What's its state now? Does it still have a killer feature?
The killer feature for me is that it just works and does pretty much everything I need it to do. With that said, it seems like most OS' have more or less leveled off in terms of functionality.
As for its state, there are probably people here who could speak more knowledgeably on that than I can.
Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be the killer feature in Windows or the Mac OS? Would you count Siri or Cortana as a killer feature?
I do wonder about Mint now. I mean it really jumped into the limelight as an Ubuntu alternative back when every project was doing their best to screw over the standard user interfaces but with the rise of Cinnamon and it's support in mainstream distributions I eventually switched back to Ubuntu, albeit without the Unity garbage.
I'm not the kind of guy that is always chasing the new shiny or jumping ship for the latest version of whatever. I've been using Mint for a while now on my laptop and I see no reason to change. It works well for me and it would something pretty compelling for me to switch. It just works, and like I said earlier, I just need to get stuff done.
Elementary OS or some other distro might be a better choice for some other people, but I'm very happy with Mint so far.
Same here. I've been using it for months on my laptop and a couple of desktops and I love it. It's solid, stable, and does pretty much everything I need.
"The Cmd shell remains an essential part of Windows, and is used daily by millions of businesses, developers, and IT Pro's around the world."
Yeah, whatever. Seriously, since when has dependence on a spec or tool ever stopped Microsoft from abandoning it? I'm not saying they will, but just because people use it means nothing, absolutely nothing to Microsoft. Or to Apple, for that matter. Headphone jack, anyone?
Seriously? It matters a shitload if the price of bitcoin drops. Suddenly a whole lot of my money is *gone*, unlike with dollars.
Lets say that one bitcoin is worth $1000 and my house payment is also $1000.
If I have 20 bitcoin in my wallet, I can make 20 house payments...but if the value of bitcoin drops to $500, now I can only make 10 house payments. See the problem?
The loan-payout portion is fixed if it's a fixed-rate home loan. The insurance, property taxes, neighborhood association fees, and other costs most people think about when they talk about a "house payment" are typically variable.
Yes, it's a fixed-rate loan like the majority of home loans. But, even if taxes and insurance and "other costs" (whatever those unspecified things may be) went up drastically, my house payment wouldn't go up to, say, $2000 a month.
But if I had all my money in Bitcoin, who knows what it would be? Maybe my payment would be 0.75 Bitcoin, or maybe it would be 3 Bitcoins. Maybe it would be 10 bitcoins.
And by the way, even if taxes and insurance and "other costs" went up, that rise in cost would still have to be paid in Bitcoin, which could potentially make it even worse for me.
Fiat currency does have one advantage over bitcoin: It is almost always legal tender for paying current and past-due domestic debts, including tax debts.
And there's this: If my house payment is $1000, it'll be $1000 in a fiat currency like US dollars, period.
But how much will that be in Bitcoin today or tomorrow or next week? Maybe it'll be 1 Bitcoin, or maybe it'll be 1.5 Bitcoins, and so on. It's similar to gold or silver or any variable commodity in that the "value" can vary widely from day to day. But my house payment will be $1000 US dollars regardless of the price of gold or silver or bitcoin or whatever.
Good is the stability in its supply, that it can't be diluted by evil government and made valueless.
Lol, I wouldn't bet on that. I may not be able to articulate how they could do it, but I would also never claim that it's immune to them finding a way to fiddle with the value of bitcoin.
what about the directional channels for electrons? i hear those help with maximizing picture quality and audio fidelity.
Yep, they make the ones straighter and the zeros rounder. But the cables have to use oxygen-free copper, braided on the thighs of virgins from a third-world country for it to work right.
That work used to be done by little old Italian widows listening to Verdi but then they unionized and things just haven't been the same since.
2 extra millimeters thick, how will I ever be able to carry such a monstrous device?
I say "Bravo!" to HP for doing this. Longer battery life means waaaaaay more to me than shaving a couple of millimeters off the thickness.
And I don't care if it's heavier, it's not like I'd go on marathon hikes while I'd be using it. However much more it weighs, I'm sure my desk or table will be up to the task.
Hell, increase the weight by a pound, I don't give a shit. If I'm going to hike the Appalachian Trail with a laptop then I'll look for a lighter one. Until then I'll just suffer holding it through that arduous 1-minute elevator ride.
it is not a compelling argument against the existence of a live spiritual figure that is later retconned into something much, much greater than he was in life when the need arose.
The compelling argument is that he left not a single trace of his existence behind, whether he was a magical super-being or just some ordinary schmuck. If he was just some ordinary schmuck then we can stop right there. If he wasn't, then it's clear that the evidence doesn't support any part of the story that he's the central figure in.
You've come to your materialistic atheistic conclusion by faith
Ummm, no. I've come to my "materialistic atheistic conclusion" through logic and reason, which is more than I can say for anyone who believes any of the fantastical stories in the bible. "Faith" is the last thing that I would use to determine the true nature of anything.
No, I'm not going to waste an hour of my life listening to someone trying to convince me that the whole "god story" makes some kind of sense. It doesn't; it's self-contradictory and would be akin to mental masturbation.
This incredible omnipotent god can't even make a dollar bill. In fact, he can't do a whole list of things that I can do, so why should I believe he's omnipotent?
I was telling you to consider it a viable primary source for the existence of Jesus.
Except that it's not. All things considered, it's a viable primary source that tends to show he never existed. They fucked up when they wrote it, and then they fucked up some more when they tried to amend it with forgeries and bogus supporting evidence. They weren't as clever as they thought they were.
But it's not a "very credible source", the text basically disproves itself with all the mistakes and force-fit revisions it contains. Talking snakes, demon pigs, virgin births, etc etc etc. Yeah, it's all so very credible.
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But I suspect you don't even want to do that, because as soon as you give them any shred of historical credibility, then you have to wrestle with the fact that more might be true than the mere existence of Jesus.
No, I don't have to wrestle with the idea that a Bronze-age fairy tale about a magical god-man might be true.:)
while historians would generally agree that Josephus was altered
But that's NOT what they say...historians now all pretty much agree that Josephus is a complete forgery from start to finish and that it was done specifically to shore up the fairy tale it presumes to reference. And it's all still bullshit, just like if I came out with a story that "revealed" that Harry Potter secretly worked as a shoe salesman while he attended Hogwarts.
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Is any of this going to convince you?
No, because I'm not a gullible fucking idiot. When the whole premise that all this crap rests on is that there's an omnipotent invisible super-being who created the universe, then no, I probably won't believe any of it, including all of the ridiculous interpretations and add-ons that every Tom, Dick, and Joesephus have tried to shoehorn into the story.
You're arguing the finer points of a story that is itself a load of bollocks, so you'll just have to pardon me if I don't play along. Minutiae about what Batman had for breakfast last Thursday would be just as relevant.
Jesus is one of the most historically recorded figures. There are multiple books, accounts, and eye witness recordings about him.
I was just about to say the same thing about Superman and Harry Potter and Batman and Sherlock Holmes and SpongeBob SquarePants and Darth Vader, but you totally convinced me.
Hell, they even have movin' pictures of most of those guys!
What's so unreasonably restrictive about that? After all the amazing shit he supposedly did you'd think that someone would want to capture his likeness, no?
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Here you identify alleged resurrection (had it occurred) as sufficiently noteworthy to have merited some mention.
Yes...well, maybe it's just me, but I think dying and them coming back to life is one of those things that might seem noteworthy to the average Joe. It should raise a few eyebrows at the very least. But no one wrote a single word about it, not one word. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that it's a lot easier to make fantastic claims about something when everyone who might have disagreed with your claim is dead and gone?
Sorry but I'm not going to watch two and a half hours of bullshit trying to prove something true that I know to be false. It might as well be two and a half hours of "leprechauns are real!"
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All in all, it's about faith to some extent,
All in all it's about suspending your disbelief to the level of a kindergartner.
Your claim of "faith" is the worst possible way to try and convince any thinking person of your position, especially when your position includes fantastical claims cobbled together 20 centuries ago by ignorant, desert-dwelling sheep herders, most of whom lived their entire lives within about 10 miles of the place they'd been born.
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but there is considerable evidence that the Bible is God's Word...
If the bible is god's word, why are there so many silly mistakes in it? Why are there so many blatant contradictions in it? And while we're on the subject, which of the 600 or so versions of the bible are we talking about, anyway?
...it seems like you're somewhat surprised that nobody wrote about Jesus's alleged resurrection during his lifetime. But, in a strict sense, if they had, wouldn't that constitute prophecy?
No one is claiming they should have written about his death/resurrection before it happened, at least not me and not anyone in this thread that I'm aware of. (??) What I've said is that no one wrote a single word about him during the time in which he supposedly lived.
In the real world, had his death/resurrection actually happened, they would have written about in the weeks and months following this astounding event. It would have been a big deal and they would hardly have waited 50 or 60 years to make start making mention of it. It beggars belief to think that no one at the time would bother to make a note about someone dying and then coming back to life. Even if it happened during football season.
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What's its state now? Does it still have a killer feature?
The killer feature for me is that it just works and does pretty much everything I need it to do. With that said, it seems like most OS' have more or less leveled off in terms of functionality.
As for its state, there are probably people here who could speak more knowledgeably on that than I can.
Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be the killer feature in Windows or the Mac OS? Would you count Siri or Cortana as a killer feature?
I do wonder about Mint now. I mean it really jumped into the limelight as an Ubuntu alternative back when every project was doing their best to screw over the standard user interfaces but with the rise of Cinnamon and it's support in mainstream distributions I eventually switched back to Ubuntu, albeit without the Unity garbage.
I'm not the kind of guy that is always chasing the new shiny or jumping ship for the latest version of whatever. I've been using Mint for a while now on my laptop and I see no reason to change. It works well for me and it would something pretty compelling for me to switch. It just works, and like I said earlier, I just need to get stuff done.
Elementary OS or some other distro might be a better choice for some other people, but I'm very happy with Mint so far.
Same here. I've been using it for months on my laptop and a couple of desktops and I love it. It's solid, stable, and does pretty much everything I need.
Best Linux Distro for people who just want to get stuff done: Linux Mint
Well, if I had only known that the Donald was about to make that tweet and I had shorted those companies, I could have made a lot of money.
I have no doubt that this will soon be a "feature" of the new administration, basically a game of "Guess Who To Short" (or buy).
Maybe he'll sell advance notice of his upcoming Twitter rants to serious investors.
And what happens if his feed is hacked and some joker tweets, "Russia bad! Launching nuclear missiles now! All Russians will die!"
Yeah: you're trying to use Bitcoin to store value. Bitcoin is for moving your savings around, not for storing them.
Think about what you've just said. Seriously...just think about it for a moment.
"The Cmd shell remains an essential part of Windows, and is used daily by millions of businesses, developers, and IT Pro's around the world."
Yeah, whatever. Seriously, since when has dependence on a spec or tool ever stopped Microsoft from abandoning it? I'm not saying they will, but just because people use it means nothing, absolutely nothing to Microsoft. Or to Apple, for that matter. Headphone jack, anyone?
It'll be $1000 worth of Bitcoin.
What does it matter if that's 1 BTC or 1.5 BTC?
Seriously? It matters a shitload if the price of bitcoin drops. Suddenly a whole lot of my money is *gone*, unlike with dollars.
Lets say that one bitcoin is worth $1000 and my house payment is also $1000.
If I have 20 bitcoin in my wallet, I can make 20 house payments...but if the value of bitcoin drops to $500, now I can only make 10 house payments. See the problem?
The loan-payout portion is fixed if it's a fixed-rate home loan. The insurance, property taxes, neighborhood association fees, and other costs most people think about when they talk about a "house payment" are typically variable.
Yes, it's a fixed-rate loan like the majority of home loans. But, even if taxes and insurance and "other costs" (whatever those unspecified things may be) went up drastically, my house payment wouldn't go up to, say, $2000 a month.
But if I had all my money in Bitcoin, who knows what it would be? Maybe my payment would be 0.75 Bitcoin, or maybe it would be 3 Bitcoins. Maybe it would be 10 bitcoins.
And by the way, even if taxes and insurance and "other costs" went up, that rise in cost would still have to be paid in Bitcoin, which could potentially make it even worse for me.
Fiat currency does have one advantage over bitcoin: It is almost always legal tender for paying current and past-due domestic debts, including tax debts.
And there's this: If my house payment is $1000, it'll be $1000 in a fiat currency like US dollars, period.
But how much will that be in Bitcoin today or tomorrow or next week? Maybe it'll be 1 Bitcoin, or maybe it'll be 1.5 Bitcoins, and so on. It's similar to gold or silver or any variable commodity in that the "value" can vary widely from day to day. But my house payment will be $1000 US dollars regardless of the price of gold or silver or bitcoin or whatever.
Good is the stability in its supply, that it can't be diluted by evil government and made valueless.
Lol, I wouldn't bet on that. I may not be able to articulate how they could do it, but I would also never claim that it's immune to them finding a way to fiddle with the value of bitcoin.
what about the directional channels for electrons? i hear those help with maximizing picture quality and audio fidelity.
Yep, they make the ones straighter and the zeros rounder. But the cables have to use oxygen-free copper, braided on the thighs of virgins from a third-world country for it to work right.
That work used to be done by little old Italian widows listening to Verdi but then they unionized and things just haven't been the same since.
Yeah I'm sure this will scare the pants off some guy in his bedroom in Romania or Chelyabinsk.
He'll probably give up his evil ways, go straight, and get a day job at the local Burger King, AMIRITE?
2 extra millimeters thick, how will I ever be able to carry such a monstrous device?
I say "Bravo!" to HP for doing this. Longer battery life means waaaaaay more to me than shaving a couple of millimeters off the thickness.
And I don't care if it's heavier, it's not like I'd go on marathon hikes while I'd be using it. However much more it weighs, I'm sure my desk or table will be up to the task.
Hell, increase the weight by a pound, I don't give a shit. If I'm going to hike the Appalachian Trail with a laptop then I'll look for a lighter one. Until then I'll just suffer holding it through that arduous 1-minute elevator ride.
Gee, who knew that pirates and file-sharers don't pay attention to the FBI splash screens? Truly a shocking revelation!!
it is not a compelling argument against the existence of a live spiritual figure that is later retconned into something much, much greater than he was in life when the need arose.
The compelling argument is that he left not a single trace of his existence behind, whether he was a magical super-being or just some ordinary schmuck. If he was just some ordinary schmuck then we can stop right there. If he wasn't, then it's clear that the evidence doesn't support any part of the story that he's the central figure in.
You've come to your materialistic atheistic conclusion by faith
Ummm, no. I've come to my "materialistic atheistic conclusion" through logic and reason, which is more than I can say for anyone who believes any of the fantastical stories in the bible. "Faith" is the last thing that I would use to determine the true nature of anything.
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Do me a favor and listen to this before you make any more ridiculous remarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, I'm not going to waste an hour of my life listening to someone trying to convince me that the whole "god story" makes some kind of sense. It doesn't; it's self-contradictory and would be akin to mental masturbation.
This incredible omnipotent god can't even make a dollar bill. In fact, he can't do a whole list of things that I can do, so why should I believe he's omnipotent?
Fair enough--we'll go with malicious ignorance.
Lol, that's what bible thumpers always say when they encounter someone who's unwilling to buy their silly stories.
I was telling you to consider it a viable primary source for the existence of Jesus.
Except that it's not. All things considered, it's a viable primary source that tends to show he never existed. They fucked up when they wrote it, and then they fucked up some more when they tried to amend it with forgeries and bogus supporting evidence. They weren't as clever as they thought they were.
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And the truth is that it is a very credible source (also see http://www.timothypauljones.co...).
But it's not a "very credible source", the text basically disproves itself with all the mistakes and force-fit revisions it contains. Talking snakes, demon pigs, virgin births, etc etc etc. Yeah, it's all so very credible.
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But I suspect you don't even want to do that, because as soon as you give them any shred of historical credibility, then you have to wrestle with the fact that more might be true than the mere existence of Jesus.
No, I don't have to wrestle with the idea that a Bronze-age fairy tale about a magical god-man might be true. :)
Which is ridiculous because you can't simply dismiss the NT out of hand.
Watch closely and you'll see me do just that.
I don't care how revered your book of Bronze-Age fairy tales is, it's rubbish to anyone who has two brain cells to rub together.
while historians would generally agree that Josephus was altered
But that's NOT what they say...historians now all pretty much agree that Josephus is a complete forgery from start to finish and that it was done specifically to shore up the fairy tale it presumes to reference. And it's all still bullshit, just like if I came out with a story that "revealed" that Harry Potter secretly worked as a shoe salesman while he attended Hogwarts.
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Is any of this going to convince you?
No, because I'm not a gullible fucking idiot. When the whole premise that all this crap rests on is that there's an omnipotent invisible super-being who created the universe, then no, I probably won't believe any of it, including all of the ridiculous interpretations and add-ons that every Tom, Dick, and Joesephus have tried to shoehorn into the story.
You're arguing the finer points of a story that is itself a load of bollocks, so you'll just have to pardon me if I don't play along. Minutiae about what Batman had for breakfast last Thursday would be just as relevant.
Jesus is one of the most historically recorded figures. There are multiple books, accounts, and eye witness recordings about him.
I was just about to say the same thing about Superman and Harry Potter and Batman and Sherlock Holmes and SpongeBob SquarePants and Darth Vader, but you totally convinced me.
Hell, they even have movin' pictures of most of those guys!
Here you set the bar at "during their life".
What's so unreasonably restrictive about that? After all the amazing shit he supposedly did you'd think that someone would want to capture his likeness, no?
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Here you identify alleged resurrection (had it occurred) as sufficiently noteworthy to have merited some mention.
Yes...well, maybe it's just me, but I think dying and them coming back to life is one of those things that might seem noteworthy to the average Joe. It should raise a few eyebrows at the very least. But no one wrote a single word about it, not one word. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that it's a lot easier to make fantastic claims about something when everyone who might have disagreed with your claim is dead and gone?
Try to explain away this analysis... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sorry but I'm not going to watch two and a half hours of bullshit trying to prove something true that I know to be false. It might as well be two and a half hours of "leprechauns are real!"
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All in all, it's about faith to some extent,
All in all it's about suspending your disbelief to the level of a kindergartner.
Your claim of "faith" is the worst possible way to try and convince any thinking person of your position, especially when your position includes fantastical claims cobbled together 20 centuries ago by ignorant, desert-dwelling sheep herders, most of whom lived their entire lives within about 10 miles of the place they'd been born.
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but there is considerable evidence that the Bible is God's Word...
If the bible is god's word, why are there so many silly mistakes in it? Why are there so many blatant contradictions in it? And while we're on the subject, which of the 600 or so versions of the bible are we talking about, anyway?
...it seems like you're somewhat surprised that nobody wrote about Jesus's alleged resurrection during his lifetime. But, in a strict sense, if they had, wouldn't that constitute prophecy?
No one is claiming they should have written about his death/resurrection before it happened, at least not me and not anyone in this thread that I'm aware of. (??) What I've said is that no one wrote a single word about him during the time in which he supposedly lived.
In the real world, had his death/resurrection actually happened, they would have written about in the weeks and months following this astounding event. It would have been a big deal and they would hardly have waited 50 or 60 years to make start making mention of it. It beggars belief to think that no one at the time would bother to make a note about someone dying and then coming back to life. Even if it happened during football season.