stuff came about.
You have the story scrambled. The GMO mosquitos are going to be introduced to kill off the natural organic free-range progressive mosquitos which are spreading the virus.
Slashdot Mirror
its a 'show off' item for rich motherfuckers.
Is a ~$300 high-tech item really a show off item? I mean, we're at the point now where pretty much anywhere in the country (and excepting fast food), a dinner for a family of 4 costs a minimum of $50, and probably a good bit higher. I'm not calling $300 pocket change, but I'm not sure it gets you into "rich asshole" territory either! (Hypocrisy alert, if I knew someone dropped $300 on a namebrand purse or some shit like that, I would call it a show off item!)
for them, they can afford to throw it out each year or two. they could care less how much it costs; its a hipster show-off item and apple full well knows it.
Most of the people I have met with Apple watches actually were road warriors---people who travel constantly for work. One guy liked it because he always stays at Starwoods and he can unlock his room via the watch. Another liked hers because she got so many text messages for work that she filtered the Watch to only get family messages, so she didn't have to constantly be pulling her phone out of her purse whenever it dinged. etc. Most of the other users I've met just seem to use it like a glorified FitBit. I actually have not seen or met a single hipster-type wearing one!
Full disclosure, I don't have one and don't particularly want on, but I don't think your characterizations are remotely accurate--they seem more driven by your own imagination of what a gross characterization of an Apple user is!
That's the stupidest damn thing; should've at least been a splitter adapter.
Other than the fact that Apple includes an adapter in the box, everything you say is correct.
Warranty is not the same as AppleCare. The two year pro-rated number was the closest approximation I could come up with. Not perfect, but a rough ballpark.
I just checked too, and I thought actually putting some numbers down would be informative, rather than just making statements without any backing data. What computer are you talking about that costs $649 baseline (I didn't see anything like that on a quick look on the Apple store).
Germany, Baseline Silver MacBook (Apple.com/de/): €1449
United States, Baseline Silver MacBook (Apple.com): $1299
UK, Baseline Silver Macbook (Apple.com/uk/): £1049 (a lot more flux than normal in this price, due to Brexit and unusually low USD.GBP exchange rates)
Cost of AppleCare = $129 for 3 years. Cost per year then is $43, so two years of warranty would be an added $86.
DE €1449 -> $1600. Minus 19% VAT = $1,344. Plus two years of AppleCare ($86) = $1430
UK £1049 -> $1395. Minus 20% VAT = $1162. Plus two years of AppleCare ($86) = $1248
US $1299. Plus full 3 years of AppleCare ($129) = $1428. Two dollars difference from what what I estimated as the DE price breakdown.
So the German price in Euros seems pretty darn close to me! Did I miss anything?
Scott Adams has an interesting take on things.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145309172876/the-risks-of-a-trump-presidency
My only question is---if Trump is so racist, sexist, and prone to violent reactions--why hasn't that popped up in his past? Discrimination lawsuits? Sexual harassment cases? Workplace violence or intimidation? Anything like that? I mean everything that comes out about him basically makes him seem like a mild-mannered Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg... As far a celebrity children, his don't seem particularly bad nor attention-seeking (which IMHO speaks well for him).
I disabled the learning portion of the Nest after less than a year of using. I now just use it as a dumb thermostat (with away mode) that I can control from my cellphone. Blergh.
The mobile software is unbelievably shitty too.
European freight trains carry a tiny percentage of European freight (even more so electric freight trains), especially vis-a-vis the United States. That's the point. (Though I would wonder about the grid and power distribution efficiencies.)
No, actually you missed the point. Here's what I wrote (emphasis added):
As we've seen over the last year, there's no such thing as clean diesel, and diesel trucks are notoriously dirty (not to mention clogging up highways, causing accidents, etc.)
My reference to diesel was to talk about Europe's much greater reliance on diesel TRUCKING for moving freight.
Virtue signaling? I'm not sure you know what that means. I want some dirt!!
I think you're right. This is one of the areas where the US is greener than Europe.
A much greater percentage of freight in America is carried by train than that carried by train in Europe. European trains are largely passenger, while US trains are largely freight (I've read that less than 10% of European freight is carried by train, versus 40%+ for the US). As we've seen over the last year, there's no such thing as clean diesel, and diesel trucks are notoriously dirty (not to mention clogging up highways, causing accidents, etc.)
See, e.g.: http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/
I've read a few of your posts just now and the bitterness and despair really makes me cringe--Sounds like you've been burned by some bad companies. I personally can't relate (my work experiences are very different), and I don't work in tech. Care to share any details about the types of job you've experienced? Tech, IT, etc?
What made it run out so poorly for the South was being attacked by a different country. Don't you know about the War of Northern Aggression?
In all seriousness, slavery had to end and, IMHO it would have ended, if perhaps on a slightly longer timeframe, anyway--soon Slavery had ended pretty much everywhere else, and economic and political pressures would have forced it to end in the south. Maybe things would have been nicer for the South and the North if they had peacefully split. Maybe not. Hard to say.
It's a truism that statists and those whose well-being is embedded in the apparatus of the state will always favor expansive government power. It's why the elites always favor greater centralized authority and are anti Scottish independence, Catalonian independence, Brexit, etc. What skin does Obama have in the Brexit game?
I know you're just trying to be cutesy, but I'm always in favor of polities splitting up into the smallest units that people want.
How is a consumer economy supposed to work given a robotic workforce?
You better be prepared to have a much larger welfare state.
Honestly, I think we need a much smaller society. Big business (profits$$), left-wing groups (votes), and politicians of all stripes (easy economic growth) have pushed open borders and mass immigration for years. Immigration is easy economic growth. But what matters to most people is not aggregate economic growth, it's individual growth.
I view the US as being in a position like a high-end university. We can, in essence, take in anybody we want to. I remember you posted that you were a UC undergrad (I got a grad degree from UC). UC maintains its unique culture and high-degree of excellence because it can select who it wants. If UC suddenly allowed in hundreds of people for the wrong reason, UC would change for the worse. Well, I'm utterly convinced that a robotic future is coming. I'm convinced that within my lifetime, most farm harvesting will be done by robots. (As a side note, imagine a a swarm of tiny agricultural bots that could zap insects without widespread spraying of pesticides--talk about organic.) I thin a lot of driver/transportation jobs will disappear. We've already seen a lot of high-skill/high-training jobs like lawyers disappear over the last decade, though that owes more to sites like LegalZoom.com and RocketLawyers.com than robotics. Doctors are next.
The US does not need lots of low-skill, low-education workers. I fully admit to being purely a pragmatist and not very empathetic the others here, but I do worry about what happens when the need for a lot of low-skill labor dries up.
What people find "sexy" is mostly culture.
As I said before, it's not that different societies can have different ideals of beauty or "sexiness", it's that what is "sexy" is almost always exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. That's what's programmed into us. Interest in phalluses, pudenda, butts, and breasts, is pretty much universal. (Straight male primates are interested in other males' penises too, FWIW.)
No, interest in breasts is not a uniquely western thing (see Kama Sutra, see ancient Chinese figurines and art, medieval Persian art, etc.), for the obvious reason that stimulation of breasts produces an erotic response.
Amongst humans, breast size, penis size, and butt size have all been sexuality selected for. That's evolution for you.
Which is biologically wrong, as the semen of the first one is killing the semen of the following ones. Humans have three kinds of sperms, sperms that fertilize the egg, sperms that build a cocoon like buffer in front of the womb to prevent "enemy sperms" to get in and killer sperms that actively hunt "enemy sperms".
Thus the belief that the "shovel" shape of the human penis is design to scoop out the previously present semen. See, e.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/02/penis-shape-explanation_n_1642613.html
Getting aroused like that much more likely leads to orgies in a tribe like society where everyone has sex with his/her spouse when some one started it.
Interesting, I've never read that speculation (well, other than in Clan of the Cave Bears--the sequels at least) nor read about any precedent in any extant human societies. Could be logical. Give the above belief about the physical structure of the penis, I would still be more inclined to go with the "ready for action" theory.
Sexual animals frequently evolve exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics (peacock? Plenty of primate examples, etc). Butts and breasts are the two most common exaggerated traits in humans. My point is not that all humans find the exact same traits attractive but rather that it's programmed into us to be drawn towards these exaggerated traits.
I heard an interesting talk the other day in which the speaker speculated that human males get aroused watching other people have sex because, evolutionarily, men who are ready to spring into action after another male are more likely to procreate successfully. (The physical structure of the penis seeming to be especially good at scooping semen out.)
How a society became so ill that woman think breasts so big that you get spine issues are a "good thing" or sexy or beautiful is beyond me.
It's called sexual dimorphism. Why do you think "society" has anything to do with it?
Warcraft 3, dryad unit, line after being clicked a bunch:
Want to hear my human call? said in Valley Girl voice "I'm so wasted--I'm sooo wasted!"
You'll notice I said "next output location", not "next field".
Pedantically, you said:
The physical tab key has meant "move the output location to the next field" for a hundred years or so.
But that's ok, I get where you're coming from. Also, some interesting info on Wikipedia.
The physical tab key has meant "move the output location to the next field" for a hundred years or so. The idea of a "literal tab character" was always goofy - an ASCII legacy like form-feed, bell, ENQ etc. I don't want to tab key to type an actual 0x09 character any more than I want the PageDown key to type an actual 0x0C character, or the backspace key to type an actual 0x08 character.
I'm not sure that's quite right.
The origin of tab keys is from typewriters where there were physical gears that controlled where the carriage stopped. When you pressed tab, the carriage would be moved to the next tab stop (wherever you set that). Tab is short for "tabulate" because this functionality was primarily useful for tabular data--columns of numbers, etc.
So, similar in concept to "next field" but different too.
Me, I like tabs.
Why not just delete the delete button from the keyboard? Many other 'meta-keys' have disappeared in order to dumb-down the keyboard. Keyboards used to have both backspace and delete, which did two slightly different things. Now my Macbook pro only has a delete button that acts like backspace (not delete), no home/end keys, and all sorts of other missing keys. So, just fucking delete the delete button too. Just like the 'Forward' and 'Refresh' buttons in Firefox. Dumb everything down for the people who do nothing but watch videos on their computers. And before you say, 'Those keys were removed to keep the keyboards small for smaller laptops'... ever hear of modifier keys like fcn, control, alt?
I'm not entirely sure I'm reading your message correctly, but on an Apple keyboard:
Fn+Up = Page Up
Fn+Down = Page Down
Fn+Backspace (labeled as "delete") = Del
Fn+Left arrow = Home
Fn+Right arrow = End
Fn+Enter = Return (is it vice versa??)
Fn+Esc = Break
And just some other useful:
Option+Up = cursor to beginning of line, or if at beginning of line, up one line
Option+Down = cursor to end of line, or if at end of line, down one line
Option+Left arrow = move cursor left one word
Option+Right arrow = move cursor right one word
If you're new to Mac OS, shortcut keys and modifier keys are really big. Try dragging with various modifier keys, clicking on the desktop with various modifier keys (e.g. Option+Click on desktop hides the current active program windows, same as Cmd+H), check out Application and system menus while holding down Option, etc.
Sure, religious conversions almost always follow tribal, caste, racial, social, or economics (or some combination!) divisions.
I'm by no means an expert on the West African jihads, but I don't think you can just boil them down to a proxy for tribal conflict. There were certainly economic motivations as well--the slave trade was huge in, e.g., Sokoto. From what I do know, though, you would be very hard-pressed to make the case that those jihads were not driven by a desire to spread Islam.
As a counter example, in India today, many Muslims are the descendants of Muslims (Arabs, Turks, Persians, and others who invaded the subcontinent at various times). Many Muslims who are converts (or rather, whose family converted at some point in history) came from the lowest castes of Hinduism. The same thing goes with Christianity (minus the descendants of invaders). Many--if not the majority--of Indian Christians in India today came from low castes. Another interesting phenomena in Indian Christianity is that 50-60 years ago, across most of India (and ignoring areas like Kerala), almost all ministers and priests would have been of Western descent. Today, that's rate, and almost all religious organizations, etc., are run indigenously.
In India, many Muslims and Christians alike converted to their new religious precisely because their new religion was seen as more egalitarian.
Here's a fascinating article I read recently that illustrates the point:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36220329 (Why are many Indian Muslims seen as untouchable?)
Isn't that also the agenda of Christianity and every other fanatical missionary religion in human history?
With some historical differences.
Both Islam and Christianity are spreading religions. That is, it's a tenet of faith that it's a good thing to spread the faith by conversion. One can compare this to, e.g., Judaism.
Christianity has been spread by both force and by missionary activity. The earliest conversions were almost entirely underground and "bottom up." Many later conversions were "top down". Today it's pretty much universally agreed that conversion cannot be forced and must be personal. Even the most imperialist missionaries of the the 18th and 19th centuries were almost always essentially aid workers as well (building schools, hospitals, etc). Yes, they did have an ulterior motive!
Islam has also been spread by both force and by missionary activity (See the relatively peaceful spread of Islam in e.g. Malaysia and Indonesia). Unlike Christianity, the early and most rapid spread of Islam followed pretty much exactly with the Arab conquest of North Africa through Central Asia, southern Europe through Africa. Islam has historically been linked much more tightly to political apparatus than Christianity--I like to think of it in terms of Islam being a "triumphalist" religion (winning battles and expanding rapidly in the time of Muhammad) versus Christianity as underground of subversive religion--spreading underground through conversion (think even today, the house churches in China). The climax of Islam is Muhammad receiving revelations from god and winning. The climax of Christianity is Jesus being executed for his beliefs and actions. Quite a difference!
Islam has also been much more concerned that Muslims live in Islamic controlled states--not that the polities necessarily have to be 100% Muslim. This is Marshall Hodgson's term "Islamdom." The sphere of the world controlled by Islamic political powers and largely Islamicate (his term, again) in terms of culture, but that may not even be majority Muslim in terms of faith of the population! So historians think that it may have been the 18th century before a majority of Egyptians were Muslim, for instance (after over a millennium of Islamic rule).
In terms of that interesting word jihad, that's widely debated. Some would argue that jihad is never about conversion. I don't believe that. For recent examples, see for instance the area of Afghanistan formerly known as Kafiristan (Lands of the Unbelievers) and now known as Nuristan (Land of Enlightenment) after a jihad of forced conversion in the 1890s. See also the jihads of forced conversion in West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. Or, for the matter, the stealing of Nigerian Christian girls and their forced conversion in Nigeria today.
So, that all boils down to, do Christianity and Islam both have as its agenda to "take over the world?" Yes and no :-) I would say that Islamic theology has long had a greater interest in Islamic institutions being in political control than has Christian theology. IMHO, that's one of the reasons Europe was able to overcome religion and secular humanism, the age of reason, and all that good stuff came about.
You have the story scrambled. The GMO mosquitos are going to be introduced to kill off the natural organic free-range progressive mosquitos which are spreading the virus.
I think the GP was probably referring to the belief that Zika was caused by GMO mosquitos.