I've always found that when I'm working on a ginormous software project that's literally years and years behind schedule despite drastic pruning of scope, the _exact_ trick to speed things up is to reorganize the whole company and add a few more officers.
I experience unshakeable confidence that the one and only thing the visthorn development effort was lacking was enough officers.
What planet are you living on? All the previous versions had no file security and no memory protection mechanisms AT ALL. Any program executed on the machine has 100%, uninhibited access to all resources. This is public knowledge.
I'm certainly not suggesting that paleomacos is a shining paragon of security, just that it was consistently better than its Windows contemporaries.
This sounds interestingly unlike you providing a reference for your claim that "Apple admitted" that macos was less secure than Windows.
No, actually, it seems that Apple doesn't even write the majority of that software, so they don't write the fixes for it.
Um.. sure, that's sometimes true. How is that relevant to this discussion? The end result is still patched software installed on nearly all machines.
...whose user has not gone out of their way to disable updates.
Not gone out of their way? You mean not clicked 'off'?
That's exactly what I mean. The overwhelmingly vast majority of users do not change the default settings of most software they use. This is why it's significant that macos defaults to being secure (updates applied regularly, zero services running), and Windows defaults to being insecure (what's the current median time to compromise of a newly-installed Windows machine on the net now, about six minutes?).
...within a not-bad span of time...
I see you turned on the "RDF" option. You really shouldn't preach that as a matter of faith.
Helllooooo, ad hominem. I wasn't "preaching" an article of "faith". I was careful with my choice of words: Apple's patch speed is not "stellar" or "phenomenal" or "instant", but it is "not bad". Specifically relevant to this conversation, their track record is consistently much better than Microsoft's.
I'm sorry, but you're under the mistaken impression that everyone wants and does have it [Software Update] running, especially a bad assumption with dial-up users.
Most people never give it a second thought; of those who do, most will have the common "updates must be good!" mindset. People who are using modems and yet are clever/confident enough to turn it off seem like a fairly small group. And if such a person were in such a situation, why wouldn't they just set it to pre-download updates in the middle of the night or day, and have them queued up waiting for authorization when they're actually at the machine? (Which, again, is the default behaviour.)
You're making an even worse assumption that the software compromised will be something covered by Apple's automated update system. That's a really, REALLY horrible assumption to make.
Everything that an attacker could reliably expect to have on a target machine to use as a vector is covered by Apple's software update: the kernel, the Finder, Mail, Safari, itunes, Quicktime, sshd, apache, samba. It's of course possible for users to manually install software that's outside the scope of what Apple's updates cover, but that drastically raises the odds that that user is comfortable with also upgrading that software as necessary.
Please forgive me if I have ever implied that there is any OS in the world that is immune to any negative effects of having bad kernel modules (or local equivalent) inserted into it. That is clearly untrue.
There is, however, a significant gap between "better designed" and "perfectly immune to its administrator doing extremely dumb things." I'd love to see some software that's the latter, but for the moment I'll settle for the former.
Lacking protected memory is clearly a disadvantage, but it doesn't automatically translate into instant vulnerability. It just means that you lack security compartmentalization once some part of the host has already been compromised, but it doesn't necessarily make the border any less secure.
So yes, any program you ran could do that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any program did.
Why would it make them more famous? Because you say it's more difficult? If they did, no one would care. People have made viruses for older versions of Mac OS and no one cared. The funny thing is, the pre-OS X versions had very few viruses due to lack of popularity, despite even Apple admitting it having even less security than windows.
Care to cite Apple admitting that? Or any evidence that it's true? I've used back through System 7, and my experience and understanding has always been that macos releases are substantially more secure than their Windows contemporaries. As you say yourself, viruses were not a problem for macos then, and they're not a problem now.
What incentive? Praise from a tiny number of geeks? Because that's all that would happen, realistically.
Um, yes. That's all that ever happens. You think people are writing viruses because it's a prudent career choice? They're doing it to enleeten themselves in the eyes of their friends, and tainting the relatively-pristine territory of macosx or linux would do that far more than writing Windows Virus #72,927,215.
You're certainly right that osx has had security vulnerabilities; I don't think anyone is trying to suggest that it's absolutely inviolable all the time. But you know how you found those vulnerabilities listed? Because Apple fixed them. As Apple has a tendency to do, within a not-bad span of time, and which fixes then get automatically distributed to every osx machine whose user has not gone out of their way to disable updates.
This means that the millions of osx machines out there have a tendency to be a fairly inhospitable place for viruses. There's a reasonably small window between the discovery of vulnerabilities and the disappearance of them on very close to every single system. Which is why your statement:
All it takes is a single unpatched machine to spread and that's no different than it is for windows--since windows users are notorious for not patching.
...is simply not correct. A single unpatched machine would result in, at most, a single compromised machine. And numbers well above "single" are unlikely not because there are few osx machines total, but simply because Software Update runs by default and makes it inconvenient to not maintain current patches.
Completely true. Anti-virus software is itself a hugely invasive, expensive, destabilizing chunk of voodoo that alters your system's behaviour in countless poorly-documented ways. Unless your virus risk is absurdly out of control (ie, you're running Windows), anti-virus software is vastly worse than the problem it supposedly solves.
The only thing I find amazing is that a large number of people somehow find it okay that their systems are broken enough by default that it's reasonable to think you need some additional tool to de-break them.
Apparently Symmantec was concerned that it might cross people's minds that it's possible to just use a sane OS in the first place and not "require" their type of product, so they churned out yet another propaganda piece to try and convince people that viruses are fundamentally inescapable any way except using their snake oil.
Why would an email client want to know anything about phone numbers?
You should have a user-wide address book database that can be accessed by any application through a clear API. Though that database would likely contain phone numbers, an email client would never expose that portion of the contact information, as that's irrelevant to its job.
This looks very much like a clone of Outlook, which is a truly awful notion. One Outlook is already 100% more than the world needs.
they didn't abandon it, apple refused to provide specs to them for the g3 machines.
That excuse was absurd then, and it's absurd now. The g3's specs were precisely as public as every previous mac, on which BeOS had no difficulty running. LinuxPPC was up and running on the g3s almost immediately after their release, belying any claims that they were so foreign and incomprehensible as to make porting to them impossible.
I was at the BeOS developer conference immediately after the switch, and Gassee seemed pretty open about the fact that this was not a technology choice, but a market share choice. He drew some laughs from the crowd by pointing out, "We've looked at the market, and we noticed that there were a lot more Windows PCs than macs out there." Any nonsense about the mysterious nature of the g3 was just a thin veil over their choice to target a larger market.
Yeah, it's been "waiting for someone to write the backend" for over a decade now.
I used BeOS on a Power Computing machine, and even back then the story was, "yeah, we laid all the foundations for it being a multiuser system, so finishing up implementing that should be a snap. We'll have it done any day now."
(Sorry, I'm _still_ bitter about BeOS abandoning the mac platform.)
Firstly, it was the post to which I was responding that brought up the idea that these wars might be a good deal from a financial perspective, and I just wanted to refute that particular notion. I was not suggesting that monetary cost should be the primary or only way to evaluate a war.
(For the record, my views on these two particular wars are that the Afghani one was justified but inthoroughly handled, and that the Iraqi one was absurdly contrived.)
Bringing up women's rights clarifies the ways in which these nations and wars were so vastly different, and cannot be lumped together. In Afghanistan, women were oppressed by a brutal theocracy, and their lot has indeed gotten better since the US came in. (Well, at least in the tiny portion of the country in which the US has any control.)
But in Iraq, women have had relatively equal rights for decades, freely pursuing careers, driving, and--to the admittedly-laughable degree that anyone was--voting. For all the ways in which Hussein was a bad guy, he was at least secular. The US invasion has resulted in a new government which enshrines Sharia in its constitution, setting up women to be... oppressed by a brutal theocracy.
I'm surprised to read about people having accuracy trouble with menus. I run at 1600x1200 too, and I drink tons of coffee as well as taking prescription stimulants for my ADHD, and it's never been a problem.
I don't think that the issue is one of people being unable to hit the menubar successfully, but one of it being much slower to need to worry about precision. This is generally described by Fitt's Law: the time required to acquire a target is inversely proportional to the size of that target. And the corollary is that targets which are made infinitely tall by virtue of being at the top of the display become very fast indeed.
I use a 2400x1920 display (two 24" displays in portrait mode), and it's vastly faster for me to zip up to the menu bar at top than to actually take the milliseconds to aim carefully at widgets in the local window--even when that window is at the opposite corner of the display than the menu bar is.
At least today, the ISP market actually has a lot of smallish players who are likely to provide you with exactly what you're requesting. I myself have a 6M/1.5M line, a handful of static addresses, and no filtering or blocking beyond disconnecting systems which are clearly infected and spewing poisoned traffic. I'm getting this from Cyberverse in Los Angeles; with a little hunting, you can probably find some similar good, small provider in your area.
Of course, with the recent deregulation of telco access, things may very shortly turn into the oligopoly that you describe. But we're not there at the moment.
Yes, I have found this to be a poor design choice within itunes. At the moment, there really is no such thing as "unrated", there's simply a rating of zero stars, to which everything defaults.
I'd like to see unrated be considered average. The cheesy way to do that would be to evaluate unrated as three stars; the better way would be to evaluate it as the average of all tracks that you have rated.
I guess I could semi-manually just set all my unrated stuff as such. Or create a tool that would do it periodically, perhaps even sticking "unrated" into the comments and cleverly not using those as part of the averaging body. But, eh, work.
Well, at the moment I'm only suggesting that instances scale to the _number_ of players, not to the _level_ of them. So that would stay about as it is now, with instances getting relatively easier as you level up.
I thought about the idea of scaling to level as well. While that's kind of appealing, it would actually be a little difficult to do: you'd run into difficulties with automatically changing the level of eq dropped by mobs, and what happens when instances cross levels at which players get particularly important abilities.
So the suggestion of scaling to players' numerousness is a more reasonable one to make right now, given that it would take _very_ little work to implement.
It would be considerably more helpful for you to assert why and how this would fail, rather than just asserting that it's impossible.
Certainly the credibility of your claim is not helped by the fact that WoW already does this. A simple multiplier of health, xp, and loot drop rates is all that distinguishes an "elite" mob from a normal one. All I'm suggesting is that that multiplier should be related to the number of players in the instance, rather than fixed arbitrarily at 3.
And if you'll forgive me for repeating it, Diablo II used precisely this same system, to very good effect. Games ended up having approximately the same level of difficulty and reward regardless of how many people were in them, which made group size purely a function of player preference.
It strikes me as an odd choice that all instances should be arbitrarily tuned to a hard-coded number of players (40, 20, or, most often, 5). Given that the game already has the notion of "elite" mobs that have a multiplier applied to their total health, item drop rates, and xp rewards, why doesn't this multiplier adjust to match the number of players in the instance, rather than being fixed at 3?
This seems all the more strange to me in light of the fact that Blizzard has already used this mechanism, with great success, in Diablo II. This seems to confirm that not only is it not a generally difficult thing to implement, it is specifically not beyond the reach of Blizzard in particular.
The current approach of using manually-tuned dungeons seems like the worst possible deal for everyone: players have a limited set of content that suits the play style they prefer, and Blizzard needs to do much more work to separately create content for soloers, small-group players, and huge-raid players. Causing all instances to scale smoothly would seem to allow players the most flexibility, and Blizzard the greatest return on their efforts.
This issue is of personal interest to me because I prefer to play with one to three real-world friends or alone, rather than with thirty-nine strangers. I've essentially ceased playing the game because there's simply no more content that suits the solo/small-group playstyle that I enjoy.
I certainly accept that other people prefer the feel of a huge raid, and I don't wish to deny them any content tuned to their preferences. Indeed, I'd like them to be able to 80-man any instance in the game if they so choose, while I 3-man the same instances with rewards scaled down to match.
If you look at the patent filing (or even the posts to which you're replying), you'll notice that this regards also finding numbers expressed as words or equations. The terms in their example are "one thousand two hundred", "1,234,567", and "2*X=23".
I think it would, to say the least, require a rather more complex regex to find such things.
Then I would respectfully suggest that you frame your rebuttals around the portions of the argument that you do find to be problematic, rather than going out of your way to highlight specific phrases which are in fact valid.
As is it, I have a hard time reconciling your first post with your second. How can you be so concerned with how this mythical "lay person's" reading "translates into certainty in the public eye" if "they're not taken seriously any more?"
Since when do "probably", "believed to be", and "suspects" sound like "crushing certainty"?
The only statement you excerpt there that has an absolute is "undoubtedly connected to climactic warming". Nothing about an anthropogenic nature to that warming, not even the term global, just climactic. So you're taking issue with the wild assertion that melting is connected to warming?
That's the strict geometry definition. The term also gets used in compsci, statistics, and general conversation to mean "varying independently" or "unrelated". eg, age and left-handedness are orthogonal.
"Infidel" means someone of a faith different from or antithetical to your own. "Civilian" means not part of a military organization. The terms are not antonyms to one another, they are unrelated; you can have civilian infidels, soldier infidels, civilian co-believers, and soldier co-believers.
The person to whom I was responding had made the argument that because non-Muslims could be considered infidels, the prohibition on acts against "civilians" did not apply. In addition to being nonsense on the face of it (if this edict applies to no one, why was it issued in the first place?), this argument is simply not relevant.
So, by your logic, not only do we *have* to exist, there must be an infinite number of (ever so slightly different) well-formed human races in the galaxy, compounded by an even greater infinite number of malformed, degenerate, incomplete evolutions of dirt.
With the small correction that "galaxy" != "universe", yes, this seems obviously true. What of it?
You'd think one could follow the same logic, and purport that not only should there be one "missing link", there should be a nearly infinitessimal number, easily and regularly discovered by school children around the globe.
....eh?
Even leaving out what appear to be gross misuses of the terms "infinitessimal" and "missing", you now appear to be equating the universe with a single planet. The time and space that evolution on this planet have seen is clearly finite, so expecting every possible thing to have happened here recently is not approriate.
(And I can't resist dismissing this "missing link" nonsense. No matter how many links there are, how closely placed, there will always be some space between them in which someone can claim that there's another step that's missing.)
What the statement conveniently sidesteps is the fact that under strict Islamic law, almost anyone living in America (or most western nations) are not civilians. They (or we) are considered "infidels".
"Civilian" and "infidel" are orthogonal.
I've found that it's not wise to take everything at face value, especially from religious figures whose belief states that we should killed.
And I've found it's not wise to pay much heed to someone so xenophobic that they believe that a billion or so people are all categorically untrustworthy because of their religion.
As with all other religious texts, the Koran has very mixed messages about nearly all topics, including how one deals with members of other religions. In some places there's discussion of killing infidels, in other places there is discussion of respect and coexistence with all other monotheistic religions, and the assertion that all scriptures from all different religions are simply subsets of the same larger book that exists within heaven. Trying to simplify this to "they want to kill us all!" does no one any favors.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always found that when I'm working on a ginormous software project that's literally years and years behind schedule despite drastic pruning of scope, the _exact_ trick to speed things up is to reorganize the whole company and add a few more officers.
I experience unshakeable confidence that the one and only thing the visthorn development effort was lacking was enough officers.
This sounds interestingly unlike you providing a reference for your claim that "Apple admitted" that macos was less secure than Windows.
Um.. sure, that's sometimes true. How is that relevant to this discussion? The end result is still patched software installed on nearly all machines. That's exactly what I mean. The overwhelmingly vast majority of users do not change the default settings of most software they use. This is why it's significant that macos defaults to being secure (updates applied regularly, zero services running), and Windows defaults to being insecure (what's the current median time to compromise of a newly-installed Windows machine on the net now, about six minutes?). Helllooooo, ad hominem. I wasn't "preaching" an article of "faith". I was careful with my choice of words: Apple's patch speed is not "stellar" or "phenomenal" or "instant", but it is "not bad". Specifically relevant to this conversation, their track record is consistently much better than Microsoft's. Most people never give it a second thought; of those who do, most will have the common "updates must be good!" mindset. People who are using modems and yet are clever/confident enough to turn it off seem like a fairly small group. And if such a person were in such a situation, why wouldn't they just set it to pre-download updates in the middle of the night or day, and have them queued up waiting for authorization when they're actually at the machine? (Which, again, is the default behaviour.) Everything that an attacker could reliably expect to have on a target machine to use as a vector is covered by Apple's software update: the kernel, the Finder, Mail, Safari, itunes, Quicktime, sshd, apache, samba. It's of course possible for users to manually install software that's outside the scope of what Apple's updates cover, but that drastically raises the odds that that user is comfortable with also upgrading that software as necessary.Please forgive me if I have ever implied that there is any OS in the world that is immune to any negative effects of having bad kernel modules (or local equivalent) inserted into it. That is clearly untrue.
There is, however, a significant gap between "better designed" and "perfectly immune to its administrator doing extremely dumb things." I'd love to see some software that's the latter, but for the moment I'll settle for the former.
So yes, any program you ran could do that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any program did.
You're certainly right that osx has had security vulnerabilities; I don't think anyone is trying to suggest that it's absolutely inviolable all the time. But you know how you found those vulnerabilities listed? Because Apple fixed them. As Apple has a tendency to do, within a not-bad span of time, and which fixes then get automatically distributed to every osx machine whose user has not gone out of their way to disable updates.
This means that the millions of osx machines out there have a tendency to be a fairly inhospitable place for viruses. There's a reasonably small window between the discovery of vulnerabilities and the disappearance of them on very close to every single system. Which is why your statement:
Completely true. Anti-virus software is itself a hugely invasive, expensive, destabilizing chunk of voodoo that alters your system's behaviour in countless poorly-documented ways. Unless your virus risk is absurdly out of control (ie, you're running Windows), anti-virus software is vastly worse than the problem it supposedly solves.
The only thing I find amazing is that a large number of people somehow find it okay that their systems are broken enough by default that it's reasonable to think you need some additional tool to de-break them.
Apparently Symmantec was concerned that it might cross people's minds that it's possible to just use a sane OS in the first place and not "require" their type of product, so they churned out yet another propaganda piece to try and convince people that viruses are fundamentally inescapable any way except using their snake oil.
Why would an email client want to know anything about phone numbers?
You should have a user-wide address book database that can be accessed by any application through a clear API. Though that database would likely contain phone numbers, an email client would never expose that portion of the contact information, as that's irrelevant to its job.
This looks very much like a clone of Outlook, which is a truly awful notion. One Outlook is already 100% more than the world needs.
I was at the BeOS developer conference immediately after the switch, and Gassee seemed pretty open about the fact that this was not a technology choice, but a market share choice. He drew some laughs from the crowd by pointing out, "We've looked at the market, and we noticed that there were a lot more Windows PCs than macs out there." Any nonsense about the mysterious nature of the g3 was just a thin veil over their choice to target a larger market.
Yeah, it's been "waiting for someone to write the backend" for over a decade now.
I used BeOS on a Power Computing machine, and even back then the story was, "yeah, we laid all the foundations for it being a multiuser system, so finishing up implementing that should be a snap. We'll have it done any day now."
(Sorry, I'm _still_ bitter about BeOS abandoning the mac platform.)
Firstly, it was the post to which I was responding that brought up the idea that these wars might be a good deal from a financial perspective, and I just wanted to refute that particular notion. I was not suggesting that monetary cost should be the primary or only way to evaluate a war.
(For the record, my views on these two particular wars are that the Afghani one was justified but inthoroughly handled, and that the Iraqi one was absurdly contrived.)
Bringing up women's rights clarifies the ways in which these nations and wars were so vastly different, and cannot be lumped together. In Afghanistan, women were oppressed by a brutal theocracy, and their lot has indeed gotten better since the US came in. (Well, at least in the tiny portion of the country in which the US has any control.)
But in Iraq, women have had relatively equal rights for decades, freely pursuing careers, driving, and--to the admittedly-laughable degree that anyone was--voting. For all the ways in which Hussein was a bad guy, he was at least secular. The US invasion has resulted in a new government which enshrines Sharia in its constitution, setting up women to be... oppressed by a brutal theocracy.
Estimated costs for New York:
$20B
2752 lives
Estimated cost of Afghan and (purportedly related) Iraqi wars if things go _well_:
$300B
50,000 - 150,000 lives
So, no. Even if you want to just use a simple ROI analysis of the tangible effects, this "war or terror" is an awful deal.
I use a 2400x1920 display (two 24" displays in portrait mode), and it's vastly faster for me to zip up to the menu bar at top than to actually take the milliseconds to aim carefully at widgets in the local window--even when that window is at the opposite corner of the display than the menu bar is.
Of course, with the recent deregulation of telco access, things may very shortly turn into the oligopoly that you describe. But we're not there at the moment.
Yes, I have found this to be a poor design choice within itunes. At the moment, there really is no such thing as "unrated", there's simply a rating of zero stars, to which everything defaults.
I'd like to see unrated be considered average. The cheesy way to do that would be to evaluate unrated as three stars; the better way would be to evaluate it as the average of all tracks that you have rated.
I guess I could semi-manually just set all my unrated stuff as such. Or create a tool that would do it periodically, perhaps even sticking "unrated" into the comments and cleverly not using those as part of the averaging body. But, eh, work.
I'm as much in favor of competition in markets as anyone else, but the particular complaint you make is pretty silly.
Well, at the moment I'm only suggesting that instances scale to the _number_ of players, not to the _level_ of them. So that would stay about as it is now, with instances getting relatively easier as you level up.
I thought about the idea of scaling to level as well. While that's kind of appealing, it would actually be a little difficult to do: you'd run into difficulties with automatically changing the level of eq dropped by mobs, and what happens when instances cross levels at which players get particularly important abilities.
So the suggestion of scaling to players' numerousness is a more reasonable one to make right now, given that it would take _very_ little work to implement.
Certainly the credibility of your claim is not helped by the fact that WoW already does this. A simple multiplier of health, xp, and loot drop rates is all that distinguishes an "elite" mob from a normal one. All I'm suggesting is that that multiplier should be related to the number of players in the instance, rather than fixed arbitrarily at 3.
And if you'll forgive me for repeating it, Diablo II used precisely this same system, to very good effect. Games ended up having approximately the same level of difficulty and reward regardless of how many people were in them, which made group size purely a function of player preference.
It strikes me as an odd choice that all instances should be arbitrarily tuned to a hard-coded number of players (40, 20, or, most often, 5). Given that the game already has the notion of "elite" mobs that have a multiplier applied to their total health, item drop rates, and xp rewards, why doesn't this multiplier adjust to match the number of players in the instance, rather than being fixed at 3?
This seems all the more strange to me in light of the fact that Blizzard has already used this mechanism, with great success, in Diablo II. This seems to confirm that not only is it not a generally difficult thing to implement, it is specifically not beyond the reach of Blizzard in particular.
The current approach of using manually-tuned dungeons seems like the worst possible deal for everyone: players have a limited set of content that suits the play style they prefer, and Blizzard needs to do much more work to separately create content for soloers, small-group players, and huge-raid players. Causing all instances to scale smoothly would seem to allow players the most flexibility, and Blizzard the greatest return on their efforts.
This issue is of personal interest to me because I prefer to play with one to three real-world friends or alone, rather than with thirty-nine strangers. I've essentially ceased playing the game because there's simply no more content that suits the solo/small-group playstyle that I enjoy.
I certainly accept that other people prefer the feel of a huge raid, and I don't wish to deny them any content tuned to their preferences. Indeed, I'd like them to be able to 80-man any instance in the game if they so choose, while I 3-man the same instances with rewards scaled down to match.
If you look at the patent filing (or even the posts to which you're replying), you'll notice that this regards also finding numbers expressed as words or equations. The terms in their example are "one thousand two hundred", "1,234,567", and "2*X=23".
I think it would, to say the least, require a rather more complex regex to find such things.
Then I would respectfully suggest that you frame your rebuttals around the portions of the argument that you do find to be problematic, rather than going out of your way to highlight specific phrases which are in fact valid.
As is it, I have a hard time reconciling your first post with your second. How can you be so concerned with how this mythical "lay person's" reading "translates into certainty in the public eye" if "they're not taken seriously any more?"
Since when do "probably", "believed to be", and "suspects" sound like "crushing certainty"?
The only statement you excerpt there that has an absolute is "undoubtedly connected to climactic warming". Nothing about an anthropogenic nature to that warming, not even the term global, just climactic. So you're taking issue with the wild assertion that melting is connected to warming?
That's the strict geometry definition. The term also gets used in compsci, statistics, and general conversation to mean "varying independently" or "unrelated". eg, age and left-handedness are orthogonal.
"Infidel" means someone of a faith different from or antithetical to your own. "Civilian" means not part of a military organization. The terms are not antonyms to one another, they are unrelated; you can have civilian infidels, soldier infidels, civilian co-believers, and soldier co-believers.
The person to whom I was responding had made the argument that because non-Muslims could be considered infidels, the prohibition on acts against "civilians" did not apply. In addition to being nonsense on the face of it (if this edict applies to no one, why was it issued in the first place?), this argument is simply not relevant.
Even leaving out what appear to be gross misuses of the terms "infinitessimal" and "missing", you now appear to be equating the universe with a single planet. The time and space that evolution on this planet have seen is clearly finite, so expecting every possible thing to have happened here recently is not approriate.
(And I can't resist dismissing this "missing link" nonsense. No matter how many links there are, how closely placed, there will always be some space between them in which someone can claim that there's another step that's missing.)
"Civilian" and "infidel" are orthogonal.
And I've found it's not wise to pay much heed to someone so xenophobic that they believe that a billion or so people are all categorically untrustworthy because of their religion.
As with all other religious texts, the Koran has very mixed messages about nearly all topics, including how one deals with members of other religions. In some places there's discussion of killing infidels, in other places there is discussion of respect and coexistence with all other monotheistic religions, and the assertion that all scriptures from all different religions are simply subsets of the same larger book that exists within heaven. Trying to simplify this to "they want to kill us all!" does no one any favors.