This shocking revelation surely means that OS X is definitely not ready for the desktop yet. What will Apple do?
Wow... you Mac fanbois are certainly over-defensive, aren't you?
I said nothing negative about the OS X - I was simply making the point that the Windows usage would be higher than Mac penetration of the market might seem to indicate.
Even people opposed to the censorship law include socialist mobs like Green Left Weekly... hardly a pro-freedom movement.
You don't understand politics, do you?
Because I recognise socialism as anti-freedom?
You know what they say, If you're not a socialist when you're a teenager, you don't have a heart - but if you're still a socialist when you're 30, you don't have a brain.
No, the senator pushing for this is the "family" party. The majority party, in order to get his support, decided to go with him on this... to my understanding, anyway...
Your understanding is incorrect. This is ALP's baby - though it's true that Family First would like to ban "hard-core pornography" altogether. Libs are not much better (and are only likely to oppose it for their own political reasons - there's no driving principle of free speech, etc)
This has less to do with "religious nutters" (of any persuasion) and more to do with control. The problem with politicians (on all sides), is that they just love to control people... they'll say they believe in freedom of choice, but only if you make what they consider the "right" choices.
Even people opposed to the censorship law include socialist mobs like Green Left Weekly... hardly a pro-freedom movement.
To use your example, yes, fire could be considered a means of artificial selection. If a creature was insufficiently adapted to the cold, and it's fellow creatures had developed fire such that it could survive anyway, it's less than advantageous genes would have been preserved by it's society's action
No, the genes which gave it the ability to acquire knowledge on how to create fire ARE the advantageous genes. I do agree with your point below about eugenics though...
The human gene pool is not being filtered by adaptiveness to the environment anymore.
On the contrary, we've just figured out more efficient ways to adapt. Medicine, birth control, technology - these are tools of our adaptation. I guess it's just semantics - but I disagree with those who think our level of intervention is a bad thing
All these things are good, mind. It just means that we're not evolving due to natural selection. We're guiding our own progress. Which is good, cause the old way is slow as hell.
Natural selection vs Artificial selection... In the case of intervening in our own lives, I'd still call that natural selection. Intervening in other species - eg, breeding cattle to be nice and tasty, or to have a high milk yield - that's a case of artificial selection on the part of cattle.
I believe an important part of growing up is taking the bigger picture into account, and deciding who and what we support based on more than just our immediate personal result.
To me, that seems rather self-defeating... different people can take different things from a book, though I sympathise with your view.
I'm a conservative, and if I applied this reasoning, I would not be able to enjoy too much in the way of music, movies, or even sci-fi.
That said, views portrayed in the story do sometimes get a bit much - I certainly found this in the later Ender books, but I enjoyed the first couple.
I never got around to checking out Card's work though it's often been recommended to me by those who know my tastes, but if one of his books were put in my hand now I'd see the name of a man who has seen fit to loudly classify many of my family and friends as second-class citizens.
This reminds me of the debate around Battlefield Earth... I enjoyed the book, before knowing about all this Scientology background. Once I did, I could see the references to psychology, and so on... but I still enjoyed the book - nothing can change that.
Greed is beneficial as long as the greedy individual can keep what he or she obtains.
So true... though to work properly (and keep things in balance) they also need to "keep" their losses - and not get bailed out for stupid decisions.
The balance between greed and altruism basically depends on the general wisdom of society. The more altruistic people are, the more greedy people can benefit, but the less altruistic people are, the less they benefit from cooperation. A stable point is where there is just enough altruism and greed to consume all the available resources without too many people getting upset and changing the gene pool with a shotgun.
I'd say that there's a balance between co-operation and conflict, rather than greed and altruism. And that balance between cooperation and conflict is called competition. Works well, most of the time.
I'm not sure altruism really exists... or society for that matter;)
There's a lot of coercion in having made a poor decision.
Persuasion is not the same as coercion. Who are you to say that they made a poor decision?
...Or current believers in free market capitalism, for that matter.
Given that we haven't had free market capitalism for some time, people are right to still believe in it - it would have saved us from the current crisis.
A system where corporations socialise the cost of their risk-taking, (but not the profits, of course) is not a free market. A system where banks are required by law to make sub-prime loans (Community Reinvestment Act) is not a free market.
I've never done that kind of comparison as I will never install Microsoft Windows on my Mac, but I am much more impressed with it on the Mac than I was on Microsoft Windows XP.
Well, it's been over a year since I played WoW, so things may have changed, but at the time, it was optimised for directx. It's possible they since got their act together on the Mac version. It's also possible that when you switched to Mac, you were simply playing with better hardware.
We're not talking about subjective value-feelings here;
Of course we're talking about relative values. Nobody has been coerced - they have merely been persuaded to change their values. People buy particular brands of clothing for similar reasons.
we're talking about intentional manipulation by a sleak advertising campaign that turns people into drones who really do believe that there is something magical in a Mac that other computers don't have.
I have to admit, the Apple (and in some ways, Google) approach of collecting followers does seem rather creepy, but ultimately, people are responsible for their own decisions.
People often criticise Microsoft for putting money first. There's a popular bible quote, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
If you accept that, then logically (yet disturbingly), the most profitable course of action is to collect souls. That seems to be Apple and Google's business plan.
Where's the value? Technically speaking, it's got the same hardware in it as a Windows laptop.
As the parent said, "Price is what you pay, value is what you get"
Value is subjective. People might grumble about the higher prices, but if they still pay it, then they either received value, or are otherwise irrational beings.
To paraphrase Joe Biden, "two words - World of Warcraft."
WoW really rocks on a Mac. As a Draenei in Winterspring on a Mac you can almost feel the snow beneath your hooves...
Really? I'd heard a while back, that WoW ran faster on a Mac running windows than it did with OS X... Is this no longer the case, or was I misinformed to begin with?
Also, the melting point of the steel used in the Twin Towers is actually about 400 degrees HOTTER than the temperature at which jet fuel burns.
The steel doesn't need to melt to cause catastrophic failure... which is why, for instance, steel support beams on a bridge can collapse when a fuel tanker explodes.
The Twin Towers would also be the first example in history of a steel building where the steel failed due to fire.
Yeah... well, it was a bit more than a normal fire, wasn't it?
John McCain is 72 years old and has had several cancerous growths removed.
I'm not an actuarial, but I bet the odds are not good that he'd make it through a full term.
So, if McCain keels over, you get someone with little experience become president... on the other hand, if Obama gets in, you have someone with little experience from day one.
Here's an even more depressing thought: in terms of executive experience, she has more than Obama, Biden and McCain combined!
Solyanik warns that Google's engineers care more about the 'coolness' of a service than about the service's effectiveness.
I don't think that's entirely true. Like all companies, they are concerned with maximising profit - which they do by maximising use of their products. So, the question is whether users care more about coolness or the effectiveness of the service (and whether Google anticipates the correct answer to that question)
Slashdot Mirror
MY GOODNESS...
This shocking revelation surely means that OS X is definitely not ready for the desktop yet. What will Apple do?
Wow... you Mac fanbois are certainly over-defensive, aren't you?
I said nothing negative about the OS X - I was simply making the point that the Windows usage would be higher than Mac penetration of the market might seem to indicate.
Also, I know more than one Mac user who uses dual-boot with Windows...
You don't understand politics, do you?
Because I recognise socialism as anti-freedom?
You know what they say, If you're not a socialist when you're a teenager, you don't have a heart - but if you're still a socialist when you're 30, you don't have a brain.
No, the senator pushing for this is the "family" party. The majority party, in order to get his support, decided to go with him on this... to my understanding, anyway...
Your understanding is incorrect. This is ALP's baby - though it's true that Family First would like to ban "hard-core pornography" altogether. Libs are not much better (and are only likely to oppose it for their own political reasons - there's no driving principle of free speech, etc)
This has less to do with "religious nutters" (of any persuasion) and more to do with control. The problem with politicians (on all sides), is that they just love to control people... they'll say they believe in freedom of choice, but only if you make what they consider the "right" choices.
Even people opposed to the censorship law include socialist mobs like Green Left Weekly... hardly a pro-freedom movement.
To use your example, yes, fire could be considered a means of artificial selection. If a creature was insufficiently adapted to the cold, and it's fellow creatures had developed fire such that it could survive anyway, it's less than advantageous genes would have been preserved by it's society's action
No, the genes which gave it the ability to acquire knowledge on how to create fire ARE the advantageous genes. I do agree with your point below about eugenics though...
The human gene pool is not being filtered by adaptiveness to the environment anymore.
On the contrary, we've just figured out more efficient ways to adapt. Medicine, birth control, technology - these are tools of our adaptation. I guess it's just semantics - but I disagree with those who think our level of intervention is a bad thing
All these things are good, mind. It just means that we're not evolving due to natural selection. We're guiding our own progress. Which is good, cause the old way is slow as hell.
Natural selection vs Artificial selection... In the case of intervening in our own lives, I'd still call that natural selection. Intervening in other species - eg, breeding cattle to be nice and tasty, or to have a high milk yield - that's a case of artificial selection on the part of cattle.
Uh, no. We won't do anything, because by introducing artificial controls, we've shortcircuited evolution.
At what point did our actions become artificial?
I believe an important part of growing up is taking the bigger picture into account, and deciding who and what we support based on more than just our immediate personal result.
To me, that seems rather self-defeating... different people can take different things from a book, though I sympathise with your view.
I'm a conservative, and if I applied this reasoning, I would not be able to enjoy too much in the way of music, movies, or even sci-fi. That said, views portrayed in the story do sometimes get a bit much - I certainly found this in the later Ender books, but I enjoyed the first couple.
I never got around to checking out Card's work though it's often been recommended to me by those who know my tastes, but if one of his books were put in my hand now I'd see the name of a man who has seen fit to loudly classify many of my family and friends as second-class citizens.
This reminds me of the debate around Battlefield Earth... I enjoyed the book, before knowing about all this Scientology background. Once I did, I could see the references to psychology, and so on... but I still enjoyed the book - nothing can change that.
Greed is beneficial as long as the greedy individual can keep what he or she obtains.
So true... though to work properly (and keep things in balance) they also need to "keep" their losses - and not get bailed out for stupid decisions.
The balance between greed and altruism basically depends on the general wisdom of society. The more altruistic people are, the more greedy people can benefit, but the less altruistic people are, the less they benefit from cooperation. A stable point is where there is just enough altruism and greed to consume all the available resources without too many people getting upset and changing the gene pool with a shotgun.
I'd say that there's a balance between co-operation and conflict, rather than greed and altruism. And that balance between cooperation and conflict is called competition. Works well, most of the time.
I'm not sure altruism really exists... or society for that matter ;)
Sadly, most coffee makers fail to achieve a sufficiently high temperature to make a respectable brew.
In the case of espresso, you don't want the water too hot, as it makes the coffee bitter - that's why you're supposed to warm the cups first.
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
"They are alone. They are a dying species. We should let them pass"
It makes the 'i hate commies' people uncomfortable, atleast enough to shut it.
Well, I do hate commies... but alas, we elected them to power (but don't blame me, I voted for Kodos)
There's a lot of coercion in having made a poor decision.
Persuasion is not the same as coercion. Who are you to say that they made a poor decision?
...Or current believers in free market capitalism, for that matter.
Given that we haven't had free market capitalism for some time, people are right to still believe in it - it would have saved us from the current crisis. A system where corporations socialise the cost of their risk-taking, (but not the profits, of course) is not a free market. A system where banks are required by law to make sub-prime loans (Community Reinvestment Act) is not a free market.
I've never done that kind of comparison as I will never install Microsoft Windows on my Mac, but I am much more impressed with it on the Mac than I was on Microsoft Windows XP.
Well, it's been over a year since I played WoW, so things may have changed, but at the time, it was optimised for directx. It's possible they since got their act together on the Mac version. It's also possible that when you switched to Mac, you were simply playing with better hardware.
We're not talking about subjective value-feelings here;
Of course we're talking about relative values. Nobody has been coerced - they have merely been persuaded to change their values. People buy particular brands of clothing for similar reasons.
we're talking about intentional manipulation by a sleak advertising campaign that turns people into drones who really do believe that there is something magical in a Mac that other computers don't have.
I have to admit, the Apple (and in some ways, Google) approach of collecting followers does seem rather creepy, but ultimately, people are responsible for their own decisions.
People often criticise Microsoft for putting money first. There's a popular bible quote, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
If you accept that, then logically (yet disturbingly), the most profitable course of action is to collect souls. That seems to be Apple and Google's business plan.
Where's the value? Technically speaking, it's got the same hardware in it as a Windows laptop.
As the parent said, "Price is what you pay, value is what you get" Value is subjective. People might grumble about the higher prices, but if they still pay it, then they either received value, or are otherwise irrational beings.
To paraphrase Joe Biden, "two words - World of Warcraft."
WoW really rocks on a Mac. As a Draenei in Winterspring on a Mac you can almost feel the snow beneath your hooves ...
Really? I'd heard a while back, that WoW ran faster on a Mac running windows than it did with OS X... Is this no longer the case, or was I misinformed to begin with?
"This puts the nation at the heart of a software controversy..."
Not going open source is a controversy now? When did that happen?
Also, the melting point of the steel used in the Twin Towers is actually about 400 degrees HOTTER than the temperature at which jet fuel burns.
The steel doesn't need to melt to cause catastrophic failure... which is why, for instance, steel support beams on a bridge can collapse when a fuel tanker explodes.
The Twin Towers would also be the first example in history of a steel building where the steel failed due to fire.
Yeah... well, it was a bit more than a normal fire, wasn't it?
It's cute how you Americans think the Democrats are left wing.
It's cute how socialists thing they're not left-wing enough...
Wait - you mean to tell me that MoveOn.org is opposed to a Republican? Stop the presses!
John McCain is 72 years old and has had several cancerous growths removed.
I'm not an actuarial, but I bet the odds are not good that he'd make it through a full term.
So, if McCain keels over, you get someone with little experience become president... on the other hand, if Obama gets in, you have someone with little experience from day one.
Here's an even more depressing thought: in terms of executive experience, she has more than Obama, Biden and McCain combined!
[/sarcasm]Federal regulation.....what we always need.[/sarcasm]
Oh, a sarcasm tag... now there's a useful invention.
Solyanik warns that Google's engineers care more about the 'coolness' of a service than about the service's effectiveness.
I don't think that's entirely true. Like all companies, they are concerned with maximising profit - which they do by maximising use of their products. So, the question is whether users care more about coolness or the effectiveness of the service (and whether Google anticipates the correct answer to that question)