Imagine what it was like to live through the era where in roughly one century we went from taking weeks to get a message across a country... to the point where you could talk to someone on the other side of the world using a device no bigger than your fist
You know, they've had telegraphs for about 150 years now.
Sooner or later every religious person I've ever had a discussion with has shown a complete ineptitude for logical thought.
Then you are talking to idiots. Talk to me instead, or better yet, read the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm or any of the thousands of other totally brilliant, immensely logical people who were and are Christians (and there are many very intelligent and logical people of other religions as well). His Holiness, the Pope is another good example. So is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The problem with religion is that we tend to hear the most from the people who are least qualified to represent it. While we do hear from the Pope, we also hear way too much from the Jimmy Swaggerts and the Fred Phelps and plenty of other well-meaning*, but intellectually bankrupt people who do far more damage to, and in the name of, Christianity.
* Of course, I find it hard to believe that some of these people can rationalize their intense hatred with "well-meaning" but there is plenty of insanity to go around, and religious people do not have a monopoly on that, nor do non-religious people have a monopoly on knowledge and logic.
The Pope is basing his pronouncements based on 2000 years of Christian thought. He's not just positing an opinion. The problem is that everyone seems to think that everyone's opinion is equally valid, no matter how ignorant the person is, or how specious his opinion is. Yes, there are different ways of thinking, and yes, there are different kinds of belief, but that doesn't mean they are all valid. Some things are right and some things are wrong, and while we will disagree on what those things are, denying objective truth is the complete abandonment of intellectual integrity and leads to philosophical anarchy and the embracing of ignorance as a virtue.
The Pope needs no lessons in public speaking. He is saying exactly what he means.
I had to read that sentence three times before I realized you weren't referring to some word processor called "frex". I was thinking... "Maybe it stands for 'friendly regular expressions'" or something... I gotta Google that bad boy, I hope it's OSS."
More and more, I see SF as putting out the message "scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous, only the lone researcher who disagrees with the group knows what is actually going on, and the pitchfork/torch wielding crowd have the right idea on how to fix things."
That might have been true in 1950, but I think you're either only reading really old stuff or you consider stuff like "Independence Day" or "The Core" as state-of-the-art SF.
It seems everyone thinks it's no longer possible to run an election. I don't know how it managed to work for the last 200-some years in the U.S....
And yes, I do have a problem when our system needs so much work to account for people who are barely functional. The average voter isn't sufficiently educated, and when you get someone who can't even figure out how fill out a ballot, does voting even mean anything?
It's almost impossible to make an informed decision with access to all the resources in the world because there is little or no correlation between the candidates representation of themselves and what they actually intend to do if elected.
The system is bottoming out at the lowest common denominator.
Buy the Star Wars sets. They don't suffer from the "specialized" parts problem. My son has a bunch of them. He builds the "official" model once and then spends all his time building and customizing his own spaceships and stuff. The Star Wars sets are classic Lego in that regard and are everything to product should be. But much of what they sell as Lego really isn't...
My youngest son like Bioncles, but he does plenty of "real" Lego play thanks to his big brother's example.
Actually, I got my first Lego set when I was 3, which was 40 years ago this March. Yeow! I feel old.
I had that space set from 1979 and it totally rawked. So did the "expert" Lego that came out around that time or a little later. The product went through some less-than-great phases in the late 80s or 90s but I think it's still as vibrant and good as ever, with the option of choosing more "formulaic" play if that's what you want.
Well, wait... if they were advanced enough to have DC-8s 75 million years ago, it's reasonable to assume they would have managed to also invent DC-10s. QED
(Wow, that sounds like Scientology logic, at least if I threw in a bunch of meaningless terms).
Good luck getting stuff to run on Vista, even if you ever do get the machine in a usable state. It's not that Vista 64 isn't ready for prime-time, it's Vista, period, that's not ready for prime-time. There's a chance Windows 7 might be better, but frankly, who cares? XP works great for me, and by the time Windows 7 is coming around, I'll be using Linux full time (I do use it on my desktops, but my laptop had just too many driver issues with Ubuntu).
The status quo has a lot to gain by suppressing the idea that he has a lot of support because he's the only candidate that _doesn't_ represent some permutation of the status quo, which every other candidate not only supports but is heavily invested in. The whole corrupt, corporacratic (or "coprocratic?") edifice of the Republican and Democrat parties comes crashing down if the notion begins to percolate in Joe Twelvepack's head that there are real alternatives and that it isn't inevitable that our country will disintegrate under the twin anchors of the industrial-military complex and geometrically increasing entitlements.
I've had the same e-mail address for 15 years, since before the ISP in question even offered PPP access to the Web. They offer good spam filtering and have been very reliable so I've kept it even after moving off from dial-up to (eveutually) Verizon FIOS. I do get spammed a bit, but the filters they provide catch about 99.8% of the 400 or so spams I get a day.
Actually, I don't find this outrageous or obnoxious or anything. These things happen. It's like the U.S. Mail delivering a letter decades after it was posted. They handle billions of pieces a year. It's bound to happen eventually.
What I want to know is whether the BSOD problem was ever fixed in those 10 years?
1. Everyone hates Microsoft. People feel they deserve derision even when it's not their fault. 2. It's an easy target. Microsoft has the kind of track record that makes people expect them to screw up. 3. Complexity. Good code or not, Microsoft has so much code that there's bound to be a problem somewhere. 4. Because it's probably going to happen. Face it, It wouldn't be the first time that a bug has been unearthed after more than a decade in Microsoft code. They've shown an uncanny level of innovation when it comes to finding ways to screw up even the most simple things.
Kids, these days. They think all you need to do is divert 10's of millions of cycles to some bloated library that does all the work for you, and there's nothing wrong with your software requiring a hundred megabytes and a multi-gigahertz processor to do the same thing some of us were doing on an 80286 running at 10MHz or even a 6502 running at 2MHz with hundreds or even tens of kilobytes of RAM.
SimCity was a great accomplishment. I spent many an hour with the Amiga version back in the day.
From what I've heard OOo opens Word documents better than Word. If Word crashes when opening a document (a sure sign of the sheer evil of Microsoft, because incompetence does _not_ explain how this is possible in a product that has been around for nearly 20 years), I am told that OOo is likely to still be able to open it.
Not me. I use WordPad when I have a need for it and I like it.
It's got almost everything I would ever need in a word processor, and if I needed more I would use ReStructured Text because WYSIWYG word processing has become completely unmanageable and out of control (although OOo Write is light years ahead of Word in terms of me being able to make things look like I want without constant and seemingly random changes).
I appreciated and made good use of the fact that I could see the codes embedded in the text
I've never met a knowledgeable person who doesn't say this. It all boils down to the fact that you can't understand what Word is doing, and there's no real way to find out. It is typical of the contempt which Microsoft treats everyone... "We know better than you and don't you dare question our judgement." Come to think of it, it sounds like our government, too.
Agreed. "Word processing" is one of the biggest jokes foisted on computer users ever. For everyone but dedicated, experienced users it is a huge waste of time, whereas markup like LaTeX or something simpler like reStructed Text is instantly learnable and gives the same results for most uses. In my opinion, "word processing" was much more functional and usable 25 years ago.
Microsoft Word, aside from being a hideous monstrosity of an application I wouldn't wish on my enemies is like using an F-15 to drive to the grocery store for 95% of users and uses. Hard things are possible, if you have near-infinite patience, and easy things are possible, but also only if you have infinite patience. Microsoft could single-handedly improve the world's productivity by billions of man-hours a year by throwing out 90% of what Word does (and thus 90% of its complexity), calling it "Word Lite" and offering it as an alternative.
The biggest hindrance I found when I attempted to use Word was that it was constantly trying to correct things for me and was thus completely unpredictable. It's modal, which is totally insane in this day and age (I last used it in 2006), but there is no obvious way to realize this. The last time I tried to use Word, it crashed and lost my document (this was on the Max), even though I'd saved it. That something like this could happen in the 21st century is a testament to the evil Microsoft commits by being a monopoly, because in no way should something so horrible be possible. Microsoft hates users, and their hatred increases every year.
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Imagine what it was like to live through the era where in roughly one century we went from taking weeks to get a message across a country... to the point where you could talk to someone on the other side of the world using a device no bigger than your fist
You know, they've had telegraphs for about 150 years now.
Well said, Zanth. We can never be accused of acting inhumane if we are simply allowed to decide arbitrarily what is, and is not, human.
Sooner or later every religious person I've ever had a discussion with has shown a complete ineptitude for logical thought.
Then you are talking to idiots. Talk to me instead, or better yet, read the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm or any of the thousands of other totally brilliant, immensely logical people who were and are Christians (and there are many very intelligent and logical people of other religions as well). His Holiness, the Pope is another good example. So is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The problem with religion is that we tend to hear the most from the people who are least qualified to represent it. While we do hear from the Pope, we also hear way too much from the Jimmy Swaggerts and the Fred Phelps and plenty of other well-meaning*, but intellectually bankrupt people who do far more damage to, and in the name of, Christianity.
* Of course, I find it hard to believe that some of these people can rationalize their intense hatred with "well-meaning" but there is plenty of insanity to go around, and religious people do not have a monopoly on that, nor do non-religious people have a monopoly on knowledge and logic.
The Pope is basing his pronouncements based on 2000 years of Christian thought. He's not just positing an opinion. The problem is that everyone seems to think that everyone's opinion is equally valid, no matter how ignorant the person is, or how specious his opinion is. Yes, there are different ways of thinking, and yes, there are different kinds of belief, but that doesn't mean they are all valid. Some things are right and some things are wrong, and while we will disagree on what those things are, denying objective truth is the complete abandonment of intellectual integrity and leads to philosophical anarchy and the embracing of ignorance as a virtue.
The Pope needs no lessons in public speaking. He is saying exactly what he means.
I had to read that sentence three times before I realized you weren't referring to some word processor called "frex". I was thinking... "Maybe it stands for 'friendly regular expressions'" or something... I gotta Google that bad boy, I hope it's OSS."
I need to go outside or something.
More and more, I see SF as putting out the message "scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous, only the lone researcher who disagrees with the group knows what is actually going on, and the pitchfork/torch wielding crowd have the right idea on how to fix things."
That might have been true in 1950, but I think you're either only reading really old stuff or you consider stuff like "Independence Day" or "The Core" as state-of-the-art SF.
It seems everyone thinks it's no longer possible to run an election. I don't know how it managed to work for the last 200-some years in the U.S....
And yes, I do have a problem when our system needs so much work to account for people who are barely functional. The average voter isn't sufficiently educated, and when you get someone who can't even figure out how fill out a ballot, does voting even mean anything?
It's almost impossible to make an informed decision with access to all the resources in the world because there is little or no correlation between the candidates representation of themselves and what they actually intend to do if elected.
The system is bottoming out at the lowest common denominator.
Buy the Star Wars sets. They don't suffer from the "specialized" parts problem. My son has a bunch of them. He builds the "official" model once and then spends all his time building and customizing his own spaceships and stuff. The Star Wars sets are classic Lego in that regard and are everything to product should be. But much of what they sell as Lego really isn't...
My youngest son like Bioncles, but he does plenty of "real" Lego play thanks to his big brother's example.
Actually, I got my first Lego set when I was 3, which was 40 years ago this March. Yeow! I feel old.
I had that space set from 1979 and it totally rawked. So did the "expert" Lego that came out around that time or a little later. The product went through some less-than-great phases in the late 80s or 90s but I think it's still as vibrant and good as ever, with the option of choosing more "formulaic" play if that's what you want.
Perhaps, but it is also a badge of honor, I think.
Well, wait... if they were advanced enough to have DC-8s 75 million years ago, it's reasonable to assume they would have managed to also invent DC-10s. QED
(Wow, that sounds like Scientology logic, at least if I threw in a bunch of meaningless terms).
... there's no reason anyone would ever want to use it.
Everything else is irrelevant.
Good luck getting stuff to run on Vista, even if you ever do get the machine in a usable state. It's not that Vista 64 isn't ready for prime-time, it's Vista, period, that's not ready for prime-time. There's a chance Windows 7 might be better, but frankly, who cares? XP works great for me, and by the time Windows 7 is coming around, I'll be using Linux full time (I do use it on my desktops, but my laptop had just too many driver issues with Ubuntu).
Wow, you have no idea how economics works, must be a Democrat Presidential candidate.
That's OK, I didn't notice the mistake until it was pointed out.
As your penance, please sing the "Philosopher's Song" three times.
Go in peace.
Bring out... the Comfy Chair!
Fair enough. I should have mentioned those candidates too. In any event, they are being shoved to the side just as effectively.
The status quo has a lot to gain by suppressing the idea that he has a lot of support because he's the only candidate that _doesn't_ represent some permutation of the status quo, which every other candidate not only supports but is heavily invested in. The whole corrupt, corporacratic (or "coprocratic?") edifice of the Republican and Democrat parties comes crashing down if the notion begins to percolate in Joe Twelvepack's head that there are real alternatives and that it isn't inevitable that our country will disintegrate under the twin anchors of the industrial-military complex and geometrically increasing entitlements.
I've had the same e-mail address for 15 years, since before the ISP in question even offered PPP access to the Web. They offer good spam filtering and have been very reliable so I've kept it even after moving off from dial-up to (eveutually) Verizon FIOS. I do get spammed a bit, but the filters they provide catch about 99.8% of the 400 or so spams I get a day.
Actually, I don't find this outrageous or obnoxious or anything. These things happen. It's like the U.S. Mail delivering a letter decades after it was posted. They handle billions of pieces a year. It's bound to happen eventually.
What I want to know is whether the BSOD problem was ever fixed in those 10 years?
Choose your reason:
1. Everyone hates Microsoft. People feel they deserve derision even when it's not their fault.
2. It's an easy target. Microsoft has the kind of track record that makes people expect them to screw up.
3. Complexity. Good code or not, Microsoft has so much code that there's bound to be a problem somewhere.
4. Because it's probably going to happen. Face it, It wouldn't be the first time that a bug has been unearthed after more than a decade in Microsoft code. They've shown an uncanny level of innovation when it comes to finding ways to screw up even the most simple things.
Kids, these days. They think all you need to do is divert 10's of millions of cycles to some bloated library that does all the work for you, and there's nothing wrong with your software requiring a hundred megabytes and a multi-gigahertz processor to do the same thing some of us were doing on an 80286 running at 10MHz or even a 6502 running at 2MHz with hundreds or even tens of kilobytes of RAM.
SimCity was a great accomplishment. I spent many an hour with the Amiga version back in the day.
From what I've heard OOo opens Word documents better than Word. If Word crashes when opening a document (a sure sign of the sheer evil of Microsoft, because incompetence does _not_ explain how this is possible in a product that has been around for nearly 20 years), I am told that OOo is likely to still be able to open it.
Not me. I use WordPad when I have a need for it and I like it.
It's got almost everything I would ever need in a word processor, and if I needed more I would use ReStructured Text because WYSIWYG word processing has become completely unmanageable and out of control (although OOo Write is light years ahead of Word in terms of me being able to make things look like I want without constant and seemingly random changes).
I appreciated and made good use of the fact that I could see the codes embedded in the text
I've never met a knowledgeable person who doesn't say this. It all boils down to the fact that you can't understand what Word is doing, and there's no real way to find out. It is typical of the contempt which Microsoft treats everyone... "We know better than you and don't you dare question our judgement." Come to think of it, it sounds like our government, too.
Agreed. "Word processing" is one of the biggest jokes foisted on computer users ever. For everyone but dedicated, experienced users it is a huge waste of time, whereas markup like LaTeX or something simpler like reStructed Text is instantly learnable and gives the same results for most uses. In my opinion, "word processing" was much more functional and usable 25 years ago.
Microsoft Word, aside from being a hideous monstrosity of an application I wouldn't wish on my enemies is like using an F-15 to drive to the grocery store for 95% of users and uses. Hard things are possible, if you have near-infinite patience, and easy things are possible, but also only if you have infinite patience. Microsoft could single-handedly improve the world's productivity by billions of man-hours a year by throwing out 90% of what Word does (and thus 90% of its complexity), calling it "Word Lite" and offering it as an alternative.
The biggest hindrance I found when I attempted to use Word was that it was constantly trying to correct things for me and was thus completely unpredictable. It's modal, which is totally insane in this day and age (I last used it in 2006), but there is no obvious way to realize this. The last time I tried to use Word, it crashed and lost my document (this was on the Max), even though I'd saved it. That something like this could happen in the 21st century is a testament to the evil Microsoft commits by being a monopoly, because in no way should something so horrible be possible. Microsoft hates users, and their hatred increases every year.