I mean, really -- they *sell* you swords. They aren't really interested in helping you or the side of good in general. And the few people who *don't* charge you want you to rescue their lost kitten or something before they give you the Gem of Shining Awesomeness or what not. So loot away, adventurer -- villagers are jerks.
Except those with monarchs. Even North Korea is a republic even though the Kim dynasty basically is a royal line. Being a republic and being a democracy are orthogonal. The UK is a good example of a monarchy that is also a democracy, just like the US is a republic that is also a democracy, and North Korea is a republic that is also a dictatorship. Yes, neither the US nor the UK are *direct* democracies like in ancient Athens.
History is about events that happened. "God" never did *anything* that has evidence of actually happening. So why should "he" be mentioned in a book of history? Sure talk about religion. Priests and equivalent clerics had a major influence on history. But priests are human.
It's true that Gates may not have been a real leader of Microsoft since the 1980s, but like Jobs he was the charismatic symbol of his company. The media ate up his "The Road Ahead" stuff just like they fawn over Jobs' keynotes. Ballmer, despite his sometimes amusing antics, is basically a generic CEO of no real consequence or media appeal.
An API is not an OS. Nor is a command loop. Yes, it is obvious that the iPhone has an API and some sort of command loop, but there is no reason to assume there was an actual operating system behind that. Again, many consumer electronics products get by without anything analogous to an OS, and they don't have processors with "instructions for every function" either.
I think a major reason for the Far Side's popularity among science and engineering types is that Larson used science as the basis for many of his strips. Because of this, even when the joke wasn't that good, people in the relevant field would tape them up on lab doors, just because they were amused that anyone would make a comic about their field. Perhaps xkcd is the modern equivalent (although THe Far Side seemed to focus more on the biological sciences, as Larson had a zoology background, and xkcd is more physics/math)
Then what *is* "OS X" to you if not Darwin? The Finder? I was really skeptical before jailbreaking my iPhone that there was an operating system at all. But there clearly is -- you can even ssh into your jailbroken iPhone, install gcc, run perl, python, and ruby -- basically anything you can do on the command line of OS X.
If you jailbreak an iPhone, you can open a terminal window running bash. If you type "uname -a" you'll see that iPhones run Darwin (the actual OS behind OS X), just like Macintoshes.
The computer allows us to make everything, and yet we insist on creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Where is the weird, the fantastic, the horrible and the wonderful? Why do we settle, when we can have anything? When do we start creating art?
Normally, "art" *is* about creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Mass market movies and genre novels are all about aliens, explosions, and dashing adventurers. Art movies and literary fiction are generally about realistic stories -- people coping with a divorce or the death of their child, things like that.
Do you don't use a laptop? Or do you have a 3G modem or something? That's the main point of Gears -- being able to edit a Google Docs document on a laptop without needing to find a wifi hotspot.
I thought people realized a long time ago that there was "soft" science fiction that really was just using SF to say something about current society and its problems and "hard" science fiction that was actually about the science and technology. Star Trek is probably the most famous example of the "soft" style. Stross obviously just prefers the second type.
E-ink certainly *does* cause less eye-strain than LCDs -- that's the whole point of using it. There were LCD e-books in the 1990s (like the RocketBook), but nobody was interested in them.
Supposedly a "supergun". But like the rest of Iraqs' WMDs, it may may have been mythical. It's really not that absurd that Saddam would actually want a facility to launch peaceful satellites. I mean, the guy was a dictator, but he liked money; having a facility to hire out would have given him the cash to build even more palaces for himself.
Well, in part, but another important lesson in science labs is learning to report the truth, even if is disappointing and not what you want. This is an important lesson and unfortunately even some well known scientists don't learn it,
1) As people have already said, there weren't *nearly* as many cows around before we started making them a major part of our diet 2) The cows that *were* around ate grass. Feeding cows corn, as farmers tend to do, fattens them up but gives them much more gas.
Really, I have yet to see an iPhone game that captured my attention for more than an hour or two -- even the recent version of the Sims for the iPhone is a very stripped down version of the real game. A DS or full fledged console or computer game may cost $30 or more but I expect I'll get at least 50 hours of enjoyment out of it....
The problem is that most of these are not particularly good translations and lack commentary -- you won't be able to follow Newton, for example, without the detailed commentary that other editions, such as those edited by the historian of science Bernard Cohen, have. It isn't just converting Latin to English -- the mathematical techniques themselves need "translation" as nobody today does math using the primitive methods available to Newton.
No. you don't have to go through Amazon. You put things on a Kindle via USB. It mounts like a thumb drive and you just copy things over. The only need for Amazon's servers is to buy books.
For commercial content that is. There's no DRM even on the Kindle for your own content, but you are deluding yourself if you think major publishers are going to allow DRM-free e-books. If you don't want DRM, you are going to be limited to Project Gutenberg and the works of Cory Doctorow, basically.
Obviously Creationism and other literal scriptural interpretations are the most obvious conflicts with logic and reason, but they aren't the only ones. Consider the idea of the "soul" and "afterlife". It's not reasonable to think that we can live on after our bodies and brains have decomposed. Only faith supports such an idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, really -- they *sell* you swords. They aren't really interested in helping you or the side of good in general. And the few people who *don't* charge you want you to rescue their lost kitten or something before they give you the Gem of Shining Awesomeness or what not. So loot away, adventurer -- villagers are jerks.
Except those with monarchs. Even North Korea is a republic even though the Kim dynasty basically is a royal line. Being a republic and being a democracy are orthogonal. The UK is a good example of a monarchy that is also a democracy, just like the US is a republic that is also a democracy, and North Korea is a republic that is also a dictatorship. Yes, neither the US nor the UK are *direct* democracies like in ancient Athens.
History is about events that happened. "God" never did *anything* that has evidence of actually happening. So why should "he" be mentioned in a book of history? Sure talk about religion. Priests and equivalent clerics had a major influence on history. But priests are human.
It's true that Gates may not have been a real leader of Microsoft since the 1980s, but like Jobs he was the charismatic symbol of his company. The media ate up his "The Road Ahead" stuff just like they fawn over Jobs' keynotes. Ballmer, despite his sometimes amusing antics, is basically a generic CEO of no real consequence or media appeal.
An API is not an OS. Nor is a command loop. Yes, it is obvious that the iPhone has an API and some sort of command loop, but there is no reason to assume there was an actual operating system behind that. Again, many consumer electronics products get by without anything analogous to an OS, and they don't have processors with "instructions for every function" either.
Most electronic devices don't have an OS. Your microwave has a microprocessor but doesn't have an OS.
I think a major reason for the Far Side's popularity among science and engineering types is that Larson used science as the basis for many of his strips. Because of this, even when the joke wasn't that good, people in the relevant field would tape them up on lab doors, just because they were amused that anyone would make a comic about their field. Perhaps xkcd is the modern equivalent (although THe Far Side seemed to focus more on the biological sciences, as Larson had a zoology background, and xkcd is more physics/math)
Then what *is* "OS X" to you if not Darwin? The Finder? I was really skeptical before jailbreaking my iPhone that there was an operating system at all. But there clearly is -- you can even ssh into your jailbroken iPhone, install gcc, run perl, python, and ruby -- basically anything you can do on the command line of OS X.
If you jailbreak an iPhone, you can open a terminal window running bash. If you type "uname -a" you'll see that iPhones run Darwin (the actual OS behind OS X), just like Macintoshes.
The computer allows us to make everything, and yet we insist on creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Where is the weird, the fantastic, the horrible and the wonderful? Why do we settle, when we can have anything? When do we start creating art?
Normally, "art" *is* about creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Mass market movies and genre novels are all about aliens, explosions, and dashing adventurers. Art movies and literary fiction are generally about realistic stories -- people coping with a divorce or the death of their child, things like that.
Do you don't use a laptop? Or do you have a 3G modem or something? That's the main point of Gears -- being able to edit a Google Docs document on a laptop without needing to find a wifi hotspot.
It only went out to the sub 10K crowd...
I thought people realized a long time ago that there was "soft" science fiction that really was just using SF to say something about current society and its problems and "hard" science fiction that was actually about the science and technology. Star Trek is probably the most famous example of the "soft" style. Stross obviously just prefers the second type.
E-ink certainly *does* cause less eye-strain than LCDs -- that's the whole point of using it. There were LCD e-books in the 1990s (like the RocketBook), but nobody was interested in them.
Supposedly a "supergun". But like the rest of Iraqs' WMDs, it may may have been mythical. It's really not that absurd that Saddam would actually want a facility to launch peaceful satellites. I mean, the guy was a dictator, but he liked money; having a facility to hire out would have given him the cash to build even more palaces for himself.
When I read "OS 9" I was thinking "Gee..I didn't know they ported OS-9 to the Mac until I realized that you meant version 9 of the the classic Mac OS.
Well, in part, but another important lesson in science labs is learning to report the truth, even if is disappointing and not what you want. This is an important lesson and unfortunately even some well known scientists don't learn it,
1) As people have already said, there weren't *nearly* as many cows around before we started making them a major part of our diet
2) The cows that *were* around ate grass. Feeding cows corn, as farmers tend to do, fattens them up but gives them much more gas.
Really, I have yet to see an iPhone game that captured my attention for more than an hour or two -- even the recent version of the Sims for the iPhone is a very stripped down version of the real game. A DS or full fledged console or computer game may cost $30 or more but I expect I'll get at least 50 hours of enjoyment out of it....
The problem is that most of these are not particularly good translations and lack commentary -- you won't be able to follow Newton, for example, without the detailed commentary that other editions, such as those edited by the historian of science Bernard Cohen, have. It isn't just converting Latin to English -- the mathematical techniques themselves need "translation" as nobody today does math using the primitive methods available to Newton.
No. you don't have to go through Amazon. You put things on a Kindle via USB. It mounts like a thumb drive and you just copy things over. The only need for Amazon's servers is to buy books.
For commercial content that is. There's no DRM even on the Kindle for your own content, but you are deluding yourself if you think major publishers are going to allow DRM-free e-books. If you don't want DRM, you are going to be limited to Project Gutenberg and the works of Cory Doctorow, basically.
'Trick Used To Pass French "Three Strikes"'
Sounds like you are talking about a trick used to avoid failing a language class!
Remember that Transylvania used to be part of Hungary, and has a Hungarian-speaking minority even to this day...
Obviously Creationism and other literal scriptural interpretations are the most obvious conflicts with logic and reason, but they aren't the only ones. Consider the idea of the "soul" and "afterlife". It's not reasonable to think that we can live on after our bodies and brains have decomposed. Only faith supports such an idea.