Atheists often try to reduce God to the God of the Gaps, which entirely ignores the code-of-ethics, -behavior, and -worship that actually makes up a religion.
The problem is that said codes are typically justified by "because god said so", or in some cases "you'll go to hell if you don't do this".
Yet the outcome of popular elections (see Bush v Gore, c. 11/2000, et al.) are regularly contested. If 75% of people were 'cultists', as you call those who follow an organized religion (of which are not all zealots), then when it comes to politics, their brainwashed masses would pretty well dictate the political discourse with relative ease. They all drank the same Kool-Aid, right?
Yes. That's why an atheist being elected as US President would be one of the most noteworthy events in history.
Well, with the increase of production, oil prices would drop substantially. With lower oil prices, we could tax imported oil by the barrel and still have us paying less at the pump. Take the money you make from taxing imported oil by the barrel and invest that money into "green energy" research.
Who would be buying the foreign oil when the local oil is so much cheaper ?
The problem with the target market you describe is that it is already filled by their competitors willing to sell computers with razor thin margins.
Apple are the only vendor selling Macs. The primary motivation of Mac purchasers is to buy a _Mac_, not "a computer". If all they were interested in was "a computer", they'd be buying PCs with equivalent capabilities at anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 the price.
Could have fooled me. I know roughly what our hardware costs and it isn't in the millions (per node), unless that is you try to buy stuff from EMC.
I am curious as to what storage system you have that can provide ca. 5-10 gigabytes/second of sustained data transfer, to and from multiple hosts, over Fibre Channel.
I'm not going to talk about the details, but lets say a normal single machine configuration has 8 fiber channel ports (QLE2564) at 8Gbit/sec. The machine itself is reading manipulating/transforming and writing data at multiple GB/sec, and these things are very often clustered. If you look at the enterprise storage market you might see quite a lot of very interesting hardware. Some of it is built for IOP, some of it is built for bandwidth.
A storage system capable of streaming dozens of GB/sec is well into the millions of dollars. This is a discussion about mid-range desktop PCs.
Same reason they did it in the past ? Because their customers want it ?
If you are looking for a cheap PC, go buy a cheap PC.
It wouldn't be a cheap PC. It would be an expensive PC. A thousand bucks is a *lot* of money to pay for a minitower.
The only difference between what you describe and a generic Windows box is the operating system. Apple would be retarded to do that. The fastest way for Apple to become unprofitable is to get into selling products that are no different than any other computer maker.
By your metric the Mac Pro is "no different than any other computer maker's" high end workstation> Are Apple "retarded" because they make those ?
Revisionist history? I thought Apple was very, very anti-USB and pro-firewire? Heck the first iPod didn't even interface to USB (and therefore couldn't talk to anything but macs). That's how anti-USB apple was initially.
How quickly people forget.
USB was the new low-speed peripheral interface to replace ADB, PS/2, LPT, etc for devices like keyboards, mice and printers. Firewire was the high-speed interface to replace SCSI for devices like external hard disks.
Apple stuck to this model long (probably too long) after Intel pumped up USB to USB2 in an effort to make it useful for high-speed peripherals. They were never anti-USB, just using it as it was designed to be used.
It's most significant impact will (hopefully) be to finally bring decent docking station options (back) to Mac laptops, probably implemented as part of the next update to Apple's displays.
I mentioned a couple legit sources of HD streaming video in my previous comment
None of the streaming options offer decent HD quality, the bitrates are all too low (not to mention only stereo sound). You may as well watch a DVD. Heck, a well upscaled DVD would probably look better.
The networking infrastructure is not yet widespread enough for anything close to BR-equivalent streaming. Nor is it likely to be any time soon.
And if you're talking about those instances of trojans that rely on social engineering, what anti-virus program can defend against a user who willingly types in an administrative password and installs the malware on his own?
Er, that's pretty much the whole *point* of AV software - the last ditch effort to protect the user trying to shoot himself in the foot.
A massive proportion of malware uses the trojan horse model. The reason we have AV software at all, is because OS-level security can't defend against ignorant users with administrative privileges.
Windows from the beginning was never designed with security in mind. It was bolted on as PCs were designed mostly to be single user computers. Networking and multiple users came later as MS added them.
Windows NT (that is to say, every version of Windows released since Me) was designed from the ground up to be a networked, multiuser OS.
Many of those programs in a Unix/Linux environment would have been designed to run under user and not admin rights. MS however has to redesign the base of Windows to do this.
No, they don't. Incompetent application developers need to fix their applications. There's no OS-level problem to fix, and in the case of Windows NT, never has been.
The only thing Microsoft is doing is building layers of redirection and shims to make broken applications work properly.
Because you say it does? Because Karl Marx says it will? Despite the fact that it only happens through unrestrained government power?
You misspelled "government power corrupted by rich corporate interests". Hope that helps.
Here's a clue for you: You have been fed a line of BS, and you don't want to question it, even though history has proven it wrong. Try thinking for yourself some time, instead of latching on to hating the groups people tell you should hate.
Comedy gold coming from someone preaching cookie-cutter right-wing rhetoric.
History has demonstrated - is currently demonstrating - what happens with poorly regulated markets.
In other words: "If we had been allowed to bash enough heads, things would have been better".
I though that the was the right-wing excuse for why we had crime ?
Well you just sound like a misguided socialist, bought into the idea that central planning will provide equal outcomes for everyone.
You sound like a typical paranoid Tea-partier, convinced that the only two possibilities are an unregulated and unrestrained free market, or a centrally managed communist economy.
Which in a way it will, as we see in places like North Korea, where most of the people live in abject poverty, and the rulers control the economy and all the means of production. This is how all socialist systems work - they focus on satisfying the needs of the producers. But it leaves most people without the food and goods they actually need.
Or, if we're not parroting more paranoid rhetoric, we look at the rest of the Western world, at countries like Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands, where the horrible curse of "socialism" has produced some of the most successful states in history. The UK, Australia and Canada to a lesser degree, particularly in recent decades, but that's largely because they have followed the US down the path of deregulation and corporate rent-seeking.
I'm sure it will all work fine when nobody has property rights, and government micro-manages every plot of land and property is leased at the pleasure of the collective. You know, just like the good old days of Kings and Vassels. Do you think you'll get to be one of the rulers, or will you be one of the serfs?
I'm sure it will all work fine when nobody has property rights, and a handful of rich old white men allow their vassals to manage their affairs in exchange for luxury and wealth. You know, just like the good old days of Feudalism. Do you have to go to work tomorrow ? If you do, I've got bad news for you - you're going to be one of the peasants.
It's amazing that you're so scared of a centrally planned economy, when that's exactly where the "free market" will take you. Centrally planned by a small number of people who either - directly or by proxy - own everything you need to live your life.
Yea, dumb ass, because "free market" means the King owns all the shit by Divine Right! What kind of stupid shit claim is that? Centralized control is feudalism, dumb ass, free market means you are FREE to TRADE. WTF?
Control by a small number of owners over most of the property, tended to by vassals and peasants is where an unregulated free market ultimately converges, and a destination we are well on the way to. That's pretty much Feudalism to a T.
Called GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATORS and CORPORATE EXECUTIVES - each swapping roles all the time. Duh.
No. Those are the people the real wealth holders (generally - some still get their hands dirty at the coalface) pay to do their bidding.
Yep. And assholes like you supporting it.
Not in the slightest.
And a handful of government bureaucrats lording over the remaining slaves to government dependence and handouts.
Given how pitifully inadequate the "handouts" to normal people are in the US, that's difficult to envisage. Mainly because if any large proportion of people really had to depend on "handouts" in the US, they'd probably be dead from neglect inside a year.
As if they could do it without the government protection and "regulation" (which somehow always ends up as some form of twisted crony capitalism).
Wow. Talk about missing the point.
The reason they do it with government protection and "regulation" is because they've used the "free market" to buy and pay for the government to enact the legislation they need (that's what happens when you have a system that does something as ludicrous as equating money with speech), because that's cheaper and easier than having to do it the old fashioned way with private armies.
LOL - because you keep expecting that if you vote in enough lying shitbags that cry "Eat the Rich" and "If we could just bash a few more heads, we could get [your enemy] under control!" that they will magically be on your side and do something that actually helps.
Well the first part sounds like some sort of anarchist warcry and the second part sounds like a cornerstone of conservative philosophy, so I'm still a little unclear as to how we get "progressive" out of it.
Well then what the fuck do you call yourself - socialist? I thought you preferred progressive. Tell me what you call it and I'll use your term.
Well I would call myself centre-left, because that's what most of the world would consider me. But in America you'd probably call me a raging communist because I support things like publicly funded healthcare and education, large amounts of publicly funded infrastructure, strong protections for workers' rights, high and progressive taxation to minimise wealth disparity and strong regulations to curtail corporate abuse of property and the environment. You know, the stuff the Democrats used to work towards 30+ years ago when they were still something that could be regarded as a vaguely left-wing political party.
If you are literally at the threshold of starvation, all social security is going to do is take enough out of your paycheck to push you over the edge and cause you to starve to death before you ever get old enough to collect. If you are not at the threshold of starvation then you make enough money that you could save some if social security did not exist -- at least the amount that you currently pay in social security tax.
Wow. I...
Really, I just don't know what to say to someone who thinks that so long as people aren't literally dying of starvation, they've got enough money to save for retirement. I just can't comprehend how your moral compass could get that far out of whack.
The relative difference in net income or net asset value has little practical consequence.
No, it makes a lot of difference. The person who barely makes enough to cover his essential expenses, when faced with a large unexpected expense, is suddenly on the edge of ruin, if not death. The person whose essential expenses comprise a single-digit percentage of his annual income, when faced with the same unexpected expense, suffers no meaningful impact whatsoever on his quality of life.
The large majority of the wealth of rich people exists only on paper.
Taxable income measured in hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars a year, is not money that "only exists on paper". Neither are property holdings, or blue-chip stocks and the like.
The question is whether poor people today are better off than poor people historically. The answer is clearly that they are.
No. The question is whether the median living standard is rising. Whether or not that is true, especially for the last 20-30 years, is dubious, to say the least. The middle class is shrinking, real wages are dropping and social mobility is decreasing.
Yes, if you exclude all of the countries with a lower cost of living than the US, the US has a lower cost of living than the remaining countries.
No.
If you set a particular standard of living - let's call it "the American lifestyle" - then of all the countries in the world that have a roughly equivalent living standard (let's call them the "first world" for the sake of argument), in the USA that lifestyle costs the least, by a large, large factor.
It's true if you set your minimum standard to be something on the level of a South American or Eastern European slum, then cost of living in the USA is "high". But that's an argument with a broken premise.
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The problem is that said codes are typically justified by "because god said so", or in some cases "you'll go to hell if you don't do this".
Yes. That's why an atheist being elected as US President would be one of the most noteworthy events in history.
Who would be buying the foreign oil when the local oil is so much cheaper ?
There's nothing "now" about this. Apple have always only allowed virtualisation of OS X on Apple hardware.
The lack of a removable battery and docking station option on the MBP make it's "Professional" highly questionable as well.
You misspelled "Governments".
Apple are the only vendor selling Macs. The primary motivation of Mac purchasers is to buy a _Mac_, not "a computer". If all they were interested in was "a computer", they'd be buying PCs with equivalent capabilities at anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 the price.
I am curious as to what storage system you have that can provide ca. 5-10 gigabytes/second of sustained data transfer, to and from multiple hosts, over Fibre Channel.
A storage system capable of streaming dozens of GB/sec is well into the millions of dollars. This is a discussion about mid-range desktop PCs.
Same reason they did it in the past ? Because their customers want it ?
It wouldn't be a cheap PC. It would be an expensive PC. A thousand bucks is a *lot* of money to pay for a minitower.
By your metric the Mac Pro is "no different than any other computer maker's" high end workstation> Are Apple "retarded" because they make those ?
I'd have to say an old Mac with a bunch of external drives hanging off it would be right up there.
What's your usage scenario that needs data constantly streamed at >600MB/sec ?
How quickly people forget.
USB was the new low-speed peripheral interface to replace ADB, PS/2, LPT, etc for devices like keyboards, mice and printers. Firewire was the high-speed interface to replace SCSI for devices like external hard disks.
Apple stuck to this model long (probably too long) after Intel pumped up USB to USB2 in an effort to make it useful for high-speed peripherals. They were never anti-USB, just using it as it was designed to be used.
You're in trouble then, because that is clearly where Apple has been headed since The Steve's return.
The problem is they ignore the one with people in it who want a machine that sits in the gaping hole between the iMac and the Mac Pro.
Thunderbolt is basically a PCIe bus on a wire.
It's most significant impact will (hopefully) be to finally bring decent docking station options (back) to Mac laptops, probably implemented as part of the next update to Apple's displays.
I mentioned a couple legit sources of HD streaming video in my previous comment
None of the streaming options offer decent HD quality, the bitrates are all too low (not to mention only stereo sound). You may as well watch a DVD. Heck, a well upscaled DVD would probably look better.
The networking infrastructure is not yet widespread enough for anything close to BR-equivalent streaming. Nor is it likely to be any time soon.
Er, that's pretty much the whole *point* of AV software - the last ditch effort to protect the user trying to shoot himself in the foot.
A massive proportion of malware uses the trojan horse model. The reason we have AV software at all, is because OS-level security can't defend against ignorant users with administrative privileges.
Windows NT (that is to say, every version of Windows released since Me) was designed from the ground up to be a networked, multiuser OS.
No, they don't. Incompetent application developers need to fix their applications. There's no OS-level problem to fix, and in the case of Windows NT, never has been.
The only thing Microsoft is doing is building layers of redirection and shims to make broken applications work properly.
Which parts of the design ? What features and capabilities are lacking ?
You misspelled "government power corrupted by rich corporate interests". Hope that helps.
Comedy gold coming from someone preaching cookie-cutter right-wing rhetoric.
History has demonstrated - is currently demonstrating - what happens with poorly regulated markets.
I though that the was the right-wing excuse for why we had crime ?
You sound like a typical paranoid Tea-partier, convinced that the only two possibilities are an unregulated and unrestrained free market, or a centrally managed communist economy.
Or, if we're not parroting more paranoid rhetoric, we look at the rest of the Western world, at countries like Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands, where the horrible curse of "socialism" has produced some of the most successful states in history. The UK, Australia and Canada to a lesser degree, particularly in recent decades, but that's largely because they have followed the US down the path of deregulation and corporate rent-seeking.
I'm sure it will all work fine when nobody has property rights, and a handful of rich old white men allow their vassals to manage their affairs in exchange for luxury and wealth. You know, just like the good old days of Feudalism. Do you have to go to work tomorrow ? If you do, I've got bad news for you - you're going to be one of the peasants.
It's amazing that you're so scared of a centrally planned economy, when that's exactly where the "free market" will take you. Centrally planned by a small number of people who either - directly or by proxy - own everything you need to live your life.
Control by a small number of owners over most of the property, tended to by vassals and peasants is where an unregulated free market ultimately converges, and a destination we are well on the way to. That's pretty much Feudalism to a T.
No. Those are the people the real wealth holders (generally - some still get their hands dirty at the coalface) pay to do their bidding.
Not in the slightest.
Given how pitifully inadequate the "handouts" to normal people are in the US, that's difficult to envisage. Mainly because if any large proportion of people really had to depend on "handouts" in the US, they'd probably be dead from neglect inside a year.
Wow. Talk about missing the point.
The reason they do it with government protection and "regulation" is because they've used the "free market" to buy and pay for the government to enact the legislation they need (that's what happens when you have a system that does something as ludicrous as equating money with speech), because that's cheaper and easier than having to do it the old fashioned way with private armies.
Well the first part sounds like some sort of anarchist warcry and the second part sounds like a cornerstone of conservative philosophy, so I'm still a little unclear as to how we get "progressive" out of it.
Well I would call myself centre-left, because that's what most of the world would consider me. But in America you'd probably call me a raging communist because I support things like publicly funded healthcare and education, large amounts of publicly funded infrastructure, strong protections for workers' rights, high and progressive taxation to minimise wealth disparity and strong regulations to curtail corporate abuse of property and the environment. You know, the stuff the Democrats used to work towards 30+ years ago when they were still something that could be regarded as a vaguely left-wing political party.
No, they're not.
Wow. I...
Really, I just don't know what to say to someone who thinks that so long as people aren't literally dying of starvation, they've got enough money to save for retirement. I just can't comprehend how your moral compass could get that far out of whack.
No, it makes a lot of difference. The person who barely makes enough to cover his essential expenses, when faced with a large unexpected expense, is suddenly on the edge of ruin, if not death. The person whose essential expenses comprise a single-digit percentage of his annual income, when faced with the same unexpected expense, suffers no meaningful impact whatsoever on his quality of life.
Taxable income measured in hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars a year, is not money that "only exists on paper". Neither are property holdings, or blue-chip stocks and the like.
No. The question is whether the median living standard is rising. Whether or not that is true, especially for the last 20-30 years, is dubious, to say the least. The middle class is shrinking, real wages are dropping and social mobility is decreasing.
No.
If you set a particular standard of living - let's call it "the American lifestyle" - then of all the countries in the world that have a roughly equivalent living standard (let's call them the "first world" for the sake of argument), in the USA that lifestyle costs the least, by a large, large factor.
It's true if you set your minimum standard to be something on the level of a South American or Eastern European slum, then cost of living in the USA is "high". But that's an argument with a broken premise.