I'm fairly certain your parent post was pointing out how people bitched up a fit about the iMac not having that piece of junk back in 1998, not when the major PC builders finally dropped them from their standard configuration within the last 2 years.
Maybe because things might have changed a bit in 8+ years? Many people were still using floppy disks in 1998 (and as pointed out, there was no alternative supplied for writing media). A few years later, floppy disks are dead and every computer has CDRW or even DVDRW, along with support for memory cards.
And actually, I read the OP (and probably the Grandparent) as taking the piss out of people who claimed that the iMac was some revolutionary ("high technology") machine for not having a floppy drive. (Even if that is worth a claim to fame, the Amiga CDTV did it years before anyway.)
I'm non-religious and do hold certain beliefs to be true without myself having direct evidence
I said without evidence, not without "direct" evidence, so I'm afraid your post argues against a strawman.
In contrast, for religion, the search for truth has ceased (assuming it at some point existed); those involved with religion have beliefs which are also linked into chains
And if you follow those chains, where does it lead to? It's just someone's opinion of what God supposedly says. The problem with religious belief is not that someone in the chain may be telling fibs - it's that the chain doesn't go anywhere beyond some person's claim.
than stop condemning other points of view. you ridicule another point of view, but really have no basis to say your pov is any better than someone else's.
I'm not sure how I'm oppressing people simply by stating my point of view on Slashdot, and where have I "ridiculed"? This is a debate - if you think my claims have no basis, then say why, rather than suggesting that no one has any right to judge or criticise beliefs.
And let's say you're right - in that case, please can you stop condemning my point of view?
some people may find their assumptions about religion 'useful' for their purposes. what right do you have to say your assumptions (based solely on them 'being useful') is any better than someone else's?
I'm not sure what you mean - I have just as much right to say what I think on Slashdot just like anyone else. I'm not saying that religious people shouldn't be allowed their beliefs.
As for why I think the axioms of mathematics are better than the assumptions in religious beliefs, I can simply point to the vast amount of technological advancement that results from the former, and then ask you what insights from the world we have learnt from religious beliefs?
its my belief that its false. I'd never go out and impose that belief on someone else.
Yes, obviously anything I say is "my belief", and I'm not imposing that belief on anyone. I could put "in my humble opinion" on the end of everything I write, but IMHO that seems pointless...
Do you 'believe' in cause & effect? it can never be proven. What about the basic postulates that ALL of mathematics are based upon... which have yet to ever be proven? Both are just things believed to be true.
The axioms in mathematics that you refer to are assumptions. No one "believes" them in any real sense - they're chosen because they are useful in some way.
And I'm not sure that scientists particularly believe in cause and effect, beyond that which is empirically tested and proven (and quantum mechanics shows that some things don't have a cause).
The OP didn't say that scientists don't have any beliefs, just that their beliefs are nothing more than those than can be proven, and everything else is the scientific method.
It's a common tactic to claim that the non-religious also hold beliefs without evidence, but I've yet to see it, and your two suggestions are not examples of this.
When scientists themselves can hold mutually exclusive theories about something, it holds to reason that science isn't as clear cut as you make it out to be
Examples? If there are mutually exclusive theories, then that's great - it means we can test it, and find out which is correct. It's not a matter of "belief" - it's not something to fight wars over, or condemn the other point of view as immoral, for example.
Doom was cited as a supposed "cause" of Columbine. Yes, Rockstar may today draw most of the criticism as it's the one with the most violent material, but take that away, and people would still be blaming the other games. Just like they blame films, rock music and sex.
(And just to add - people in the US should think themselves lucky if people only claim that games turn their children into killers - here in the UK, people claim that they turn adults into killers...)
Although to add to my previous comment, a more recent BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7193416.stm has what claims to be a direct quote from Hasbro: "gross copyright and trademark infringement". So it seems that Hasbro view it as both a copyright and a trademark violation, after all.
Now yes, it's possible that certain things may constitute a trademark - but these things can be fixed by changing the name and even the colours if need be.
Not as if you're going to be wanting to check your email or run other apps as you frag away.
If we're talking quick games where I might frag away for a bit, I don't want to close everything down and reboot for a quick bit of game playing. With long games I play for hours, I quite often pop back to check email or a website.
More generally, what is this "check your email"? My email application runs in the background and tells me when I have email. My IM program is there is someone wants to talk to me. I don't expect these functions to go down just because I want to play a game.
I don't know, the idea of going back to 1990 where you only ran one application at a time and rebooted between every game seems quite mad to me.
Thanks for pointing that out - it's disappointing that even the BBC can't tell the difference between copyright and trademarks, first claiming "Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game" then saying "The request to remove the add-on came from both Hasbro and Mattel because ownership of the Scrabble trademark is split between the two."
If the BBC have got it wrong, and the lawyers said nothing about copyright, isn't that a potentially libellous statement, I wonder?
I would never encourage anyone to buy a laptop without a warranty.
As you say, you get a year free - no one is buying laptops without warranties at all. The question is whether it's worth spending hundreds on a warranty just for the extra few years.
It's the imac over again - lack of the floppy drive is touted as an advantage. When someone says they actually still want one - it's okay, you can pay Apple to solve that.
Never do I have to go home to get email, or look stuff up
I check email and look stuff up on my dirt-cheap bog-standard phone. Granted, there's certainly a market for something larger and more convenient that a phone, whilst not quite so large as typical laptops. But we're years past the stage when checking email meant you had to go home.
I agree - not sure why you were modded down, but sadly moderation is broken on Apple stories - anything non-positive about Apple gets modded down.
It's even funnier when you think how not to long ago, Intel was supposed to be rubbish and Macs were so much better for using PowerPC. Yet when they turn round and have to use PC chips after all, suddenly they still somehow get to claim the glory that they're better!
Wanted criminals have always been second-class citizens. Captured criminals even moreso.
What, you mean an innocent person might end up wrongly accused? Oops, better scrap the whole criminal justice system then.
The UK keeps fingerprints of everyone who's ever been arrested, even if not charged.
The US fingerprints everyone who enters the country.
Even TFS says "Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record".
The justice systems works by bring evidence, and determining if there is sufficient evidence to prove someone's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, not by flagging someone up in a database.
And the point of the OP is that that stuff is already out there. SpeedTree [wikipedia.org] is one example.
Dryad is free. SpeedTree isn't. So for hobbyist programmers who neither have an art department to generate 3D content for them, nor lots of money to spend on licences, it might be worth a look.
(If you know of other examples that are free, please let me know!)
To get a drivers license, one has to pass one or more tests which (supposedly) will demonstrate your grasp of how to operate a vehicle safely.
Yes, but either this is a sufficient test for determine if one will not drink drive, or it isn't.
If it is, it should be fine to have the drinking age at 18, because the only people driving will be those people who have passed the test.
If it isn't, then the test is irrelevant as soon as they get drunk - so again, for the reasons I gave, it's not clear why it's better to raise the drinking age, rather than the driving age. I suspect it comes down to the idea that driving (particularly in the US) is seen as a fundamental right, whilst drinking is viewed as inherently bad.
I suspect that 9/11 would still have happened if people were armed. The problem wasn't that passengers were outarmed by the terrorists, the problem was that back then, people had no idea that hijackers would have the plans they did - the assumption was that if you sit back and wait, it'll all be okay. So things would have gone the same - no one would try to be the hero, fearing it would just end in more deaths.
Now that people are aware of what happened on 9/11, even without guns, I hope I'm right in thinking that it's unlikely the same tactic will happen, because the passengers will try everything to stop them. It doesn't matter whether neither have guns, or both have guns - in fact, I'd say the latter is worse, because there's more chance of people getting killed in any conflict.
And lastly, even if it's true that a hole in the plane isn't any problem, you still have to factor in the possibility of extra deaths now that you have an enclosed space with several hundred people, many of them armed - whether it's people mistakenly thinking someone is a terrorist, or just people who go in a rage.
The same cannot be said of a 16 (or 18) year old who gets their drivers license and to celebrate, gets drunk and goes driving.
This is true, but it strikes me as odd that they solve this by having the drinking age higher, not the driving age.
I mean, driving is still a risk even if you aren't drunk, whilst this way of doing things unfairly affects under 21s who don't drive. It's also surely more likely that an under 21 driver might get hold of some alcohol, compared with an under 21 who can legally drink then randomly deciding to find someone else's car and illegally go for a drive...
And I don't know, but to me, being able to drink - something which can be done even in private - seems like a more fundamental right than being able to drive a potentially dangerous vehicle around on public roads at life-threatening speeds... But I guess given the taboo of drugs in general, not many agree with me.
At highway speeds (60mph), three minutes will take you just 3 miles. This, of course assumes that both your driveway and the grocery store's parking lot exit directly onto the highway, an unlikely situation. And every local (read: lower speed) road only decreases the distance. An average person can easily WALK 3 miles per hour. Are you saying your busses travel at a speed slower than walking? I find that hard to beleive.
I have experienced cases at least where walking takes just as long as getting a bus (and we're talking timescales of about an hour) - the problem is that buses often take very non-direct routes, they spend ages stopping frequently and having a queue of passengers pay to get on, and then there's the time walk to the bus stop and waiting.
I agree logic and philosophy are obviously important, and part of that is theology. But in the example you describe, firstly the answers are still found by following logic and reasoning, and not by religious faith or accepting something written down in a book or said by a person, which is what I meant by "religion". Secondly, the answers come from attacking the claim that God must exist.
As I said in my previous post, there are obviously things outside the domain of science, simply because what we usually refer to science is usually only concerned with physics, chemistry and biology, and not say history - or logic and theology. But this doesn't mean that religion has any answers. It's not clear here that theological thought should be put under the religion camp anyway, since this discovery came from disproving the proof - arguably therefore it's more atheism than theism.
Fair enough, I can agree there may be psychological benefits to religious belief.
faith has value because sometimes it's all that can keep a person going. not strictly religious faith, it could be faith in the sunrise tomorrow, faith in one's self, faith in karma, faith in true love, faith in all kinds of elusive, unprovable things. faith has value because, when held deeply, it is the most indestructible thing ever. faith has value because it helps people survive war, disease, and all kinds of other worldly atrocities. faith has value because it is a key component of trust, and without trust there could be no society.
Be careful not to conflate different meanings of "faith" here. It can mean:
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. 2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See synonyms at belief, trust. 3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters. 4. often Faith Christianity. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith. 5. A set of principles or beliefs.
So by religion, we're talking 3 or 4. You generalise to 2 - although I'd say only karma falls into this. Again, I agree that it can have psychological advantages to believe in it, but beyond that I see no use. Faith in love, that the sun will come up, trusting people, are all things that fall into 1 - this is a different meaning of the word altogether. These are things which we can have evidence for.
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I'm fairly certain your parent post was pointing out how people bitched up a fit about the iMac not having that piece of junk back in 1998, not when the major PC builders finally dropped them from their standard configuration within the last 2 years.
Maybe because things might have changed a bit in 8+ years? Many people were still using floppy disks in 1998 (and as pointed out, there was no alternative supplied for writing media). A few years later, floppy disks are dead and every computer has CDRW or even DVDRW, along with support for memory cards.
And actually, I read the OP (and probably the Grandparent) as taking the piss out of people who claimed that the iMac was some revolutionary ("high technology") machine for not having a floppy drive. (Even if that is worth a claim to fame, the Amiga CDTV did it years before anyway.)
I'm non-religious and do hold certain beliefs to be true without myself having direct evidence
I said without evidence, not without "direct" evidence, so I'm afraid your post argues against a strawman.
In contrast, for religion, the search for truth has ceased (assuming it at some point existed); those involved with religion have beliefs which are also linked into chains
And if you follow those chains, where does it lead to? It's just someone's opinion of what God supposedly says. The problem with religious belief is not that someone in the chain may be telling fibs - it's that the chain doesn't go anywhere beyond some person's claim.
than stop condemning other points of view. you ridicule another point of view, but really have no basis to say your pov is any better than someone else's.
I'm not sure how I'm oppressing people simply by stating my point of view on Slashdot, and where have I "ridiculed"? This is a debate - if you think my claims have no basis, then say why, rather than suggesting that no one has any right to judge or criticise beliefs.
And let's say you're right - in that case, please can you stop condemning my point of view?
some people may find their assumptions about religion 'useful' for their purposes. what right do you have to say your assumptions (based solely on them 'being useful') is any better than someone else's?
I'm not sure what you mean - I have just as much right to say what I think on Slashdot just like anyone else. I'm not saying that religious people shouldn't be allowed their beliefs.
As for why I think the axioms of mathematics are better than the assumptions in religious beliefs, I can simply point to the vast amount of technological advancement that results from the former, and then ask you what insights from the world we have learnt from religious beliefs?
its my belief that its false. I'd never go out and impose that belief on someone else.
Yes, obviously anything I say is "my belief", and I'm not imposing that belief on anyone. I could put "in my humble opinion" on the end of everything I write, but IMHO that seems pointless...
If you remove all the subjective statements from your post, you sound EXACTLY like a terrorist.
Wake me up when he's using violence against those he disagrees with.
Whilst I agree with you in that I wouldn't support outlawing religious organisations, I don't think the OP is quite what you describe.
Do you 'believe' in cause & effect? it can never be proven. What about the basic postulates that ALL of mathematics are based upon... which have yet to ever be proven? Both are just things believed to be true.
The axioms in mathematics that you refer to are assumptions. No one "believes" them in any real sense - they're chosen because they are useful in some way.
And I'm not sure that scientists particularly believe in cause and effect, beyond that which is empirically tested and proven (and quantum mechanics shows that some things don't have a cause).
The OP didn't say that scientists don't have any beliefs, just that their beliefs are nothing more than those than can be proven, and everything else is the scientific method.
It's a common tactic to claim that the non-religious also hold beliefs without evidence, but I've yet to see it, and your two suggestions are not examples of this.
When scientists themselves can hold mutually exclusive theories about something, it holds to reason that science isn't as clear cut as you make it out to be
Examples? If there are mutually exclusive theories, then that's great - it means we can test it, and find out which is correct. It's not a matter of "belief" - it's not something to fight wars over, or condemn the other point of view as immoral, for example.
Doom was cited as a supposed "cause" of Columbine. Yes, Rockstar may today draw most of the criticism as it's the one with the most violent material, but take that away, and people would still be blaming the other games. Just like they blame films, rock music and sex.
(And just to add - people in the US should think themselves lucky if people only claim that games turn their children into killers - here in the UK, people claim that they turn adults into killers...)
Although to add to my previous comment, a more recent BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7193416.stm has what claims to be a direct quote from Hasbro: "gross copyright and trademark infringement". So it seems that Hasbro view it as both a copyright and a trademark violation, after all.
Yes. Lots of designs are trademarked.
He said copyrighted, not trademarked.
Now yes, it's possible that certain things may constitute a trademark - but these things can be fixed by changing the name and even the colours if need be.
Copyrights and trademarks are different things.
Not as if you're going to be wanting to check your email or run other apps as you frag away.
If we're talking quick games where I might frag away for a bit, I don't want to close everything down and reboot for a quick bit of game playing. With long games I play for hours, I quite often pop back to check email or a website.
More generally, what is this "check your email"? My email application runs in the background and tells me when I have email. My IM program is there is someone wants to talk to me. I don't expect these functions to go down just because I want to play a game.
I don't know, the idea of going back to 1990 where you only ran one application at a time and rebooted between every game seems quite mad to me.
Thanks for pointing that out - it's disappointing that even the BBC can't tell the difference between copyright and trademarks, first claiming "Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game" then saying "The request to remove the add-on came from both Hasbro and Mattel because ownership of the Scrabble trademark is split between the two."
If the BBC have got it wrong, and the lawyers said nothing about copyright, isn't that a potentially libellous statement, I wonder?
Unfortunately for them, Parker Brothers have a Monopoly monopoly...
I would never encourage anyone to buy a laptop without a warranty.
As you say, you get a year free - no one is buying laptops without warranties at all. The question is whether it's worth spending hundreds on a warranty just for the extra few years.
It's the imac over again - lack of the floppy drive is touted as an advantage. When someone says they actually still want one - it's okay, you can pay Apple to solve that.
Never do I have to go home to get email, or look stuff up
I check email and look stuff up on my dirt-cheap bog-standard phone. Granted, there's certainly a market for something larger and more convenient that a phone, whilst not quite so large as typical laptops. But we're years past the stage when checking email meant you had to go home.
Did you not see the custom Dual Core built for it?
It's not a custom chip, it's made by Intel. Custom chips were things like the Amiga had - custom, as opposed to using a 3rd party component.
I agree - not sure why you were modded down, but sadly moderation is broken on Apple stories - anything non-positive about Apple gets modded down.
It's even funnier when you think how not to long ago, Intel was supposed to be rubbish and Macs were so much better for using PowerPC. Yet when they turn round and have to use PC chips after all, suddenly they still somehow get to claim the glory that they're better!
Wanted criminals have always been second-class citizens. Captured criminals even moreso.
What, you mean an innocent person might end up wrongly accused? Oops, better scrap the whole criminal justice system then.
The UK keeps fingerprints of everyone who's ever been arrested, even if not charged.
The US fingerprints everyone who enters the country.
Even TFS says "Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record".
The justice systems works by bring evidence, and determining if there is sufficient evidence to prove someone's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, not by flagging someone up in a database.
And the point of the OP is that that stuff is already out there. SpeedTree [wikipedia.org] is one example.
Dryad is free. SpeedTree isn't. So for hobbyist programmers who neither have an art department to generate 3D content for them, nor lots of money to spend on licences, it might be worth a look.
(If you know of other examples that are free, please let me know!)
To get a drivers license, one has to pass one or more tests which (supposedly) will demonstrate your grasp of how to operate a vehicle safely.
Yes, but either this is a sufficient test for determine if one will not drink drive, or it isn't.
If it is, it should be fine to have the drinking age at 18, because the only people driving will be those people who have passed the test.
If it isn't, then the test is irrelevant as soon as they get drunk - so again, for the reasons I gave, it's not clear why it's better to raise the drinking age, rather than the driving age. I suspect it comes down to the idea that driving (particularly in the US) is seen as a fundamental right, whilst drinking is viewed as inherently bad.
I suspect that 9/11 would still have happened if people were armed. The problem wasn't that passengers were outarmed by the terrorists, the problem was that back then, people had no idea that hijackers would have the plans they did - the assumption was that if you sit back and wait, it'll all be okay. So things would have gone the same - no one would try to be the hero, fearing it would just end in more deaths.
Now that people are aware of what happened on 9/11, even without guns, I hope I'm right in thinking that it's unlikely the same tactic will happen, because the passengers will try everything to stop them. It doesn't matter whether neither have guns, or both have guns - in fact, I'd say the latter is worse, because there's more chance of people getting killed in any conflict.
And lastly, even if it's true that a hole in the plane isn't any problem, you still have to factor in the possibility of extra deaths now that you have an enclosed space with several hundred people, many of them armed - whether it's people mistakenly thinking someone is a terrorist, or just people who go in a rage.
The same cannot be said of a 16 (or 18) year old who gets their drivers license and to celebrate, gets drunk and goes driving.
This is true, but it strikes me as odd that they solve this by having the drinking age higher, not the driving age.
I mean, driving is still a risk even if you aren't drunk, whilst this way of doing things unfairly affects under 21s who don't drive. It's also surely more likely that an under 21 driver might get hold of some alcohol, compared with an under 21 who can legally drink then randomly deciding to find someone else's car and illegally go for a drive...
And I don't know, but to me, being able to drink - something which can be done even in private - seems like a more fundamental right than being able to drive a potentially dangerous vehicle around on public roads at life-threatening speeds... But I guess given the taboo of drugs in general, not many agree with me.
Sorry, but I call BS on this one.
At highway speeds (60mph), three minutes will take you just 3 miles. This, of course assumes that both your driveway and the grocery store's parking lot exit directly onto the highway, an unlikely situation. And every local (read: lower speed) road only decreases the distance.
An average person can easily WALK 3 miles per hour. Are you saying your busses travel at a speed slower than walking? I find that hard to beleive.
I have experienced cases at least where walking takes just as long as getting a bus (and we're talking timescales of about an hour) - the problem is that buses often take very non-direct routes, they spend ages stopping frequently and having a queue of passengers pay to get on, and then there's the time walk to the bus stop and waiting.
I agree logic and philosophy are obviously important, and part of that is theology. But in the example you describe, firstly the answers are still found by following logic and reasoning, and not by religious faith or accepting something written down in a book or said by a person, which is what I meant by "religion". Secondly, the answers come from attacking the claim that God must exist.
As I said in my previous post, there are obviously things outside the domain of science, simply because what we usually refer to science is usually only concerned with physics, chemistry and biology, and not say history - or logic and theology. But this doesn't mean that religion has any answers. It's not clear here that theological thought should be put under the religion camp anyway, since this discovery came from disproving the proof - arguably therefore it's more atheism than theism.
Fair enough, I can agree there may be psychological benefits to religious belief.
faith has value because sometimes it's all that can keep a person going. not strictly religious faith, it could be faith in the sunrise tomorrow, faith in one's self, faith in karma, faith in true love, faith in all kinds of elusive, unprovable things. faith has value because, when held deeply, it is the most indestructible thing ever. faith has value because it helps people survive war, disease, and all kinds of other worldly atrocities. faith has value because it is a key component of trust, and without trust there could be no society.
Be careful not to conflate different meanings of "faith" here. It can mean:
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See synonyms at belief, trust.
3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters.
4. often Faith Christianity. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.
The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith.
5. A set of principles or beliefs.
So by religion, we're talking 3 or 4. You generalise to 2 - although I'd say only karma falls into this. Again, I agree that it can have psychological advantages to believe in it, but beyond that I see no use. Faith in love, that the sun will come up, trusting people, are all things that fall into 1 - this is a different meaning of the word altogether. These are things which we can have evidence for.