First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite. You simply need to be careful about what you mean by "finite".
God is infinite in the sense that He has always been here and will always be here; God is not a created being like the rest of us. More accurately, God exists outside of time; there was a beginning of time and will be and end of time, and God exists outside of that. As another poster explained in a different article, asking what came before the beginning of time is like asking what's north of the north pole - it's a grammatically valid question, but that's as far as it goes. You can't go any farther north, not because you hit a wall, but because our definition of "north" means that there is no farther north than that. Similarly, there is no "before" Creation, because that was essentially the beginning of time as we understand it. Anyway, went off on a bit of a tangent, but yes, God is infinite in terms of time.
Also, God is infinite in the sense that He is everywhere at once, but this is because just as God exists outside of time, God also exists outside of space. God is present at all points in time and space, simultaneously. God sees everything and knows everything.
Finally, God is infinitely powerful. God created the Universe and everything in it; anything that exists within the Universe is (pretty much by definition) less powerful than God. The question "can God create a rock so big that He can't lift it?" can be answered by returning to the matter of God's immutability: God is constant and unchanging, and creating an immovable rock and moving said rock are two different ideas that require two different purposes. God can create an immovable rock if doing so is consistent with God's will, and God can move a rock if doing so is consistent with God's will, but creating an immovable rock and then moving it would require God to change His mind about what He wanted to do with the rock, and God doesn't change.
However, God is distinct from His creations. We are not partially God, with God being partially us. I said that God exists at all points in space and time, but also that God exists outside of space and time. God isn't really a part of this universe; God is present but sort of indirectly. I'm too tired to come up with a better explanation of this. Heaven and Hell, though, which exist outside of this universe, operate a bit differently: in that world, God is not present in all places, because Hell is (by definition) outside of the presence of God. Heaven is where God is present, and Hell is where God is not present; God cannot enter Hell, because to do so would make it cease to be Hell. I believe all the talk of lakes of fire and brimstone and whatnot are really just a description of existence in the absence of God, and there's not much more to it than that.
Wow, off on a tangent again. Sorry, it's late.
Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable. Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with. Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability. Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change! I did a quick Google search while looking for examples to help explain apparent contradictions, but came across this page, which explains exactly what I was going to say but better written and with more research to back it up. Basically, God doesn't really change, and anywhere the Bible says something that sounds like God has changed, it's only because the author was trying to describe something in human terms and that was the best way they could think of to describe it.
Of course, that also raises the question of how likely two random people are to generate an identical MP3 from the same source CD using the same encoder. The fact that my Britney.mp3 is identical to yours doesn't necessarily indicate more than a shared poor taste in music. They're not really that concerned about people who ripped an MP3 from CD; they're interested in the thousands of people who all downloaded the identical MP3 from a P2P site.
Of course, this article is about the MPAA, not the RIAA, and they're not concerned about MP3s at all.;-)
ot only is this both fraud and breaking the DMCA (they circumvent an encryption device -- Windows firewall), Uh, sorry, bypassing the Windows firewall isn't circumventing encryption (there's no encryption involved).
First of all, as an Oregon resident, I think you guys do good work, mostly; thanks.
Another idea I've heard of for solving the traffic jam problem is, rather than minimum speed limits, just have a variable maximum speed limit. Basically, replace all the signs that say "55" with electronic signs that would say "55" most of the time, but if there's an accident, you lower the limit a few miles before the accident, say to 50 then 45 then 40. So by the time you get there, everybody is already going slower anyway, and traffic can flow smoothly (at a slower speed) instead of everybody bunching up and trying to change lanes. Obviously the difficulty here is the cost of replacing all the signs.
By the way, what's your opinion of increasing the speed limit on I-205 from 55 to 65? Traffic permitting, the left lane usually averages 65 normally anyway, and it doesn't appear to be a problem. Do you believe there would be significantly more accidents if the limit were increased?
Any time I have to spend f$%king with my OS instead of playing games, reading web pages, checking and answering my email is wasted. It's this spending-time-on-your-OS-is-your-ultimate-goal mentality that's holding Linux back from more mainstream adoption. The perfect OS would 'just work', let me run applications, and not require my attention in any way. That's what I like about Slackware, compared to, say, Fedora. Yes, you kinda have to know what you're doing when you set it up, but I've had bad experiences with other distros just doing something as simple as installing security patches. I recently installed Fedora 7, only to find that the "network" service wasn't running, for no obvious reason. It's the little things like that that bug me.
1) Oh, Universal's music is no longer available on iTunes. I'll buy this piece of crap Zune instead of the cool new iPod Femto
or
2) Oh, Universal's music is no longer available on iTunes. I'll have to <strike>pirate it like there's no tommorrow</strike> rip it from CD onto my iPod or
3) Oh, Universal's music is no longer available on iTunes. Hey, here's a cool song on iTunes, from some other label, I was thinking about getting this one too, I guess I'll just buy it instead. I don't really need that other song I wanted.
or
4) Universal conspires with two or three other big labels to also drop iTunes if their collective demands aren't met. Apple accuses the labels of forming a dangerous anti-consumer cartel, while the labels accuse Apple of being a dangerous anti-consumer monopoly, and because the labels have deeper pockets and are much more experienced at spreading ridiculous lies and deceit, few people hear Apple's side.
or, as another poster pointed out,
5) Universal sets up an iTMS competitor selling DRM-free tracks; they offer an introductory price of $0.89/track for the first three months, then jack it up to $1.99 per track for the tracks more than a handful of people want, while still offering crap nobody likes for $0.89/track (which is the price they'll advertise, of course). Throw billions of dollars at promoting it, and they'll convince some people to switch away from iTMS.
Then I doubt apple are going to bother porting, quicktime, safari and itunes to the tiny marketshare that is windows 64 bit editions. As others have pointed out, apparently QuickTime and iTunes already work fine on 64-bit Windows, it's the iPod driver that doesn't work.
Also OS X is a threat to Linux, not so much vice versa. If Apple actually saw Linux as a threat to OS X they'd start enforcing some of the numerous patents which linux distros are infringing (such as those which copy even recent OS X features such as "expose".) If Apple were to try that, they'd alienate potential customers and developers. Apple doesn't want Linux to get too far ahead, but Apple can't attack Linux either. Apple wants to attract people who are currently developing for and using Linux over to the Mac platform, and suing them isn't going to do that.
Also porting any OSX technology to Linux is actually easier than porting to windows, since Linux shares much of the same *NIX underpinnings. (Hence why it's also so easy to run "Linux software" on Mac OS X.) This is a common misconception. Porting Linux CLI software to Mac OS X is pretty straightforward, especially because Apple has been adding more and more Linux compatibility features with each new release of Mac OS X. Porting simple GUI apps should be pretty simple; you just have to rewrite the GUI. Porting complex GUI apps like OpenOffice.org is a huge pain in the ass. Firefox wasn't really ported from Linux; it was basically ported from Mac OS 9 and then various pieces were gradually replaced to make it more OSX-native.
But going the other way is a whole different ball game. There is no Carbon API on Linux. The closest thing to the Cocoa API is GNUStep, which AFAIK isn't really compatible enough yet. And all the cool stuff Apple keeps coming out with like CoreImage and QTKit just isn't going to be there. I wouldn't expect porting a Mac app to Linux to be any easier than porting a Mac app to Windows (aside from the obvious blessing that you wouldn't have to run Windows to do it), or porting a Windows app to Linux.
(Do any real developers who have actually done any of this type of porting have anything authoritative to say on this topic?)
Open source software development doesn't just happen by magic. If you want this to happen, start coding. Otherwise, you may find that no such project exists.
Even Apple is releasing their OS as 64-bit soon. For the record, Apple started selling Macs with 64-bit CPUs four years ago, and although not all of the operating system fully takes advantage of it yet, a lot of it does, and 32-bit and 64-bit code can run side by side, natively. There is no 64-bit edition or 32-bit edition of the OS. Apple has been prepared to go 64-bit since 1994.
You don't. Just have it activated at an AT&T store like all the other phones they sell. Apple has been fairly clear that you can't do this. Of course you could sign up for an iTunes account and activate your phone from any computer - it's a bit unlikely that an AT&T employee will let you use one of their computers in the store for this purpose, and your local public library probably won't let you run iTunes on their computers, but if you can get someone to let you borrow their computer for a few minutes, you should be able to do it.
Of course it works on Mac OS X on 64-bit hardware. Apple planned ahead, all the way back to the original PowerPC in 1994, to make sure that mixing 32-bit and 64-bit code on the Mac will mostly be a non-issue. It's Windows that has a problem with it.
why does iTunes run the iPod service even when iTunes isn't running and even though I've never used an iPod? Because (they're hoping), someday you might plug one in, and if you do, it'll be a nicer experience for you if it simply works.
Why does Quicktime automatically have your browser open MP3s in Quicktime instead of downloading them (and not give you the option of turning this "feature" off?) For this one, you can blame browser vendors. Browser plug-ins allow the browser to support additional media types in much the same way that a browser supports basic things like GIF and JPEG images. If you click on a JPEG image, it'll open in the browser instead of downloading it; the QuickTime plugin adds support for other formats that QuickTime supports so the browser can display them just as easily.
A decade ago, most browsers gave you complete control over the configuration of this feature - you just scroll through a list of every available MIME type, and choose which plug-in you wanted to handle it, or if you wanted it to download, or whatever. For some reason, browser vendors have decided you no longer need this configurability, and they've removed the UI for it. I'm sure it's buried in about:config somewhere on Firefox. I think Opera still gives you the option in Preferences, and it wouldn't surprise me if SeaMonkey does as well, but I'm too lazy to check right now.
Why do Apple programs "break" the usual look and feel of Windows programs? For exactly the same reason Apple programs "break" the usual look and feel of Mac OS programs (although in recent years, Apple has revised the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines to define what these apps do as not broken, and has encouraged third parties to break their apps in the same way, although it sounds like Leopard might change things).
If you don't like their products, you're probably outside their target market. I know I'm outside their target market. But their product is so damn cool, I wish they'd expand their target market to include me, so I can realistically buy one.
(The must-have feature for me is the ability to use the iPhone as a Bluetooth modem, to connect to the Internet via my laptop. I can do this with my current phone (over GPRS, not EDGE, so all of you whiners saying the iPhone sucks because it doesn't support 3G can go take a flying leap) and I really can't give that up. I need to be able to get work done when there's no wifi around. There are plenty of other missing features that I hope to see in the next revision, but I decided I can do without them. This one, I need.)
They through the anti-DRM a small bone Please learn to speak English! It's 2am here and this mangled phrase was very difficult for my tired brain to decipher.
If Microsoft didn't want x64 to be mainstream, why do they require that any software and hardware with a Certified For or Works With Vista logo to be tested and pass on x64 editions? Sure, Microsoft would like it to be mainstream. But Microsoft can't have everything they want, now can they?
It's pretty expensive, yes. Mostly because for every signed driver, they need to build a new PC, Surely you mean, they need to re-image the same PC they used to test the last driver they signed?
Apple would address linux before 64 bit windows. Either you're trolling, or you're grossly misinformed.
First of all, as someone else said, getting the software to work on 64-bit editions of Windows should be fairly straightforward for the most part; Apple simply hasn't done it yet (rather, they tried it but ran into some problems that they haven't been able to fix reliably yet).
Secondly, from a technical standpoint, getting iTunes to work on Linux would be a huge pain in the ass. iTunes is heavily dependent on QuickTime, and QuickTime doesn't exist on Linux. Yes, there are various applications and libraries to play/encode/convert QuickTime-formatted video files, and I'm sure many of these work quite well for that, but an app like iTunes is going to need 100% compatibility with the entire QuickTime API. No QuickTime, no iTunes. And porting QuickTime to Linux isn't something that's just going to happen overnight - apparently when Apple ported QuickTime to Windows, they determined that rewriting QuickTime to run on Win32 just wasn't feasible, and it would be an easier project to port the entire Macintosh Toolbox over to Windows so they didn't have to use the Win32 API. Apple would have to do the same thing again: port the Carbon API (the modern descendent of the Macintosh Toolbox) over to Linux, then port QuickTime to run on that, THEN port iTunes.
Thirdly, from a business standpoint, Apple views Linux as a larger competitor and threat to its business than Windows. Sure, Windows has 90% market share, so it seems bigger, but remember, Windows is a monopoly. Apple's computer business only exists within the market for non-Windows systems, and Linux is a huge part of that market. Yes, it would be nice for Apple's iPod/iPhone business if iTunes were fully supported on Linux... but if it were, that would only make Apple's biggest computer competitor (PCs running Linux) that much more attractive an option (for the 10% of people in the market for a non-Windows computer).
When you add the technical and business issues together, it just doesn't make sense for Apple to devote huge resources to shooting themselves in the foot.
Why, for fucks sakes, does anyone need to print anything these days? Is emailing pictures not enough? Can you not just purchase a scanner? TEACH YOURSELF how to take advantage of technology and at least make it harder for this kind of crap to keep happening. Although many people are ignorant about technology, please try to understand that there are a LOT of us who know perfectly well how to e-mail a document, and still want to print stuff out. Looking at stuff on a screen sucks. I absolutely hate reading large quantities of text on a screen; I'd much rather print it and read it on paper. I will never subscribe to O'Reilly Safari, because I want the actual physical book on my shelf.
Get back to me when e-ink displays (the kind that don't need a backlight at all) are readily available to consumers, and we'll talk.
and it's always a huge relief to plug in a real multi-button mouse (and fire up my Logitech bluetooth keyboard) and get back to my "usability nightmare". I don't believe he was calling multiple buttons on a mouse a usability nightmare, just multiple buttons on a trackpad specifically. On a mouse, all the buttons are under your fingers, so you just click with a different finger to do a right-click or middle-click or whatever. On a trackpad, the way you use your hand is completely different. I think I do prefer the control-click and the gigantic single button on my iBook... when I'm away from my desk. When I'm at my desk, I use an Apple USB keyboard and a multi-button IBM mouse with 4-way scrolling whatchamacallit.
found it *impossible* to reliably right-click with the "Mighty Mouse" Yeah, the Mighty Mouse sucks for that reason (although the scrollball feels sorta neat).
or with the chorded touchpad. If you're having trouble holding the pointer still without letting go of the trackpad, something's wrong. Either you've got the sensitivity up way too high, or you have an atypical physical impairment. If the latter, I'm sorry, but please try to understand that for those of us without your limitation, Apple's current solution works better for us than something that would work for you. If the former, go to System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse / Trackpad / Tracking Speed.
Didn't you ever notice that these campout events never coincide? Don't tell anyone, but... those Star Wars fans, Lord of the Rings fans, iPhone fans... they're all the same people. They're a hired group of actors who inflate the perceived popularity of a product. All other victims of the consequent group think then aren't insane; they're just conformists. I've been told (by a friend who lived there for a few years) that in Japan it's not at all uncommon for a company to hire people for precisely this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
God is infinite in the sense that He has always been here and will always be here; God is not a created being like the rest of us. More accurately, God exists outside of time; there was a beginning of time and will be and end of time, and God exists outside of that. As another poster explained in a different article, asking what came before the beginning of time is like asking what's north of the north pole - it's a grammatically valid question, but that's as far as it goes. You can't go any farther north, not because you hit a wall, but because our definition of "north" means that there is no farther north than that. Similarly, there is no "before" Creation, because that was essentially the beginning of time as we understand it. Anyway, went off on a bit of a tangent, but yes, God is infinite in terms of time.
Also, God is infinite in the sense that He is everywhere at once, but this is because just as God exists outside of time, God also exists outside of space. God is present at all points in time and space, simultaneously. God sees everything and knows everything.
Finally, God is infinitely powerful. God created the Universe and everything in it; anything that exists within the Universe is (pretty much by definition) less powerful than God. The question "can God create a rock so big that He can't lift it?" can be answered by returning to the matter of God's immutability: God is constant and unchanging, and creating an immovable rock and moving said rock are two different ideas that require two different purposes. God can create an immovable rock if doing so is consistent with God's will, and God can move a rock if doing so is consistent with God's will, but creating an immovable rock and then moving it would require God to change His mind about what He wanted to do with the rock, and God doesn't change.
However, God is distinct from His creations. We are not partially God, with God being partially us. I said that God exists at all points in space and time, but also that God exists outside of space and time. God isn't really a part of this universe; God is present but sort of indirectly. I'm too tired to come up with a better explanation of this. Heaven and Hell, though, which exist outside of this universe, operate a bit differently: in that world, God is not present in all places, because Hell is (by definition) outside of the presence of God. Heaven is where God is present, and Hell is where God is not present; God cannot enter Hell, because to do so would make it cease to be Hell. I believe all the talk of lakes of fire and brimstone and whatnot are really just a description of existence in the absence of God, and there's not much more to it than that.
Wow, off on a tangent again. Sorry, it's late. Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable. Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with. Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability. Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change! I did a quick Google search while looking for examples to help explain apparent contradictions, but came across this page, which explains exactly what I was going to say but better written and with more research to back it up. Basically, God doesn't really change, and anywhere the Bible says something that sounds like God has changed, it's only because the author was trying to describe something in human terms and that was the best way they could think of to describe it.
You may find this interview with Douglas Adams relevant. He described himself as "a radical atheist".
Of course, this article is about the MPAA, not the RIAA, and they're not concerned about MP3s at all.
Yep, those were the good old days, before the terrorists won.
First of all, as an Oregon resident, I think you guys do good work, mostly; thanks.
Another idea I've heard of for solving the traffic jam problem is, rather than minimum speed limits, just have a variable maximum speed limit. Basically, replace all the signs that say "55" with electronic signs that would say "55" most of the time, but if there's an accident, you lower the limit a few miles before the accident, say to 50 then 45 then 40. So by the time you get there, everybody is already going slower anyway, and traffic can flow smoothly (at a slower speed) instead of everybody bunching up and trying to change lanes. Obviously the difficulty here is the cost of replacing all the signs.
Are you familiar with this page?
By the way, what's your opinion of increasing the speed limit on I-205 from 55 to 65? Traffic permitting, the left lane usually averages 65 normally anyway, and it doesn't appear to be a problem. Do you believe there would be significantly more accidents if the limit were increased?
Yeah, but:
3.5
3.6
4.0
7.0
7.1
8.0
8.1
9.0
9.1
10.0
10.1
10.2
11.0
12.0
(I don't know how many releases there were before 3.5.)
or
2) Oh, Universal's music is no longer available on iTunes. I'll have to <strike>pirate it like there's no tommorrow</strike> rip it from CD onto my iPod or
3) Oh, Universal's music is no longer available on iTunes. Hey, here's a cool song on iTunes, from some other label, I was thinking about getting this one too, I guess I'll just buy it instead. I don't really need that other song I wanted.
or
4) Universal conspires with two or three other big labels to also drop iTunes if their collective demands aren't met. Apple accuses the labels of forming a dangerous anti-consumer cartel, while the labels accuse Apple of being a dangerous anti-consumer monopoly, and because the labels have deeper pockets and are much more experienced at spreading ridiculous lies and deceit, few people hear Apple's side.
or, as another poster pointed out,
5) Universal sets up an iTMS competitor selling DRM-free tracks; they offer an introductory price of $0.89/track for the first three months, then jack it up to $1.99 per track for the tracks more than a handful of people want, while still offering crap nobody likes for $0.89/track (which is the price they'll advertise, of course). Throw billions of dollars at promoting it, and they'll convince some people to switch away from iTMS.
But going the other way is a whole different ball game. There is no Carbon API on Linux. The closest thing to the Cocoa API is GNUStep, which AFAIK isn't really compatible enough yet. And all the cool stuff Apple keeps coming out with like CoreImage and QTKit just isn't going to be there. I wouldn't expect porting a Mac app to Linux to be any easier than porting a Mac app to Windows (aside from the obvious blessing that you wouldn't have to run Windows to do it), or porting a Windows app to Linux.
(Do any real developers who have actually done any of this type of porting have anything authoritative to say on this topic?)
How 'bout a roofie colada?
The whole reason Apple made the iPod in the first place was, nobody else's MP3 players worked with Macs.
Open source software development doesn't just happen by magic. If you want this to happen, start coding. Otherwise, you may find that no such project exists.
Of course it works on Mac OS X on 64-bit hardware. Apple planned ahead, all the way back to the original PowerPC in 1994, to make sure that mixing 32-bit and 64-bit code on the Mac will mostly be a non-issue. It's Windows that has a problem with it.
A decade ago, most browsers gave you complete control over the configuration of this feature - you just scroll through a list of every available MIME type, and choose which plug-in you wanted to handle it, or if you wanted it to download, or whatever. For some reason, browser vendors have decided you no longer need this configurability, and they've removed the UI for it. I'm sure it's buried in about:config somewhere on Firefox. I think Opera still gives you the option in Preferences, and it wouldn't surprise me if SeaMonkey does as well, but I'm too lazy to check right now. Why do Apple programs "break" the usual look and feel of Windows programs? For exactly the same reason Apple programs "break" the usual look and feel of Mac OS programs (although in recent years, Apple has revised the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines to define what these apps do as not broken, and has encouraged third parties to break their apps in the same way, although it sounds like Leopard might change things).
(The must-have feature for me is the ability to use the iPhone as a Bluetooth modem, to connect to the Internet via my laptop. I can do this with my current phone (over GPRS, not EDGE, so all of you whiners saying the iPhone sucks because it doesn't support 3G can go take a flying leap) and I really can't give that up. I need to be able to get work done when there's no wifi around. There are plenty of other missing features that I hope to see in the next revision, but I decided I can do without them. This one, I need.)
First of all, as someone else said, getting the software to work on 64-bit editions of Windows should be fairly straightforward for the most part; Apple simply hasn't done it yet (rather, they tried it but ran into some problems that they haven't been able to fix reliably yet).
Secondly, from a technical standpoint, getting iTunes to work on Linux would be a huge pain in the ass. iTunes is heavily dependent on QuickTime, and QuickTime doesn't exist on Linux. Yes, there are various applications and libraries to play/encode/convert QuickTime-formatted video files, and I'm sure many of these work quite well for that, but an app like iTunes is going to need 100% compatibility with the entire QuickTime API. No QuickTime, no iTunes. And porting QuickTime to Linux isn't something that's just going to happen overnight - apparently when Apple ported QuickTime to Windows, they determined that rewriting QuickTime to run on Win32 just wasn't feasible, and it would be an easier project to port the entire Macintosh Toolbox over to Windows so they didn't have to use the Win32 API. Apple would have to do the same thing again: port the Carbon API (the modern descendent of the Macintosh Toolbox) over to Linux, then port QuickTime to run on that, THEN port iTunes.
Thirdly, from a business standpoint, Apple views Linux as a larger competitor and threat to its business than Windows. Sure, Windows has 90% market share, so it seems bigger, but remember, Windows is a monopoly. Apple's computer business only exists within the market for non-Windows systems, and Linux is a huge part of that market. Yes, it would be nice for Apple's iPod/iPhone business if iTunes were fully supported on Linux... but if it were, that would only make Apple's biggest computer competitor (PCs running Linux) that much more attractive an option (for the 10% of people in the market for a non-Windows computer).
When you add the technical and business issues together, it just doesn't make sense for Apple to devote huge resources to shooting themselves in the foot.
Get back to me when e-ink displays (the kind that don't need a backlight at all) are readily available to consumers, and we'll talk.
Can anyone from Japan confirm or deny?