however, the difference is that contrary to the title of this topic suggests, the Australian so-called smartcard is not compulsory. It is (or will be) required to claim welfare benefits, which, unless they include simple medicare rebates, won't affect me one way or the other.
You sound like the UK Government - they too have been claiming the ID card scheme will initially be voluntary, because you can choose to give up your passport instead.
This reasoning is absurd - if you are penalised for not having one, then it is not voluntary in any meaningful sense of the word. By that logic, anything is voluntary, because you can always choose to go to prison instead! The only difference here is that the penalty (not having benefits, not having a passport) is something some people may be able to do without, and hence it won't affect them.
Please note that Swiss ID cards do not have biometric nonsense attached to them. They are just ID cards. ID cards are useful.
The point is that not all "ID cards" are the same. It is a strawman argument to suggest that people oppose any conceivable document that can serve as ID. The objection is to particular ID schemes.
The arguments you give are arguments in favour of voluntary ID cards (why waste money on those who already have other forms of ID?).
Saying "I don't need my passport to do such and such, since I can use my ID card" is absurd, since you might as well use your passport in the first place. If you would prefer a more convenient sized passport, then that's an argument for resizing the passport; it's not an argument for introducing compulsory ID cards.
Luckily, the Lords put a stop to that, and initially at least it will be optional for you to take the ID Card when you get your next passport.
And:
Of course, you will still be charged for it, and all the information will still be logged into the central database whether you take the card or not.
Well quite - this is hardly "luckily the Lords put a stop to it", but rather "Labour got what they wanted anyway". You still have to pay for the card and be put on the database, it's just that you can choose not to be given the piece of plastic. But that's irrelevant - it's not that people have some phobia about pieces of plastic, it's the related aspects that people object to, and these will be compulsory for all passport holders from 2008.
With the way they've set it up, I see no difference between opting in or supposedly opting out, other than to make a symbolic protest.
Windows (the OS which most people use) looks a hell of a lot more like the Mac OS than the OS which was dominating the market (MS-DOS) when the Lisa was first introduced.
There were plenty of other GUI-based OSs. It's a statement of the bleeding obvious to say that Windows now looks more like a GUI-based OS than DOS, since DOS didn't have a GUI - but Windows is no closer to MacOS than many of the other OSs.
Indeed, it should also be noted that MacOS lacked a command line, and ultimately got replaced by one which had both a GUI and command line - so the credit for the vision should go to those OSs which had both.
Almost everybody has moved to object-based development, just like he was saying they would back when he founded NeXT.
Talk is cheap - how much has he done to make this vision happen?
CGI dominates the entire animation industry, just like he knew it would when he acquired Pixar from LucasArts for a tiny fraction of what it would ultimately be worth.
So that's financially clever, but it's not the same thing at all as changing the world with a vision, which is what you assert. For that to be true, he would have to be responsible for making CGI dominating the entire industry.
Companies all over are pouring huge resources into finding ways to make computers more appliance-like.
What has this got to do with Apple? Many companies have been doing this, as well as Apple, and not because of Apple.
The guy gets off on advancing Big Ideas and seeing them catch on. He doesn't seem to care how much he personally benefits when it happens
But why then include "he acquired Pixar from LucasArts for a tiny fraction of what it would ultimately be worth", which is crediting someone for personal profit making, and not changing the world with a vision?
The "pagan roots" are spurious, and laughably predictable. There are no references to hot cross buns prior to their Christian origins. However the dungeons-and-dragons crowd, or psuedo-pagan role players try to claim every Christian custom as usurping their ancient (circa 1950AD, England) traditions. Please provide a primary source for this claim, or stop repeating the malarky. P.S. wikipedia, and internet blogs are not primary sources historical research.
You're quite right - let's trust an Anonymous Coward posting on Slashdot instead.
So Apple gives a 6 month lead time (sound familiar? [apple.com]) and then tells all game developers to support their platform or they lose their hardcore base that's switched to Mac Hardware.
There are problems with this. Firstly, it's hard to know how much of the game company's userbase are using dual-booting Macs, so the fear of losing an unknown number of potential customers isn't going to make them port to a new platform. Secondly, Apple can't magically make dual-boot machines stop working - all they can do is give up supporting it, or perhaps prevent it from working with newer Macs or possibly a newer version of OS X. Not to mention that the number of people using Windows on dual-boot Macs will probably be tiny compared to Mac users, let alone Windows users as a whole, so this isn't going to significantly affect the viability of a MacOS port.
They also are willing to drop support of a product just to get users to move to a newer version. Microsoft is just starting to learn this trick, but no one does it better than Apple. This is why there are still more PC's with Windows 98 installed than XP and very few Macs with OS9 installed than OSX.
I suspect that that's more to do with the fact the popularity of Macs has increased significantly since the release of OS X, where as the popularity of Windows 98 versus XP was relatively constant. The extra OS X Macs probably weren't people upgrading from MacOS 9.
I think they'll wait a few months/years to get their sales up, and then cut out the rug and say, we don't support Windows any longer on our hardware. It's a very risky play but I wouldn't put it past Apple to do this.
Possibly, but I don't think it's comparable. They've only done the jumps like 68k to PPC and MacOS to MacOS X by maintaining backwards compatibility. If they just remove support for Windows, without offering any alternative, then people may not be happy at no longer being able to run all those Windows applications and games they have.
As a Mac user I'm excited about being able to run Outlook for work and IE for intranet access while being able to do everything else in OS X proper.
The reason we are excited is because we can start sneaking Macs into work right and left now without anyone noticing, since we can still get to our calendars.
And can you explain how you're going to check email and get to your calendars in Windows, at the same time as doing everything else in OS X?
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
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Going To Boot Camp
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The "lack of games" argument has just been disintegrated forever.
No it hasn't, because rebooting is a pain.
Being able to dual boot an extra OS can be something that's interesting to try, a way of testing out a new OS, useful if you (rarely) need to run something on that OS, or if you have more than person using a machine. But it is not a way to use a machine in general. It's very awkward to constantly reboot everytime you want to run a particular application or game.
Judging by some of the comments on recent articles, it seems like I've slipped back 15 years to the days when you only ran one application at a time, and you had to reboot between playing each game.
Furthermore, even if some types of geeks seem to enjoy managing multiple OSs, this doesn't apply to your average user - and since Macs are supposed to be "easy", this is even more important. Try explaining why they need to boot this other "OS thing" just to play a game.
again: the study does not even address the question of whether praying is more likely to help you than not praying, as both groups, as the study noted and as i mentioned, had people praying for them (friends and family members not covered by the study).
I see your point - though note there were still some in the non-prayer group who wouldn't have had people prayed for them. Maybe this group was too small to show up a difference, we can't really tell from the article, and it's not clear whether they took that into account.
that said, if the study was valid, and confirmed or denied my opinions, i still wouldn't be impressed -- prayers for miracles are for miracles, and should be expected to be *statistically* significant.
But yes, this is what I would say too. If any effect for those remaining people not prayed for is too small to show up, even if there is some effect, it's probably not worth all the effort of prayer.
like screaming when drowning in a public pool instead of just splashing and sinking -- the lifeguard will pull you out either way, but the lifeguard prefers it if you make it very clear you want his or her help...
I don't agree - you scream to let people know you're in trouble, not because he prefers it. It's quite possible that the lifeguard won't see someone drowning in a pool full of people, if they aren't making any noise.
So, does this mean that you pray because God might not know you are in trouble? This can't apply to people who believe God to be all-knowing...
the initial/general Christian answer is something along the lines of "why bother talking with your wife if she's going to make you dinner anyway?" -- because the talking is an end in itself, and even if she already knows you want chicken tonight, it builds your relationship to talk about it.
But again, you're sidestepping the point. Let me repeat myself with what I specifically meant to say: If he helps you when no one prays for help, why bother praying for help?
Sure there may be other reasons to pray, just as there are other reasons to talk to your wife - i.e., to converse and build a relationship. The issue here is whether praying is more likely to help you than not praying. This study showed no evidence that it does. But many people claim that it does. They claim that it is worth praying for help, not just for issues related to building a relationship.
so confirming the study would have required God specifically killing off more people in the control group and healing more in the extra-prayer group, just to cause statistical correlation between the number of people being prayed for *by measured praying-people,* and the people not in that group.
I can see that perhaps God wanted to help everyone equally, rather than "killing off" those that weren't prayed for. But the question is, if he helps you even if you aren't prayed for, why bother praying?
The claim isn't "God doesn't exist" or even "God never helps anyone", but rather that this isn't related to praying to him.
Give it a little while. Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.
Yes, but how many people are using old machines, pushing them to the limits?
I read the sentence as referring specifically to this machine. Sure, eventually there'll be greater demand for power, but it won't be done on that particular machine (and indeed, as others pointed out, the reason why is explained if you read the whole sentence).
That reminds me of something I observed the last time I was in a Church (for a christening). There was some member of the regular congregation suffering from an illness, and the vicar prayed - not for him to get better, but for the doctors to do their job well.
I'm in the UK, so I don't know if this is part of some general difference between religion in the UK and US. I still think it's rubbish, but at least that sort of prayer doesn't try to get in the way of actual treatment (by implying that prayer alone would be enough).
(Talking of that service, the funniest part - for me, the lone athiest - was where everyone had to read out from a sheet entitled "What We Believe" - yes, we read what we believed from the printed words on the paper. I was expecting it to end "Yes, we're all individuals"...)
It's largely the liberal athiest crowd that promotes abortion and euthanasia and teaches that I'm nothing more than a slightly evolved ape.
Whilst it is fair to point out that not all religious people "devalue" life, it is ridiculous to lump a large group of diverse people under the label of "liberal atheist crowd", and suggest that they devalue life based on these absurd arguments.
* People who are pro-choice (not pro abortion) often believe that before we are born is before what the OP would class as "this life". Yes, I know that you don't believe that, but the point is that that's what they believe, so there is no inconsistency in their beliefs. * Presumably valuing humanity also means valuing one's freedom to end one's life. There is more to quality and value of life than simply how long it is. So yes, allowing euthanasia is entirely consistent with valuing humanity and life. * "Cosmic accident" - have fun with your strawman. * I don't see how valuing life is equivalent to teaching them things that we have no idea are true just to comfort them - do you advocate teaching other fairy tales too? Also, I'm not sure that "You will burn in hell for eternity if you aren't a Christian" is comforting - I'd say that sort of stuff's quite disturbing for a child. * If you go back more than 100 years, most people were religious; one might equally ask why slavery occured in the first place, if the religious people valued a good life for slaves too? Obviously it wasn't due to atheists being in power! * Well, maybe you are just a slightly evolved ape, but the rest of us didn't evolve from apes, and no one says that the evolution is "slight" either (whilst the number of genetic differences may be small when looked at as a percentage of total genes, clearly the resultant differences are quite significant). Oh, and "nothing more" is strawman again. What do you claim - that we're "nothing more" than blobs made by God - how do we differ from the way animals were made? And you say women are nothing more than bits from men's ribs?
i pick at the wording because it assumes these people deserve to be given a few more years to live, and, moreover, that God is obligated to be more merciful on those in the commissioned-prayer subgroup. it assumes that mercy = extra years of life, and the extra years of life = the greatest good.
So you agree that prayer doesn't help people live longer?
That's the point. It doesn't matter whether prayer doesn't work because God doesn't exist, or because they don't deserve to be given that extra life. The point is that prayer doesn't work - even though a large number of people think it does, for purposes including praying for good health, and for complete strangers.
Cash is a risk, whether you're posting or carrying it around. Even if you're fine with £50, what about if it's a few hundred? Plus there's the fact that with a cheque, I don't need to have the cash on me. There are certainly advantages of using cheques over cash.
In some circumstances can be easier to just write a cheque rather than trying to set up a money transfer. There's also the issue that, rightly or wrongly, most people haven't bothered to set up online banking yet, for whatever reasons.
So yes, for personal money exchanges, cheques are very common.
Hell, prior to OS X, Apple used preemptive multitasking (think Windows 3.1 where the system stops other programs that are running to let the active program use all the system resources).
I think you mean cooperative multitasking - preemptive multitasking is the better one which other OSs had.
That's not so bad perhaps, but it's unlikely things will be so simple in the UK. The ID card will be combined with a passport, so replacing it will be at least as hard and expensive as replacing a passport - which involves paying out again, providing proof of identity and getting someone who's known you a few years who belongs to a certain profession to identify you. This is only going to get worse, as things such as taking biometrics are introduced. In addition, from this year you will have to attend an interview.
If it's stolen, then congratulations, an illegal immigrant will become YOU.
Even if there isn't, the point still stands that a 14 day warranty is pretty poor customer service compared with most hardware companies, even if they do extend it to another day.
Though as others have comment - I suspect he's confused warranty with "refund for any reason", in which case they weren't doing him any favours.
Indeed, I'd consider it rather poor customer service that they tried to pretend it was too late to replace it.
(Can anyone else confirm - do Macs really only have a 14 day warranty, or not?)
Where I live, ID cards have fingerprint and photo. And it's mandatory to carry one's card all the time. As far as I know, nobody gives a shit about it.
I find it hard to believe that no one has a problem with it. Anyway, what happens if you forget it one day, or if you lose it or have it stolen? I'm just curious how this works.
Concerning costs, I recall I had to pay some amount to renew it when I got married, but it was really low. It's not that expensive to produce an ID card, why do people have to pay, quoting you, an "absurd amount" to take it?
Well that's just it - the UK card will cost £90+ (it's combined with a passport, but that's still a £50 increase). And some estimates put it as £300 per person. I've no idea why it's so expensive, but even the Government aren't trying to pretend this will be cheap.
Anyway, if the government can track you by your ID card, then they don't need to resort to a bunch of illegal stuff to fight crime and terrorism, as it seems to be a habit lately.
I suspect the rationale was something like, "if we vote against this again, the government will ram it through with the Parliament Act; at least if we accept this, we get a tiny concession."
I wish they would have had to resort to the Parliament Act. Firstly it would show that the Lords still oppose it, rather than this pretence of them supposedly coming to some kind of compromising agreement.
Furthermore, it would be a rather interesting situation given that compulsory ID cards were not a manifesto pledge. (Who gets to decide, when there is disagreement over if the Act can be applied?)
I think the Parliament Act would at least make more sense if there were more conditions attached - e.g., requiring a much larger number of MPs to vote in favour, since a Government majority simply means a Government that only got a third of the election vote.
But the European countries with ID cards don't have schemes like the UK's one - e.g., costing absurd amounts, the centralised database, taking your fingerprints.
I mean, I already have an "ID card" - it's called a passport. But I still object to Labour's scheme.
(Having said that, I could never live with the idea of it being a crime if I forget to take ID with me when I leave my house, which seems to be the case in many countries.)
Everyone knew that New Labour [tm] wanted to introduce ID cards way before the election last year, and yet, they still won it. I'm sorry, but we did vote for it.
Leaving aside the fact that only a minority of people voted for Labour, and that few of those knew about the ID card scheme, there is also the point that their manifesto claimed that ID cards would be voluntary.
So, far from fulfilling a manifesto pledge, they are actually breaking it.
(And yes, yes, I know that Blair and Clarke like to use childish logic to twist things so that "compulsary" equals "voluntary", but this clearly isn't what any normal person with a basic grasp of logic and the English language would assume they mean.)
Slashdot Mirror
however, the difference is that contrary to the title of this topic suggests, the Australian so-called smartcard is not compulsory. It is (or will be) required to claim welfare benefits, which, unless they include simple medicare rebates, won't affect me one way or the other.
You sound like the UK Government - they too have been claiming the ID card scheme will initially be voluntary, because you can choose to give up your passport instead.
This reasoning is absurd - if you are penalised for not having one, then it is not voluntary in any meaningful sense of the word. By that logic, anything is voluntary, because you can always choose to go to prison instead! The only difference here is that the penalty (not having benefits, not having a passport) is something some people may be able to do without, and hence it won't affect them.
Please note that Swiss ID cards do not have biometric nonsense attached to them. They are just ID cards. ID cards are useful.
The point is that not all "ID cards" are the same. It is a strawman argument to suggest that people oppose any conceivable document that can serve as ID. The objection is to particular ID schemes.
The arguments you give are arguments in favour of voluntary ID cards (why waste money on those who already have other forms of ID?).
Saying "I don't need my passport to do such and such, since I can use my ID card" is absurd, since you might as well use your passport in the first place. If you would prefer a more convenient sized passport, then that's an argument for resizing the passport; it's not an argument for introducing compulsory ID cards.
Luckily, the Lords put a stop to that, and initially at least it will be optional for you to take the ID Card when you get your next passport.
And:
Of course, you will still be charged for it, and all the information will still be logged into the central database whether you take the card or not.
Well quite - this is hardly "luckily the Lords put a stop to it", but rather "Labour got what they wanted anyway". You still have to pay for the card and be put on the database, it's just that you can choose not to be given the piece of plastic. But that's irrelevant - it's not that people have some phobia about pieces of plastic, it's the related aspects that people object to, and these will be compulsory for all passport holders from 2008.
With the way they've set it up, I see no difference between opting in or supposedly opting out, other than to make a symbolic protest.
Windows (the OS which most people use) looks a hell of a lot more like the Mac OS than the OS which was dominating the market (MS-DOS) when the Lisa was first introduced.
There were plenty of other GUI-based OSs. It's a statement of the bleeding obvious to say that Windows now looks more like a GUI-based OS than DOS, since DOS didn't have a GUI - but Windows is no closer to MacOS than many of the other OSs.
Indeed, it should also be noted that MacOS lacked a command line, and ultimately got replaced by one which had both a GUI and command line - so the credit for the vision should go to those OSs which had both.
Almost everybody has moved to object-based development, just like he was saying they would back when he founded NeXT.
Talk is cheap - how much has he done to make this vision happen?
CGI dominates the entire animation industry, just like he knew it would when he acquired Pixar from LucasArts for a tiny fraction of what it would ultimately be worth.
So that's financially clever, but it's not the same thing at all as changing the world with a vision, which is what you assert. For that to be true, he would have to be responsible for making CGI dominating the entire industry.
Companies all over are pouring huge resources into finding ways to make computers more appliance-like.
What has this got to do with Apple? Many companies have been doing this, as well as Apple, and not because of Apple.
The guy gets off on advancing Big Ideas and seeing them catch on. He doesn't seem to care how much he personally benefits when it happens
But why then include "he acquired Pixar from LucasArts for a tiny fraction of what it would ultimately be worth", which is crediting someone for personal profit making, and not changing the world with a vision?
The "pagan roots" are spurious, and laughably predictable. There are no references to hot cross buns prior to their Christian origins. However the dungeons-and-dragons crowd, or psuedo-pagan role players try to claim every Christian custom as usurping their ancient (circa 1950AD, England) traditions. Please provide a primary source for this claim, or stop repeating the malarky. P.S. wikipedia, and internet blogs are not primary sources historical research.
You're quite right - let's trust an Anonymous Coward posting on Slashdot instead.
So Apple gives a 6 month lead time (sound familiar? [apple.com]) and then tells all game developers to support their platform or they lose their hardcore base that's switched to Mac Hardware.
There are problems with this. Firstly, it's hard to know how much of the game company's userbase are using dual-booting Macs, so the fear of losing an unknown number of potential customers isn't going to make them port to a new platform. Secondly, Apple can't magically make dual-boot machines stop working - all they can do is give up supporting it, or perhaps prevent it from working with newer Macs or possibly a newer version of OS X. Not to mention that the number of people using Windows on dual-boot Macs will probably be tiny compared to Mac users, let alone Windows users as a whole, so this isn't going to significantly affect the viability of a MacOS port.
They also are willing to drop support of a product just to get users to move to a newer version. Microsoft is just starting to learn this trick, but no one does it better than Apple. This is why there are still more PC's with Windows 98 installed than XP and very few Macs with OS9 installed than OSX.
I suspect that that's more to do with the fact the popularity of Macs has increased significantly since the release of OS X, where as the popularity of Windows 98 versus XP was relatively constant. The extra OS X Macs probably weren't people upgrading from MacOS 9.
I think they'll wait a few months/years to get their sales up, and then cut out the rug and say, we don't support Windows any longer on our hardware. It's a very risky play but I wouldn't put it past Apple to do this.
Possibly, but I don't think it's comparable. They've only done the jumps like 68k to PPC and MacOS to MacOS X by maintaining backwards compatibility. If they just remove support for Windows, without offering any alternative, then people may not be happy at no longer being able to run all those Windows applications and games they have.
As a Mac user I'm excited about being able to run Outlook for work and IE for intranet access while being able to do everything else in OS X proper.
The reason we are excited is because we can start sneaking Macs into work right and left now without anyone noticing, since we can still get to our calendars.
And can you explain how you're going to check email and get to your calendars in Windows, at the same time as doing everything else in OS X?
The "lack of games" argument has just been disintegrated forever.
No it hasn't, because rebooting is a pain.
Being able to dual boot an extra OS can be something that's interesting to try, a way of testing out a new OS, useful if you (rarely) need to run something on that OS, or if you have more than person using a machine. But it is not a way to use a machine in general. It's very awkward to constantly reboot everytime you want to run a particular application or game.
Judging by some of the comments on recent articles, it seems like I've slipped back 15 years to the days when you only ran one application at a time, and you had to reboot between playing each game.
Furthermore, even if some types of geeks seem to enjoy managing multiple OSs, this doesn't apply to your average user - and since Macs are supposed to be "easy", this is even more important. Try explaining why they need to boot this other "OS thing" just to play a game.
again: the study does not even address the question of whether praying is more likely to help you than not praying, as both groups, as the study noted and as i mentioned, had people praying for them (friends and family members not covered by the study).
I see your point - though note there were still some in the non-prayer group who wouldn't have had people prayed for them. Maybe this group was too small to show up a difference, we can't really tell from the article, and it's not clear whether they took that into account.
that said, if the study was valid, and confirmed or denied my opinions, i still wouldn't be impressed -- prayers for miracles are for miracles, and should be expected to be *statistically* significant.
But yes, this is what I would say too. If any effect for those remaining people not prayed for is too small to show up, even if there is some effect, it's probably not worth all the effort of prayer.
like screaming when drowning in a public pool instead of just splashing and sinking -- the lifeguard will pull you out either way, but the lifeguard prefers it if you make it very clear you want his or her help...
I don't agree - you scream to let people know you're in trouble, not because he prefers it. It's quite possible that the lifeguard won't see someone drowning in a pool full of people, if they aren't making any noise.
So, does this mean that you pray because God might not know you are in trouble? This can't apply to people who believe God to be all-knowing...
the initial/general Christian answer is something along the lines of "why bother talking with your wife if she's going to make you dinner anyway?" -- because the talking is an end in itself, and even if she already knows you want chicken tonight, it builds your relationship to talk about it.
But again, you're sidestepping the point. Let me repeat myself with what I specifically meant to say: If he helps you when no one prays for help, why bother praying for help?
Sure there may be other reasons to pray, just as there are other reasons to talk to your wife - i.e., to converse and build a relationship. The issue here is whether praying is more likely to help you than not praying. This study showed no evidence that it does. But many people claim that it does. They claim that it is worth praying for help, not just for issues related to building a relationship.
so confirming the study would have required God specifically killing off more people in the control group and healing more in the extra-prayer group, just to cause statistical correlation between the number of people being prayed for *by measured praying-people,* and the people not in that group.
I can see that perhaps God wanted to help everyone equally, rather than "killing off" those that weren't prayed for. But the question is, if he helps you even if you aren't prayed for, why bother praying?
The claim isn't "God doesn't exist" or even "God never helps anyone", but rather that this isn't related to praying to him.
Give it a little while. Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.
Yes, but how many people are using old machines, pushing them to the limits?
I read the sentence as referring specifically to this machine. Sure, eventually there'll be greater demand for power, but it won't be done on that particular machine (and indeed, as others pointed out, the reason why is explained if you read the whole sentence).
So then why did God make doctors?
That reminds me of something I observed the last time I was in a Church (for a christening). There was some member of the regular congregation suffering from an illness, and the vicar prayed - not for him to get better, but for the doctors to do their job well.
I'm in the UK, so I don't know if this is part of some general difference between religion in the UK and US. I still think it's rubbish, but at least that sort of prayer doesn't try to get in the way of actual treatment (by implying that prayer alone would be enough).
(Talking of that service, the funniest part - for me, the lone athiest - was where everyone had to read out from a sheet entitled "What We Believe" - yes, we read what we believed from the printed words on the paper. I was expecting it to end "Yes, we're all individuals"...)
It's largely the liberal athiest crowd that promotes abortion and euthanasia and teaches that I'm nothing more than a slightly evolved ape.
Whilst it is fair to point out that not all religious people "devalue" life, it is ridiculous to lump a large group of diverse people under the label of "liberal atheist crowd", and suggest that they devalue life based on these absurd arguments.
* People who are pro-choice (not pro abortion) often believe that before we are born is before what the OP would class as "this life". Yes, I know that you don't believe that, but the point is that that's what they believe, so there is no inconsistency in their beliefs.
* Presumably valuing humanity also means valuing one's freedom to end one's life. There is more to quality and value of life than simply how long it is. So yes, allowing euthanasia is entirely consistent with valuing humanity and life.
* "Cosmic accident" - have fun with your strawman.
* I don't see how valuing life is equivalent to teaching them things that we have no idea are true just to comfort them - do you advocate teaching other fairy tales too? Also, I'm not sure that "You will burn in hell for eternity if you aren't a Christian" is comforting - I'd say that sort of stuff's quite disturbing for a child.
* If you go back more than 100 years, most people were religious; one might equally ask why slavery occured in the first place, if the religious people valued a good life for slaves too? Obviously it wasn't due to atheists being in power!
* Well, maybe you are just a slightly evolved ape, but the rest of us didn't evolve from apes, and no one says that the evolution is "slight" either (whilst the number of genetic differences may be small when looked at as a percentage of total genes, clearly the resultant differences are quite significant). Oh, and "nothing more" is strawman again. What do you claim - that we're "nothing more" than blobs made by God - how do we differ from the way animals were made? And you say women are nothing more than bits from men's ribs?
i pick at the wording because it assumes these people deserve to be given a few more years to live, and, moreover, that God is obligated to be more merciful on those in the commissioned-prayer subgroup. it assumes that mercy = extra years of life, and the extra years of life = the greatest good.
So you agree that prayer doesn't help people live longer?
That's the point. It doesn't matter whether prayer doesn't work because God doesn't exist, or because they don't deserve to be given that extra life. The point is that prayer doesn't work - even though a large number of people think it does, for purposes including praying for good health, and for complete strangers.
Cash is a risk, whether you're posting or carrying it around. Even if you're fine with £50, what about if it's a few hundred? Plus there's the fact that with a cheque, I don't need to have the cash on me. There are certainly advantages of using cheques over cash.
In some circumstances can be easier to just write a cheque rather than trying to set up a money transfer. There's also the issue that, rightly or wrongly, most people haven't bothered to set up online banking yet, for whatever reasons.
So yes, for personal money exchanges, cheques are very common.
Yeah, they might as well have joked that the UK Government want to pass their very own Enabling Act, allowing them to change laws without going through Parliament. Only a total muppet could believe that.
Hell, prior to OS X, Apple used preemptive multitasking (think Windows 3.1 where the system stops other programs that are running to let the active program use all the system resources).
I think you mean cooperative multitasking - preemptive multitasking is the better one which other OSs had.
You go to the registry and ask a new one.
That's not so bad perhaps, but it's unlikely things will be so simple in the UK. The ID card will be combined with a passport, so replacing it will be at least as hard and expensive as replacing a passport - which involves paying out again, providing proof of identity and getting someone who's known you a few years who belongs to a certain profession to identify you. This is only going to get worse, as things such as taking biometrics are introduced. In addition, from this year you will have to attend an interview.
If it's stolen, then congratulations, an illegal immigrant will become YOU.
That's not so good!
No there isn't.
Even if there isn't, the point still stands that a 14 day warranty is pretty poor customer service compared with most hardware companies, even if they do extend it to another day.
Though as others have comment - I suspect he's confused warranty with "refund for any reason", in which case they weren't doing him any favours.
Indeed, I'd consider it rather poor customer service that they tried to pretend it was too late to replace it.
(Can anyone else confirm - do Macs really only have a 14 day warranty, or not?)
Where I live, ID cards have fingerprint and photo. And it's mandatory to carry one's card all the time. As far as I know, nobody gives a shit about it.
I find it hard to believe that no one has a problem with it. Anyway, what happens if you forget it one day, or if you lose it or have it stolen? I'm just curious how this works.
Concerning costs, I recall I had to pay some amount to renew it when I got married, but it was really low. It's not that expensive to produce an ID card, why do people have to pay, quoting you, an "absurd amount" to take it?
Well that's just it - the UK card will cost £90+ (it's combined with a passport, but that's still a £50 increase). And some estimates put it as £300 per person. I've no idea why it's so expensive, but even the Government aren't trying to pretend this will be cheap.
Anyway, if the government can track you by your ID card, then they don't need to resort to a bunch of illegal stuff to fight crime and terrorism, as it seems to be a habit lately.
I don't see how ID cards will prevent terrorism.
I suspect the rationale was something like, "if we vote against this again, the government will ram it through with the Parliament Act; at least if we accept this, we get a tiny concession."
I wish they would have had to resort to the Parliament Act. Firstly it would show that the Lords still oppose it, rather than this pretence of them supposedly coming to some kind of compromising agreement.
Furthermore, it would be a rather interesting situation given that compulsory ID cards were not a manifesto pledge. (Who gets to decide, when there is disagreement over if the Act can be applied?)
I think the Parliament Act would at least make more sense if there were more conditions attached - e.g., requiring a much larger number of MPs to vote in favour, since a Government majority simply means a Government that only got a third of the election vote.
But the European countries with ID cards don't have schemes like the UK's one - e.g., costing absurd amounts, the centralised database, taking your fingerprints.
I mean, I already have an "ID card" - it's called a passport. But I still object to Labour's scheme.
(Having said that, I could never live with the idea of it being a crime if I forget to take ID with me when I leave my house, which seems to be the case in many countries.)
Everyone knew that New Labour [tm] wanted to introduce ID cards way before the election last year, and yet, they still won it. I'm sorry, but we did vote for it.
Leaving aside the fact that only a minority of people voted for Labour, and that few of those knew about the ID card scheme, there is also the point that their manifesto claimed that ID cards would be voluntary.
So, far from fulfilling a manifesto pledge, they are actually breaking it.
(And yes, yes, I know that Blair and Clarke like to use childish logic to twist things so that "compulsary" equals "voluntary", but this clearly isn't what any normal person with a basic grasp of logic and the English language would assume they mean.)