You have a point, but, most political donations go towards communication, and most of that is in the form of television advertising, you know the worst form of political fear-mongering and outright lies. Lobbyists are another issue, but the problem with taking money out of campaigns is that you are effectively stifling speech.
The real problem is that this particular kind of speech is far more effective than it has any reason or right to be.
The information on candidates is out there. Albeit it's hard to sort through all the misinformation and outright lies, but that's what the press is supposed to do. Unfortunately, they have all but given up any pretense that they are impartial.
If commericals that go like "Candidate X eats kittens and wants to sell your children into slavery. Candidate Y once raised a puppy from the dead with just a smile and will cure cancer if elected. PaidForByTheCommitteeToElectCandidateY" weren't so gosh-darned effective, the situation wouldn't be such a problem.
But according to settled law, more than a century old, corporations are legally persons. A lot of people think a lot that's wrong with this country has resulted from that. I think they may be on to something.
The big difference, of course, is that one votes with ballots, the other with dollars.
Of course, Fox News controls the media. In fact, they control the world. Why do you think Obama has failed everything he's tried to do. It's because those insidious Fox News villains are secretly sabotaging all the President's vague^H^H^H^H^Hbrilliant platitudes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplans?
If you dig a bit, you will find plenty of papers showing that climate change in the past century correlates more closely to astronomical phenomena (sunspots, cosmic radiance, tidal forces) than it does to CO2 levels? If temperature increases correlate so strongly to CO2 levels then why was the increase so much slower from 1940 to 1970, than it was from 1970 to 2000, and why has it been so much slower in the last decade than predicted by every single model promulgated by the IPCC AR4?
Or this, from NASA itself, which shows the decrease in sunspot activity which correlates to the current decrease in temperatures in the past decade or so.
Yes, CO2 can and does affect the climate, but so do many other things, especially some things that aren't well understood yet. And that's not even considering whether we humans are significantly contributing to the problem or more importantly, whether we can do anything about it.
Now, correlation does not imply causation, but the current models always seem to fail to predict what's actually happening, or "retro-predict" was has already occurred.
The AC probably does know what a fact is. He probably, however, does not realize that in the case of AGW, the facts are not known. Not only are the facts not known, but all the models are proving to be wrong. The 23 models promulgated in IPCC's AR4 have all been shown to have overestimated the prediction of temperature changes (i.e., increases) in the last several years. Every single one of them. Now of course, if you have 23 models predicting something, some of them are going to be wrong, and some will be more accurate or less, but given that every single one is wrong in the direction that politically and financially benefits the global warming crowd, it strikes me as particularly far-fetched that this is a coincidence.
The facts, as they are, have yet to be elucidated.
These things take thousands of years. Climate change is occurring over the span of less than a hundred.
Tell that to the Medieval Warming Period, or the Little Ice Age, or "the year without a summer" in 1815. There are many things, natural things, that can and have affected the climate much more rapidly than thousands of years.
I use the launch bar, or Windows 7's alternative of pinning icons to the taskbar and the Start Menu most of the time. The rest of the time I launch programs from the command-line. I can't comment on Windows 8 because I haven't seen it or used it, but XP Start Menu (if you organize it intelligently) and the LaunchBar/pinned icons works great for me.
Also less use of the mouse is always better for efficiency. Mouses are very useful, and sometimes absolutely necessary for a task, but using the mouse is always slower than using the keyboard for anyone with any typing skill.
The sad thing is that it's been obvious for many years that Microsoft has failed to make inroads in non-PCs (not counting X-Box) because of its insistence that trying to make Windows a huge monolith that supports every device from the smallest phone to the largest server.
It seems that rather than following Apple's very successful lead in creating iOS, MS is doubling-down on this strategy with Windows 8 and trying to make Windows even more monolithic. I think they are making a big mistake even worse, but then again, I'm not the most powerful and richest software company in the world, so my opinion might not be so good.
I disagree. NT 3.51 was rock solid. In my experience, the most stable OS Microsoft ever made. So was NT 4.0 as long as you avoided the even-numbered service packs. At the time, I expected to Windows 2000 to be a complete mess, but aside from Explorer being ridiculously crashy (it would sometimes crash on me with an hour of installing 2000 from scratch), 2000 was also quite solid. XP had its issues, but it was much more compatible with older software, and pre-SP3 security wasn't a problem for a knowledgeable and careful user. The eye-bleedingly ugly UI theme could quickly be turned off. Explorer was less horrible too. I never had any interest in Vista, but I had it foisted upon me when I bought a new computer. Vista just pissed me off so much and in so many ways I actually bought an XP license just to get away from it. It's default theme was also hideously ugly, too and its performance was a big step down in most ways.
Windows 7 has a lot of things that annoy me, but nothing major. Explorer still sucks on toast, but at least it rarely crashes. I don't hate it and it doesn't prevent me from doing what I want, how I want to do it. On the other hand, there really isn't anything about it I prefer to XP except for maybe a few really minor UI improvements, and the usual "support for newer hardware" that was almost always by far the most useful reason to upgrade Windows.
I always thought the Start Menu was a pretty good idea, although there were lots of ways it could have been made better. I found Windows 7's Start Panel to be a confusing and unpredictable mess. Just like Apple's iTunes software, it's only helpful if you are the kind of person who cannot or does not want to organize things yourself. It will do it for you, but you have to like the way it's done.
So Windows is starting to catch up to where Linux was 10+ years ago. Good for them.
Yeah, I'm being obnoxious, but there were better file managers on Linux many years ago than Explorer is now or ever will be, and the lack basic functionality like burning and mounting ISO images, scp and other basic command-line functionality have always been weak points in Windows.
Of course these problems are generally fixed with quick additions of any of the many simple and good third-party solutions, but the truth is that Windows out of the box gives you very little useful functionality until you start installing applications.
And I don't buy that bundling apps will lead to anti-trust issues. First off, Microsoft's anti-trust activities had mostly been implemented and successful before IE ever existed. Second, bundling IE with Windows really wasn't a problem regardless of what anyone ever said, it was MS strong-arming OEMs to prevent them from providing alternatives, as well as their general willingness to do everything possible to disrupt standards and make life difficult for competitors to their own applications. Third, IE beat Netscape because at the time (mid to late 90s) it was simply _better_. I'm no MS apologist and haven't regularly used IE since Firefox was Phoenix 0.5, but I was happy to switch to IE at version 3, and thought version 4 offered a lot of good stuff too.
I'm very curious to see how Windows 8 will go over in the market place. I think MS has been on the inexorable road to complete irrelevance for years and it would take something bold for them to halt their decline. Windows 8 sounds like a bad idea to me, but I'll give MS credit for being bold. However, Windows as we have known it is not long for this world, and good riddance.
I know the whole Windows vs Linux argument inside and out, and I use both at work and home, although 95% of the reason I still use Windows on my own hardware is because of games) but as far as I'm concerned, MS has never and will never provide an OS that gives me as much value as I can get from installing even the most minimal Linux distro. Windows will be around with us for many, many years, and Linux will probably never overtake it on the desktop, but of course, the desktop as we know it probably won't exist in 10 years.
If you described to someone in the year 2000 about the preponderance of operating systems like iOS and Android, they would have a hard time believing you, but today it's old news. I'm happy to see Microsoft continue as a member of the group of companies in true competition, because despite their pathetic and evil leadership, MS has a tremendous amount of talent working for them. But I'm glad to see the days of the MS monopoly coming to a close because they have been nothing but a boat-anchor on true innovation for too many years.
OK, that is a very good question, and deserves a detailed answer. I haven't had time to get around it, but I will try to.
In short though, I think it's fair to say that it's obvious that Jesus Himself established a separate priesthood with His Apostles and specifically conferred unto them particular authority as leaders of the Church He founded over its members (i.e., the rest of us). It can be demonstrated through Scripture (and Tradition) that it was His intention that this priesthood is an integral and necessary part of the Church (as it had always been throughout Jewish history), especially because He singled out one person in particular, St. Peter, the be the head of this new Church. As the highest of the High Priests, Jesus Himself was merely passing along this role and the authority and duties to His Apostles, who in fact work "in persona Christi" ("in the person of Christ"), i.e., their authority derived not from any merit on their own but through the Holy Orders established and passed down from Christ. An obvious defense of this is that if anyone is entitled to interpret Scripture and decide Church doctrine, which is how most Protestants see it, then you end up with 40,000 denominations that disagree on everything its possible to disagree about beyond the simple "Jesus, the Son of God, died for our sins." So given a choice, would Christ have intended a single earthly authority to represent Him and His Law, or complete anarchy? And of course, since all men are flawed and sinful, Jesus knew it was necessary to remain with them through His Spirit to keep the whole thing from running off the rails the moment He ascended back to Heaven.
I will try to follow this up in detail over the next day or two.
No, it's like saying I can look at the mess that is the U.S. Federal government in 2012 and say, I believe in the principles upon which this nation was founded, and am hopeful that it will return to them.
But I'll give you a Godwin honorable mention point for playing the "KKK" card.
Slashdot Mirror
Or just get Jeff Goldblum to fix it all by making a computer virus using his Mac.
They probably won't. But I've never seen a 20-foot tall ostrich.
You have a point, but, most political donations go towards communication, and most of that is in the form of television advertising, you know the worst form of political fear-mongering and outright lies. Lobbyists are another issue, but the problem with taking money out of campaigns is that you are effectively stifling speech.
The real problem is that this particular kind of speech is far more effective than it has any reason or right to be.
The information on candidates is out there. Albeit it's hard to sort through all the misinformation and outright lies, but that's what the press is supposed to do. Unfortunately, they have all but given up any pretense that they are impartial.
If commericals that go like "Candidate X eats kittens and wants to sell your children into slavery. Candidate Y once raised a puppy from the dead with just a smile and will cure cancer if elected. PaidForByTheCommitteeToElectCandidateY" weren't so gosh-darned effective, the situation wouldn't be such a problem.
But according to settled law, more than a century old, corporations are legally persons. A lot of people think a lot that's wrong with this country has resulted from that. I think they may be on to something.
The big difference, of course, is that one votes with ballots, the other with dollars.
The are enough brainwashed hipsters that more than one organization can leverage them... Apple, the DNC, Starbucks, global communism....
Of course, Fox News controls the media. In fact, they control the world. Why do you think Obama has failed everything he's tried to do. It's because those insidious Fox News villains are secretly sabotaging all the President's vague^H^H^H^H^Hbrilliant platitudes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplans?
If you dig a bit, you will find plenty of papers showing that climate change in the past century correlates more closely to astronomical phenomena (sunspots, cosmic radiance, tidal forces) than it does to CO2 levels? If temperature increases correlate so strongly to CO2 levels then why was the increase so much slower from 1940 to 1970, than it was from 1970 to 2000, and why has it been so much slower in the last decade than predicted by every single model promulgated by the IPCC AR4?
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/US_Temperatures_and_Climate_Factors_since_1895.pdf
http://www.duke.edu/~renato/RamosdaSilvaandAvissarGRL2005.pdf
Or this, from NASA itself, which shows the decrease in sunspot activity which correlates to the current decrease in temperatures in the past decade or so.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
Yes, CO2 can and does affect the climate, but so do many other things, especially some things that aren't well understood yet. And that's not even considering whether we humans are significantly contributing to the problem or more importantly, whether we can do anything about it.
Now, correlation does not imply causation, but the current models always seem to fail to predict what's actually happening, or "retro-predict" was has already occurred.
The AC probably does know what a fact is. He probably, however, does not realize that in the case of AGW, the facts are not known. Not only are the facts not known, but all the models are proving to be wrong. The 23 models promulgated in IPCC's AR4 have all been shown to have overestimated the prediction of temperature changes (i.e., increases) in the last several years. Every single one of them. Now of course, if you have 23 models predicting something, some of them are going to be wrong, and some will be more accurate or less, but given that every single one is wrong in the direction that politically and financially benefits the global warming crowd, it strikes me as particularly far-fetched that this is a coincidence.
The facts, as they are, have yet to be elucidated.
These things take thousands of years. Climate change is occurring over the span of less than a hundred.
Tell that to the Medieval Warming Period, or the Little Ice Age, or "the year without a summer" in 1815. There are many things, natural things, that can and have affected the climate much more rapidly than thousands of years.
But why not? It didn't happen. It never happened. Gee, could there actually be a reason other than blind luck?
Yeah, but you had to pay for it. Of course, the Business edition could "upgrade" to XP for free, exactly the users who wouldn't need to be able to.
Vista was a big turd, which is fine. Having it foisted on machines that weren't capable of running it was just evil.
Xenix is still good.
Because there's no compelling reason to upgrade a machine running XP, and a lot of reasons to avoid it.
You mean I no longer restart Windows with the non-intuitive and practically non-sensical series of "Start", "Shutdown", ...
I use the launch bar, or Windows 7's alternative of pinning icons to the taskbar and the Start Menu most of the time. The rest of the time I launch programs from the command-line. I can't comment on Windows 8 because I haven't seen it or used it, but XP Start Menu (if you organize it intelligently) and the LaunchBar/pinned icons works great for me.
Also less use of the mouse is always better for efficiency. Mouses are very useful, and sometimes absolutely necessary for a task, but using the mouse is always slower than using the keyboard for anyone with any typing skill.
The sad thing is that it's been obvious for many years that Microsoft has failed to make inroads in non-PCs (not counting X-Box) because of its insistence that trying to make Windows a huge monolith that supports every device from the smallest phone to the largest server.
It seems that rather than following Apple's very successful lead in creating iOS, MS is doubling-down on this strategy with Windows 8 and trying to make Windows even more monolithic. I think they are making a big mistake even worse, but then again, I'm not the most powerful and richest software company in the world, so my opinion might not be so good.
I disagree. NT 3.51 was rock solid. In my experience, the most stable OS Microsoft ever made. So was NT 4.0 as long as you avoided the even-numbered service packs. At the time, I expected to Windows 2000 to be a complete mess, but aside from Explorer being ridiculously crashy (it would sometimes crash on me with an hour of installing 2000 from scratch), 2000 was also quite solid. XP had its issues, but it was much more compatible with older software, and pre-SP3 security wasn't a problem for a knowledgeable and careful user. The eye-bleedingly ugly UI theme could quickly be turned off. Explorer was less horrible too. I never had any interest in Vista, but I had it foisted upon me when I bought a new computer. Vista just pissed me off so much and in so many ways I actually bought an XP license just to get away from it. It's default theme was also hideously ugly, too and its performance was a big step down in most ways.
Windows 7 has a lot of things that annoy me, but nothing major. Explorer still sucks on toast, but at least it rarely crashes. I don't hate it and it doesn't prevent me from doing what I want, how I want to do it. On the other hand, there really isn't anything about it I prefer to XP except for maybe a few really minor UI improvements, and the usual "support for newer hardware" that was almost always by far the most useful reason to upgrade Windows.
Classic Shell is an absolute must for Windows 7.
I always thought the Start Menu was a pretty good idea, although there were lots of ways it could have been made better. I found Windows 7's Start Panel to be a confusing and unpredictable mess. Just like Apple's iTunes software, it's only helpful if you are the kind of person who cannot or does not want to organize things yourself. It will do it for you, but you have to like the way it's done.
So Windows is starting to catch up to where Linux was 10+ years ago. Good for them.
Yeah, I'm being obnoxious, but there were better file managers on Linux many years ago than Explorer is now or ever will be, and the lack basic functionality like burning and mounting ISO images, scp and other basic command-line functionality have always been weak points in Windows.
Of course these problems are generally fixed with quick additions of any of the many simple and good third-party solutions, but the truth is that Windows out of the box gives you very little useful functionality until you start installing applications.
And I don't buy that bundling apps will lead to anti-trust issues. First off, Microsoft's anti-trust activities had mostly been implemented and successful before IE ever existed. Second, bundling IE with Windows really wasn't a problem regardless of what anyone ever said, it was MS strong-arming OEMs to prevent them from providing alternatives, as well as their general willingness to do everything possible to disrupt standards and make life difficult for competitors to their own applications. Third, IE beat Netscape because at the time (mid to late 90s) it was simply _better_. I'm no MS apologist and haven't regularly used IE since Firefox was Phoenix 0.5, but I was happy to switch to IE at version 3, and thought version 4 offered a lot of good stuff too.
I'm very curious to see how Windows 8 will go over in the market place. I think MS has been on the inexorable road to complete irrelevance for years and it would take something bold for them to halt their decline. Windows 8 sounds like a bad idea to me, but I'll give MS credit for being bold. However, Windows as we have known it is not long for this world, and good riddance.
I know the whole Windows vs Linux argument inside and out, and I use both at work and home, although 95% of the reason I still use Windows on my own hardware is because of games) but as far as I'm concerned, MS has never and will never provide an OS that gives me as much value as I can get from installing even the most minimal Linux distro. Windows will be around with us for many, many years, and Linux will probably never overtake it on the desktop, but of course, the desktop as we know it probably won't exist in 10 years.
If you described to someone in the year 2000 about the preponderance of operating systems like iOS and Android, they would have a hard time believing you, but today it's old news. I'm happy to see Microsoft continue as a member of the group of companies in true competition, because despite their pathetic and evil leadership, MS has a tremendous amount of talent working for them. But I'm glad to see the days of the MS monopoly coming to a close because they have been nothing but a boat-anchor on true innovation for too many years.
Well, if you're going be pedantic, Vista was Windows 6.0 and "Windows 7" is really Windows 6.1.
That's why they have a platinum-iridium VW Bug locked in a vault filled with helium in Paris.
OK, that is a very good question, and deserves a detailed answer. I haven't had time to get around it, but I will try to.
In short though, I think it's fair to say that it's obvious that Jesus Himself established a separate priesthood with His Apostles and specifically conferred unto them particular authority as leaders of the Church He founded over its members (i.e., the rest of us). It can be demonstrated through Scripture (and Tradition) that it was His intention that this priesthood is an integral and necessary part of the Church (as it had always been throughout Jewish history), especially because He singled out one person in particular, St. Peter, the be the head of this new Church. As the highest of the High Priests, Jesus Himself was merely passing along this role and the authority and duties to His Apostles, who in fact work "in persona Christi" ("in the person of Christ"), i.e., their authority derived not from any merit on their own but through the Holy Orders established and passed down from Christ. An obvious defense of this is that if anyone is entitled to interpret Scripture and decide Church doctrine, which is how most Protestants see it, then you end up with 40,000 denominations that disagree on everything its possible to disagree about beyond the simple "Jesus, the Son of God, died for our sins." So given a choice, would Christ have intended a single earthly authority to represent Him and His Law, or complete anarchy? And of course, since all men are flawed and sinful, Jesus knew it was necessary to remain with them through His Spirit to keep the whole thing from running off the rails the moment He ascended back to Heaven.
I will try to follow this up in detail over the next day or two.
You're not good at the whole symbolism thing, are you?
No, it's like saying I can look at the mess that is the U.S. Federal government in 2012 and say, I believe in the principles upon which this nation was founded, and am hopeful that it will return to them.
But I'll give you a Godwin honorable mention point for playing the "KKK" card.
This sad stereotype of history is easily debunked and isn't even worth the effort for someone ignorant enough to believe it uncritically, i.e., you.
Come back when you have something worth refuting.