Lots of systems, including Xerox had things that were functionally identical to pull-down menus and graphically very similar. Furthermore, the idea of putting a menu bar at the top of the screen existed in several non-Apple software products. So, what you call "pull down menus" was a minor graphical variation on existing practice at the time.
It also ended up not catching on. Most systems ended up with menu buttons at the top of windows, not the screen. Even NeXT went back to copying Smalltalk's menu system for a while. On current Macs, the menu bar at the top is a usability problem and an anachronism.
Well, look at it this way: if that God exists exactly as you perceive him to be portrayed, what happens to you if you're one of the people who down-plays his might/existence?
In that case, Gnosticism has a better explanation, identifying God with the demiurge.
Even Christianity tells you that man knows right from wrong, so no matter what religious figures or holy texts say you, ultimately you should follow your own moral compass. If that conflicts with doctrine, it's likely doctrine that's wrong, even according to Christianity itself.
Christian churches vastly overreport their membership. A very large number of Christians neither knows, nor agrees with, official Christian dogma and beliefs. Many are nothing but "cultural Christians".
"I have just been informed that Sam's Club is pulling 'The Brick Bible' from the shelves of all of their retail locations nationwide due to the complaints of a handful of people that it is vulgar and violent,"
That probably has something to do with the fact that the Bible itself is vulgar and violent: it contains human sacrifice, genocide, infidelity, and incest, much of it actually approved by God!
But for all intents and purposes, it makes no difference whatsoever whether we are 95%, 90% or 80% sure that we are fucking up the climate. The odds suck, regardless.
Running a statistical test and get an "80% confidence level" does not mean that we are "80% sure" or that there is an "80% probability". That only applies if you design the entire experiment ahead of time, know the distributions involved, change nothing about the data analysis after you have obtained the data, and did all the proper controls. None of those apply to the climate data. Just the fact that people have tried hundreds of different ways of preprocessing the data before selecting one that gave them a test result they liked makes any test that yields less than 99.9% confidence meaningless (and even if you could get that level, it would likely still not be all that convincing).
Furthermore, it's a stretch to go from "we are causing earth to get warmer" to "we are fucking up the climate". Personally, I think there's a good argument to be made that warming is good and that we want more of it, despite some obvious short-term drawbacks.
Shortly thereafter, Xerox doomed its chances to own the icon-driven future by pouring its resources into the Xerox Star, a product aimed strictly at the corporate market. Each Star purchase required an initial $75,000 installation and a network of external file servers, plus another $16,000 for each additional workstation (twice the price of a new car at the time). A digital revolution for the masses, it wasn’t.
No, Xerox didn't "doom the future", they just started with an expensive first product and then were driving the cost down. Apple saw this and started cloning it. Their first attempt also cost about $10000 per workstation. Then Apple cut a lot of corners and drove the price down further to about $2500 (about $5000 in today's dollars). Corner cutting involved getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell, a shell that looked nice but was hell to program.
Of course, power plants based on "renewable energies" consumes other resources. But those other resources (including water) can be obtained with energy that the plant produces. The idea is to have excess energy and sustainable output overall.
Also, unless you think that technology is just going to stop dead in its tracks, we don't need eternally sustainable solutions, just solutions that work for the next decades or centuries. The history of humanity and progress has always been driven by unsustainable practices. Europe became big and powerful by turning its oil, minerals, and forests into technology, innovation, and conquest, and the same is happening on a global scale.
You have choices even under a monopoly or a centrally planned economy. There's a whole branch of economics concerned with maximizing profits for monopolies by deciding what choices to offer at what price.
As long as switching carriers requires paying hundreds of dollars for a new phone, the mobile phone market is not efficient. And prices in the US are much higher than elsewhere, also a clear indication that the US mobile market is not efficient.
It's easier to deal with things when the change is slow - there's no rush then, and migrations are gradual rather than spontaneous. [...] It's not just the projected magnitude of the change that's worrying, it's the speed at which it is happening.
Where are the facts showing that the speed of global warming is problematic? The IPCC "worst case scenario" projects 4C warming over a century and a sea level rise of 60cm. That seems pretty gradual. Let's look at what Greenpeace has to say: http://tinyurl.com/3hsj69p Adaptation to a 1m sea level rise would cost the US $156 billion over a century; peanuts really, and that's the global worst case. Greenpeace correctly points out that some island nations would get submerged, 17% of Bangladesh would get flooded, some ground water would become undrinkable, and crops would fail in some places, but over the span of a century, but those changes are small compared to the kind of environmental changes humans have caused and experienced for other reasons anyway.
The actual problem, if you can call it that, is that given population pressures, people will always settle in marginal habitats, and they will always have to migrate sooner or later. This only becomes a problem if you prevent their migration and if there is no place for them to move to. Both of those are issues unrelated to global warming (if anything, global warming likely creates more habitable land than it destroys).
By refusing to accept facts and take responsibility for the situation we have created, millions will be forced from their homes around the world, people will die from starvation and floods, species will become extinct, etc. etc.. How can we in good conscience stand by and be civil about it as others spread lies and misinformation for their own personal gain?
Yes, global warming is happening. But nobody has convinced me that it is a bad thing, however. Human civilization has coped with far bigger climate change than even the worst case scenarios projected by the IPCC. Large parts of the Mediterranean have turned to desert, for example, yet we don't exactly think of Italy as a disaster area. People cope with climate change through migration and adaptation, and they cope with it well. We've never really had a stable climate, and it's foolish to think that we can engineer one.
Furthermore, historically, humans have coped with warming much better than with cooling; even a slight drop in temperatures is a major disaster. And even if we could reduce CO2 emissions, the costs are staggering, since most of our economy is energy limited. Food production itself is energy intensive and produces a lot of CO2. If you cut CO2 emissions in half, you put a serious dent into the world economy for the foreseeable future, and that will "force millions from their homes and people will die from starvation".
All this handwringing over climate change seems like middle class angst to me. It's an attempt to control the uncontrollable, a longing for a stability that has never existed and will never exist.
On the one side there is a body of evidence supporting the theory that doubles every time you look at it, on the other there is... what exactly?
The evidence is only for the fact that human CO2 emissions have caused an increase in average temperatures. There were legitimate questions about that point until a few years ago because the statistical work was shoddy. That's been settled now. But more evidence on that point doesn't strengthen the overall policy arguments for counteracting climate change. Just because humans have caused the climate to get warmer through CO2 emissions does not mean that we necessarily need to do anything about it, or that it would even be beneficial to do something about it.
How long can most of us talk about evolution with a creationist before we start to show how exasperating the whole argument is?
Although scientists are nearly universally convinced that evolution explains the origin of species, the details of the process are still poorly understood. But we don't need to understand the details in order to know that creationism is wrong. For action global warming, on the other hand, the details matter a great deal in determining whether we can and should act. Depending on the details, reducing CO2 emissions may be effective or ineffective, vital, useless, or even harmful.
There is no "other side" to the climate debate. There is a widely accepted set of facts,
There is a narrow set of facts most people agree on: it's getting warmer, the CO2 concentrations have increased significantly due to human activity, and the two observations are probably linked.
Large-scale glaciers calving off into icebergs.
The recent huge calving is likely unrelated to global warming. But let's say that it is, let's say all the glaciers in the world melt and the polar ice caps recede as well, and the oceans rise by 1m over the next century, as they will under the IPCC's worst case scenario predictions.
So what? Who cares? What's the alternative? How are you going to prevent it? Is prevention cost effective? There is no widespread agreement on those questions at all.
This is the best thing that the iPhone has done for the cell phone industry. Apple doesn't bow down and let the carrier load whatever crap they want to on the phone.
Apple doesn't rely on the carriers screwing you, Apple just screws you themselves!
This makes the iPhone a much better experience, because an iPhone from Verizon is exactly the same as an iPhone from AT&T
True, in the US, the iPhone is a little better that way than other phones, but that's a quirk of the US market. In much of the rest of the world, most phones work on most carriers, and the iPhone is a lot more restrictive (not to mention expensive) than other phones.
They let the market sort it out. I might not have been the best approach from a technical point of view, but from a capitalistic point of view it was fine.
No, it wasn't "fine" from a free market point of view either. In order to have an efficient market, people need to be able to make choices.
Expecting the government to make educated decisions when it comes to technology is unrealistic.
The government didn't have to guess, it could simply have forced companies to pick a common standard. Furthermore, given how far behind the US is with deploying these technologies, all they needed to do is to look what worked elsewhere.
Generally, this kind of government intervention is undesirable. But for mobile phones, the existing system clearly is not working well.
I think you don't quite understand what the Fermi paradox is about. There may be lots of intelligent, sub-glacial pond scum, but that's not what the Fermi paradox isn't concerned with their existence.
The Fermi paradox is essentially: why can't we detect a single civilization like ours: oxygen atmosphere, technology use, energy use, the whole bit? Given that it took less than a billion years to go from nothing to humanity, that there are lots of stars like ours, lots of planets, and organic chemistry provides ready-made building blocks everywhere, you would expect that there are lots of civilizations like ours, many of them millions or potentially billions of years old. They should be visible with today's technology. Heck, they should be in the solar system. Is there some reason there aren't? Do they all self-destruct within a few thousand years?
There are long lists of possible answers to that question, some of them even plausible. But it's still a mystery, and guessing plausible answers is not the same as knowing the right answer.
a) absense of evidence is not evidence of absense b) given that even a hundred years ago, radio communication
The Fermi paradox isn't saying "there are no aliens", it is asking "why aren't we seeing aliens in any form?"
Your explanation is "because they are using communications technologies we can't detect". But that doesn't address the paradox. The paradox asks: (1) why aren't they physically here and (2) why don't we detect their activity?
Communicating with them is sufficient for detecting aliens, but not necessary.
The Fermi paradox asks why people aren't just wandering into his dome. Sooner or later, surely someone is going to walk in off the outside street, right? Or at least knock on the door. Heck, even a scientist from the 1800's could conclude that the dome is an artificial structure surrounding him. He'd be able to detect trucks and subways going by outside, hear jets overhead, etc. All weird, inexplicable phenomena that clearly aren't natural. We've seen nothing like that out in the universe so far.
Second, an 18th century physicist didn't have a good idea about what physics was like because there had been very few experiments. In the 21st century, we have done tons of experiments, and if there is some other long-range communications medium, we must have missed something really fundamental.
Third, telescopes are getting good enough that we already should be seeing major civilizations, regardless of whether they are trying to communicate or not. In another decade, we should be able to see civilizations like ours within our galactic neighborhood.
We have neither the technology or energy resources to do what you want. Ever.
Launching a large, self-sustaining inflatable habitat takes a few launches using existing technologies and rockets. There's no technology or energy needed beyond that. Once launched, traveling anywhere in the solar system (and beyond) takes essentially no energy if you go slowly, and there is no reason to go fast.
And when the oil starts getting more and more expensive, what will power your precious rockets?
Once launched, what would you need rockets for?
And you seriously believe humanity is going to run out of energy? Just on earth, we have coal, gas, Uranium, Thorium for fission, and Deuterium for fusion. In addition, we have huge amounts of solar, wind, wave, and geothermal energy.
I never said any of that. You're really grasping at straws.
You hadn't said anything technical at all, so it was hard to respond to your objections and identify your misconception.
We've made some progress: you believe that there is an energy shortage looming and you believe that space colonization requires continuous use of rockets. Both of those notions are erroneous. Any more bad ideas we can dispel?
Get some perspective on humanity and biology and get out of your Buck Rogers and Christian mindset: the Earth wasn't created 6000 years ago, and the apocalypse and end time aren't near. Intelligent life on this planet has many millions of years ahead. People will settle in space not for short term economic reasons (which is what the Economist and Savage debate), but simply because they can and they get bored here.
There were no humans even a million years ago, what makes you think anything resembling humans will be here in a million years?
I expect humans on earth to be very much like they always used to look; we are well adapted to our planet, and barring disaster, successful species stick around for millions of years.
Humans moving out into space will quickly evolve into something physically quite different from us.
Your lack of understanding of the true scale of what you are talking about is obvious. Go back to drooling over sci-fi and Space Age posters.
Get real! Your mind has been warped by Star Trek. There aren't going to be any sleek spacecraft, and planetary settlements are hard.
There are, however, going to be is lots of inflatable structures tethered to comets, first in near-earth orbits, later going out further and further. We have the inflatable structures, we have traveled to comets, and we can set up self-sustaining biospheres. And comets contain vast quantities of water and organic molecules.
The biggest obstacle right now is that humans don't do well in zero G; biotech or genetic engineering will likely fix that within a few decades.
The "inalienable right to health care" also is an "inalienable right to someone else's property", so there is ample precedent.
(Note that I think that basic health care should actually be provided to everybody, but that's cheap. The "right to health care" in US and European politics means universal access to expensive, state-of-the-art first world treatments, which is something entirely different.)
Because given what we already know about physics and the universe, the distances are not a problem. All you need is the ability to colonize objects like asteroids and comets, and even humans are close to that. Time, reproduction, and galactic rotation will do the rest. It takes maybe a few hundred million years to spread across the galaxy.
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Lots of systems, including Xerox had things that were functionally identical to pull-down menus and graphically very similar. Furthermore, the idea of putting a menu bar at the top of the screen existed in several non-Apple software products. So, what you call "pull down menus" was a minor graphical variation on existing practice at the time.
It also ended up not catching on. Most systems ended up with menu buttons at the top of windows, not the screen. Even NeXT went back to copying Smalltalk's menu system for a while. On current Macs, the menu bar at the top is a usability problem and an anachronism.
In that case, Gnosticism has a better explanation, identifying God with the demiurge.
Even Christianity tells you that man knows right from wrong, so no matter what religious figures or holy texts say you, ultimately you should follow your own moral compass. If that conflicts with doctrine, it's likely doctrine that's wrong, even according to Christianity itself.
Christian churches vastly overreport their membership. A very large number of Christians neither knows, nor agrees with, official Christian dogma and beliefs. Many are nothing but "cultural Christians".
That probably has something to do with the fact that the Bible itself is vulgar and violent: it contains human sacrifice, genocide, infidelity, and incest, much of it actually approved by God!
Running a statistical test and get an "80% confidence level" does not mean that we are "80% sure" or that there is an "80% probability". That only applies if you design the entire experiment ahead of time, know the distributions involved, change nothing about the data analysis after you have obtained the data, and did all the proper controls. None of those apply to the climate data. Just the fact that people have tried hundreds of different ways of preprocessing the data before selecting one that gave them a test result they liked makes any test that yields less than 99.9% confidence meaningless (and even if you could get that level, it would likely still not be all that convincing).
Furthermore, it's a stretch to go from "we are causing earth to get warmer" to "we are fucking up the climate". Personally, I think there's a good argument to be made that warming is good and that we want more of it, despite some obvious short-term drawbacks.
No, Xerox didn't "doom the future", they just started with an expensive first product and then were driving the cost down. Apple saw this and started cloning it. Their first attempt also cost about $10000 per workstation. Then Apple cut a lot of corners and drove the price down further to about $2500 (about $5000 in today's dollars). Corner cutting involved getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell, a shell that looked nice but was hell to program.
Of course, power plants based on "renewable energies" consumes other resources. But those other resources (including water) can be obtained with energy that the plant produces. The idea is to have excess energy and sustainable output overall.
Also, unless you think that technology is just going to stop dead in its tracks, we don't need eternally sustainable solutions, just solutions that work for the next decades or centuries. The history of humanity and progress has always been driven by unsustainable practices. Europe became big and powerful by turning its oil, minerals, and forests into technology, innovation, and conquest, and the same is happening on a global scale.
You have choices even under a monopoly or a centrally planned economy. There's a whole branch of economics concerned with maximizing profits for monopolies by deciding what choices to offer at what price.
As long as switching carriers requires paying hundreds of dollars for a new phone, the mobile phone market is not efficient. And prices in the US are much higher than elsewhere, also a clear indication that the US mobile market is not efficient.
Where are the facts showing that the speed of global warming is problematic? The IPCC "worst case scenario" projects 4C warming over a century and a sea level rise of 60cm. That seems pretty gradual. Let's look at what Greenpeace has to say: http://tinyurl.com/3hsj69p Adaptation to a 1m sea level rise would cost the US $156 billion over a century; peanuts really, and that's the global worst case. Greenpeace correctly points out that some island nations would get submerged, 17% of Bangladesh would get flooded, some ground water would become undrinkable, and crops would fail in some places, but over the span of a century, but those changes are small compared to the kind of environmental changes humans have caused and experienced for other reasons anyway.
The actual problem, if you can call it that, is that given population pressures, people will always settle in marginal habitats, and they will always have to migrate sooner or later. This only becomes a problem if you prevent their migration and if there is no place for them to move to. Both of those are issues unrelated to global warming (if anything, global warming likely creates more habitable land than it destroys).
Yes, global warming is happening. But nobody has convinced me that it is a bad thing, however. Human civilization has coped with far bigger climate change than even the worst case scenarios projected by the IPCC. Large parts of the Mediterranean have turned to desert, for example, yet we don't exactly think of Italy as a disaster area. People cope with climate change through migration and adaptation, and they cope with it well. We've never really had a stable climate, and it's foolish to think that we can engineer one.
Furthermore, historically, humans have coped with warming much better than with cooling; even a slight drop in temperatures is a major disaster. And even if we could reduce CO2 emissions, the costs are staggering, since most of our economy is energy limited. Food production itself is energy intensive and produces a lot of CO2. If you cut CO2 emissions in half, you put a serious dent into the world economy for the foreseeable future, and that will "force millions from their homes and people will die from starvation".
All this handwringing over climate change seems like middle class angst to me. It's an attempt to control the uncontrollable, a longing for a stability that has never existed and will never exist.
The evidence is only for the fact that human CO2 emissions have caused an increase in average temperatures. There were legitimate questions about that point until a few years ago because the statistical work was shoddy. That's been settled now. But more evidence on that point doesn't strengthen the overall policy arguments for counteracting climate change. Just because humans have caused the climate to get warmer through CO2 emissions does not mean that we necessarily need to do anything about it, or that it would even be beneficial to do something about it.
Although scientists are nearly universally convinced that evolution explains the origin of species, the details of the process are still poorly understood. But we don't need to understand the details in order to know that creationism is wrong. For action global warming, on the other hand, the details matter a great deal in determining whether we can and should act. Depending on the details, reducing CO2 emissions may be effective or ineffective, vital, useless, or even harmful.
There is a narrow set of facts most people agree on: it's getting warmer, the CO2 concentrations have increased significantly due to human activity, and the two observations are probably linked.
The recent huge calving is likely unrelated to global warming. But let's say that it is, let's say all the glaciers in the world melt and the polar ice caps recede as well, and the oceans rise by 1m over the next century, as they will under the IPCC's worst case scenario predictions.
So what? Who cares? What's the alternative? How are you going to prevent it? Is prevention cost effective? There is no widespread agreement on those questions at all.
Apple doesn't rely on the carriers screwing you, Apple just screws you themselves!
True, in the US, the iPhone is a little better that way than other phones, but that's a quirk of the US market. In much of the rest of the world, most phones work on most carriers, and the iPhone is a lot more restrictive (not to mention expensive) than other phones.
It is so open, your data falls right out of it!
(Sorry, couldn't resist. If you use proprietary operating systems on your phone, you are, of course, just as screwed.)
No, it wasn't "fine" from a free market point of view either. In order to have an efficient market, people need to be able to make choices.
The government didn't have to guess, it could simply have forced companies to pick a common standard. Furthermore, given how far behind the US is with deploying these technologies, all they needed to do is to look what worked elsewhere.
Generally, this kind of government intervention is undesirable. But for mobile phones, the existing system clearly is not working well.
I think you don't quite understand what the Fermi paradox is about. There may be lots of intelligent, sub-glacial pond scum, but that's not what the Fermi paradox isn't concerned with their existence.
The Fermi paradox is essentially: why can't we detect a single civilization like ours: oxygen atmosphere, technology use, energy use, the whole bit? Given that it took less than a billion years to go from nothing to humanity, that there are lots of stars like ours, lots of planets, and organic chemistry provides ready-made building blocks everywhere, you would expect that there are lots of civilizations like ours, many of them millions or potentially billions of years old. They should be visible with today's technology. Heck, they should be in the solar system. Is there some reason there aren't? Do they all self-destruct within a few thousand years?
There are long lists of possible answers to that question, some of them even plausible. But it's still a mystery, and guessing plausible answers is not the same as knowing the right answer.
The Fermi paradox isn't saying "there are no aliens", it is asking "why aren't we seeing aliens in any form?"
Your explanation is "because they are using communications technologies we can't detect". But that doesn't address the paradox. The paradox asks: (1) why aren't they physically here and (2) why don't we detect their activity?
Communicating with them is sufficient for detecting aliens, but not necessary.
The Fermi paradox asks why people aren't just wandering into his dome. Sooner or later, surely someone is going to walk in off the outside street, right? Or at least knock on the door. Heck, even a scientist from the 1800's could conclude that the dome is an artificial structure surrounding him. He'd be able to detect trucks and subways going by outside, hear jets overhead, etc. All weird, inexplicable phenomena that clearly aren't natural. We've seen nothing like that out in the universe so far.
Second, an 18th century physicist didn't have a good idea about what physics was like because there had been very few experiments. In the 21st century, we have done tons of experiments, and if there is some other long-range communications medium, we must have missed something really fundamental.
Third, telescopes are getting good enough that we already should be seeing major civilizations, regardless of whether they are trying to communicate or not. In another decade, we should be able to see civilizations like ours within our galactic neighborhood.
Launching a large, self-sustaining inflatable habitat takes a few launches using existing technologies and rockets. There's no technology or energy needed beyond that. Once launched, traveling anywhere in the solar system (and beyond) takes essentially no energy if you go slowly, and there is no reason to go fast.
Once launched, what would you need rockets for?
And you seriously believe humanity is going to run out of energy? Just on earth, we have coal, gas, Uranium, Thorium for fission, and Deuterium for fusion. In addition, we have huge amounts of solar, wind, wave, and geothermal energy.
You hadn't said anything technical at all, so it was hard to respond to your objections and identify your misconception.
We've made some progress: you believe that there is an energy shortage looming and you believe that space colonization requires continuous use of rockets. Both of those notions are erroneous. Any more bad ideas we can dispel?
Get some perspective on humanity and biology and get out of your Buck Rogers and Christian mindset: the Earth wasn't created 6000 years ago, and the apocalypse and end time aren't near. Intelligent life on this planet has many millions of years ahead. People will settle in space not for short term economic reasons (which is what the Economist and Savage debate), but simply because they can and they get bored here.
I expect humans on earth to be very much like they always used to look; we are well adapted to our planet, and barring disaster, successful species stick around for millions of years.
Humans moving out into space will quickly evolve into something physically quite different from us.
Get real! Your mind has been warped by Star Trek. There aren't going to be any sleek spacecraft, and planetary settlements are hard.
There are, however, going to be is lots of inflatable structures tethered to comets, first in near-earth orbits, later going out further and further. We have the inflatable structures, we have traveled to comets, and we can set up self-sustaining biospheres. And comets contain vast quantities of water and organic molecules.
The biggest obstacle right now is that humans don't do well in zero G; biotech or genetic engineering will likely fix that within a few decades.
The "inalienable right to health care" also is an "inalienable right to someone else's property", so there is ample precedent.
(Note that I think that basic health care should actually be provided to everybody, but that's cheap. The "right to health care" in US and European politics means universal access to expensive, state-of-the-art first world treatments, which is something entirely different.)
Censorship and mandates--maybe we get lucky and these kinds of idiotic proposals cancel each other out?
Because given what we already know about physics and the universe, the distances are not a problem. All you need is the ability to colonize objects like asteroids and comets, and even humans are close to that. Time, reproduction, and galactic rotation will do the rest. It takes maybe a few hundred million years to spread across the galaxy.
The more planets and potentially earth-like planets we discover, the more paradoxical the Fermi paradox becomes: "where are they?"