Do you have any idea how many Cessna 172's are located in the US? A 12 gauge shotgun and a 172 would have those things in pieces. It be like goose season.
That, my friends, is why we have the Second Amendment.
Because Redcoats and Indians flying Cessnas were a major threat to the American colonies.
it's worse than that. the great republican governor of new jersey killed funding for a new tunnel between manhattan and midtown. it's expensive. apparently more expensive than the quality of life of thousands of new jersey residents who commute to manhattan
Apparently taxation and the devaluation of your savings/retirement due to the current spending/printing policies of the government and the Fed don't affect the quality of life of New Jersey residents...
That's narrow minded short term thinking. The loss of the ARC Tunnel meant the loss of thousands of jobs involved in it's construction. It also chokes off a lot of economic growth potential for the North Jersey region. That will also impact the quality of life of those New Jersey residents as well as the economic health of the state. Small enough that the state is we do have people who think of it as a South Jersey vs. North Jersey think, and Christie is definitely South Jersey in mentality.
The thing is about pure science... it's the science that pays off in the very long term or not at all, even if it has other values such as cultural enrichment. Much of it doesn't return in the nature of Apollo type spinoffs, as spinoffs come from engineering projects, not as much from pure science. Now I think that the science does have worth, but you can't expect it to be funded out of the magic hand of Adam Smith.
The telescope in question isn't likely to return itself in any of the ways you think of. Nor is the VLBA. Radio phenomena tend to be both very distant and way too lethal for tourist excursions, and they won't give us anything new as far as tools in going back to the Moon or mining in the asteroid belt. That's part of the reasons we do have government.... to fund things of worth that can't justify themselves on the sole justification of bottom line returns, because quite frankly on most of the projects conducted on these instruments... there isn't any of that kind of return in the foreseeable future.
This is the fact that seems to escape many slashdotters. They seem to think that there are enough billionaires to fund a seemingly limitless numbers of multi-million dollar projects as long as we can raise their taxes. You can see it in the other posts here.
Actually most slashdotters seem to be of the mindset that privatising anything will conjure private funding from who knows where.
I understand when people stare at the defense budget and go "they have too much, take some of that", but it occurs to me that running a military is one of the things that government has been for from the very beginning. You don't shut down the military in favor of other things in the government.
So considering the current and future threats to the US militarily how much of our GDP do you think we should be spending on the military?
Military spending is so hardly ever questioned that NASA has found it best to get funding for projects via the Air Force since the NASA budget is looked over with a lice comb and hair remover.
There were several proposals to run NASA purely as an arm of the Air Force. However Washington wanted the propaganda value of keeping NASA a civilian organization in name to contrast with the obviously military Soviet program. Of course you weren't going to be flying if you weren't an Air Force pilot, and there was the launch facility in Vandenberg used only for secret military projects, but who's counting?
I did some grant work when I lived in Seattle...out of the thousands of grant companies I browsed through in just the state of Washington, I found a fund who dumped large amounts of money into 'childhood obesity, youth leadership' and something else related to Parkour...
this fund...$685,000,000...just sits in the state of washington waiting for reasonable applications to give the money away...
It's not like the money is not out there...it's just not a priority anymore...not since we found out how unlikely it would be for Russia to build a missile site on the moon. When Space was semi-attached to the war machine for those few years...well, that was the 'Golden Age' of space...
It was the golden age for Cold War research. Big projects like Apollo and the Space Shuttle tend to kill a lot more science than they generate. The golden age for planetary science was mostly post-Apollo or before it. Areceibo itself was originally built as a temporary experiment researching conditions that would impact Air Force communications. It took a major overhaul to make it fit for more long range science.
That's pretty hefty, but a non-profit might be viable. I wonder if the cost could be cut down in some way? I know I'd willingly hand over a few bucks a year to keep it open, but would a couple million other people do so? It's hard to say.
(I should have known OP would bring out a mob of anti-libertarian kooks. Say the word "government" in anything but the most positive light, and suddenly you're Ayn Rand's evil baby-eating ghost, and they must defeat you. He's right, though, it really is politics that's shutting this down, and the only way it'll stay open now is to disconnect it from the government somehow, even if the very idea rustles a lot of jimmies.)
Ayn Rand would be among the first to not only shut the telescope down, but strong arm the scrap metal contract for profit.
I'm hoping we are learning to take science (particularly space in this case) out of the 'gov't' sector...if this telescope was privately funded, they wouldn't have to be dealing with partisan crap based on ideological 'budgets'...politics...but that's the price for receiving 'public funding'...*shrugs*
What type of private funding are you thinking of? You must be invoking charities out of thin air, because this isn't the kind of enterprise that's going to justify itself in returns on a corporate bottom line. People invoke the words "private funding"as if it conjured money out of thin air. If it did, than the painful choice of what to turn off this year would not be an issue.
His final act was to copy George Washington and free the slaves upon his death in 1826.
Jefferson only manumitted two slaves, he allowed one other to leave without manumission, and five others were freed upon his death. Whether he was prevented from freeing others is under debate. He was however a big spender and rather addicted to international shopping so he did leave behind a lot of debt. The Presidency did not help matters either.
Also the fact that most of the stuff they're producing these days is pretty rubbish, so instead of admitting that sales are down because no-one like "Mega Explosions 12" they can point at piracy and claim they're the reason sales are down.
Then again if you're taking the trouble to pirate this stuff the claim that "it's all rubbish" rings rather hollow.
Has anyone actually READ the Review's reasons for de-funding the telescope, or did everyone who posted here, just settle for the lazy brain knee-jerk reaction response?
Is there perhaps given a reality of limited funding that there are OTHER science projects that need a greater priority? Maybe the choice this time isn't between science and welfare, but science and science?
If we spent only 10% of the Military budget on NASA, we would see most of science fiction become a reality within only 2 generations (If physics plays nicely).
Physics plays by it's own rules and really doesn't have the slightest care for our preferences in the matter. It's rather stubborn that way.
a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.
If FDR was such an excellent leader, then why did the Second World War happen in the first place? He didn't have the power to stop things like the French leaders and Stalin had, but his economic policies (for example, state-enforced oligopolies, special labor union powers, clunky work programs that didn't do much of anything) directly contributed to US weakness at a time when that was a really bad idea. A strong US would have kept Japan at bay. And there were times during 1936-1938 when Germany could have been thwarted by determined intervention from the other European powers.
r.
It was Japan's containment by the Western powers that led to it's desperation. It's an island nation heavily dependent on imports yet the U.S. and the West were shutting them out of the Asian market.
And FDR's programs were leading the nation into recovery by getting people back into work. Prior to Pearl Harbor his and the United State's priorities were domestic, not foreign. He had inherited a nation that had gone isolationist ever since the end of the Great War. The Second World War happened because not only were the causes of the first never addressed, the post war handling of the European powers created a nation that was hell-bent on reversing both it's defeat, and the death spiral the reparations enforced had plunged it into.
3G worldphone, LTE, and decent battery life. This is actually impressive, though we've been waiting 2 years for it.
If it let you out of the Apple sandbox if you wanted, then it would be the best smartphone by far. But that sandbox is a major detractor.
Yeah, having over 700,000 applications available just blows.
Sandbox vs.open field. In the grand scheme of things that's just a clash of whose techno religous hype are you going for? I quite frankly don't care as long as I can get the application I want and have a reasonable chance that it's one not fitted with malware. I've got issues with Apple but I trust them to do more oversight than Goggle does for it's Market. Although I trust that Google will start taking closer looks at making sure it's customers have a halfway decent chance of not screwing themselves when they download an app.
If I find NFC on any phone I buy, my first action will be to turn it off and weld it shut. Last thing I need is to get robbed by an NFC scanner in a public crowd.
As I go through the day and occasionally read comments like the above, I find myself wondering the exact nature of the mental illness that would cause someone to write such a post. The post has no relevance to the OP, and neither the title or the text is funny...just strange. So is this writer on something? Stoned? On another specific drug or a combination? Perhaps they are drunk.
Or perhaps the person is mentally ill, or is perhaps autistic. What is the exact nature of the mental illness?
Perhaps the person is both mentally ill and on drugs and drunk. Their spelling is acceptable, so they aren't completely out of it, and the sentence makes sense, but bears no relation to anything relevant in this thread.
Let us ponder these things.
Perhaps the poster couldn't think of anything else to bash Apple on today. You're not a proper slashdotter unless you write one Anti-Apple post a day. to keep the Jobs away.
How do you intend to purchase apps without giving Apple your address and a method of payment? You could just use free apps, or use Apple gift cards for making purchases, and provide a fake name and address.
At least as of the iPhone 4S, and 3rd Gen iPad you aren't required to plug into a computer or use iTunes to activate. All setup is now done on device.
I'd say the biggest detriment that Apple had to desktop usage of GNU/Linux was taking the spotlight as a not-Windows option. OS X had a lot of advertisement, so when people wanted to 'stick it to the man' and choose a non-MS OS, the first thing they found was a Mac. In the early days, Macs ran on PPC, so dual booting was not an option. They have also been priced out a truly mainstream market. Apple provided the perfect anemic competition to make the majority of people compliant with a MS-dominated desktop, and in the mind of the general consumer, made a Wintel option seem 'not so bad.' Absent Apple's presence, it's quite likely that the alternative of choice would have been GNU/Linux.
I beg to differ. You people talk as if you expect end users to use machines the way you do. When OS X first came out, Desktop Linux was virtually UNUSABLE if you were not not a tech geek. If you were doing phone support for a friend and they were using a different distribution than you were, your navigation instructions could be completely useless given that from distro to distro might as well be completely different operating systems as far as the desktop experience would be, what menus would look like, and so on.
When Apple was on a terminal downslide, you blamed Windows for the lack of Linux as a consumer desktop presence. When OS X came out, you blamed Apple for stealing the opportunity when Microsoft created that opening by launching VISTA. When OS X started to attract the colleagues who worked on server programming, doing the same kind of work you're hand rolling on Linux, you went ballistic, assigning to Apple the same sins that Microsoft committed when it actively went against companies like Dell trying to provide Linux solutions. You're all adept at pointing out blame everywhere save where it really belongs... the fractured, disunited, and frequently bickering Linux developing community itself.
And a lot of it is the mentality. You downgrade Apple and Windows users as idiot minded sheep. And you talk about some standard that computer USERS should be abiding by, as if they should be practising the same kind of arcane disciplines needed to get slackware up and functional. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have one thing in common that many of you do not. They emphathise with the end user. Even Jobs was forcing users down a certain path by taking out things such as floppy drives on his desktops and Fflash on iOS, it was with that end user experience in mind.
As long as linux developers keep treating the end user as an afterthought, Linux will remain where it is. An excellent tool for uses that demand technical excellence like server based applications, and a frightful intimidating monster for people who's avocation does not involve gearhead level self programming.
I can't believe that in 2012 we STILL doesn't have direct comparability of software between operating systems. Wasn't this something we were going to fix in the 80s? Writing a program shouldn't be writing it for a particular OS, it should be writing it for computers in general. This is the kind of thing the government needs to mandate.
Thing is those pesky operating systems refused to stay still. They got all graphical on us, added tons of different functions and system calls and each insisted on going their own way.
So yes you DO have programs that you can run on multiple operating systems, bloated slowware running on Java with lowest common denominator interfaces. But people want more than that they want programs that take advantage of what the OS has to offer. Adobe does LCD which means it's program inteface is fine for windows and sucks for OS X. LCD programming might be fine for you but others have higher standards.
Funny thing, my Mom (nearly 70) uses an Ubuntu machine I set up for her to do browsing, email, and Mahjong and has never screwed it up.
That's presumably because besides starting up the unit and shutting it down She's never done ANYTHING but browsing, mail, and Mahjong. So for all intents and purposes she might as well be using a console or a tablet. She's not t he vast majority of computer users who then get into trouble by trying to install their own software. Or a printer, or a camera. or whatever.
Congratulations folks, we've finally figured out how to get the Linux Desktop to the masses. We have to assign each user their own personal IT support agent.
One is compelled to wonder why it is acceptable for him to implore such a thing, while at the same time condoning said parents' continued attitudes? This seems sort of self-contradictory to me. If one is not okay, why is the other, or vice versa?
Because he recognizes that after a certain point in your life, you do get set in your attitudes. Nye acknowledges that forcing the older generation to give up it's beliefs would be like trying to force right handedness in children. Young people on the other hand are still open to possibilities, at least a lot more than their parents would be. Nye's invocation is nothing more than a plea to let the children make their minds up on their own.
It's not a reasonable assumption, but it's one that someone like Nye would make.
Creationism makes god out to be an idiot. I would think that an all powerful god could have made humans totally different than germs, bacteria, and virus so that none of them would have any effect on humans. I blame evolution and our similarities to lower forms of life for most of our illness. I blame contagious illness for most of our hostility toward our fellow humans. So while evolution is true it is the root of all evil.
The Creationists' reply would be that Adam and Eve being perfect in the Garden, had no such faults. Disease, old age, and the rest are a product of our fallen state.
You need more practice in knowing your opponents.
On their way out, though, Lot's wife turned back and looked, and was instantly turned into a pillar of salt.
Obviously, the moral is not to screw around with God. If he tells you not to turn around and look at something, you'd better damn well not turn around and look or else the consequences could be severe. Practically speaking, though, I was never able to get past how insanely petty this was.
You have to judge by the standards of the time, remembering that these books were written centuries before the ones that would be included in the New Testament. If you take a look at the gods of the region worshiped at the time, they're pretty much stern, unforgiving beings who deal out harsh punishments for what we would consider minor infractions or lapses. By our standards it was severe, by the standards of the time that sort of behavior in dieties, especially father figure ones is par for the course. You as a native of the era would literally not respect a father god who wasn't at least that harsh.
The expectations had changed quite a bit by the time of the First Century though, there enters Jesus and now the expected standard is the God of Love as opposed to the God of Law, such stern deities having fallen pretty far out of fashion by this time in the up and coming new cultures such as the growing Roman urbanism. What we call Christianity and the standards we define it by were not drawn up by Jesus and his Hebrew followers, but by his famous Roman convert, Paul who comes from a very different background.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any idea how many Cessna 172's are located in the US? A 12 gauge shotgun and a 172 would have those things in pieces. It be like goose season.
That, my friends, is why we have the Second Amendment.
Because Redcoats and Indians flying Cessnas were a major threat to the American colonies.
it's worse than that. the great republican governor of new jersey killed funding for a new tunnel between manhattan and midtown. it's expensive. apparently more expensive than the quality of life of thousands of new jersey residents who commute to manhattan
Apparently taxation and the devaluation of your savings/retirement due to the current spending/printing policies of the government and the Fed don't affect the quality of life of New Jersey residents...
That's narrow minded short term thinking. The loss of the ARC Tunnel meant the loss of thousands of jobs involved in it's construction. It also chokes off a lot of economic growth potential for the North Jersey region. That will also impact the quality of life of those New Jersey residents as well as the economic health of the state. Small enough that the state is we do have people who think of it as a South Jersey vs. North Jersey think, and Christie is definitely South Jersey in mentality.
The thing is about pure science... it's the science that pays off in the very long term or not at all, even if it has other values such as cultural enrichment. Much of it doesn't return in the nature of Apollo type spinoffs, as spinoffs come from engineering projects, not as much from pure science. Now I think that the science does have worth, but you can't expect it to be funded out of the magic hand of Adam Smith. The telescope in question isn't likely to return itself in any of the ways you think of. Nor is the VLBA. Radio phenomena tend to be both very distant and way too lethal for tourist excursions, and they won't give us anything new as far as tools in going back to the Moon or mining in the asteroid belt. That's part of the reasons we do have government.... to fund things of worth that can't justify themselves on the sole justification of bottom line returns, because quite frankly on most of the projects conducted on these instruments... there isn't any of that kind of return in the foreseeable future.
This is the fact that seems to escape many slashdotters. They seem to think that there are enough billionaires to fund a seemingly limitless numbers of multi-million dollar projects as long as we can raise their taxes. You can see it in the other posts here.
Actually most slashdotters seem to be of the mindset that privatising anything will conjure private funding from who knows where.
I understand when people stare at the defense budget and go "they have too much, take some of that", but it occurs to me that running a military is one of the things that government has been for from the very beginning. You don't shut down the military in favor of other things in the government.
So considering the current and future threats to the US militarily how much of our GDP do you think we should be spending on the military?
Military spending is so hardly ever questioned that NASA has found it best to get funding for projects via the Air Force since the NASA budget is looked over with a lice comb and hair remover.
There were several proposals to run NASA purely as an arm of the Air Force. However Washington wanted the propaganda value of keeping NASA a civilian organization in name to contrast with the obviously military Soviet program. Of course you weren't going to be flying if you weren't an Air Force pilot, and there was the launch facility in Vandenberg used only for secret military projects, but who's counting?
I did some grant work when I lived in Seattle...out of the thousands of grant companies I browsed through in just the state of Washington, I found a fund who dumped large amounts of money into 'childhood obesity, youth leadership' and something else related to Parkour... this fund...$685,000,000...just sits in the state of washington waiting for reasonable applications to give the money away... It's not like the money is not out there...it's just not a priority anymore...not since we found out how unlikely it would be for Russia to build a missile site on the moon. When Space was semi-attached to the war machine for those few years...well, that was the 'Golden Age' of space...
It was the golden age for Cold War research. Big projects like Apollo and the Space Shuttle tend to kill a lot more science than they generate. The golden age for planetary science was mostly post-Apollo or before it. Areceibo itself was originally built as a temporary experiment researching conditions that would impact Air Force communications. It took a major overhaul to make it fit for more long range science.
That's pretty hefty, but a non-profit might be viable. I wonder if the cost could be cut down in some way? I know I'd willingly hand over a few bucks a year to keep it open, but would a couple million other people do so? It's hard to say.
(I should have known OP would bring out a mob of anti-libertarian kooks. Say the word "government" in anything but the most positive light, and suddenly you're Ayn Rand's evil baby-eating ghost, and they must defeat you. He's right, though, it really is politics that's shutting this down, and the only way it'll stay open now is to disconnect it from the government somehow, even if the very idea rustles a lot of jimmies.)
Ayn Rand would be among the first to not only shut the telescope down, but strong arm the scrap metal contract for profit.
I'm hoping we are learning to take science (particularly space in this case) out of the 'gov't' sector...if this telescope was privately funded, they wouldn't have to be dealing with partisan crap based on ideological 'budgets'...politics...but that's the price for receiving 'public funding'...*shrugs*
What type of private funding are you thinking of? You must be invoking charities out of thin air, because this isn't the kind of enterprise that's going to justify itself in returns on a corporate bottom line. People invoke the words "private funding"as if it conjured money out of thin air. If it did, than the painful choice of what to turn off this year would not be an issue.
His final act was to copy George Washington and free the slaves upon his death in 1826.
Jefferson only manumitted two slaves, he allowed one other to leave without manumission, and five others were freed upon his death. Whether he was prevented from freeing others is under debate. He was however a big spender and rather addicted to international shopping so he did leave behind a lot of debt. The Presidency did not help matters either.
Also the fact that most of the stuff they're producing these days is pretty rubbish, so instead of admitting that sales are down because no-one like "Mega Explosions 12" they can point at piracy and claim they're the reason sales are down.
Then again if you're taking the trouble to pirate this stuff the claim that "it's all rubbish" rings rather hollow.
Has anyone actually READ the Review's reasons for de-funding the telescope, or did everyone who posted here, just settle for the lazy brain knee-jerk reaction response? Is there perhaps given a reality of limited funding that there are OTHER science projects that need a greater priority? Maybe the choice this time isn't between science and welfare, but science and science?
If we spent only 10% of the Military budget on NASA, we would see most of science fiction become a reality within only 2 generations (If physics plays nicely).
Physics plays by it's own rules and really doesn't have the slightest care for our preferences in the matter. It's rather stubborn that way.
a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.
If FDR was such an excellent leader, then why did the Second World War happen in the first place? He didn't have the power to stop things like the French leaders and Stalin had, but his economic policies (for example, state-enforced oligopolies, special labor union powers, clunky work programs that didn't do much of anything) directly contributed to US weakness at a time when that was a really bad idea. A strong US would have kept Japan at bay. And there were times during 1936-1938 when Germany could have been thwarted by determined intervention from the other European powers. r.
It was Japan's containment by the Western powers that led to it's desperation. It's an island nation heavily dependent on imports yet the U.S. and the West were shutting them out of the Asian market. And FDR's programs were leading the nation into recovery by getting people back into work. Prior to Pearl Harbor his and the United State's priorities were domestic, not foreign. He had inherited a nation that had gone isolationist ever since the end of the Great War. The Second World War happened because not only were the causes of the first never addressed, the post war handling of the European powers created a nation that was hell-bent on reversing both it's defeat, and the death spiral the reparations enforced had plunged it into.
3G worldphone, LTE, and decent battery life. This is actually impressive, though we've been waiting 2 years for it.
If it let you out of the Apple sandbox if you wanted, then it would be the best smartphone by far. But that sandbox is a major detractor.
Yeah, having over 700,000 applications available just blows. Sandbox vs.open field. In the grand scheme of things that's just a clash of whose techno religous hype are you going for? I quite frankly don't care as long as I can get the application I want and have a reasonable chance that it's one not fitted with malware. I've got issues with Apple but I trust them to do more oversight than Goggle does for it's Market. Although I trust that Google will start taking closer looks at making sure it's customers have a halfway decent chance of not screwing themselves when they download an app.
If I find NFC on any phone I buy, my first action will be to turn it off and weld it shut. Last thing I need is to get robbed by an NFC scanner in a public crowd.
. None of the competing 10" tablets come close to the iPad's market share..
As I understand it, the Ipad 3's main competition is the Ipad 2.
As I go through the day and occasionally read comments like the above, I find myself wondering the exact nature of the mental illness that would cause someone to write such a post. The post has no relevance to the OP, and neither the title or the text is funny...just strange. So is this writer on something? Stoned? On another specific drug or a combination? Perhaps they are drunk.
Or perhaps the person is mentally ill, or is perhaps autistic. What is the exact nature of the mental illness?
Perhaps the person is both mentally ill and on drugs and drunk. Their spelling is acceptable, so they aren't completely out of it, and the sentence makes sense, but bears no relation to anything relevant in this thread.
Let us ponder these things.
Perhaps the poster couldn't think of anything else to bash Apple on today. You're not a proper slashdotter unless you write one Anti-Apple post a day. to keep the Jobs away.
How do you intend to purchase apps without giving Apple your address and a method of payment? You could just use free apps, or use Apple gift cards for making purchases, and provide a fake name and address.
At least as of the iPhone 4S, and 3rd Gen iPad you aren't required to plug into a computer or use iTunes to activate. All setup is now done on device.
That's true of any device running iOS 5 or later.
I'd say the biggest detriment that Apple had to desktop usage of GNU/Linux was taking the spotlight as a not-Windows option. OS X had a lot of advertisement, so when people wanted to 'stick it to the man' and choose a non-MS OS, the first thing they found was a Mac. In the early days, Macs ran on PPC, so dual booting was not an option. They have also been priced out a truly mainstream market. Apple provided the perfect anemic competition to make the majority of people compliant with a MS-dominated desktop, and in the mind of the general consumer, made a Wintel option seem 'not so bad.' Absent Apple's presence, it's quite likely that the alternative of choice would have been GNU/Linux.
I beg to differ. You people talk as if you expect end users to use machines the way you do. When OS X first came out, Desktop Linux was virtually UNUSABLE if you were not not a tech geek. If you were doing phone support for a friend and they were using a different distribution than you were, your navigation instructions could be completely useless given that from distro to distro might as well be completely different operating systems as far as the desktop experience would be, what menus would look like, and so on.
When Apple was on a terminal downslide, you blamed Windows for the lack of Linux as a consumer desktop presence. When OS X came out, you blamed Apple for stealing the opportunity when Microsoft created that opening by launching VISTA. When OS X started to attract the colleagues who worked on server programming, doing the same kind of work you're hand rolling on Linux, you went ballistic, assigning to Apple the same sins that Microsoft committed when it actively went against companies like Dell trying to provide Linux solutions. You're all adept at pointing out blame everywhere save where it really belongs... the fractured, disunited, and frequently bickering Linux developing community itself.
And a lot of it is the mentality. You downgrade Apple and Windows users as idiot minded sheep. And you talk about some standard that computer USERS should be abiding by, as if they should be practising the same kind of arcane disciplines needed to get slackware up and functional. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have one thing in common that many of you do not. They emphathise with the end user. Even Jobs was forcing users down a certain path by taking out things such as floppy drives on his desktops and Fflash on iOS, it was with that end user experience in mind.
As long as linux developers keep treating the end user as an afterthought, Linux will remain where it is. An excellent tool for uses that demand technical excellence like server based applications, and a frightful intimidating monster for people who's avocation does not involve gearhead level self programming.
I can't believe that in 2012 we STILL doesn't have direct comparability of software between operating systems. Wasn't this something we were going to fix in the 80s? Writing a program shouldn't be writing it for a particular OS, it should be writing it for computers in general. This is the kind of thing the government needs to mandate.
Thing is those pesky operating systems refused to stay still. They got all graphical on us, added tons of different functions and system calls and each insisted on going their own way. So yes you DO have programs that you can run on multiple operating systems, bloated slowware running on Java with lowest common denominator interfaces. But people want more than that they want programs that take advantage of what the OS has to offer. Adobe does LCD which means it's program inteface is fine for windows and sucks for OS X. LCD programming might be fine for you but others have higher standards.
Funny thing, my Mom (nearly 70) uses an Ubuntu machine I set up for her to do browsing, email, and Mahjong and has never screwed it up.
That's presumably because besides starting up the unit and shutting it down She's never done ANYTHING but browsing, mail, and Mahjong. So for all intents and purposes she might as well be using a console or a tablet. She's not t he vast majority of computer users who then get into trouble by trying to install their own software. Or a printer, or a camera. or whatever. Congratulations folks, we've finally figured out how to get the Linux Desktop to the masses. We have to assign each user their own personal IT support agent.
One is compelled to wonder why it is acceptable for him to implore such a thing, while at the same time condoning said parents' continued attitudes? This seems sort of self-contradictory to me. If one is not okay, why is the other, or vice versa?
Because he recognizes that after a certain point in your life, you do get set in your attitudes. Nye acknowledges that forcing the older generation to give up it's beliefs would be like trying to force right handedness in children. Young people on the other hand are still open to possibilities, at least a lot more than their parents would be. Nye's invocation is nothing more than a plea to let the children make their minds up on their own. It's not a reasonable assumption, but it's one that someone like Nye would make.
Creationism makes god out to be an idiot. I would think that an all powerful god could have made humans totally different than germs, bacteria, and virus so that none of them would have any effect on humans. I blame evolution and our similarities to lower forms of life for most of our illness. I blame contagious illness for most of our hostility toward our fellow humans. So while evolution is true it is the root of all evil.
The Creationists' reply would be that Adam and Eve being perfect in the Garden, had no such faults. Disease, old age, and the rest are a product of our fallen state. You need more practice in knowing your opponents.
On their way out, though, Lot's wife turned back and looked, and was instantly turned into a pillar of salt.
Obviously, the moral is not to screw around with God. If he tells you not to turn around and look at something, you'd better damn well not turn around and look or else the consequences could be severe. Practically speaking, though, I was never able to get past how insanely petty this was.
You have to judge by the standards of the time, remembering that these books were written centuries before the ones that would be included in the New Testament. If you take a look at the gods of the region worshiped at the time, they're pretty much stern, unforgiving beings who deal out harsh punishments for what we would consider minor infractions or lapses. By our standards it was severe, by the standards of the time that sort of behavior in dieties, especially father figure ones is par for the course. You as a native of the era would literally not respect a father god who wasn't at least that harsh. The expectations had changed quite a bit by the time of the First Century though, there enters Jesus and now the expected standard is the God of Love as opposed to the God of Law, such stern deities having fallen pretty far out of fashion by this time in the up and coming new cultures such as the growing Roman urbanism. What we call Christianity and the standards we define it by were not drawn up by Jesus and his Hebrew followers, but by his famous Roman convert, Paul who comes from a very different background.
Yup, the Sodomites wanted to rape the intruders. That was definitely wrong.
But Rape =! Homosexuality
Lot, being the hospitable guy he was, offered up his daughters instead.