Have you actually tried that? Cheap paint, or any paint for that matter, doesn't feel right for this.
And paint wears off. I don't think the letters go away with solvent on a good keyboard, otherwise finger oils would just smudge it away, which I think has something to do with why painted keyboards feel horrible, it softens the paint a bit, making them a bit sticky.
Try Krylon Semi-Flat Black. (Not semi-gloss, Semi-FLAT) The stuff is flat amazing (ugh!) - It has a beatiful sheen that is just right, and it's tough as a boot - I've used it for all kinds of things:
Blacking out trim and even grilles and headlight surrounds on cars (it survives outside just fine, even in the Texas sun, and is tough enough to avoid chipping from all but the worst abuse.)
Blacking out CD-rom drives and the like (back when black components were outrageously expensive - pop the bezel and door off, spray them and put them back - looks great.)
Even creating the only stealth black Lear Seigler ADM3A I've ever seen. Mine was the sky/royal combo and was getting a bit ratty. a few minutes with a screwdriver to remove the CRT, a few more minutes to mask here and there, and voila, a terminal that is actually a bit *too* black - oh, well...
Make sure to spray in a dust-free area, and sun-cure them (after the paint is no longer tacky) for at least a day or two for the best results. As always with spray paint, several thin coats work a LOT better than one thick one. A crappy spray nozzle from another old spray can can even create an interesting "spot texture" pattern that can be useful in some cases. Experiment and see...
Anyway, it's great stuff, and should be easy to find, since it's Krylon. IIRC, WalMart has a good Krylon selection.
Now if you could just buy paint that *really* looks like plated metal... (Although I do have a "secret" process I stumbled upon when repainting my son's bike that produces a finish that is indistinguishable from blue anodized aluminum - at least until it chips - it's a bit more fragile than I'd like.)
Jon = Good article, but it completely ignored one very important point that X or any alternatives must address in today's world: audio, and more particularly, audio and video can be synchronized for support of various kinds of multimedia. In my mind, this is the single most compelling reason why there is no serious open source desktop alternative: what little support there is for such things today is a gruesome hack - it needs to be built directly into the display system, and if network extensibility is supported for graphics (as in X), then network extensibility of audio must also be supported. (Making all HID and I/O devices network-extensible is worth thinking about, too...)
1. ipods run MP3's natively. No encoding to a proprietary format (ATRAC) and losing quality as with minidisc.
But not WMA, Ogg, FLAC, WAV, etc., if you care about any of those...
2. "sonicstage sure, stupid program, but its easy" Meet iTunes. It's not stupid, it's quite awesome, and quite easy. And it's a great portal into a digital music store.
Easy, sure, but pretty much a ball and chain, especially if you actually use that digital music store, which will happily sell you songs all day at approx 8x the price of the best legal alternative site that doesn't insist on onerous DRM, but will sell you most music in a huge variety of MP3 formats, and some music in alternative formats such as those mentioned above - even lossless formats. Apple's DRM won't look so innocuous when you realize a couple of computers or music players down the road that you have to buy the music *again*...
I've never understood why the people in this community are so willing to accept Apple's extremely proprietary architecture and DRM schemes. I actually have no problem with DRM, if I could actually *own* whatever I buy, and (if I've authorized it) even sell it or give it away.
I love the iPod's design and UI, but I may never buy one because of this.
3. You have to use interchangeable discs. My iPod has 40GB. I have 5000 songs, over a dozen audiobooks, and now a dozen constantly synced podcasts on this thing. I drive a lot, and what I feel like listening to at any given moment can change frequently.
Advantage over Minidisc, sure, but not over the many other HDD music players.
4. You can use ipods like portable hard drives. Because they are.
Again, like many others, *if* you remember the special USB cable...
5. Apple engineering. Sorry, the iPods are a thing of beauty and great UI. This counts, A LOT.
Granted, Apple does this really well, but Creative and others are finally starting to get close. Dell will never get it.
6. Marketing. iPods are hip. MDs were never hip. Yeah, this counts as well. When you see white headphones, you know there's an ipod on the other end. Steve Jobs is f---ing brilliant at marketing.
There's a book by Stuart Kauffman "The Origins Of Order", which clearly satisfies the requirements of the prize.
Then you should encourage him to apply for it. Although I have not read his book, the requirements are quite stringent, and I doubt he has cleared all the hurdles to the point that a couple of hundred other scientists would agree.
There are four states for any two binary orthogonal values A and B, they are {A,B}, {A,!B}, {!A,B}, {!A,!B}. The only case your assertion holds is in the degenerate case where A=B (at which point A and B are not orthogonal)
They're not orthogonal, rather, one follows from the other. That's not just my opinion, it's the position of numerous philisophers, from Christians, to existentialists. Satre and Kant are at least honest enough to realize that denying God requires denying the meaning of life, and that since everything is relative, there can be no moral right or wrong.
For example, I do not believe in god (so god does not exist, at least for me), but my life has meaning to me.
Perhaps you should read up a bit more. You're deluding yourself. The existence of God (or anything else, for that matter) has nothing to do with what you believe. It's a matter of objective truth and reality.
Can you name the leading evolutionary experts and can you give me a link? What your saying is interesting and bears further study. I'm hoping that you can send me links to the leading evolutionary experts agreeing in the manner you describe.
There are a lot of references, you can Google the quotes below for more information. I believe any evolutionist who is intellectually honest will admit that life certainly does at the very least appear to be exhibit features of purpose and design.
Here are three good examples, there are many others:
One good example is Richard Dawkins, probably the world's leading evolutionist (and an avowed atheist/humanist), who said in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker,
"...
despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics...." (Emphasis added)
To be fair, Dawkins absolutely rejects the existence of design in living things, but he does acknowledge the existence of "apparent design" and tries (badly and in vain, I think) to argue that what is apparent cannot actually be. Bottom line: blind watchmakers don't build watches, especially by chance. Dawkins recognizes that design is evedent, but then basically offers an argument that amounts to, "Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?" Dawkins is just wrong here, the issue is not one of just order, but design - and design implies and requires a designer.
Another example: Richard Lewontin, in the 1978 issue of Scientific American (which was entirely devoted to the topic of evolution), wrote:
Life forms are more than simply multiple and diverse, however. Organisms fit remarkably well into the external world in which they live.
They have morphologies, physiologies and behaviors that appear to have been carefully and artfully designed to enable each organism to appropriate the world around it for its own life. It was the marvelous fit of organisms to the environment, much more than the great diversity of forms, that was the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer (Emphasis added)
The late world-renowned astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle is another good example of scientific acknowledgement that life evidences design:
"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that
a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond question." (Emphasis added)
Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds of the collection of enzymes required for a single living cell arising by chance at 1 in 10e40000, a number that is incredibly, mind-bogglingly large: there are only ~10e85 subatomic particles in the entire universe! (Note that this just deals with the creation of the enzymes, not actual instantiation of life - we know for sure that all those enzymes (and much more required material) are present in a recently killed living creature, but despite the availabilty of all the right "supplies", dead things never come to life. For those enzymes to actually come to life requires beating astronomically larger odds, and similar odds for that life to grow, survive, and reproduce to form more life.)
It was this probability, as close to zero as possible that convinced Hoyle that life was indeed designed. Hoyle correctly skewered evolutionists for ignoring the complex information, its sources, and its processing required for life to develop. (Information theory is yet another great argument against evolution - information evidences design and does not arise spontaneously. Information is easily recognized - if not, we would never have any hope of decoding an encrypted message...) Hoyle was right to deny evolution, but not intellectually honest enough to
Wow. I'm sure the church was very interested in people exploring the wonders of science so they could learn how things work rather than relying on the ole "cuz god made it that way" routine.
Actually, by and large, yes it was. (And by the way, there's no problem with the coexistence of learning how things work and recognizing that they work that way because God did in fact make it that way. You create an entirely erroneous dichotomy there...)
Churches, being human institutions (although ordained by God), are subject to human errors and pitfalls, as are all other human institutions. I don't know anyone that would claim that the church is always right - sometimes it, too, is deperately wicked and misguided: The rampant corruption of the Borgia popes that led to the Reformation, or the more current examples of the Episcopal church embracing perversity (one of the things the Reformation was about) or the PCUSA Presbyterians' more recent antisemitism. I'd argue the Roman church's stance against science was on occasion (Galileo/Copernicus, etc.) not at all supported by scripture, but tradition or ego. This was also one of the big things the Reformation was about - one of the five Solas was Sola Scriptura - scripture alone is the measure of truth, not church tradition or any wooly theories or interpretations layered on top of it.
As a matter of scientific fact, it's not possible to determine whether the earth, the sun, or any other point is the center of the universe - in fact, it was when asked to prove that the earth wasn't the center of the universe that Einstein began the line of thinking that led to relativity.
A correct understanding of Christianity leaves believers in awe and wonder of their Creator, and eager to find out more about His handiwork. I think a good look at the church in Scotland a few hundred years ago shows that although there were tensions from time to time, it was generally very supportive of scientific inquiry.
In any case, even leading evolutionists agree that life at the very least *appears* to show Intelligent Design, so how can investigating that very evident apeearance of design be unscientific? (Uunless you've decided beforehand what must be true - but then you'd no longer be engaged in science, would you?) Evolution is every bit as much a religious worldview as is Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, all of which believe in special Creation. The church of Evolution simply presupposes not the truth of scripture and revelation, but the truth of hubris - that we cannot possibly be wrong, that nothing can exist which we do not see. Whether or not that is true is a matter of theological and philosophical debate, but it is certainly anything but scientific.
Science is the quest for objective Truth - that is, truth that is true regardless of whether you or I think or acknowledge that it is true. Christians know that true science can only be done in the context of a Christian worldview, since that is the only context that permits the consistent existence of objective truth in the first place.
So, what happens when you cut off the science? Simple: you run out of things to engineer, and thereby, tecnological progress.
Actually, I think you can make a much stronger argument that engineering has driven science for the past several hundred years rather than the other way around. Science has shown itself historically to be moribund and uninterested in driving real breakthroughs.
Engineering, though, creates innovation with impact, and thus generates wealth, which in turn fuels the demand for more engineering and technology. In fact, I'd argue that science has been pretty much enslaved to engineering and technology for at least the past century. "Technological progress" is far more dependent on engineering than on science. Look around: most of what you would call "scientific" progress is in reality science in thralldom to engineering's demonstrated ability to turn technological innovation into improved standards of living.
Teaching ID in public schools isn't going to cut down on the number of good scientists.
No, in fact, it will create them. Outside the media drumbeaters, even the leading evolutionist experts agree that life has the appearance of design. The issue is whether it is merely an appearance or the result of actual design. From a scientific investigatory stance, we have to consider both options.
Anyone who can't see through the ID crap fails that test by definition.
Nice of you to pre-judge that! In reality, even evolutionists recognize that ID arguments are substantial and must be addressed in any credible cohesive argument for evolutionary origins. That's why their million-dollar prize for a credible evolutionary model requires addressing ID's claims, which are substantial and credible objections to evolution on a scientific basis - that's why ID has to be tarred as anti-scientific - because in reality it is entirely scientific, so undermining credibility is the only option, since the real objections to ID can't be answered by evolutionary science. (http://scienceagainstevolution.org/v9i11f.htm)
If you really think it's so easy to disprove ID and prove evolution scientifically, let's see you submit a credible and scientifically reasonable explanation of naturalistic origins of life. There'a a cool million dollars waiting for you if you do, not to mention the undying fawning attention of the mainstream media for decades to come. I'd like to see you win it. Really.
(A good writeup on how this million dollar challenge requires refuting several significant ID assertions can be found in this month's ScienceAgainstEvolution newsletter.)
And I am not anti-American by any means. I just think that this culture of true love, self fulfillment, avoidance of suffering has made us too soft to survive.
What?! You mean you're in favor of that nasty Protestant work ethic? That sort of knee-jerk religious stuff isn't tolerated here, son! You're officially a troll yourself now, by the prevailing standards here!
There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important - is it any suprise teachers and parents pass that attitude on to their kids?
Perhaps that's related to the fact that mathematics education (especially in the West) is deplorable, and mostly relies on methods that have been proven not to work for the past few centuries. But we did know how once - the medieval education system was actually far superior to ours in many respects, and often did especially well in logic-heavy disciplines like philosophy and mathematics.
Maybe if we actually start *teaching* mathematics, students will start to learn it. (And I say this as someone who considers himself a "math failure" even though I am an engineer. I know the math education I received was deplorable, and the state of math education seems to have gone downhill rapidly since then...)
But the fact that numberous people here are saying Christianity has declined science is fallacious and does not have enough evidence to prove itself.
Thanks for mentioning this. Christians are being demonized here, but the truth is there are loonies on both sides.
That said, Christians need never be afraid of the Truth, since it is quite literally our God. That means there is absolutely nothing that real and valid science can prove that can possibly disprove His existence. In fact, it is well-accepted amongst philosophers that objective truth and God are inseparable, and that if God does not exist, then neither can objective truth. Those philosophers who are reject God but are intellectually honest take this to it's logical conclusion of existentialism and the utter meaninglessness of life. Logically, God exists and life has meaning, or He doesn't and it does not. There is no in-between for a binary condition.
That the universe around us (and particularly living things) exhibit the hallmarks of intelligent design is inescapable, even to evolutionary scientists looking for proof of their theory. But the real point of this debate should be that there are very good scientific reasons to doubt evolution. Evolution is the church of the anti-God, and abandoned any real pretense of science years ago. When "scientists" assemble a "human ancestor" skeleton made up of badly damaged fragments of bones found over many miles and numerous geological layers, why shouldn't we all question the validity of that "science"? (See Parent of the Apes, Part 1, Parent of the Apes, Part 2, and Let's talk about Lucy.)
That's *exactly* the sort of thing we should be teaching our students to watch for - people on any side of an issue who are willing to cheat to make their point. The purpose of real science is to expose TRUTH - nothing more, nothing less. Evolutionary science (and to be fair, almost all of of "creation science", too) are not interested in truth-seeking, but grandstanding. Any real scientists are only interested in finding what is objectively true and real, and since real belief in objective truth requires the existence of God (whether or not one chooses to live in accordance with His wishes), then atheism and science are incompatible. This was well understood several hundred years ago at the height of scientific progress when theology was known as "Queen of the Sciences". Theology was not paced above all other sciences because of church domination, but because it is a logical necessity, and people then were smart enough to realize it and intellectually honest enough to acknowledge it.
Someone with mod points mod parent up. This is an extraordinarily to-the-point explanation of why OSS may never attain the penetration a lot of/.'ers would like. In my own, new company, for instance, I'm leaning heavily toward commercial, even Microsoft (!) soultions for much of the corparate infrastructure, for a lot of the same reasons. Sure, I can kludge together a mass of OSS stuff, to run the company, but then it's totally unmaintainable, and relies on way too much expert knowledge of way too many things that only contribute peripherally to the company's success. One thing the hackers don't get is that applications and operating systems, as individual, separate things, are effectively useless - what's needed is a real integrated soultion that meets real business needs. SME server was a great step in the right direction before Mitel abandoned stewardship of development and the community imploded. The problem is that a soultin like that requires strong architecture leadership, something that is mostly present only in the BSD community - but thery're committted tot he parts and pieces model, and if you don't like gluing them together, you're not worthy.
(As an example of how OSS falls flat, there is just simply *no* acceptable open source calendaring alternative, so I'm even considering the dreaded Exchange server, even though I *hate* it for all the right reasons. Now that the success of my own company is on the line, I can overlook its obvious warts in favor of its out-of-the-box functionality and supportability, neither of which are available in the OSS solutions, which are more like "solution construction kits", with way more than "some assembly required"...)
I wish my previous CFO would spend more time on slashdot, and perhaps we'd have done far fewer stupid things like maintaining an unmaintainable mess of microsoft components and forcing them on our customers.
Slashdot, beyond the way the trolls word things, is a great place to find best-practices for the IT world.
Oh, really? I've just "wasted" the entire first half of today searching the net in the vain hope that by 2005, the open source community has finally figured out how to build a calendar server that works cross-platform, has a secure web interface, and can sync with a Palm (and Palm became the defacto PDA standard a *decade* ago.) It's *still* not possible. Sunbird/Mozilla Calendar can't sync, and really isn't a server, but a webDAV hack to fake it. The various open "groupware" products are hopelessly lame, mostly abandonware, and generally incapable of interoperating with the windows world, even if they actually had enough functionality to be useful.
I hate Exchange, but there is NO open source alternative that can meet the needs of my new company. (And you know what? Now that it's mine, I have *very* little allegiance to open source - If MS has a solution (even a bad and expensive one like Exchange) that can get my team the tools they need, then they'll get the nod (and the money.)
So today, your argument falls flat. Way flat. (And no, I'm not trolling, check my history - I against the GPL, but have been a huge proponent of open source for 20 years. Open source just can't deliver on much beyond the limited things programmers care about...
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
You're off by a bit, and are making some invalid assumptions to start with.
Steve Allen of the Lick Observatory has a great paper explaining the the fundamental clock problem and also exploring effects and impacts on society. It's really quite fascinating, and considerably more complex than most people imagine. I've read papers on the other side, but agree with Allen that nailing the world's time to TI (atomic time) breaks what has never been broken before in all human history, and that letting a bunch of bureaucrats push this through will have serious global consequences.
This is a real problem, and one that will have huge consequences if we let the "science weenies" redefine clock time. As the article points out, the fundamental problem is that "what time is it?" is a qusetion that has two different answers, depending on what you're trying to do. The vast majority of the time, that question means "What time of day is it?" (which is why replacing UT1 with TI/TAI is unwise), but other times (especially to scientists) it means "what interval in invariant time units (seconds, we hope) has passed since I last looked at the clock?" Of course, seconds haven't always been of the same length, or even, for that matter, of fixed length: as recently as 1971, the world's master clocks used "rubber seconds" instead of leap seconds to keep clocks properly in sync with the real world. (This is mostly why Unix/Posix clocks don't know about leap seconds: because leap seconds were only a proposal until a year after teh epoch.)
There is a fundamental incompatibility between time-of-day and time intervals. Keeping clocks aligned is extrraordinarily difficult, and breaking the lock between the clocks and "earth time" has hideously expensive and insidiously far-reaching consequences. (Not least of all to navigation, which is already complex enough, but becomes even more difficult if you let the day slip around the planet. If you don't understand celestial navigation and how determining longitude is *exactly* the same thing as having a clock that is rigorously synchronized to the sun, then spend a while reading Bowditch.)
Reminds me of a joke I heard Roger Moore tell on Johnny Carson one time (boy that dates me, and I'm not really all *that* old...), in the early days of Eurotegetherness:
In European Heaven, The English are the policemen, the French are the cooks, the Germans are the automakers, the Italians are the lovers, and the Swiss are the bankers.
In European Hell, The English are the cooks, the French are the automakers, the Germans are the policemen, the Italians are the bankers, and the Swiss are the lovers.
With MS for example you never know when critical software will be end-of-lifed. When the source is Free you don't have to worry about this.
That argument falls more than a little flat with those of us that were more or less forced to upgrade Linux distros back in the disastrous libc5 to glibc2 transition of a few years ago.
I'd argue that in reality, commercial OSes are supported *far* longer than open source ones, where every version is effectively end-of-lifed with the release of each new version. That's certainly been my experience, and I've been doing this for a while.
Note that Microsoft just this week pulled support for Windows 2000 - five years after its introduction. That's not nearly as long as Sun supports its Solaris releases (usually ~8 years), but it's not too shabby, and far longer than any Linux vendor I know of offers support for thier distro. I don't expect that Red Hat offers support for RH6 (which is about as old as W2K)anymore, either...
OK, I'm going to give up the mods I've done here because someone needs to point out that we have Open Office for only one reason: Sun spent millions of dollars of its own cold, hard, cash to buy StarDivision (the original developers of StarOffice.) They then spent millions more going through the code and making sure they *could* give it away, before actually doing so. There is simply no greater example of corporate commitment to the ideals of open source.
Stallman hates Sun because Sun has more successfully than any other company (inluding Red Hat) shown that it is possible to mix open source and successful commercialization of software, and make that work for everyone.
For you youngsters out there, you ought to know that virtually all Linux distros used Sun's OpenWindows windowing environment as the default in the early days - you can make a credible argument, in fact that it was that open source code that raised Linux up from the crowd, making it a "real" alternative to commercial Unix, especially since BSD was mired in lawsuits at the time.
Over the years, in fact, there is absolutely NO company that can hold a candle with Sun in terms of walking the talk with opening up source - NFS (itself hugely important in the development of the whole idea of networked computing), OpenWindows, OpenOffice (probably the largest and most important single body of software *ever* open sourced as a whole, and the only significant contribution that was a pure *gift* to the open source community, not just open-sourced for convenience), Java (likewise, huge, and yes, it's really open-sourced - most of us don't care if the license is GPL compatible), and most recetly, Solaris itself (and that code has shown how far ahead Solaris really is in many areas that are vitally important if you want to use an OS in mission-critical, enterprise environments.) (No, those aren't just market-speak buzzwords - they are shorthand for a whole lot of really important characteristics needed by those that want to do more than spend thier lives tweaking the look of thier desktop.)
Sun is without a doubt the biggest giver in open source history, so it's getting tiresome to see Stallmans legions of flying monkeys screech "Not Free!" with every move Sun makes. Open source does NOT mean GPL, or even GPL compatible. A great many of us value diversity in the kinds of freedom provided by different kinds of licenses - they're there for a reason, and they serve a very valid and useful purpose. (Personally, I'm O.K. with almost any open source license that is non-viral in nature...)
And Dubya absolutely doesn't give a shit about Iraq owning large oilfields, right??
The tired old liberal canard riases its ugly head again. Look a tthe facts - if the war was really about seizing Iraqi oil, don't you think we'd have done that by now? We're years into this deal, and all that oil is still owned and controlled by Iraqis. Granted, some of the reconstruction is being done by US firms (and why not? - they're the best in the world), but to claim that the US owns or is even substantially in control of Iraq's oil is to completely ignore reality.
We certainly *could* have taken over Iraq's oil, if we'd wanted to - we had every opportunity. We didn't though, because the US is not that kind of a country. The invasion of Iraq was not about conquest and subjugation, but liberation and freedom from a tyrannical dictator - one whom *all* parties and governments in the western world (including the UN) believed to have large WMD stockpiles.
The success of Iraq is literally changing the Middle East in ways unimaginable before the Iraq war - free elections (including women!) have been held in Aghanistan and Iraq, to elect free governments by the people. Lebanon is free again, the Syrian occupiers chased out by a peaceful democracy demonstration. Even Saudi Arabia is beginning to realize it may have to open up to democratization, a step that could finally end the rule of the last absolute monachies on the globe. That's all terrific news, unless you're one of the bad guys...
Your paranoid rant forgot to mention that the Canopy Group (started by Novell founder Ray Noorda) has/had ownership positions in both SCO and Novell, and that Novell is now run by Eric Schmidt, who was Sun's longtime CTO.
I'm sure there are some other irrelevant connections that can be used to "support" moonbat paranoia, but these two are conspicuous by their absence.
It's rantings like this and the hatred of any sort of commerce (even if it *helps* the open source cause!) that will ultimately lead to the demise of open source, if we're not careful. Heck, Sun *invented* the concept of corporations making source available with NFS, and bought, paid for, and then *gave away* the world's only real Office alternative, but to hear people talk here, they're public enemy no. 2. Go figure. No, on second thought, there's no figuring required. Open sourcers, especially the virulently hatful GPL types, can never be thankful for anything. Like two-year olds, everything has to be *their way*, or they throw a tantrum. I'm becoming increasingly disgusted by this attitude as I grow older, and I know I'm not the only one...
You know you pay $X ammount and you have to wait on hold until you can get someone that says they don't know how to fix the problem either.
When I finally broke down and bought an XP upgrade last year, I had a couple of significant and difficult problems with the install. I reached the despairing point of calling Microsoft to try to sort the mess out.
All I can say is that they've apparently gotten *really* serious about support. I would have to rate it as the single best support call experience I've ever had, from any vendor. I was shocked. I got to talk to someone here in the US that could actually speak English, and didn't insist on sticking to some ridiculous script or procedure. The guy was sharp, professional, courteous, and best of all, fixed the problem, which was fairly subtle. I'm well-known as someone that dislikes Microsoft (my/. sig for years began "As much as I detest Microsoft...", but the fact is that their support, at least based on my scientific sample of one:-), and for XP issues, has become very good.
Of course, this was within the warranty period, and involved issues that had to be resolved to make XP useful to me - I'm not so sure I'd get the same response now, but that doesn't take anything away from the previous experience...
I bet a few of us can type http://slashdot.org/ faster than we realize what we are typing.
Don't most of us use Mozilla? It's just sl[tab][return], then...
(BTW, for you Firefox bigots, why is it a good thing that Firefox is "lighter"? The Mozilla suite is a helluva lot lighter than the multiple copies of Gecko, etc. I get with with Firefox + T-bird + nVu +...)
Did you realized how you 3rd party programs don't have methods to update automatically?
That's funny, I've got several third party programs (including complex apps such as CorelDraw) on my primary windows desktop that automatically update themselves through either InstallShield Update Manager or BigFix. Granted, there's no universal updater, but that's true in any environment - heck, even the Macs don't have hooks for updating third party-apps, and it's *way* easier for them than anyone else...
You can be a well educated Creationist, and if you are, you will recognize that the foundation of your faith in Creationism does not start and end at "because Gensis says so".
Ultimately, as Cornelius van Til pointed out, everything will be determined by your presuppositions, though. For me, I've found that the world, including origins, makes much more sense from both a scientific and theological point of view, if that initial presupposition is that God exists. In fact, it was science, not religion, that led me to my current belief not only in creation, but a young earth. Tha data is wildly inconsistent, but overall, when approached with an open mind, I truly believe that it's easier to reconcile the known *facts* withteh idea that the earth is a few thousand years old than with the idea that it's billions of years old. Nevertheless, from a scientific point ovf view, it's a hash at best.
As for belief - that's easier. You one really significant choice in this life - God exists, or He does not.
If He does not, then if you are bold enough to be logically consistent and intellectually honest, you will necessarily reason to the point of the existentialists. This means there is no right, no wrong, not even any truth, and certainly no meaning. (Why not rape, kill, and steal, then? Why should it be wrong to harm others?) It also means there is no love, no care, no poetry - only the mindless interaction of randomly assembled chemicals.
On the other hand, if He does exist, then we can see His love in each other and in His creation. Life has meaning, right is right, we have a place and a purpose. Good things can exist, because they flow from His goodness.
In a very real way, this is the *only* choice we ever have. Make it well.
The geologic evidence does. You can date the rocks from the ocean floor on either side of the ridge. You can also observe the alternating pattern of magnetic field reversals preserved in the rocks. You can find fossils from the same species on South America and Africa.
The Americas *were* once joined with Europe and Africa, and it *has* taken millions of years to reach their current positions.
You make two assertions in your last sentence. The first is a "possibly, even probably", based on the evidence, the second is conjecture. Creationists would argue that those many layers were produced in a great global catastrophe (a flood). (BTW - Have you noticed that if you're a scientist, you're free to posit any sort of large-scale catastrophe you like to help explain teh cataclysmic extintions in the fossil record - Supernovae, giant meteorites, etc, so long as it's not a flood?)
And niether theory has good answers for some very large-scale effects that do exist: like the thousands of square miles of sedimentary layers that were somehow "flipped over" *intact* to produce a mirror image with the seabed in the middle. (There are a lot of areas like this that are ignored by evolutionists becaue the answers only make things worse - things like giant fossils that make no sense unless ancient earth was *very* different from the wildest imaginings of evolutionists.) Science cannot adequately explain origins at this time, and any claim to the contrary is based on a dogmatic need to disprove the existence of God.
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And paint wears off. I don't think the letters go away with solvent on a good keyboard, otherwise finger oils would just smudge it away, which I think has something to do with why painted keyboards feel horrible, it softens the paint a bit, making them a bit sticky.
Try Krylon Semi-Flat Black. (Not semi-gloss, Semi-FLAT) The stuff is flat amazing (ugh!) - It has a beatiful sheen that is just right, and it's tough as a boot - I've used it for all kinds of things:
Make sure to spray in a dust-free area, and sun-cure them (after the paint is no longer tacky) for at least a day or two for the best results. As always with spray paint, several thin coats work a LOT better than one thick one. A crappy spray nozzle from another old spray can can even create an interesting "spot texture" pattern that can be useful in some cases. Experiment and see...
Anyway, it's great stuff, and should be easy to find, since it's Krylon. IIRC, WalMart has a good Krylon selection.
Now if you could just buy paint that *really* looks like plated metal... (Although I do have a "secret" process I stumbled upon when repainting my son's bike that produces a finish that is indistinguishable from blue anodized aluminum - at least until it chips - it's a bit more fragile than I'd like.)
Jon = Good article, but it completely ignored one very important point that X or any alternatives must address in today's world: audio, and more particularly, audio and video can be synchronized for support of various kinds of multimedia. In my mind, this is the single most compelling reason why there is no serious open source desktop alternative: what little support there is for such things today is a gruesome hack - it needs to be built directly into the display system, and if network extensibility is supported for graphics (as in X), then network extensibility of audio must also be supported. (Making all HID and I/O devices network-extensible is worth thinking about, too...)
No problem.
1. ipods run MP3's natively. No encoding to a proprietary format (ATRAC) and losing quality as with minidisc.
But not WMA, Ogg, FLAC, WAV, etc., if you care about any of those...
2. "sonicstage sure, stupid program, but its easy" Meet iTunes. It's not stupid, it's quite awesome, and quite easy. And it's a great portal into a digital music store.
Easy, sure, but pretty much a ball and chain, especially if you actually use that digital music store, which will happily sell you songs all day at approx 8x the price of the best legal alternative site that doesn't insist on onerous DRM, but will sell you most music in a huge variety of MP3 formats, and some music in alternative formats such as those mentioned above - even lossless formats. Apple's DRM won't look so innocuous when you realize a couple of computers or music players down the road that you have to buy the music *again*...
I've never understood why the people in this community are so willing to accept Apple's extremely proprietary architecture and DRM schemes. I actually have no problem with DRM, if I could actually *own* whatever I buy, and (if I've authorized it) even sell it or give it away.
I love the iPod's design and UI, but I may never buy one because of this.
3. You have to use interchangeable discs. My iPod has 40GB. I have 5000 songs, over a dozen audiobooks, and now a dozen constantly synced podcasts on this thing. I drive a lot, and what I feel like listening to at any given moment can change frequently.
Advantage over Minidisc, sure, but not over the many other HDD music players.
4. You can use ipods like portable hard drives. Because they are.
Again, like many others, *if* you remember the special USB cable...
5. Apple engineering. Sorry, the iPods are a thing of beauty and great UI. This counts, A LOT.
Granted, Apple does this really well, but Creative and others are finally starting to get close. Dell will never get it.
6. Marketing. iPods are hip. MDs were never hip. Yeah, this counts as well. When you see white headphones, you know there's an ipod on the other end. Steve Jobs is f---ing brilliant at marketing.
Absolutely.
So long as we're talking about beer and not politics, America is fine.
;-)
Agreed. American politics has gone to hell in a handbasket since the Reagan administration. And with Newt out of the picture, what hope is there?
Lone Star beer, and Bob Wills music...
There's a book by Stuart Kauffman "The Origins Of Order", which clearly satisfies the requirements of the prize.
Then you should encourage him to apply for it. Although I have not read his book, the requirements are quite stringent, and I doubt he has cleared all the hurdles to the point that a couple of hundred other scientists would agree.
There are four states for any two binary orthogonal values A and B, they are {A,B}, {A,!B}, {!A,B}, {!A,!B}. The only case your assertion holds is in the degenerate case where A=B (at which point A and B are not orthogonal)
They're not orthogonal, rather, one follows from the other. That's not just my opinion, it's the position of numerous philisophers, from Christians, to existentialists. Satre and Kant are at least honest enough to realize that denying God requires denying the meaning of life, and that since everything is relative, there can be no moral right or wrong.
For example, I do not believe in god (so god does not exist, at least for me), but my life has meaning to me.
Perhaps you should read up a bit more. You're deluding yourself. The existence of God (or anything else, for that matter) has nothing to do with what you believe. It's a matter of objective truth and reality.
There are a lot of references, you can Google the quotes below for more information. I believe any evolutionist who is intellectually honest will admit that life certainly does at the very least appear to be exhibit features of purpose and design.
Here are three good examples, there are many others:
One good example is Richard Dawkins, probably the world's leading evolutionist (and an avowed atheist/humanist), who said in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker,
To be fair, Dawkins absolutely rejects the existence of design in living things, but he does acknowledge the existence of "apparent design" and tries (badly and in vain, I think) to argue that what is apparent cannot actually be. Bottom line: blind watchmakers don't build watches, especially by chance. Dawkins recognizes that design is evedent, but then basically offers an argument that amounts to, "Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?" Dawkins is just wrong here, the issue is not one of just order, but design - and design implies and requires a designer.
Another example: Richard Lewontin, in the 1978 issue of Scientific American (which was entirely devoted to the topic of evolution), wrote:
The late world-renowned astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle is another good example of scientific acknowledgement that life evidences design:
Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds of the collection of enzymes required for a single living cell arising by chance at 1 in 10e40000, a number that is incredibly, mind-bogglingly large: there are only ~10e85 subatomic particles in the entire universe! (Note that this just deals with the creation of the enzymes, not actual instantiation of life - we know for sure that all those enzymes (and much more required material) are present in a recently killed living creature, but despite the availabilty of all the right "supplies", dead things never come to life. For those enzymes to actually come to life requires beating astronomically larger odds, and similar odds for that life to grow, survive, and reproduce to form more life.)
It was this probability, as close to zero as possible that convinced Hoyle that life was indeed designed. Hoyle correctly skewered evolutionists for ignoring the complex information, its sources, and its processing required for life to develop. (Information theory is yet another great argument against evolution - information evidences design and does not arise spontaneously. Information is easily recognized - if not, we would never have any hope of decoding an encrypted message...) Hoyle was right to deny evolution, but not intellectually honest enough to
Wow. I'm sure the church was very interested in people exploring the wonders of science so they could learn how things work rather than relying on the ole "cuz god made it that way" routine.
Actually, by and large, yes it was. (And by the way, there's no problem with the coexistence of learning how things work and recognizing that they work that way because God did in fact make it that way. You create an entirely erroneous dichotomy there...)
Churches, being human institutions (although ordained by God), are subject to human errors and pitfalls, as are all other human institutions. I don't know anyone that would claim that the church is always right - sometimes it, too, is deperately wicked and misguided: The rampant corruption of the Borgia popes that led to the Reformation, or the more current examples of the Episcopal church embracing perversity (one of the things the Reformation was about) or the PCUSA Presbyterians' more recent antisemitism. I'd argue the Roman church's stance against science was on occasion (Galileo/Copernicus, etc.) not at all supported by scripture, but tradition or ego. This was also one of the big things the Reformation was about - one of the five Solas was Sola Scriptura - scripture alone is the measure of truth, not church tradition or any wooly theories or interpretations layered on top of it.
As a matter of scientific fact, it's not possible to determine whether the earth, the sun, or any other point is the center of the universe - in fact, it was when asked to prove that the earth wasn't the center of the universe that Einstein began the line of thinking that led to relativity.
A correct understanding of Christianity leaves believers in awe and wonder of their Creator, and eager to find out more about His handiwork. I think a good look at the church in Scotland a few hundred years ago shows that although there were tensions from time to time, it was generally very supportive of scientific inquiry.
In any case, even leading evolutionists agree that life at the very least *appears* to show Intelligent Design, so how can investigating that very evident apeearance of design be unscientific? (Uunless you've decided beforehand what must be true - but then you'd no longer be engaged in science, would you?) Evolution is every bit as much a religious worldview as is Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, all of which believe in special Creation. The church of Evolution simply presupposes not the truth of scripture and revelation, but the truth of hubris - that we cannot possibly be wrong, that nothing can exist which we do not see. Whether or not that is true is a matter of theological and philosophical debate, but it is certainly anything but scientific.
Science is the quest for objective Truth - that is, truth that is true regardless of whether you or I think or acknowledge that it is true. Christians know that true science can only be done in the context of a Christian worldview, since that is the only context that permits the consistent existence of objective truth in the first place.
So, what happens when you cut off the science? Simple: you run out of things to engineer, and thereby, tecnological progress.
Actually, I think you can make a much stronger argument that engineering has driven science for the past several hundred years rather than the other way around. Science has shown itself historically to be moribund and uninterested in driving real breakthroughs.
Engineering, though, creates innovation with impact, and thus generates wealth, which in turn fuels the demand for more engineering and technology. In fact, I'd argue that science has been pretty much enslaved to engineering and technology for at least the past century. "Technological progress" is far more dependent on engineering than on science. Look around: most of what you would call "scientific" progress is in reality science in thralldom to engineering's demonstrated ability to turn technological innovation into improved standards of living.
Imagine that... Adam Smith was right.
Teaching ID in public schools isn't going to cut down on the number of good scientists.
No, in fact, it will create them. Outside the media drumbeaters, even the leading evolutionist experts agree that life has the appearance of design. The issue is whether it is merely an appearance or the result of actual design. From a scientific investigatory stance, we have to consider both options.
Anyone who can't see through the ID crap fails that test by definition.
Nice of you to pre-judge that! In reality, even evolutionists recognize that ID arguments are substantial and must be addressed in any credible cohesive argument for evolutionary origins. That's why their million-dollar prize for a credible evolutionary model requires addressing ID's claims, which are substantial and credible objections to evolution on a scientific basis - that's why ID has to be tarred as anti-scientific - because in reality it is entirely scientific, so undermining credibility is the only option, since the real objections to ID can't be answered by evolutionary science. (http://scienceagainstevolution.org/v9i11f.htm)
If you really think it's so easy to disprove ID and prove evolution scientifically, let's see you submit a credible and scientifically reasonable explanation of naturalistic origins of life. There'a a cool million dollars waiting for you if you do, not to mention the undying fawning attention of the mainstream media for decades to come. I'd like to see you win it. Really.
(A good writeup on how this million dollar challenge requires refuting several significant ID assertions can be found in this month's ScienceAgainstEvolution newsletter.)
And I am not anti-American by any means. I just think that this culture of true love, self fulfillment, avoidance of suffering has made us too soft to survive.
What?! You mean you're in favor of that nasty Protestant work ethic? That sort of knee-jerk religious stuff isn't tolerated here, son! You're officially a troll yourself now, by the prevailing standards here!
There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important - is it any suprise teachers and parents pass that attitude on to their kids?
Perhaps that's related to the fact that mathematics education (especially in the West) is deplorable, and mostly relies on methods that have been proven not to work for the past few centuries. But we did know how once - the medieval education system was actually far superior to ours in many respects, and often did especially well in logic-heavy disciplines like philosophy and mathematics.
Maybe if we actually start *teaching* mathematics, students will start to learn it. (And I say this as someone who considers himself a "math failure" even though I am an engineer. I know the math education I received was deplorable, and the state of math education seems to have gone downhill rapidly since then...)
But the fact that numberous people here are saying Christianity has declined science is fallacious and does not have enough evidence to prove itself.
Thanks for mentioning this. Christians are being demonized here, but the truth is there are loonies on both sides.
That said, Christians need never be afraid of the Truth, since it is quite literally our God. That means there is absolutely nothing that real and valid science can prove that can possibly disprove His existence. In fact, it is well-accepted amongst philosophers that objective truth and God are inseparable, and that if God does not exist, then neither can objective truth. Those philosophers who are reject God but are intellectually honest take this to it's logical conclusion of existentialism and the utter meaninglessness of life. Logically, God exists and life has meaning, or He doesn't and it does not. There is no in-between for a binary condition.
That the universe around us (and particularly living things) exhibit the hallmarks of intelligent design is inescapable, even to evolutionary scientists looking for proof of their theory. But the real point of this debate should be that there are very good scientific reasons to doubt evolution. Evolution is the church of the anti-God, and abandoned any real pretense of science years ago. When "scientists" assemble a "human ancestor" skeleton made up of badly damaged fragments of bones found over many miles and numerous geological layers, why shouldn't we all question the validity of that "science"? (See Parent of the Apes, Part 1, Parent of the Apes, Part 2, and Let's talk about Lucy.)
That's *exactly* the sort of thing we should be teaching our students to watch for - people on any side of an issue who are willing to cheat to make their point. The purpose of real science is to expose TRUTH - nothing more, nothing less. Evolutionary science (and to be fair, almost all of of "creation science", too) are not interested in truth-seeking, but grandstanding. Any real scientists are only interested in finding what is objectively true and real, and since real belief in objective truth requires the existence of God (whether or not one chooses to live in accordance with His wishes), then atheism and science are incompatible. This was well understood several hundred years ago at the height of scientific progress when theology was known as "Queen of the Sciences". Theology was not paced above all other sciences because of church domination, but because it is a logical necessity, and people then were smart enough to realize it and intellectually honest enough to acknowledge it.
Someone with mod points mod parent up. This is an extraordinarily to-the-point explanation of why OSS may never attain the penetration a lot of /.'ers would like. In my own, new company, for instance, I'm leaning heavily toward commercial, even Microsoft (!) soultions for much of the corparate infrastructure, for a lot of the same reasons. Sure, I can kludge together a mass of OSS stuff, to run the company, but then it's totally unmaintainable, and relies on way too much expert knowledge of way too many things that only contribute peripherally to the company's success. One thing the hackers don't get is that applications and operating systems, as individual, separate things, are effectively useless - what's needed is a real integrated soultion that meets real business needs. SME server was a great step in the right direction before Mitel abandoned stewardship of development and the community imploded. The problem is that a soultin like that requires strong architecture leadership, something that is mostly present only in the BSD community - but thery're committted tot he parts and pieces model, and if you don't like gluing them together, you're not worthy.
(As an example of how OSS falls flat, there is just simply *no* acceptable open source calendaring alternative, so I'm even considering the dreaded Exchange server, even though I *hate* it for all the right reasons. Now that the success of my own company is on the line, I can overlook its obvious warts in favor of its out-of-the-box functionality and supportability, neither of which are available in the OSS solutions, which are more like "solution construction kits", with way more than "some assembly required"...)
I wish my previous CFO would spend more time on slashdot, and perhaps we'd have done far fewer stupid things like maintaining an unmaintainable mess of microsoft components and forcing them on our customers.
Slashdot, beyond the way the trolls word things, is a great place to find best-practices for the IT world.
Oh, really? I've just "wasted" the entire first half of today searching the net in the vain hope that by 2005, the open source community has finally figured out how to build a calendar server that works cross-platform, has a secure web interface, and can sync with a Palm (and Palm became the defacto PDA standard a *decade* ago.) It's *still* not possible. Sunbird/Mozilla Calendar can't sync, and really isn't a server, but a webDAV hack to fake it. The various open "groupware" products are hopelessly lame, mostly abandonware, and generally incapable of interoperating with the windows world, even if they actually had enough functionality to be useful.
I hate Exchange, but there is NO open source alternative that can meet the needs of my new company. (And you know what? Now that it's mine, I have *very* little allegiance to open source - If MS has a solution (even a bad and expensive one like Exchange) that can get my team the tools they need, then they'll get the nod (and the money.)
So today, your argument falls flat. Way flat. (And no, I'm not trolling, check my history - I against the GPL, but have been a huge proponent of open source for 20 years. Open source just can't deliver on much beyond the limited things programmers care about...
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
You're off by a bit, and are making some invalid assumptions to start with.
Steve Allen of the Lick Observatory has a great paper explaining the the fundamental clock problem and also exploring effects and impacts on society. It's really quite fascinating, and considerably more complex than most people imagine. I've read papers on the other side, but agree with Allen that nailing the world's time to TI (atomic time) breaks what has never been broken before in all human history, and that letting a bunch of bureaucrats push this through will have serious global consequences.
This is a real problem, and one that will have huge consequences if we let the "science weenies" redefine clock time. As the article points out, the fundamental problem is that "what time is it?" is a qusetion that has two different answers, depending on what you're trying to do. The vast majority of the time, that question means "What time of day is it?" (which is why replacing UT1 with TI/TAI is unwise), but other times (especially to scientists) it means "what interval in invariant time units (seconds, we hope) has passed since I last looked at the clock?" Of course, seconds haven't always been of the same length, or even, for that matter, of fixed length: as recently as 1971, the world's master clocks used "rubber seconds" instead of leap seconds to keep clocks properly in sync with the real world. (This is mostly why Unix/Posix clocks don't know about leap seconds: because leap seconds were only a proposal until a year after teh epoch.)
There is a fundamental incompatibility between time-of-day and time intervals. Keeping clocks aligned is extrraordinarily difficult, and breaking the lock between the clocks and "earth time" has hideously expensive and insidiously far-reaching consequences. (Not least of all to navigation, which is already complex enough, but becomes even more difficult if you let the day slip around the planet. If you don't understand celestial navigation and how determining longitude is *exactly* the same thing as having a clock that is rigorously synchronized to the sun, then spend a while reading Bowditch.)
The Great European Dream
Reminds me of a joke I heard Roger Moore tell on Johnny Carson one time (boy that dates me, and I'm not really all *that* old...), in the early days of Eurotegetherness:
In European Heaven, The English are the policemen, the French are the cooks, the Germans are the automakers, the Italians are the lovers, and the Swiss are the bankers.
In European Hell, The English are the cooks, the French are the automakers, the Germans are the policemen, the Italians are the bankers, and the Swiss are the lovers.
With MS for example you never know when critical software will be end-of-lifed. When the source is Free you don't have to worry about this.
That argument falls more than a little flat with those of us that were more or less forced to upgrade Linux distros back in the disastrous libc5 to glibc2 transition of a few years ago.
I'd argue that in reality, commercial OSes are supported *far* longer than open source ones, where every version is effectively end-of-lifed with the release of each new version. That's certainly been my experience, and I've been doing this for a while.
Note that Microsoft just this week pulled support for Windows 2000 - five years after its introduction. That's not nearly as long as Sun supports its Solaris releases (usually ~8 years), but it's not too shabby, and far longer than any Linux vendor I know of offers support for thier distro. I don't expect that Red Hat offers support for RH6 (which is about as old as W2K)anymore, either...
OK, I'm going to give up the mods I've done here because someone needs to point out that we have Open Office for only one reason: Sun spent millions of dollars of its own cold, hard, cash to buy StarDivision (the original developers of StarOffice.) They then spent millions more going through the code and making sure they *could* give it away, before actually doing so. There is simply no greater example of corporate commitment to the ideals of open source.
Stallman hates Sun because Sun has more successfully than any other company (inluding Red Hat) shown that it is possible to mix open source and successful commercialization of software, and make that work for everyone.
For you youngsters out there, you ought to know that virtually all Linux distros used Sun's OpenWindows windowing environment as the default in the early days - you can make a credible argument, in fact that it was that open source code that raised Linux up from the crowd, making it a "real" alternative to commercial Unix, especially since BSD was mired in lawsuits at the time.
Over the years, in fact, there is absolutely NO company that can hold a candle with Sun in terms of walking the talk with opening up source - NFS (itself hugely important in the development of the whole idea of networked computing), OpenWindows, OpenOffice (probably the largest and most important single body of software *ever* open sourced as a whole, and the only significant contribution that was a pure *gift* to the open source community, not just open-sourced for convenience), Java (likewise, huge, and yes, it's really open-sourced - most of us don't care if the license is GPL compatible), and most recetly, Solaris itself (and that code has shown how far ahead Solaris really is in many areas that are vitally important if you want to use an OS in mission-critical, enterprise environments.) (No, those aren't just market-speak buzzwords - they are shorthand for a whole lot of really important characteristics needed by those that want to do more than spend thier lives tweaking the look of thier desktop.)
Sun is without a doubt the biggest giver in open source history, so it's getting tiresome to see Stallmans legions of flying monkeys screech "Not Free!" with every move Sun makes. Open source does NOT mean GPL, or even GPL compatible. A great many of us value diversity in the kinds of freedom provided by different kinds of licenses - they're there for a reason, and they serve a very valid and useful purpose. (Personally, I'm O.K. with almost any open source license that is non-viral in nature...)
And Dubya absolutely doesn't give a shit about Iraq owning large oilfields, right??
The tired old liberal canard riases its ugly head again. Look a tthe facts - if the war was really about seizing Iraqi oil, don't you think we'd have done that by now? We're years into this deal, and all that oil is still owned and controlled by Iraqis. Granted, some of the reconstruction is being done by US firms (and why not? - they're the best in the world), but to claim that the US owns or is even substantially in control of Iraq's oil is to completely ignore reality.
We certainly *could* have taken over Iraq's oil, if we'd wanted to - we had every opportunity. We didn't though, because the US is not that kind of a country. The invasion of Iraq was not about conquest and subjugation, but liberation and freedom from a tyrannical dictator - one whom *all* parties and governments in the western world (including the UN) believed to have large WMD stockpiles.
The success of Iraq is literally changing the Middle East in ways unimaginable before the Iraq war - free elections (including women!) have been held in Aghanistan and Iraq, to elect free governments by the people. Lebanon is free again, the Syrian occupiers chased out by a peaceful democracy demonstration. Even Saudi Arabia is beginning to realize it may have to open up to democratization, a step that could finally end the rule of the last absolute monachies on the globe. That's all terrific news, unless you're one of the bad guys...
Your paranoid rant forgot to mention that the Canopy Group (started by Novell founder Ray Noorda) has/had ownership positions in both SCO and Novell, and that Novell is now run by Eric Schmidt, who was Sun's longtime CTO.
I'm sure there are some other irrelevant connections that can be used to "support" moonbat paranoia, but these two are conspicuous by their absence.
It's rantings like this and the hatred of any sort of commerce (even if it *helps* the open source cause!) that will ultimately lead to the demise of open source, if we're not careful. Heck, Sun *invented* the concept of corporations making source available with NFS, and bought, paid for, and then *gave away* the world's only real Office alternative, but to hear people talk here, they're public enemy no. 2. Go figure. No, on second thought, there's no figuring required. Open sourcers, especially the virulently hatful GPL types, can never be thankful for anything. Like two-year olds, everything has to be *their way*, or they throw a tantrum. I'm becoming increasingly disgusted by this attitude as I grow older, and I know I'm not the only one...
You know you pay $X ammount and you have to wait on hold until you can get someone that says they don't know how to fix the problem either.
/. sig for years began "As much as I detest Microsoft...", but the fact is that their support, at least based on my scientific sample of one :-), and for XP issues, has become very good.
When I finally broke down and bought an XP upgrade last year, I had a couple of significant and difficult problems with the install. I reached the despairing point of calling Microsoft to try to sort the mess out.
All I can say is that they've apparently gotten *really* serious about support. I would have to rate it as the single best support call experience I've ever had, from any vendor. I was shocked. I got to talk to someone here in the US that could actually speak English, and didn't insist on sticking to some ridiculous script or procedure. The guy was sharp, professional, courteous, and best of all, fixed the problem, which was fairly subtle. I'm well-known as someone that dislikes Microsoft (my
Of course, this was within the warranty period, and involved issues that had to be resolved to make XP useful to me - I'm not so sure I'd get the same response now, but that doesn't take anything away from the previous experience...
I bet a few of us can type http://slashdot.org/ faster than we realize what we are typing.
Don't most of us use Mozilla? It's just sl[tab][return], then...
(BTW, for you Firefox bigots, why is it a good thing that Firefox is "lighter"? The Mozilla suite is a helluva lot lighter than the multiple copies of Gecko, etc. I get with with Firefox + T-bird + nVu +...)
Did you realized how you 3rd party programs don't have methods to update automatically?
That's funny, I've got several third party programs (including complex apps such as CorelDraw) on my primary windows desktop that automatically update themselves through either InstallShield Update Manager or BigFix. Granted, there's no universal updater, but that's true in any environment - heck, even the Macs don't have hooks for updating third party-apps, and it's *way* easier for them than anyone else...
You can be a well educated Creationist, and if you are, you will recognize that the foundation of your faith in Creationism does not start and end at "because Gensis says so".
Ultimately, as Cornelius van Til pointed out, everything will be determined by your presuppositions, though. For me, I've found that the world, including origins, makes much more sense from both a scientific and theological point of view, if that initial presupposition is that God exists. In fact, it was science, not religion, that led me to my current belief not only in creation, but a young earth. Tha data is wildly inconsistent, but overall, when approached with an open mind, I truly believe that it's easier to reconcile the known *facts* withteh idea that the earth is a few thousand years old than with the idea that it's billions of years old. Nevertheless, from a scientific point ovf view, it's a hash at best.
As for belief - that's easier. You one really significant choice in this life - God exists, or He does not.
If He does not, then if you are bold enough to be logically consistent and intellectually honest, you will necessarily reason to the point of the existentialists. This means there is no right, no wrong, not even any truth, and certainly no meaning. (Why not rape, kill, and steal, then? Why should it be wrong to harm others?) It also means there is no love, no care, no poetry - only the mindless interaction of randomly assembled chemicals.
On the other hand, if He does exist, then we can see His love in each other and in His creation. Life has meaning, right is right, we have a place and a purpose. Good things can exist, because they flow from His goodness.
In a very real way, this is the *only* choice we ever have. Make it well.
The geologic evidence does. You can date the rocks from the ocean floor on either side of the ridge. You can also observe the alternating pattern of magnetic field reversals preserved in the rocks. You can find fossils from the same species on South America and Africa.
The Americas *were* once joined with Europe and Africa, and it *has* taken millions of years to reach their current positions.
You make two assertions in your last sentence. The first is a "possibly, even probably", based on the evidence, the second is conjecture. Creationists would argue that those many layers were produced in a great global catastrophe (a flood). (BTW - Have you noticed that if you're a scientist, you're free to posit any sort of large-scale catastrophe you like to help explain teh cataclysmic extintions in the fossil record - Supernovae, giant meteorites, etc, so long as it's not a flood?)
And niether theory has good answers for some very large-scale effects that do exist: like the thousands of square miles of sedimentary layers that were somehow "flipped over" *intact* to produce a mirror image with the seabed in the middle. (There are a lot of areas like this that are ignored by evolutionists becaue the answers only make things worse - things like giant fossils that make no sense unless ancient earth was *very* different from the wildest imaginings of evolutionists.) Science cannot adequately explain origins at this time, and any claim to the contrary is based on a dogmatic need to disprove the existence of God.