And most importantly, you cannot target all these platforms with any single codebase written in any language
Yeah, because that worked out so well for Sun and Microsoft, right?
Different users have different needs that are met by different languages and environments. And unlike other companies, Google seems to have concluded reasonably that they don't know what people are going to be using, so they give people options.
That's why I was asking. However, I consider "all the other stuff" to be at least as irrational and inconsistent with physical reality as "intelligent design".
As a Christian, I happen to believe in a God who created the universe (and don't see this as incompatible with observable scientific materialist descriptions)
Christians believe in an immanent, personal God, not just a creator. So, which are you? Christian or deist?
while "intelligent design" introduces a whole new layer of metaphysical complication entirely outside of scientific knowledge
There is nothing metaphysical about "intelligent design" in principle: life on earth could have been designed by an intelligent alien. It only becomes a metaphysical issue to Christians because they wrongly belief that "the Creator" must be omnipotent, omniscient, immanent, eternal, and personal, and that he requires or deserve our worship and obedience. Intelligent design might as well be some alien's high school science project gone horribly wrong.
The real problem with intelligent design is that it tries to provide an explanation for a non-existent problem, namely "irreducible complexity".
Both intelligent design and panspermia are hypotheses about specific historical events, not scientific "theories"; that's why they don't have "predictive power". That doesn't make them unimportant or unscientific per se.
The problem with "intelligent design" is that it is trying to resolve an issue that simply doesn't exist: nobody has ever actually observed "irreducible complexity" in biology, and "intelligent design" isn't needed. On the other hand, panspermia allows us to consider additional reasonable theories for the origin of life.
The conditions for live to have evolved may simply not have existed on Earth, ever. In that case, all the research aimed at figuring out which earth environments life evolved in may be futile.
In addition, if life evolved on earth, it must evolve easily, since it appeared very quickly, as soon as temperatures were low enough. If it was seeded by panspermia, life may be a very low probability event.
Furthermore, if life was seeded from space, it would greatly change the way we interpret the genetic record of evolution. A lot of genes in higher organisms are surprisingly old, evolutionarily speaking. It's not at the level of a problem or a contradiction, but it is curious.
Government, that expression of the majority once it defines something like wealth, gets to play with it which ever way it wants to from there on it, suck it up.
You argue for a tyranny of the majority. That's not democratic, republican, or free. It's also not the form of government we have.
And government doesn't get to "define wealth". Wealth is ownership and control of property; according to our Constitution (i.e., our form of government) what you own is yours and can't be taken away for public use without just compensation. Government has the power to tax, but only for the limited purposes that government was established for; taking money from person A and giving it to person B because the majority wants it is not one of those purposes.
Your economic ideas have been tried time and again in history and they do not work; in its most radical form (the way you actually state them), they are Third Position economics, ideas that some rather famous people ran on and were democratically elected, no doubt by people as confused as you. Not only do they violate the Constitution, they lead to abhorrent outcomes.
"Progressivism" in modern US politics means the idea that progress is sought through government intervention in society, for example through redistribution of wealth, subsidies, price controls, welfare, public education, etc. That is, progressivism is a political philosophy of government. People who oppose progressivism don't oppose progress, they rather believe that progressivism is ineffective and possibly harmful for actually achieving progress.
It's common for people to pick misleading labels for their political movements: modern US "liberalism" has little to do with liberty or classical liberalism either, and "conservatism" doesn't reflect conservation of traditional or historical policies or values. Liberals themselves often now prefer the term "progressivism", which is fine with me, since I'd rather reclaim the term "liberal" for what it used to mean, instead of the caricature it has become.
Considering a LCHF (low carb-high fat) diet as a "fad" is to misunderstand the biology involved.
The "fad" isn't in the LCHF part, the "fad" your ridiculous choice of consuming 750-1500 calories of butter every day.
You're halfway there. Cutting carbs is important to a healthier diet. Restricting saturated fat is not.
Even if there weren't good reasons to believe that saturated fats are harmful to at least some people, they are nothing more than empty calories. Substituting nutritionally more valuable fats is therefore always a good thing to do: they fill you up just as much, but in addition have other benefits.
Those of us who don't believe in Zeus or G-Zeus, we still look at the 10 commandments as a fairly reasonable list of ways to go about your life...
However, presenting these entirely reasonable ideas as "The Ten Commandments" supports the lie that Christianity and Judaism somehow invented these rules and brought moral conduct and law to the world.
The Ten Commandments are plagiarized and represent advertising and promotion of a particular religion. And government has no business promoting particular religions, let alone do so with such blatant plagiarism and misrepresentations.
And I CERTAINLY do not appreciate when others attempt to judge my civic or spiritual status based on my religious or political views.
While that is certainly a nice attitude, that's not standard Christian dogma, nor does it agree with what most Christians or most Westerners believe. To most people, unfortunately, Christian belief correlates with morality and expertise in moral questions, while atheism correlates with immoral behavior.
Religion is just like any other tool: in the right hands it does a job, in the wrong hands people get hurt.
Religion is a tool for manipulating people, more precisely a tool for manipulating people by deceiving them and lying to them. Regardless of what "job" you use it for, that is always morally wrong.
A bible sitting on a table is no more dangerous than any other inanimate, non-volatile* object at a state of rest.
In fact, that Bible can become a tool for good if you point out all the evil in it.
but because he's visibly out there trying to do some good instead of smiling and waving from a balcony.
The new pope is simply parroting some populist left wing ideologies, instead of previous popes parroting populist right wing ideologies. In the end, both are equally destructive.
The main thing Christian conservatives and progressives disagree on is the existence of God, something totally irrelevant to real life. Otherwise, they are both fond of government intrusions into people's personal lives, big government, and government handouts to various special interest groups. So, I'm not surprised that Sally Kohn seens some kind of alliance possible between the two sides: they are both evil.
I want these little guys to have a planet worth living on.
Yes, I want these little guys to have a planet worth living on, and that is exactly why we should not engage in self-destructive attempts to achieve sustainability. The best outcome that would ever give us is a stagnant and dismal existence. More likely, it would simply result in either global totalitarianism or anarchy as groups try to evade sustainability controls.
The reason we have big brains is to adapt to changing environments. For us to pursue sustainability makes just about as much sense as for lions to go vegetarian.
Are you hoping for some magical technological saviour to all of our logistical problems
I'm not "hoping", that's how homo sapiens has prospered since the beginning. It's why we have big brains. You don't need big brains for living sustainably.
Living unsustainably is what drove us out of Africa, caused us to settle, caused us to start agriculture, to build cities, to explore the planet, and the green revolution. Societies that try to live sustainably die out, because sooner or later, they get conquered or their environment changes catastrophically anyway.
do you just really enjoy the idea of overpopulation, and people killing each other for resources
Both overpopulation and resource related conflicts are less of a problem today than ever before, precisely because we bet on science and technology, instead of sustainability.
Well, good for you. But it doesn't contradict my original statement. If a fad diet like that worked for you, you're not obese anymore and don't need pills.
But if it didn't work for you, you should try some of the more standard approaches, which is cutting carbs and eating what is generally regarded as a healthier diet, before starting to pop diet pills.
All money spent in manned space exploration will pay dividends ultimately, at least a trillion fold.
No, the money is wasted; future manned space exploration will use none of those technologies. And if we had spent that money for unmanned, commercially viable space exploration, robotics, etc., manned space travel would be much further ahead by now.
Manned space travel by NASA was a huge misallocation of resources that has held back both unmanned and manned space exploration.
The space race inspired the current generation of rich people prepared to put funds into private space initiatives.
There is no evidence that that was a good deal; private space exploration might well have started far earlier if the US government had gotten out earlier. I think the space shuttle was an utter disaster.
On both the smartphone OS and the GSM portion, a keylogger can be installed as part of any OS update, or many application updates. Carriers, phone vendors, spy agencies, and police clearly all have had that capability for a while, and it's been in use.
The rubbish will largely degrade. The rubbish that won't degrade (plastics, etc.) will be a resource for future generations. In addition, have sharply reduced toxic waste production over the years (if we use the same definitions across time).
But your assumption that we need to live sustainably is wrong; humanity has never lived sustainably, and we shouldn't try.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG! The horror of it! People transferring money! What is the world coming to!
Perhaps we should be rethinking this; it seems to have gone too far.
Yeah, because that worked out so well for Sun and Microsoft, right?
Different users have different needs that are met by different languages and environments. And unlike other companies, Google seems to have concluded reasonably that they don't know what people are going to be using, so they give people options.
That's why I was asking. However, I consider "all the other stuff" to be at least as irrational and inconsistent with physical reality as "intelligent design".
Christians believe in an immanent, personal God, not just a creator. So, which are you? Christian or deist?
There is nothing metaphysical about "intelligent design" in principle: life on earth could have been designed by an intelligent alien. It only becomes a metaphysical issue to Christians because they wrongly belief that "the Creator" must be omnipotent, omniscient, immanent, eternal, and personal, and that he requires or deserve our worship and obedience. Intelligent design might as well be some alien's high school science project gone horribly wrong.
The real problem with intelligent design is that it tries to provide an explanation for a non-existent problem, namely "irreducible complexity".
Both intelligent design and panspermia are hypotheses about specific historical events, not scientific "theories"; that's why they don't have "predictive power". That doesn't make them unimportant or unscientific per se.
The problem with "intelligent design" is that it is trying to resolve an issue that simply doesn't exist: nobody has ever actually observed "irreducible complexity" in biology, and "intelligent design" isn't needed. On the other hand, panspermia allows us to consider additional reasonable theories for the origin of life.
The conditions for live to have evolved may simply not have existed on Earth, ever. In that case, all the research aimed at figuring out which earth environments life evolved in may be futile.
In addition, if life evolved on earth, it must evolve easily, since it appeared very quickly, as soon as temperatures were low enough. If it was seeded by panspermia, life may be a very low probability event.
Furthermore, if life was seeded from space, it would greatly change the way we interpret the genetic record of evolution. A lot of genes in higher organisms are surprisingly old, evolutionarily speaking. It's not at the level of a problem or a contradiction, but it is curious.
I expect remote controlled drones are already in use for illegal drugs.
Because Google is an engineering company. Chrome books are for home users and light business users. They are also fairly new.
I expect Google to do more development in the browser and eventually dump Apple.
You argue for a tyranny of the majority. That's not democratic, republican, or free. It's also not the form of government we have.
And government doesn't get to "define wealth". Wealth is ownership and control of property; according to our Constitution (i.e., our form of government) what you own is yours and can't be taken away for public use without just compensation. Government has the power to tax, but only for the limited purposes that government was established for; taking money from person A and giving it to person B because the majority wants it is not one of those purposes.
Your economic ideas have been tried time and again in history and they do not work; in its most radical form (the way you actually state them), they are Third Position economics, ideas that some rather famous people ran on and were democratically elected, no doubt by people as confused as you. Not only do they violate the Constitution, they lead to abhorrent outcomes.
"Progressivism" in modern US politics means the idea that progress is sought through government intervention in society, for example through redistribution of wealth, subsidies, price controls, welfare, public education, etc. That is, progressivism is a political philosophy of government. People who oppose progressivism don't oppose progress, they rather believe that progressivism is ineffective and possibly harmful for actually achieving progress.
It's common for people to pick misleading labels for their political movements: modern US "liberalism" has little to do with liberty or classical liberalism either, and "conservatism" doesn't reflect conservation of traditional or historical policies or values. Liberals themselves often now prefer the term "progressivism", which is fine with me, since I'd rather reclaim the term "liberal" for what it used to mean, instead of the caricature it has become.
The "fad" isn't in the LCHF part, the "fad" your ridiculous choice of consuming 750-1500 calories of butter every day.
Even if there weren't good reasons to believe that saturated fats are harmful to at least some people, they are nothing more than empty calories. Substituting nutritionally more valuable fats is therefore always a good thing to do: they fill you up just as much, but in addition have other benefits.
However, presenting these entirely reasonable ideas as "The Ten Commandments" supports the lie that Christianity and Judaism somehow invented these rules and brought moral conduct and law to the world.
The Ten Commandments are plagiarized and represent advertising and promotion of a particular religion. And government has no business promoting particular religions, let alone do so with such blatant plagiarism and misrepresentations.
While that is certainly a nice attitude, that's not standard Christian dogma, nor does it agree with what most Christians or most Westerners believe. To most people, unfortunately, Christian belief correlates with morality and expertise in moral questions, while atheism correlates with immoral behavior.
Religion is a tool for manipulating people, more precisely a tool for manipulating people by deceiving them and lying to them. Regardless of what "job" you use it for, that is always morally wrong.
In fact, that Bible can become a tool for good if you point out all the evil in it.
The new pope is simply parroting some populist left wing ideologies, instead of previous popes parroting populist right wing ideologies. In the end, both are equally destructive.
The main thing Christian conservatives and progressives disagree on is the existence of God, something totally irrelevant to real life. Otherwise, they are both fond of government intrusions into people's personal lives, big government, and government handouts to various special interest groups. So, I'm not surprised that Sally Kohn seens some kind of alliance possible between the two sides: they are both evil.
IOUs, the new witches! Really, how superstitious and uninformed can your economic beliefs be?
Yes, I want these little guys to have a planet worth living on, and that is exactly why we should not engage in self-destructive attempts to achieve sustainability. The best outcome that would ever give us is a stagnant and dismal existence. More likely, it would simply result in either global totalitarianism or anarchy as groups try to evade sustainability controls.
The reason we have big brains is to adapt to changing environments. For us to pursue sustainability makes just about as much sense as for lions to go vegetarian.
I'm not "hoping", that's how homo sapiens has prospered since the beginning. It's why we have big brains. You don't need big brains for living sustainably.
Living unsustainably is what drove us out of Africa, caused us to settle, caused us to start agriculture, to build cities, to explore the planet, and the green revolution. Societies that try to live sustainably die out, because sooner or later, they get conquered or their environment changes catastrophically anyway.
Both overpopulation and resource related conflicts are less of a problem today than ever before, precisely because we bet on science and technology, instead of sustainability.
Well, good for you. But it doesn't contradict my original statement. If a fad diet like that worked for you, you're not obese anymore and don't need pills.
But if it didn't work for you, you should try some of the more standard approaches, which is cutting carbs and eating what is generally regarded as a healthier diet, before starting to pop diet pills.
No, the money is wasted; future manned space exploration will use none of those technologies. And if we had spent that money for unmanned, commercially viable space exploration, robotics, etc., manned space travel would be much further ahead by now.
Manned space travel by NASA was a huge misallocation of resources that has held back both unmanned and manned space exploration.
There is no evidence that that was a good deal; private space exploration might well have started far earlier if the US government had gotten out earlier. I think the space shuttle was an utter disaster.
On both the smartphone OS and the GSM portion, a keylogger can be installed as part of any OS update, or many application updates. Carriers, phone vendors, spy agencies, and police clearly all have had that capability for a while, and it's been in use.
The rubbish will largely degrade. The rubbish that won't degrade (plastics, etc.) will be a resource for future generations. In addition, have sharply reduced toxic waste production over the years (if we use the same definitions across time).
But your assumption that we need to live sustainably is wrong; humanity has never lived sustainably, and we shouldn't try.