Let us not become so tolerant, that we tolerate intolerance.
You could read that two ways - surely your belief that it's right to cause religious hatred is an intolerance that shouldn't be tolerated?
So asserting my constitutional rights makes me a bigot now?
You do not have a constitutional right to deliberately provoke religious (or racial) intolerance - if you believe you have that right, that makes you a bigot. So if the cap fits, wear it.
Plenty. Yet if I draw a Jesus taking a load in the face, I can walk down the street reasonably sure that I'm not going to get shot.
And your point is what, precisely? All that says is that either Jesus isn't as revered an icon in your neighbourhood than Mohammed is in a Muslim one.
And let's pretend while you're walking down the street, a Muslim person runs up to you, pointing at you and accusing you of being a pedophile, say. By your argument, you'd not be allowed to take offence at that...
Tolerance is a two way street. If they can't tolerate might rights, why should I tolerate their theological eccentricities? Especially when they're willing to be violent against a non-violent offender.
I view it completely differently, I'm afraid - you being able to tolerate them and them not being able to tolerate you makes you the better person, and probably more right.
I shouldn't have to "earn" the right to draw a caricature of Mohammed. It is my inalienable human right to do so in the first place.
Of course it is, just like you have the "right" to go out in your can now and run someone over in you want to - but as a human, you face the consequences of those actions. And if you can't face the consequences, then don't do it in the first place - that's what you learn when you become a responsible adult.
Plenty, but I have yet to see any of them get violent over a cartoon Jesus. Plus, most of the people I've actually met, who own guns, are dead serious in regards to their use of such a hunting tool. So, your implication that people who own guns and are Christian are prone to violence shows just how bigoted you are.
By all accounts, many of them get violent for much lesser things, as we've seen with the high school massacres that have taken place.
And, no, I'm no bigot, I just don't agree with the "right" to own a gun in a civilised society, especially one that declares itself as being majority Christian.
So they don't like caricatures of Mohammed, is it *REALLY* that important you somehow earn the right to be able to do it?
And how about if a group of Muslims in Afghanistan started posting cartoons on Facebook of injured American or British soldiers? Are you going to sit back and laugh about it because "It's their right" to do so?
Grow up, boy. When you get to middle-age like me you begin to understand that life is about tolerating and making allowances for others and not letting insignificant bits of crap ruin your day.
Join the real world, take your head out of your ass and looking around you - if you do that you'll see most Muslims are normal people like you and me just getting on with their day who don't give a toss about insignificant little bigots like you.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of religious violence, just how many gun-toting Christians are there in the US?
I'm Christian by birth, non-practicing & gave up on organised religion a long time ago because I'm a perfectly nice, law-abiding & considerate citizen without it - and anyone who knocks at my home trying to gain my interest in their religion, gets told to politely "Sod off".
However, if other people want to be part of an organised religion then I have no problem with that and don't consider it my place to inflict my irreligious views on them.
But quite clearly, the Facebook contest was done to *DELIBERATELY* incite religious harassment of Moslems and that is wrong, pure & simple. It's a well published fact that Moslems are offended by caricatures of Mohammed and I don't see how it's that important to feel the need to launch some kind of protest to force it down the throats of everyone, Muslim or non-Muslim.
Sorry, but if it was caricatures of disabled people or soldiers or killed in Afghanistan, then everyone would be up-in-arms about it and someone would be offended by it.
I'm all for Free Speech but I'm more for people demonstrating some intelligence & compassion when it comes to accepting others who look different or have different beliefs - inciting hatred is pathetic!
You also forgot to mention that the Apple App Store exists in the first place because Microsoft pumped money into Apple a few years ago to stop them essentially going bankrupt.
Maybe so, but then Lord Messiah Steve needs to exercise some care - he doesn't want to completely kill off the PC just in case he needs to go crawling on his knees and cap-in-hand to Microsoft a second time...
Funnily enough, I was in my local iTesco supermarket today pushing my iTrolley and when I got to the soft drinks section of the store, I discovered to my utter amazement that I was able to load my iTrolley with a wide variety of soft drinks - Coca Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Tizer, Iron Bru, iTesco's Own Brand Tooth Rot fizzy drinks...
I'm also led to believe that with the exception of iTesco's own brand products, I can buy pretty much any of the others at other supermarkets like iSainsbury, iMorrisons, or iAsda, or indeed at countless iNewsagents or iPetrol Stations.
Likewise, when I entered iTesco's, I was not greeted by a sign that said anything to the effect of "You must buy your Coca Cola here or we will forcefully remove your gonads"...
Not that I drink much of that soft drink gut-rot anyway, but there always seems to be a pretty good selection of it available to spend my hard-earned pennies on pretty much wherever I go in the UK...
Presumably this makes Steve Jobs a complete and utter hypocrite then, on the basis that a few years ago Apple were bailed out of near-insolvency by an influx of Microsoft money that was made from selling "crap" like Windows and x86?
If the PC becomes a niche product, it will be because the "great unwashed" choose an alternative product that does things as good, better than or in a more portable manner than the PC does - in other words, the replacement product will need to be able to surf the Internet, play games, send emails, edit photos, write documents, etc. etc.
However, it is currently possible to do the above in free Open Source software, yet people are not swapping in their hordes from MS Office to OpenOffice, Photoshop to GIMP, Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. etc. The only reason for this is that many people are sticking with what they are familiar with and demonstrating a degree of "brand loyalty".
It's therefore reasonable to assume that whilst the PC may be superseded by something more portable, it won't be the iPad because the iPad can't run MS Office, Photoshop, Outlook, etc. etc.
It's precisely for this reason why even I, as a bit of a Linux nut, have to accept that Windows users aren't flocking to use Linux either.
I'm no great fan of Microsoft but the fact that at this very minute I'm posting this on a Windows XP PC that is filled to the brim with nice free and commercial software that is on here because *I*, not Microsoft, chose to put it on here makes me start to realise what Apple's control freakery really is.
And earlier on this evening, I was messing about with update game engines for Quake (Darkplaces) and Duke Nukem 3D (eduke32) having downloaded them from the Internet and loading the data files from the original game CDs in my collection - over the weekend I was playing about with Commodore Amiga and ZX Spectrum emulators.
However, due to the fact that Apple consider all such things to promote copyright theft, there is absolutely no chance of being able to do any of the above on the iPad ever, yet on my £200 Asus EEE-PC, the only restriction is the computing power within the device that might mean some of the above won't work too well.
Quite frankly, waiting 30 seconds for my "half the price of an iPad" netbook to boot is more preferable than the software dictatorship under Apple.
Incidentally, I'm in the UK where the iPad has not been released yet, but a work colleague of mine bought an iPad from the US and got it last week. The moment he got it, the first thing he did was posted on Facebook about how we was going to pose with it down the local coffee shop - I like the guy a lot but it shows that the mentality of Apple users revolves purely around image, nothing more.
Finally, my missus has an iPhone and likes it a lot, but last week was talking about swapping out her PC for a Mac - that was until I reminded her that she has a fully licensed copy of MS Office 2007 that runs happily on her Windows XP box and could be installed on a new PC running Windows 7, but if she bought a Mac she'd need to buy the Mac version of it. Again, she was tempted purely by the idea of a Mac without thinking about the real consequences...
Microwaves, refrigerators and other appliances have computers in them.
Your analogy is entirely flawed. In devices like microwaves, refrigerators and similar appliances, the in-built software is part of what determines what functionality the device has at the point of sale and whether or not someone will purchase it for those features alone. None of these devices are in any way marketed to give the buyer any illusion that he or she can change those features to any great extent.
Since a PC can play games, play music, store files, allow document creation, play movies, etc., all of which the iPad can do, then the analogy of an iPad to the functionality of a PC is much closer than to a refrigerator or other household device. Plus Apple's own marketing of the App Store alongside it's iPod, iPhone and iPad products suggests to the purchaser that the device can be customised to any level he or she sees fit.
Therefore, compared to a PC, an iPad is a locked-down computing device.
...PC gamers can rejoice at the fact that they are getting what they thought they'd be getting when they purchased the game in the first place?
It's a shame a lot more gamers don't take these greedy games companies to task using the "Sale Of Goods Act", or whatever the international equivalents are outside the UK.
I am very much looking forward to Steam on Linux provided that Valve don't expect me to re-purchase all the games I have on Windows as Linux versions - free would be best but a heavy discount (to cover the costs of porting to Linux) would be acceptable.
...because it's definitive proof that they're maintaining their elitist minority status and still capable of sneering down their noses at the rest of the great unwashed masses.
They are offering extra content for the $10, not requiring it to buy the used game.
Does it not strike you as slightly suspicious that a major complaint of many modern games is that you only get 6 hours of play for a £35/$50 game but can *PAY MORE* to extend the life of that game?
The $10 voucher allows you access to stuff that 5 years ago, before DLC existed, would have been included on the original game CD.
Sorry, but as an old man in my mid-40s with a quarter century of gaming history, modern gaming and most modern games are *CRAP*!!!
Games used to be about entertainment that lasted a lot longer than 6 hours, was actually challenging and was fun when you got a few friends round to LAN party with you.
Now it's all about leeching more money out of parents by encouraging kids to always buy some piece of DLC that they can brag about to their friends because they're the first "on the block" to get it - this is why morons queue at midnight for the latest game release, Harry Potter book or overpriced Apple gadget.
Still, I've more than enough old games to play through again, load mods into or play via an emulator, as well as few nice free/Open Source games... the rest of you rabid fanbois have brought this on yourselves by buying the crap in the first place, and you're all welcome to it.
1. Vim or vi is on pretty much every UNIX or UNIX-like system - therefore if your sysadmining a number of different UNIX flavours, vi is a common factor on them all meaning the way you edit files is the same.
2. It doesn't use any control keys for navigation - therefore no messing about getting keymaps and emulations right, as long as you have the standard alphanumeric and punctuation characters on a keyboard, you can do any editing you need in it.
3. Your.vimrc config file should be transportable across many flavours of vi - so you can quickly install your favourite shortcuts, macros and syntax highlighting.
Can I just also make a point that this is *ONLY* about familiarity with a particular application and nothing more. Yesterday, for example, it took me a couple of minutes to work out how to print a document in Office 2007 on my missus' PC when I only use OpenOffice (on XP and Linux) - yet I'm a demon editing in vi and even install it on XP because I can edit much faster in that than in Notepad or any other GUI-based Linux/Windows text editor.
I'm not paying any evil corporation to move the heads on my hard disk such that they create a music file on it but I'm quite happy with CDs that are lossless, an are an in-built backup once I've ripped them and can be arranged neatly on a shelf. I like plastic cases, liner notes I can read on the toilet and have a long enough attention span to enjoy full albums without having to treat music like "Pick N Mix" sweeties.
If I find an interesting looking album on Usenet then I download it and listen to it - if it's crap I delete it, if it's good I go buy it. That way I never buy a duff CD, meaning they're always good value for money (since I also hunt them down as cheaply as possible) and therefore I keep buying them.
I'm happy, the music industry is happy and I couldn't give a toss how much money the musicians or record companies make...
The iPhone in it's current form (software wise) is a resounding, thumping, ball-busting success.
There were over 1.2 billion mobile phone sales in 2009 alone - based on that, the million or so iPhone users is less than 1% (or 0.1% of a European billion).
How about our rich Western governments get some backbones and put laws in place on corporations that state the following:
"In any financial year where you make staff redundant because you supposedly cannot afford to pay them, you cannot go buying other companies so that you, in effect, take on more staff."
And while we're on the subject:
"Greedy shitbags like Mark Hearn cannot take a pay bonus in the same year when hundreds of HP staff, including my missus, have been laid off."
Slashdot Mirror
Let us not become so tolerant, that we tolerate intolerance.
You could read that two ways - surely your belief that it's right to cause religious hatred is an intolerance that shouldn't be tolerated?
So asserting my constitutional rights makes me a bigot now?
You do not have a constitutional right to deliberately provoke religious (or racial) intolerance - if you believe you have that right, that makes you a bigot. So if the cap fits, wear it.
Plenty. Yet if I draw a Jesus taking a load in the face, I can walk down the street reasonably sure that I'm not going to get shot.
And your point is what, precisely? All that says is that either Jesus isn't as revered an icon in your neighbourhood than Mohammed is in a Muslim one.
And let's pretend while you're walking down the street, a Muslim person runs up to you, pointing at you and accusing you of being a pedophile, say. By your argument, you'd not be allowed to take offence at that...
Tolerance is a two way street. If they can't tolerate might rights, why should I tolerate their theological eccentricities? Especially when they're willing to be violent against a non-violent offender.
I view it completely differently, I'm afraid - you being able to tolerate them and them not being able to tolerate you makes you the better person, and probably more right.
I shouldn't have to "earn" the right to draw a caricature of Mohammed. It is my inalienable human right to do so in the first place.
Of course it is, just like you have the "right" to go out in your can now and run someone over in you want to - but as a human, you face the consequences of those actions. And if you can't face the consequences, then don't do it in the first place - that's what you learn when you become a responsible adult.
Plenty, but I have yet to see any of them get violent over a cartoon Jesus. Plus, most of the people I've actually met, who own guns, are dead serious in regards to their use of such a hunting tool. So, your implication that people who own guns and are Christian are prone to violence shows just how bigoted you are.
By all accounts, many of them get violent for much lesser things, as we've seen with the high school massacres that have taken place.
And, no, I'm no bigot, I just don't agree with the "right" to own a gun in a civilised society, especially one that declares itself as being majority Christian.
I blame my poor memory actually - "Be nice to everyone" is much easier to remember than 10 commandments or passages from some holy book.
My father was Catholic, my mother was Anglican, I was brought up a Catholic until my late teens when I saw for myself the hypocrisy of it all.
Other than that, it's none of your business.
One word... tolerance.
So they don't like caricatures of Mohammed, is it *REALLY* that important you somehow earn the right to be able to do it?
And how about if a group of Muslims in Afghanistan started posting cartoons on Facebook of injured American or British soldiers? Are you going to sit back and laugh about it because "It's their right" to do so?
Grow up, boy. When you get to middle-age like me you begin to understand that life is about tolerating and making allowances for others and not letting insignificant bits of crap ruin your day.
Join the real world, take your head out of your ass and looking around you - if you do that you'll see most Muslims are normal people like you and me just getting on with their day who don't give a toss about insignificant little bigots like you.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of religious violence, just how many gun-toting Christians are there in the US?
I'm Christian by birth, non-practicing & gave up on organised religion a long time ago because I'm a perfectly nice, law-abiding & considerate citizen without it - and anyone who knocks at my home trying to gain my interest in their religion, gets told to politely "Sod off".
However, if other people want to be part of an organised religion then I have no problem with that and don't consider it my place to inflict my irreligious views on them.
But quite clearly, the Facebook contest was done to *DELIBERATELY* incite religious harassment of Moslems and that is wrong, pure & simple. It's a well published fact that Moslems are offended by caricatures of Mohammed and I don't see how it's that important to feel the need to launch some kind of protest to force it down the throats of everyone, Muslim or non-Muslim.
Sorry, but if it was caricatures of disabled people or soldiers or killed in Afghanistan, then everyone would be up-in-arms about it and someone would be offended by it.
I'm all for Free Speech but I'm more for people demonstrating some intelligence & compassion when it comes to accepting others who look different or have different beliefs - inciting hatred is pathetic!
You also forgot to mention that the Apple App Store exists in the first place because Microsoft pumped money into Apple a few years ago to stop them essentially going bankrupt.
But we're not supposed to talk about that...
Maybe so, but then Lord Messiah Steve needs to exercise some care - he doesn't want to completely kill off the PC just in case he needs to go crawling on his knees and cap-in-hand to Microsoft a second time...
Funnily enough, I was in my local iTesco supermarket today pushing my iTrolley and when I got to the soft drinks section of the store, I discovered to my utter amazement that I was able to load my iTrolley with a wide variety of soft drinks - Coca Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Tizer, Iron Bru, iTesco's Own Brand Tooth Rot fizzy drinks...
I'm also led to believe that with the exception of iTesco's own brand products, I can buy pretty much any of the others at other supermarkets like iSainsbury, iMorrisons, or iAsda, or indeed at countless iNewsagents or iPetrol Stations.
Likewise, when I entered iTesco's, I was not greeted by a sign that said anything to the effect of "You must buy your Coca Cola here or we will forcefully remove your gonads"...
Not that I drink much of that soft drink gut-rot anyway, but there always seems to be a pretty good selection of it available to spend my hard-earned pennies on pretty much wherever I go in the UK...
I'm sorry, but I really must step in here... most people who can find the money for an iPad will no longer be able to afford knickers.
Presumably this makes Steve Jobs a complete and utter hypocrite then, on the basis that a few years ago Apple were bailed out of near-insolvency by an influx of Microsoft money that was made from selling "crap" like Windows and x86?
If the PC becomes a niche product, it will be because the "great unwashed" choose an alternative product that does things as good, better than or in a more portable manner than the PC does - in other words, the replacement product will need to be able to surf the Internet, play games, send emails, edit photos, write documents, etc. etc.
However, it is currently possible to do the above in free Open Source software, yet people are not swapping in their hordes from MS Office to OpenOffice, Photoshop to GIMP, Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. etc. The only reason for this is that many people are sticking with what they are familiar with and demonstrating a degree of "brand loyalty".
It's therefore reasonable to assume that whilst the PC may be superseded by something more portable, it won't be the iPad because the iPad can't run MS Office, Photoshop, Outlook, etc. etc.
It's precisely for this reason why even I, as a bit of a Linux nut, have to accept that Windows users aren't flocking to use Linux either.
I'm no great fan of Microsoft but the fact that at this very minute I'm posting this on a Windows XP PC that is filled to the brim with nice free and commercial software that is on here because *I*, not Microsoft, chose to put it on here makes me start to realise what Apple's control freakery really is.
And earlier on this evening, I was messing about with update game engines for Quake (Darkplaces) and Duke Nukem 3D (eduke32) having downloaded them from the Internet and loading the data files from the original game CDs in my collection - over the weekend I was playing about with Commodore Amiga and ZX Spectrum emulators.
However, due to the fact that Apple consider all such things to promote copyright theft, there is absolutely no chance of being able to do any of the above on the iPad ever, yet on my £200 Asus EEE-PC, the only restriction is the computing power within the device that might mean some of the above won't work too well.
Quite frankly, waiting 30 seconds for my "half the price of an iPad" netbook to boot is more preferable than the software dictatorship under Apple.
Incidentally, I'm in the UK where the iPad has not been released yet, but a work colleague of mine bought an iPad from the US and got it last week. The moment he got it, the first thing he did was posted on Facebook about how we was going to pose with it down the local coffee shop - I like the guy a lot but it shows that the mentality of Apple users revolves purely around image, nothing more.
Finally, my missus has an iPhone and likes it a lot, but last week was talking about swapping out her PC for a Mac - that was until I reminded her that she has a fully licensed copy of MS Office 2007 that runs happily on her Windows XP box and could be installed on a new PC running Windows 7, but if she bought a Mac she'd need to buy the Mac version of it. Again, she was tempted purely by the idea of a Mac without thinking about the real consequences...
Microwaves, refrigerators and other appliances have computers in them.
Your analogy is entirely flawed. In devices like microwaves, refrigerators and similar appliances, the in-built software is part of what determines what functionality the device has at the point of sale and whether or not someone will purchase it for those features alone. None of these devices are in any way marketed to give the buyer any illusion that he or she can change those features to any great extent.
Since a PC can play games, play music, store files, allow document creation, play movies, etc., all of which the iPad can do, then the analogy of an iPad to the functionality of a PC is much closer than to a refrigerator or other household device. Plus Apple's own marketing of the App Store alongside it's iPod, iPhone and iPad products suggests to the purchaser that the device can be customised to any level he or she sees fit.
Therefore, compared to a PC, an iPad is a locked-down computing device.
...PC gamers can rejoice at the fact that they are getting what they thought they'd be getting when they purchased the game in the first place?
It's a shame a lot more gamers don't take these greedy games companies to task using the "Sale Of Goods Act", or whatever the international equivalents are outside the UK.
I am very much looking forward to Steam on Linux provided that Valve don't expect me to re-purchase all the games I have on Windows as Linux versions - free would be best but a heavy discount (to cover the costs of porting to Linux) would be acceptable.
...because it's definitive proof that they're maintaining their elitist minority status and still capable of sneering down their noses at the rest of the great unwashed masses.
They are offering extra content for the $10, not requiring it to buy the used game.
Does it not strike you as slightly suspicious that a major complaint of many modern games is that you only get 6 hours of play for a £35/$50 game but can *PAY MORE* to extend the life of that game?
The $10 voucher allows you access to stuff that 5 years ago, before DLC existed, would have been included on the original game CD.
Sorry, but as an old man in my mid-40s with a quarter century of gaming history, modern gaming and most modern games are *CRAP*!!!
Games used to be about entertainment that lasted a lot longer than 6 hours, was actually challenging and was fun when you got a few friends round to LAN party with you.
Now it's all about leeching more money out of parents by encouraging kids to always buy some piece of DLC that they can brag about to their friends because they're the first "on the block" to get it - this is why morons queue at midnight for the latest game release, Harry Potter book or overpriced Apple gadget.
Still, I've more than enough old games to play through again, load mods into or play via an emulator, as well as few nice free/Open Source games... the rest of you rabid fanbois have brought this on yourselves by buying the crap in the first place, and you're all welcome to it.
Here's why:
1. Vim or vi is on pretty much every UNIX or UNIX-like system - therefore if your sysadmining a number of different UNIX flavours, vi is a common factor on them all meaning the way you edit files is the same.
2. It doesn't use any control keys for navigation - therefore no messing about getting keymaps and emulations right, as long as you have the standard alphanumeric and punctuation characters on a keyboard, you can do any editing you need in it.
3. Your .vimrc config file should be transportable across many flavours of vi - so you can quickly install your favourite shortcuts, macros and syntax highlighting.
Can I just also make a point that this is *ONLY* about familiarity with a particular application and nothing more. Yesterday, for example, it took me a couple of minutes to work out how to print a document in Office 2007 on my missus' PC when I only use OpenOffice (on XP and Linux) - yet I'm a demon editing in vi and even install it on XP because I can edit much faster in that than in Notepad or any other GUI-based Linux/Windows text editor.
...an Apple "have not and don't want".
I agree 100%.
I'm not paying any evil corporation to move the heads on my hard disk such that they create a music file on it but I'm quite happy with CDs that are lossless, an are an in-built backup once I've ripped them and can be arranged neatly on a shelf. I like plastic cases, liner notes I can read on the toilet and have a long enough attention span to enjoy full albums without having to treat music like "Pick N Mix" sweeties.
If I find an interesting looking album on Usenet then I download it and listen to it - if it's crap I delete it, if it's good I go buy it. That way I never buy a duff CD, meaning they're always good value for money (since I also hunt them down as cheaply as possible) and therefore I keep buying them.
I'm happy, the music industry is happy and I couldn't give a toss how much money the musicians or record companies make...
US Billion = 100,000,000
European Billion = 1,000,000,000
No decimal points missing as far as I can see - perhaps spend some money on maths classes rather than overpriced gadgets.
The iPhone in it's current form (software wise) is a resounding, thumping, ball-busting success.
There were over 1.2 billion mobile phone sales in 2009 alone - based on that, the million or so iPhone users is less than 1% (or 0.1% of a European billion).
That's hardly a "ball-busting success".
How about our rich Western governments get some backbones and put laws in place on corporations that state the following:
"In any financial year where you make staff redundant because you supposedly cannot afford to pay them, you cannot go buying other companies so that you, in effect, take on more staff."
And while we're on the subject:
"Greedy shitbags like Mark Hearn cannot take a pay bonus in the same year when hundreds of HP staff, including my missus, have been laid off."