This is completely incompatible with public assistance / welfare. If you have leagal drugs AND a welfare system, then people who work will get taxed so that people who don't work can buy drugs. This is a suicidal thing for any nation to do.
So what about the vast number of people who have a job and use that money to buy drugs - why should they go to prison?
And what about people on welfare who use the money to buy legal things like cigarettes and alcohol?
Add to the fact that, under the current situation where drugs are illegal, people on welfare still manage to buy drugs, it is clear that having drugs illegal doesn't solve the problem you describe in the slightest.
If you have a problem with people spending their welfare money on things you deem unsuitable, then it's specifically that which should be focused upon.
You also pay with time, because a lot of this stuff needs work, you have to pick and choose which one, etc. Time is money. With MS and Apple, the GUI just works, and you don't need to worry about it. You just dig in and make your app. That's what it is about. Not "choice", I and most other commercial developers don't give a northbound rat's southern expanse for "choice."
If you don't care about choice, then if nothing else you can just pick one and use it. You seem to be making the assumption that the standard on Windows is automatically going to be better than an arbitrary choice on Linux - you'll have to back that up with evidence (in my experience, the MFC is the worst GUI toolkit I have come across).
Secondly, there's still choice under Windows, for example the MFC, or Borland's toolkit. These may be wrappers to the same underlying API, but there are still significant differences to the developer. Does the fact that I had to spend time trying these out before I discovered that Borland made Windows development a lot easier mean we can make the same criticism of Windows?
I'm sure plenty of people would find most Slashdot comments "boring as hell", but you and I are evidently "so full of ourselves" that we continue to post here. Should people tell us to take this offline?
Also, do you have friends and if so do you discuss with them about what's happening in your lives? Why does this change when it's online? Why should you give a damn if your life isn't of interest to a complete stranger who chooses to find out about it?
Any my point is that even if you consider them both in an equal state of non-development, asking where Amiga is now is no more relevant than asking where classic MacOS is now.
Yet people are always allowed to go on about how the 20 year old Mac was first to do this or that. Does the fact that no one's still using the original Mac affect this, or the fact that other platforms are far more greatly used? Of course not.
Though note that this method works with Windows too anyway.
And it's not clear to me which method is more intuitive - I myself find trying out right click and seeing what options are available a lot more easier than trying to drag and drop things, and not knowing what effect it will have until I investigate (what about image links - will it save the image, or the target link?)
Indeed, I note how I have always known the right click method, but never thought to try the drag and drop method until you mentioned it.
No. According to the dictionary, an atheist is not one who lacks a belief about gods, but rather:
One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods. (Dictionary.com)
"Lacks a belief" is perhaps ambiguous in what it means, but I think it is reasonable to say that an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in God. As fyngyrz points out, dictionaries have a tendancy to use words like "deny" which implies they have been written by someone who believes God exists, and so therefore atheists are just "denying" this. Obviously from the point of view of an atheist, this just doesn't make sense.
As for people who don't have any sort of a belief regarding gods (meaning they never thought about the subject or they just don't care)... I don't know if there's a word for that.
Personally I would still say they are atheists, though I agree that this is different to the sort of person who has given the subject lots of thought, and still doesn't have any belief in any Gods.
I'm not trolling, this is a genuine question - can you give some examples where a right mouse button is required under Windows, and how is the same situation better handled in MacOS?
Right-click on a touch-screen could be done by pressing control too - awkward, but just what you have to do on a one-button mouse, and that behaviour seems to be acceptable judging by the comments here.
I do wonder what it is that makes you think that his position is a delusion, but yours is not - from a probabilistic standpoint, it's just as likely.
Even if the probability of a super-intelligent all-powerful being which created the universe is 50%, that most certainly does not mean that Christianity, just one of countless possible forms of theism, and which claims an awful lot more than just "there exists a God", is just as likely to be true.
I've often wondered what execution time would be for something like a game coded in assembly language with no OS or other outside calls.
As far as assembly language is concerned: assuming you can outdo the compiler, I suspect that any advantage gained will be outdone by the fact that you have less time to spend optimising the algorithms used in the game (not to mention it would generally be harder to perform optimisations in a lower level language). If there is a part of the game which can be improved by writing in assembly, then the obvious suggestion is to write just that small bit in assembly, rather than the entire game.
As for no OS - aside from this meaning that vast amounts of time need to be spent reinventing things, time that can no longer be spent on improving performance in other areas - what on earth makes you think that you can get better performance from every single graphics card out there than the people who write the drivers?
Not to mention that not using an OS would be *more* bloated, due to having to duplicate functionality.
Whilst you might be able to say something about some modern applications being bloated and slow, many programmers and especially game programmers most certainly do care about performance. Writing in assembly or avoiding the OS is no longer the most effective way to improve performance.
Age of the universe? That's fundamentally unprovable since you have no scale outside of the universe to measure it against.
The scale that's important here is that there were more than seven days between start of universe, creation of earth, and appearance of humans.
So again I ask you can you come up with definitive proof that creation didn't occur? If you can't then faith in creation is just as rational as faith in evolution.
And I await your definitive proof that invisible elephants don't exist.
As for the flood and the ark, would you explain how at least two of every single species which exists today could fit on one boat? Don't forget food for all of them too. And where did all the water come from?
What evidence is there that dinosaur extinction resulted from a flood (as opposed to say a meteorite impact, a theory which does have evidence)?
Creation can indeed be tested just as easily as Evolution.
And many if not all of the testable claims have been disproven (eg, age of the earth, age of the Universe, age of fossils, dinosaurs), with Creationists responding either by retracting the claims ("seven days doesn't really mean seven days"), or converting them to untestable claims ("God put dinosaur bones there to confuse us").
So can you point me to testable claims specific to Creationism which have been backed up with evidence?
So if this is theoretically possible, then is it not theoretically possible that some sufficiently advanced being (or intelligence) created our universe and is able to travel to it? Can it be ruled out?
First of all, saying that our bubble of spacetime was created by intelligent beings, but who in turned evolved natural in a universe which was not created by an intelligence is not the same thing at all as claiming that everything which exists was created by some intelligence.
So if such a thing was true, whilst they might be like gods to us, and whilst they would be a "higher power", it would be perfectly reasonable not to consider them to be actually Gods. Indeed, bearing in mind that such beings would presumably not be anything like what major religions depict God to be like, I suspect that the major religions would agree here, and claim that "God" was still some being who created *everything*, rather than saying that these aliens were God.
Secondly - yes, it's possible. That has nothing to do with belief though.
It's possible that we're living inside a computer virtual reality, but people who were to actually believe that would be regarded as crackpots. Would you claim that people who didn't believe in this were just as irrational as those who did?
I'm not an agnostic by any of the various definitions. However, I don't believe in God - if that's not an atheist, then what term do I use?
I also don't believe in unicorns - does that make me as religious as a Christian?
Any statement to the contrary invokes a reaction quite similar to what a Christian would have when his beliefs are argued against
No, it would invoke a reaction quite similar to what a Christian would have when you made assumptions about what he believed, simply because he called himself a Christian.
As for scientists spending effort on belief, there is a difference between only following beliefs which can at least be backed by evidence, and believing in things with no evidence just because they cannot be disproven.
Therefore a Creation viewpoint has just as much validity as the big bang.
Just because two things both cannot be proved with 100% certainty does not mean that they are both equally valid!
Indeed, nothing can be proven to 100% certainty - we can only gain evidence in support of a theory, or disprove it. There is evidence in favour of the big bang theory (I'm not expert, but I imagine things like the expansion of the Universe and background radiation) - yet on the other hand, creationist stories such as the story on Genesis can be disproven. Whether God exists or not has no bearing on these things, unless you can also prove that God fabricted lots of evidence to confuse us (eg, planting dinosaur bones).
and can't be disproved.
And that's exactly why it's an entirely non-scientific belief. Something which cannot be disproven (eg, "there exist invisible unicorns") is of no use, in comparison to a hypothesis which can be tested and either confirmed or disproven.
Plain and simple. People notice a "historical post" and they want to have their LJ face right up there in it. Total kissasses. I wonder how many of them are paid members vs free accounts. Remember, the overwhelming majority of Livejournal users are *NOT* paying customers...
But how does that support your argument? If anything, I'd say it's the other way round - people are showing their thanks, and someone who uses a service for free has more reason to be grateful for the work being done for them. A paid user would expect it to have worked in the first place.
This is what i meant by saying "what does it offer that Linux doesnt?".
What does Linux offer that Windows doesn't?
And first you actually said "Linux is useful. What are the real world modern uses for an Amiga machine?". If you're justifying Linux because it's useful (which is a perfectly reasonable justification even if that usefulness is duplicated on other platforms), then the same can still be said of the Amiga.
Listen, if the insurance companies had evidence that people who've had braces were significantly more likely to be involved in accidents than those with naturally straight teeth, you'd see checkboxes on insurance application forms about any dental work you may have done.
So? That would still be discrimination, as you wouldn't be judging people on their *individual* ability to drive without accidents.
It's still discrimination to judge an individual based on others of their gender, race or whatever, even if your views on how the others of their gender behave on average are perfectly correct.
Why charge average when charging max would maximize profits?
And what is the "maximum" amount that they can charge? By this logic, they could get away with charging an infinite amount of money to maximise profits.
Indeed, ask yourself why companies don't currently charge everyone the "maximum" rate?
You forget that sales tend to go down when prices go up.
As such they CAN show statistically significant differences in accident frequencies/seriousness/etc. As such, I don't think they can be charged with discrimination.
Even if the statistics are correct, it *is* discrimination if I am being judged on what "the average person of my gender" is like rather than what I individually am like.
I suspect that the reason they can't be charged with discrimination is because discrimination is perfectly legal, except is certain situations (eg, employment).
This is the only industry where wholesale discrimination is legal.
Isn't price discrimination legal in any industry? It doesn't happen often as there's no point in doing so, but I was under the impression that if any company wanted to charge different customers different rates for arbitrary unfair reasons, then it would be quite legal.
Although I agree that it shouldn't be legal, at least for some types of insurance, since they are either quite important (eg, health) or you have to have it (eg, car if you drive).
When I was a kid -- before email, jackasses -- there were people like you. They mailed "family updates" every Christmas, long letters about what they named their dog's puppies and who their cousin saw in Orlando. We mocked those people. No one took them seriously, and their "updates" always ended up in the trash.
Then you have completely missed one of the points of something like LiveJournal. With email, the sender decides whether the recipient gets sent the information. With a webpage, the user decides whether to read it (and I'm sorry that no one cares about you, but some of us have these things called "friends").
Btw, why did you post this comment? After, if no one cares about what you have to say..
Speaking as a former teenage self-harmer, they only do it because they take it seriously and believe others will.
Though perhaps not everyone is the same as you. In my experience, many if not most self-harmers (both teenage and older) do not do it because of what they think others will think of it.
Wanting privacy hasn't really changed though. Some people I know with a LiveJournal still do private journalling, either with private entries on LiveJournal, or something offline. There's no reason to suspect that the number of people keeping private journals is less than in the past.
Also there are different levels of privacy - many people have some entries set so only people they trust can read them, and some people do their entire journal this way.
Discussing what you did, or your feelings, no matter how personal, to your friends is nothing new. What's new is the way that places like LiveJournal allow this to be done in a far more efficient way, and on a greater scale.
Whilst I'd love to see AmigaOS on open hardware.. consider, did Macs being more expensive than PCs ever stop Macs being profitable or worthwhile?
The Mac Mini may be something that prevents anything like the Amiga becoming mainstream anytime soon, but last time I looked cheap PCs have been around for years, and we knew that this wasn't going to happen anyway.
Also on an Amiga related note, don't forget the Pegasos, which appears to be cheaper.
And it may only be a motherboard, but the Mac Mini components appear to be low end parts that can be found dirt cheap, and so adding these wouldn't add that much.
wah wah wah with the same old trite complaint. I'll give the same old trite response: apples, oranges. You own the car. With software, you only own the right to use one instance of it - right to use, not right to do whatever you want.
But if we accept that property and software are different things, then the original poster's claim that this is analogous to "If I break in your car" must be rejected as false anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is completely incompatible with public assistance / welfare. If you have leagal drugs AND a welfare system, then people who work will get taxed so that people who don't work can buy drugs. This is a suicidal thing for any nation to do.
So what about the vast number of people who have a job and use that money to buy drugs - why should they go to prison?
And what about people on welfare who use the money to buy legal things like cigarettes and alcohol?
Add to the fact that, under the current situation where drugs are illegal, people on welfare still manage to buy drugs, it is clear that having drugs illegal doesn't solve the problem you describe in the slightest.
If you have a problem with people spending their welfare money on things you deem unsuitable, then it's specifically that which should be focused upon.
You also pay with time, because a lot of this stuff needs work, you have to pick and choose which one, etc. Time is money. With MS and Apple, the GUI just works, and you don't need to worry about it. You just dig in and make your app. That's what it is about. Not "choice", I and most other commercial developers don't give a northbound rat's southern expanse for "choice."
If you don't care about choice, then if nothing else you can just pick one and use it. You seem to be making the assumption that the standard on Windows is automatically going to be better than an arbitrary choice on Linux - you'll have to back that up with evidence (in my experience, the MFC is the worst GUI toolkit I have come across).
Secondly, there's still choice under Windows, for example the MFC, or Borland's toolkit. These may be wrappers to the same underlying API, but there are still significant differences to the developer. Does the fact that I had to spend time trying these out before I discovered that Borland made Windows development a lot easier mean we can make the same criticism of Windows?
I'm sure plenty of people would find most Slashdot comments "boring as hell", but you and I are evidently "so full of ourselves" that we continue to post here. Should people tell us to take this offline?
Also, do you have friends and if so do you discuss with them about what's happening in your lives? Why does this change when it's online? Why should you give a damn if your life isn't of interest to a complete stranger who chooses to find out about it?
Any my point is that even if you consider them both in an equal state of non-development, asking where Amiga is now is no more relevant than asking where classic MacOS is now.
Yet people are always allowed to go on about how the 20 year old Mac was first to do this or that. Does the fact that no one's still using the original Mac affect this, or the fact that other platforms are far more greatly used? Of course not.
Though note that this method works with Windows too anyway.
And it's not clear to me which method is more intuitive - I myself find trying out right click and seeing what options are available a lot more easier than trying to drag and drop things, and not knowing what effect it will have until I investigate (what about image links - will it save the image, or the target link?)
Indeed, I note how I have always known the right click method, but never thought to try the drag and drop method until you mentioned it.
No. According to the dictionary, an atheist is not one who lacks a belief about gods, but rather:
One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods. (Dictionary.com)
"Lacks a belief" is perhaps ambiguous in what it means, but I think it is reasonable to say that an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in God. As fyngyrz points out, dictionaries have a tendancy to use words like "deny" which implies they have been written by someone who believes God exists, and so therefore atheists are just "denying" this. Obviously from the point of view of an atheist, this just doesn't make sense.
As for people who don't have any sort of a belief regarding gods (meaning they never thought about the subject or they just don't care)... I don't know if there's a word for that.
Personally I would still say they are atheists, though I agree that this is different to the sort of person who has given the subject lots of thought, and still doesn't have any belief in any Gods.
I'm not trolling, this is a genuine question - can you give some examples where a right mouse button is required under Windows, and how is the same situation better handled in MacOS?
Right-click on a touch-screen could be done by pressing control too - awkward, but just what you have to do on a one-button mouse, and that behaviour seems to be acceptable judging by the comments here.
I do wonder what it is that makes you think that his position is a delusion, but yours is not - from a probabilistic standpoint, it's just as likely.
Even if the probability of a super-intelligent all-powerful being which created the universe is 50%, that most certainly does not mean that Christianity, just one of countless possible forms of theism, and which claims an awful lot more than just "there exists a God", is just as likely to be true.
I've often wondered what execution time would be for something like a game coded in assembly language with no OS or other outside calls.
As far as assembly language is concerned: assuming you can outdo the compiler, I suspect that any advantage gained will be outdone by the fact that you have less time to spend optimising the algorithms used in the game (not to mention it would generally be harder to perform optimisations in a lower level language). If there is a part of the game which can be improved by writing in assembly, then the obvious suggestion is to write just that small bit in assembly, rather than the entire game.
As for no OS - aside from this meaning that vast amounts of time need to be spent reinventing things, time that can no longer be spent on improving performance in other areas - what on earth makes you think that you can get better performance from every single graphics card out there than the people who write the drivers?
Not to mention that not using an OS would be *more* bloated, due to having to duplicate functionality.
Whilst you might be able to say something about some modern applications being bloated and slow, many programmers and especially game programmers most certainly do care about performance. Writing in assembly or avoiding the OS is no longer the most effective way to improve performance.
Age of the universe? That's fundamentally unprovable since you have no scale outside of the universe to measure it against.
The scale that's important here is that there were more than seven days between start of universe, creation of earth, and appearance of humans.
So again I ask you can you come up with definitive proof that creation didn't occur? If you can't then faith in creation is just as rational as faith in evolution.
And I await your definitive proof that invisible elephants don't exist.
As for the flood and the ark, would you explain how at least two of every single species which exists today could fit on one boat? Don't forget food for all of them too. And where did all the water come from?
What evidence is there that dinosaur extinction resulted from a flood (as opposed to say a meteorite impact, a theory which does have evidence)?
Well actually, the OS is still being developed, unlike classic MacOS..
Creation can indeed be tested just as easily as Evolution.
And many if not all of the testable claims have been disproven (eg, age of the earth, age of the Universe, age of fossils, dinosaurs), with Creationists responding either by retracting the claims ("seven days doesn't really mean seven days"), or converting them to untestable claims ("God put dinosaur bones there to confuse us").
So can you point me to testable claims specific to Creationism which have been backed up with evidence?
So if this is theoretically possible, then is it not theoretically possible that some sufficiently advanced being (or intelligence) created our universe and is able to travel to it? Can it be ruled out?
First of all, saying that our bubble of spacetime was created by intelligent beings, but who in turned evolved natural in a universe which was not created by an intelligence is not the same thing at all as claiming that everything which exists was created by some intelligence.
So if such a thing was true, whilst they might be like gods to us, and whilst they would be a "higher power", it would be perfectly reasonable not to consider them to be actually Gods. Indeed, bearing in mind that such beings would presumably not be anything like what major religions depict God to be like, I suspect that the major religions would agree here, and claim that "God" was still some being who created *everything*, rather than saying that these aliens were God.
Secondly - yes, it's possible. That has nothing to do with belief though.
It's possible that we're living inside a computer virtual reality, but people who were to actually believe that would be regarded as crackpots. Would you claim that people who didn't believe in this were just as irrational as those who did?
I'm not an agnostic by any of the various definitions. However, I don't believe in God - if that's not an atheist, then what term do I use?
I also don't believe in unicorns - does that make me as religious as a Christian?
Any statement to the contrary invokes a reaction quite similar to what a Christian would have when his beliefs are argued against
No, it would invoke a reaction quite similar to what a Christian would have when you made assumptions about what he believed, simply because he called himself a Christian.
As for scientists spending effort on belief, there is a difference between only following beliefs which can at least be backed by evidence, and believing in things with no evidence just because they cannot be disproven.
Therefore a Creation viewpoint has just as much validity as the big bang.
Just because two things both cannot be proved with 100% certainty does not mean that they are both equally valid!
Indeed, nothing can be proven to 100% certainty - we can only gain evidence in support of a theory, or disprove it. There is evidence in favour of the big bang theory (I'm not expert, but I imagine things like the expansion of the Universe and background radiation) - yet on the other hand, creationist stories such as the story on Genesis can be disproven. Whether God exists or not has no bearing on these things, unless you can also prove that God fabricted lots of evidence to confuse us (eg, planting dinosaur bones).
and can't be disproved.
And that's exactly why it's an entirely non-scientific belief. Something which cannot be disproven (eg, "there exist invisible unicorns") is of no use, in comparison to a hypothesis which can be tested and either confirmed or disproven.
Plain and simple. People notice a "historical post" and they want to have their LJ face right up there in it. Total kissasses. I wonder how many of them are paid members vs free accounts.
Remember, the overwhelming majority of Livejournal users are *NOT* paying customers...
But how does that support your argument? If anything, I'd say it's the other way round - people are showing their thanks, and someone who uses a service for free has more reason to be grateful for the work being done for them. A paid user would expect it to have worked in the first place.
This is what i meant by saying "what does it offer that Linux doesnt?".
What does Linux offer that Windows doesn't?
And first you actually said "Linux is useful. What are the real world modern uses for an Amiga machine?". If you're justifying Linux because it's useful (which is a perfectly reasonable justification even if that usefulness is duplicated on other platforms), then the same can still be said of the Amiga.
Listen, if the insurance companies had evidence that people who've had braces were significantly more likely to be involved in accidents than those with naturally straight teeth, you'd see checkboxes on insurance application forms about any dental work you may have done.
So? That would still be discrimination, as you wouldn't be judging people on their *individual* ability to drive without accidents.
It's still discrimination to judge an individual based on others of their gender, race or whatever, even if your views on how the others of their gender behave on average are perfectly correct.
Why charge average when charging max would maximize profits?
And what is the "maximum" amount that they can charge? By this logic, they could get away with charging an infinite amount of money to maximise profits.
Indeed, ask yourself why companies don't currently charge everyone the "maximum" rate?
You forget that sales tend to go down when prices go up.
As such they CAN show statistically significant differences in accident frequencies/seriousness/etc. As such, I don't think they can be charged with discrimination.
Even if the statistics are correct, it *is* discrimination if I am being judged on what "the average person of my gender" is like rather than what I individually am like.
I suspect that the reason they can't be charged with discrimination is because discrimination is perfectly legal, except is certain situations (eg, employment).
This is the only industry where wholesale discrimination is legal.
Isn't price discrimination legal in any industry? It doesn't happen often as there's no point in doing so, but I was under the impression that if any company wanted to charge different customers different rates for arbitrary unfair reasons, then it would be quite legal.
Although I agree that it shouldn't be legal, at least for some types of insurance, since they are either quite important (eg, health) or you have to have it (eg, car if you drive).
When I was a kid -- before email, jackasses -- there were people like you. They mailed "family updates" every Christmas, long letters about what they named their dog's puppies and who their cousin saw in Orlando. We mocked those people. No one took them seriously, and their "updates" always ended up in the trash.
Then you have completely missed one of the points of something like LiveJournal. With email, the sender decides whether the recipient gets sent the information. With a webpage, the user decides whether to read it (and I'm sorry that no one cares about you, but some of us have these things called "friends").
Btw, why did you post this comment? After, if no one cares about what you have to say..
Speaking as a former teenage self-harmer, they only do it because they take it seriously and believe others will.
Though perhaps not everyone is the same as you. In my experience, many if not most self-harmers (both teenage and older) do not do it because of what they think others will think of it.
Wanting privacy hasn't really changed though. Some people I know with a LiveJournal still do private journalling, either with private entries on LiveJournal, or something offline. There's no reason to suspect that the number of people keeping private journals is less than in the past.
Also there are different levels of privacy - many people have some entries set so only people they trust can read them, and some people do their entire journal this way.
Discussing what you did, or your feelings, no matter how personal, to your friends is nothing new. What's new is the way that places like LiveJournal allow this to be done in a far more efficient way, and on a greater scale.
Whilst I'd love to see AmigaOS on open hardware.. consider, did Macs being more expensive than PCs ever stop Macs being profitable or worthwhile?
The Mac Mini may be something that prevents anything like the Amiga becoming mainstream anytime soon, but last time I looked cheap PCs have been around for years, and we knew that this wasn't going to happen anyway.
Also on an Amiga related note, don't forget the Pegasos, which appears to be cheaper.
And it may only be a motherboard, but the Mac Mini components appear to be low end parts that can be found dirt cheap, and so adding these wouldn't add that much.
wah wah wah with the same old trite complaint. I'll give the same old trite response: apples, oranges. You own the car. With software, you only own the right to use one instance of it - right to use, not right to do whatever you want.
But if we accept that property and software are different things, then the original poster's claim that this is analogous to "If I break in your car" must be rejected as false anyway.