It seems a little strange how atheists are very keen to strike down the pointless values of religion, yet still believe in many aspects which have no basis.
Okay, I'll bite - what things do atheists believe in, which have no basis?
A website is not the same as a physical building. When a child accesses a website, they still exist in a physical location (presumably their home), and therefore it is still their parents responsibility.
In loco parentis applies because the child is no longer able to be with their parent, and that obviously doesn't apply to a website.
Attractive nuisance applies to landowners, and is about being liable for injuries. Even if we pretended it applied to websites as well as landowners, I'm not sure how that's relevant. Whilst the average MySpace page makes my eyes hurt, it's not like you're going to trip over a bad HTML tag and injure yourself...
Some installers are annoyingly tedious, I agree, but none of this is a Windows vs Mac issue, it's just how different applications do things. Windows happily supports double-click only installations, or drag-and-drop installations, for applications that want that.
but to have a program that you download actually be a proxy to install the program you really want?
It's annoying, but better than downloading hundreds of MBs that you don't need. What's the Mac solution to this, then?
Then there is the fact that most inexperienced people see all the options in the installer and freak.
Setting up important options (e.g., a first email account in an email client) is easier this way for inexperienced people, compared with having to find the preferences and freak out when they see all the available options.
It doesn't follow that just because you simulate what happens in the brain, the computer would itself be sentient. Anymore than simulating the weather means there'll be a hurricane force wind inside your CPU.
Censoring for offensive ideas/language is a liberal thing. At least, thats the break down in the U.S.
I've never thought that censoring anything could be described as "liberal". Though I think the problem is that Liberal in the US means a different thing to the word liberal (same with "conservative", I suppose).
No, it's not hard, but what if someone has told me in person rather than on Slashdot? What if I forget and need to do it again? What if I'm faced with a new program I need installing, and I don't have time to post to Slashdot for someone to tell me the command I need to copy and paste?
How many grandmas can figure out a Windows "next, next, next" type install?
Er, all of them who speak English? Or if they can't figure out clicking "Next" to proceed, they'll have trouble using any platform, including your applet, and certainly remembering a set of commands to type.
It's the way that you and others brand all who disagree as "liberal". Sure, I've no problem with being liberal, I'd rather be liberal than fascist, but the word liberal is thrown about like an insult. There's also the implication that anyone who opposes some new authoritarian law must hold a viewpoint at the other extreme (i.e., liberal), when actually it would be opposed by anyone who does not support authoritarianism.
And I'm not liberal in the not-conservative sense, I'm liberal in the freedom-and-not-authoritarianism sense. Ironically, "liberals" these days are behaving rather conservatively, in wanting to keep things as they are rather than throw out long established freedoms for the sake of a supposed war on terror.
I don't really understand a sexual age of concent of 18 in the uk it is 16 marrage is even possible at 16 if parents consent otherwise 18. Drinking its 18 and driving cars from 17 I think you can join the armed forces at 16 too.
Agreed it's more sense at 16 - but note that even in the UK, 16 or 17 year olds taking photos would bizarrely still be treated as child pornography (in 2003, the age for child porn was raised from 16 to 18).
The Government wants to make possession of photos of yet more kinds of sexual acts illegal, even though the acts themselves are legal, and this time involving consenting adults, with its proposed "extreme porn" laws (see my sig).
Funny, my Windows machines haven't crashed in years. How come my anecdotal evidence is different to yours?
As for installation, I'm not sure how doubleclicking an "Install" icon is worse than opening up your applications folder and dragging and dropping - I'd say the latter is more awkward, less user-friendly and less intuitive. In fact, Windows applications can be distributed in the Mac way fine, but I always find it more fiddly when they come that way.
As for pressing "Next", it's perfectly possible to have an installation which asks no questions at all - it's just that it's common for applications to use the installation process to make you agree to an EULA or set up some preferences. If a Mac program wanted to do that, it would have to do it at some point anyway (e.g., on first startup). The "Next, next" has nothing to do the installation requirements, and has nothing to do with Mac vs Windows.
So, when you buy a Mac, you buy it because you know what it can do, not what it could do if you added something. You buy a Mac based on particular requirements, the same reason you buy anything. Macs are reputable for being an out-of-the-box solution for common computing tasks; emails, word processing, internet surfing, photo sharing etc.
Did I suddenly travel back in time 15 years to the days when you had to purchase additonal CD ROM drives or sound cards to do things? PCs and Windows for all their faults have worked out the box and come with all these things as standard for years.
You don't need to know how to use a computer to use a Mac.
Apple will let you run OS X on any computer it's licensed for, regardless of what other OS's may also be running on the computer. As long as you can run OS X on that computer, they don't give a shit what you do with it.
Now, unless a DIY Apple sticker is enough to satisfy this, it's not true that they let you run MacOS on any machine - and before you say that MacOS only runs on Apple computers anyway, you forget the issue of emulation (ranging from virtualisation like MacOnLinux, to full blown emulators).
So the way it reads to me, Apple try to restrict you from running MacOS in a virtual or emulated environment at all, where as Microsoft allow it but try to charge extra.
But all this of course is only a problem for those who actually make an agreement with the EULA, rather than treating it like toilet paper.
The "Nazis" delete information to stop it from filling up with unverifiable trivia. Admittedly sometimes people can be overzealous on trying to delete material, but it works most of the time - it's discussed in a debate, then an admin decides from the result of the debate.
If you tell us the names of the articles, perhaps we can see that what you wrote was genuinely good stuff, rather than taking your word for it?
There's no shared library system? The irony - to think people used to say Windows was bad because it was "bloated"...
I care by the way, because despite falling disk prices, library sizes are also getting bigger, and hard disks always eventually end up being almost full. Plus there's download sizes to consider.
For the record, I would be happy to watch a torture of the people who attempted to plot the rape of those young girls
Careful, they'll stick YOU on the sex offender registry for watching a naughty torture video!
(But yes, fully agree with what you say - even more bizarrely, fake cut-n-paste "child" porn is now treated the same as actual child porn, and John Reid even wants to include underaged cartoon characters in this!)
I agree, though I think in most cases it works, it's just Apple stories which it's broken on for some reason (I always have to read Apple stories at -1 threshold).
"His ubernerdish countenance and ostensibly tiny penis"
Reasoned debate intended to educate, and not intended to insult and enrage?
Anyhow, you're at 2 Insightful, so I wouldn't complain. There are far greater number of Apple "astroturfers" modding here, which cause anything not pro-Apple to be modded down, and unlike your case, that means sitting at 0 or -1.
Similarly, with Mac OS X, Apple accomplished their long-talked-about goal of moving their user base off of Classic and onto X. Where do you think Microsoft got the idea?
I doubt it - NT was released long before OS X was even thought of; it was pretty obvious that eventually they would want to move people to the more modern and stable OS, but they just had to keep 9x around for so long for backwards compatibility with DOS games.
Indeed, it was Apple playing catchup here, trying for years to try to add basic features such as memory protection and preemptive multitasking to the then MacOS before they finally had to ditch it, and came up with OS X.
This seems a pointless argument to me, anyway. People running older computers have no obligation to upgrade.
In fact it's not only that - whenever Apple drop older support (e.g., classic MacOS, switching processors), that's praised as a good thing for dropping support for "legacy" stuff! If it was Vista being touted as being able to run on an ancient machine, we'd be having the same argument in reverse, with people claiming that's a bad thing!
I'm running the latest and greatest apple OS on dual g4 1 ghz (4-5 years old). It runs pretty well too.
The "latest and greatest apple OS" is itself almost 2 years old, so it's not really fair to compare system requirements to an OS only just released. So that version of OS X actually ran on a machine only 2-3 years older than its release.
What are the system requirements of OS X Leopard, to be released shortly? That would be a better comparison to Vista.
Vista requires an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, which is years old.
This seems a pointless argument to me, anyway. People running older computers have no obligation to upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems a little strange how atheists are very keen to strike down the pointless values of religion, yet still believe in many aspects which have no basis.
Okay, I'll bite - what things do atheists believe in, which have no basis?
But it's ridiculous I can cite Mary Moe's book about Joe Shmoe for what he said, which is no more a primary source than the Encyclopedia.
Indeed it's not a primary source - that'd be a secondary source.
Encyclopedias in turn reference primary and secondary sources, and are sometimes considered "tertiary sources".
First day on Slashdot or first day off of mind altering substances?
You must be new here. There's more than one person on Slashdot, and we don't all share the same opinion on things.
A website is not the same as a physical building. When a child accesses a website, they still exist in a physical location (presumably their home), and therefore it is still their parents responsibility.
In loco parentis applies because the child is no longer able to be with their parent, and that obviously doesn't apply to a website.
Attractive nuisance applies to landowners, and is about being liable for injuries. Even if we pretended it applied to websites as well as landowners, I'm not sure how that's relevant. Whilst the average MySpace page makes my eyes hurt, it's not like you're going to trip over a bad HTML tag and injure yourself...
Some installers are annoyingly tedious, I agree, but none of this is a Windows vs Mac issue, it's just how different applications do things. Windows happily supports double-click only installations, or drag-and-drop installations, for applications that want that.
but to have a program that you download actually be a proxy to install the program you really want?
It's annoying, but better than downloading hundreds of MBs that you don't need. What's the Mac solution to this, then?
Then there is the fact that most inexperienced people see all the options in the installer and freak.
Setting up important options (e.g., a first email account in an email client) is easier this way for inexperienced people, compared with having to find the preferences and freak out when they see all the available options.
The program would become sentient on its own.
It doesn't follow that just because you simulate what happens in the brain, the computer would itself be sentient. Anymore than simulating the weather means there'll be a hurricane force wind inside your CPU.
Censoring for offensive ideas/language is a liberal thing. At least, thats the break down in the U.S.
I've never thought that censoring anything could be described as "liberal". Though I think the problem is that Liberal in the US means a different thing to the word liberal (same with "conservative", I suppose).
Copy and paste?
No, it's not hard, but what if someone has told me in person rather than on Slashdot? What if I forget and need to do it again? What if I'm faced with a new program I need installing, and I don't have time to post to Slashdot for someone to tell me the command I need to copy and paste?
How many grandmas can figure out a Windows "next, next, next" type install?
Er, all of them who speak English? Or if they can't figure out clicking "Next" to proceed, they'll have trouble using any platform, including your applet, and certainly remembering a set of commands to type.
It's the way that you and others brand all who disagree as "liberal". Sure, I've no problem with being liberal, I'd rather be liberal than fascist, but the word liberal is thrown about like an insult. There's also the implication that anyone who opposes some new authoritarian law must hold a viewpoint at the other extreme (i.e., liberal), when actually it would be opposed by anyone who does not support authoritarianism.
And I'm not liberal in the not-conservative sense, I'm liberal in the freedom-and-not-authoritarianism sense. Ironically, "liberals" these days are behaving rather conservatively, in wanting to keep things as they are rather than throw out long established freedoms for the sake of a supposed war on terror.
I don't really understand a sexual age of concent of 18 in the uk it is 16 marrage is even possible at 16 if parents consent otherwise 18.
Drinking its 18 and driving cars from 17 I think you can join the armed forces at 16 too.
Agreed it's more sense at 16 - but note that even in the UK, 16 or 17 year olds taking photos would bizarrely still be treated as child pornography (in 2003, the age for child porn was raised from 16 to 18).
The Government wants to make possession of photos of yet more kinds of sexual acts illegal, even though the acts themselves are legal, and this time involving consenting adults, with its proposed "extreme porn" laws (see my sig).
Whether it's your business or the teenager's - it shouldn't be the Government's business.
Also remember that the people in this case were 16 and 17, and having sex was entirely legal - it's taking a photo which made it a criminal offence.
Funny, my Windows machines haven't crashed in years. How come my anecdotal evidence is different to yours?
As for installation, I'm not sure how doubleclicking an "Install" icon is worse than opening up your applications folder and dragging and dropping - I'd say the latter is more awkward, less user-friendly and less intuitive. In fact, Windows applications can be distributed in the Mac way fine, but I always find it more fiddly when they come that way.
As for pressing "Next", it's perfectly possible to have an installation which asks no questions at all - it's just that it's common for applications to use the installation process to make you agree to an EULA or set up some preferences. If a Mac program wanted to do that, it would have to do it at some point anyway (e.g., on first startup). The "Next, next" has nothing to do the installation requirements, and has nothing to do with Mac vs Windows.
So, when you buy a Mac, you buy it because you know what it can do, not what it could do if you added something. You buy a Mac based on particular requirements, the same reason you buy anything. Macs are reputable for being an out-of-the-box solution for common computing tasks; emails, word processing, internet surfing, photo sharing etc.
Did I suddenly travel back in time 15 years to the days when you had to purchase additonal CD ROM drives or sound cards to do things? PCs and Windows for all their faults have worked out the box and come with all these things as standard for years.
You don't need to know how to use a computer to use a Mac.
How on earth do you come to this conclusion?
Apple will let you run OS X on any computer it's licensed for, regardless of what other OS's may also be running on the computer. As long as you can run OS X on that computer, they don't give a shit what you do with it.
Your last sentence is incorrect, your first sentence was more accurate - the Apple EULA has always stated something along the lines of "This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." (Previous versions said "Apple-labeled or Apple-licensed computer" - perhaps to allow for the official Mac clones?)
Now, unless a DIY Apple sticker is enough to satisfy this, it's not true that they let you run MacOS on any machine - and before you say that MacOS only runs on Apple computers anyway, you forget the issue of emulation (ranging from virtualisation like MacOnLinux, to full blown emulators).
So the way it reads to me, Apple try to restrict you from running MacOS in a virtual or emulated environment at all, where as Microsoft allow it but try to charge extra.
But all this of course is only a problem for those who actually make an agreement with the EULA, rather than treating it like toilet paper.
Well, if you're happy only running one application at a time in the same way a console only runs one game at a time, then yes.
But for the last 20-or-so years, the rest of us have been taking advantage of this thing called multi-tasking.
These guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AST_Research -?
The "Nazis" delete information to stop it from filling up with unverifiable trivia. Admittedly sometimes people can be overzealous on trying to delete material, but it works most of the time - it's discussed in a debate, then an admin decides from the result of the debate.
If you tell us the names of the articles, perhaps we can see that what you wrote was genuinely good stuff, rather than taking your word for it?
1. That's just proof that user pages are unreliable.
2. Do you have proof that he gained his admin powers from false claims, rather than his editing?
There's no shared library system? The irony - to think people used to say Windows was bad because it was "bloated"...
I care by the way, because despite falling disk prices, library sizes are also getting bigger, and hard disks always eventually end up being almost full. Plus there's download sizes to consider.
For the record, I would be happy to watch a torture of the people who attempted to plot the rape of those young girls
Careful, they'll stick YOU on the sex offender registry for watching a naughty torture video!
(But yes, fully agree with what you say - even more bizarrely, fake cut-n-paste "child" porn is now treated the same as actual child porn, and John Reid even wants to include underaged cartoon characters in this!)
I don't necessarily think it's a bad idea to track convicted rapists online
You misspelled "sex offenders"...
I agree, though I think in most cases it works, it's just Apple stories which it's broken on for some reason (I always have to read Apple stories at -1 threshold).
"His ubernerdish countenance and ostensibly tiny penis"
Reasoned debate intended to educate, and not intended to insult and enrage?
Anyhow, you're at 2 Insightful, so I wouldn't complain. There are far greater number of Apple "astroturfers" modding here, which cause anything not pro-Apple to be modded down, and unlike your case, that means sitting at 0 or -1.
Similarly, with Mac OS X, Apple accomplished their long-talked-about goal of moving their user base off of Classic and onto X. Where do you think Microsoft got the idea?
I doubt it - NT was released long before OS X was even thought of; it was pretty obvious that eventually they would want to move people to the more modern and stable OS, but they just had to keep 9x around for so long for backwards compatibility with DOS games.
Indeed, it was Apple playing catchup here, trying for years to try to add basic features such as memory protection and preemptive multitasking to the then MacOS before they finally had to ditch it, and came up with OS X.
This seems a pointless argument to me, anyway. People running older computers have no obligation to upgrade.
In fact it's not only that - whenever Apple drop older support (e.g., classic MacOS, switching processors), that's praised as a good thing for dropping support for "legacy" stuff! If it was Vista being touted as being able to run on an ancient machine, we'd be having the same argument in reverse, with people claiming that's a bad thing!
I'm running the latest and greatest apple OS on dual g4 1 ghz (4-5 years old). It runs pretty well too.
The "latest and greatest apple OS" is itself almost 2 years old, so it's not really fair to compare system requirements to an OS only just released. So that version of OS X actually ran on a machine only 2-3 years older than its release.
What are the system requirements of OS X Leopard, to be released shortly? That would be a better comparison to Vista.
Vista requires an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, which is years old.
This seems a pointless argument to me, anyway. People running older computers have no obligation to upgrade.