This is where the electronic infrastructure that our society is adopting starts to bite us in the ass. While it is true that it is possible to tamper with paper voting, tt is much easier to tamper with purely electronic voting because unlike paper, a digital record can vanish with literally *no record* that it ever existed, and it has to operate in a closed system. There is no way to 100% absolutely ensure that our r esults are being counted correctly, and this is the place where oversight is required most. It is in ALL of our interests to make sure that the elections are legitimate, and when roadblocks are put up against taking logical steps to achieve this certainty, it arouses quite a lot of suspicion. This should be our #1 priority as a country. Not #2, or #10. #1. Without certiably legitimate elections being undertaken, every other issue we have to deal with is mostly irrelevant because we no longer have any say in the government.
Do we trust the elected federal and state officials to oversee their own elections? I certainly don't. The fact that we still do this is just plain ridiculous. I'm not accusing people of voter fraud or intentional disenfranchisement - although I do suspect some goes on, if only "just in case." I'm just saying that these are common sense measures that should be taken immediately so that there is virtually NO way to doubt the result of our elections, which are the most important public mechanism we have in this country. Why can we secure our banks and not our elections? It's absurd that we don't have these things in place.
The first thing we need is an independent election commission with BIPARTISAN appointments of extremely credible appointees crossing every section of society, much like Mexico(where there are even now accusations of electoral fraud). The source code and hardware design for the voting machines should be OPEN to the p ublic, and not closed proprietary products invented by ONE corporation.
We also need people to be able to take home a legible copy of their electronically printed ballot with a counterfeit-proof watermark on it so that everyone can prove whom they voted for and certify that their vote was counted correctly. We need the physical counting to be played on television and overseen by the independent commission, not done in a closed room where no one from the outside can see what's going on inside. We can't count electronic votes - we have to count paper ballots, even if they are print-outs from an electronic machine.
I'm serious - we need to be anal about this. Literally every single step of the process needs to observed independently by people not in any way biased by the outcome of the process, from physically building the voting machines to loading the software onto them to conducting the election. This is just too important.
Why aren't we anal already? I don't know, but it seems it's probably because there are plenty of interests stacked against this type of reform. Why is it that every time someone asks Congress(both the US Congress and state Congress) to start major election reform they seem quite reluctant to take the measures necessary? Why is this? I doubt it's because of budget considerations, since we seem perfectly willing to spend $8 billion a month on a war in a far off country. Why do the American people tolerate a closed election process on EITHER side of the spectrum? Everybody deserves to have their vote counted! Everyone should demand that they know for certain that their vote was counted.
Yeah, I was worried you might misunderstand me. I'm worried about what the people we need to persuade to land-slide an election in our direction will think of us if they associate us with that kind of utterance. No matter how reasonable your position is, we need to show that we're more rational than the people we're moving against, and openly discussing social darwinist positions, ones that involve "weeding out" the crazies is not going to accomplish that. The crazies are irrelevant as long as they're not in power. Unfortunately, they are in power, and we actually have to debate them in the public forum. Don't give them any more ammunition than they already have. The point is you wouldn't be this frustrated if people you agreed with were in power - and frustration is not really an appealing thing to watch from the outside, especially if people don't understand where you're coming from.
The people who are relevant are those whose consent we need to govern. "We" in this case means moderates or liberals.
Anyway, feel free to shoot your mouth off anytime you please, as you probably aren't running for office. I'm just saying, providing a stimulus and excuse for knee-jerk, red-faced rage among us moderates or liberals is not going to help any of us get elected.
Huh...what should we call tbat mechanism? wait..I think I have one... Social darwinism. Oh wait - that doesn't work.
please, people, tone down your rhetoric a little bit. I'm on your side, but thanks to this kind of discourse we're starting to look really crazy now. i know it's because we're frustrated, but is "He should really die" and "We should let everyone whom we think stupid or disagrees with us die" (I assume this is what you mean by "weeding" out) going to help us change things? It's just going to provide fodder for the radical right to throw at us, sucking the life and meaning out of any debate with them(as if there was any to begin with.) I don't think you would being saying these things if the people in power were people you agree with.
Your comment has a few spelling mistakes. Let me fix them for you.
Seriously. I know it seems like Vista will never come, but in 7 to 12 short years it will be here. We've all had a good laugh at Microsoft for over five years now. [...]
I haven't actually had the opportunity to use Vista yet, but I have been using OS X for about two years now and if there is truly no chance it will be anything like OS X then it will definitely make XP seem usable in comparison.
I think it would, as long as, as another poster said, the rocket didn't accelerate that object past the escape velocity of the entire system. And it might not move the entire object, but it would certainly change the shape of the object - objects do not have to be rigidly connected, just physically connected(i would consider a malleable substance, such as silly putty, able to constitute an object.) All objects exert a gravitational force on other objects. Objects are pretty much artificial distinctions anyway - differentiation between objects is an aspect of cognition, not physical reality, because all objects as other people said are infinitely reducible. Distinctions and separations between objects are actually just other objects.
The large object being considered here may not be chemically connected(although it is, locally), but it certainly is physically connected - the entire thing moves together because it's bound up by gravity. So if you move one piece, (assuming you move it slowly enough) the whole thing will move.
1984 would work if you removed the double-screen and just used technology that was contemporary to Orwell's day. In fact, it did work for the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. But if you turned Big Brother into a democratically-appointed survellience system that could only watch and didn't have the Thought Police, well, then Orwell's story becomes about as spooky as Minority Report. Less, even.
Fundamental disagreement. Observation and manipulation are practically the same thing for 99% of people. It's well known that bringing a camera into a situation changes the dynamic of that situation. If you tell me point blank you wouldn't act any differently when being observed than when not beign observed, then either 1) you are lying or 2) you're not human. If you didn't find Minority Report principally spooky, well, then, we have bigger problems.
Nope. I presume that someone, either man or God, is observing me every minute of every day. I exercise my freedoms as I see fit, with the full expectation that someone will observe and, eventually, I will be called to account for my actions. (This is one of the surprisngly modern parts of Christianity, btw -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)[...] If you are less inclined to exercise your freedoms when you are being observed, well, then you probably are confusing "excerise your freedoms" with "break the rules of good behavior". Please go back to kindergarten, I think you missed a few lessons on how to operate in civilzied society.
That's a pretty scary life. Remember, not a ll of us believe in that kind of God, and not all of us feel comfortable with being observed. If you think we should be, you are suggesting nothing other than a technocratic or theocratic state, and religious law should be the governing force, not civil law.
Please go back to civics class - I think you missed the part where we talked about the constitution. "Good behavior" isn't set in stone, and beyond the basic questions of public safety, it is not something the government gets to decide. That's a cultural question, not a governmental one. Every major social change the country has seen has been because of "bad behavior." Even our revolution was a giant - and illegal - conspiracy against an occupying power -and you don't fundamentally respect our freedom to assembly, and freedoms of speech - our freedmo to say anything at all in our own homes? The point is that there is a distinction between conduct and speech, and there is a more important distinction between private and public life. For further information and rebuttals to your other arguments, see my reply to another person with a similar argument below.
But we're not removing those barriers, we're adding more barriers. Observation has existed as long as civil law. Civil law would be impossible without it, and thus therefore would freedom. Every technological advance has increased the capacity for going unobserved. Today we can send messages encrypted, so the government has no ability to read them. That certainly was not possible in the past.
Civil law would be impossible without some observation, but it is possible without *every kind* of observation. If you're speeding on a public road, you are being observed. If you are stealing money from a bank, you are being observed. All of these are *public* matters that endanger public safety and public wellbeing. What you do in your home is deliberately priveleged so that the government doesn't extend any excessive means of observation or control into your private(and FREE) life.
What are these barriers that we're putting up? Any comparison between now and five years ago will result in the discovery that we have if anything *fewer* barriers against government observation than we started with.
Technology makes it easier to collect and process information, but not necessarily to observe in the first place. It's subjective to say whether it's used against or for us. It falls to our elective representatives (hopefully, rather than the unelected judiciary) to decide what uses should be pursued. And the majority of the people want the government to be clever and resourceful in finding terrorists and other criminals who prey on the people.
Wha? Observe = collect and process. The government has access to all of our "tubes" if it wants it - the only thing preventing it from accessing our phones, internet, etc is the LAW. As we have seen witht he wiretaps, etc, people are taking liberties with that law. I put to you that it's not subjective - that would be the confusion here. Our leaders are asking us to exchange our liberty for our security. That's a situation ripe for abuse and manipulation. Moreover, any erosion of our constitutional liberties does *us* harm, against the ideal our constitution sets up, which eventually motivates further action against us. We've seen it already. United States citizens have been detained without trial for 4 years in an off-shore prison. What the hell is going on? The founder of the ACLU said that the hard part with defending liberties is that you end up defending scoundrels. Those are the people who lose their rights first.
I am certainly not. What good is free speech if no one is listening? And if the government wrongly wants to outlaw what I want to be freely do, I would rather do it defiantly than secretly. If I really want to say something privately, I use x-im.
Good for you, you are a stronger man than I. You feel free to speak your thoughts in any situation or context - 99% of people don't agree, rightly. Question: If you're being watched by the government or anyone else for that matter, you would honestly feel perfectly free say "I want to assassinate the ?" I'm not saying that you would say that - I'm just trying to ascertain that you would feel *free* to say that. It's perfectly within your rights to say that - that's free speech, not conduct, as long as you don't act on it. But the government can use it against you in as many ways as it wants to. Why do you think there's even a distinction made in our society between private/public? This sounds a lot like that flawed argument, "If I'm not doing anything wrong, there's no reason to worry that the government is watching me." Are you really that confident in your knowledge of the law and trusting of the people who enforce it to gather and report evidence honestly, without any agenda whatsoever?
Maybe you only read books one and two of the Republic. That definition of justice is brought up by one of the interlocutors and is eventually rejected by Socrates/Plato. It is replaced by this one: "Justice in the city/individual is the having and doing of one's own." Following this, each person in the government has a job that is defined by intrinsic qualities, according to a tri-partide definition of the human being, the rational, the spirited, and the base: the philosopher king, the guardians, etc.... Now the ideal city of Plato's may resemble a facist one, but it's a 2000 year old philosophical system and it's built on a flawed premise: that there are these abstract, objective "forms" of concepts like justice, heroism, the good, that float around in an objective, non-physical space which is available to humans but only through extensive rational thought. It's a pretty idea, but it doesn't really make any empirical sense. Frankly, it's silly. And do we ever trust a philosopher who thinks the best thing we can do is to make a philosopher all-powerful? Don't get me wrong, I love the Republic. But, seriously?
The Leviathan. Wow, seems you have a lot of respect for it. You would be right if our founding document was the Leviathan. It's not. It's the constitution, and that's what's being pissed on. I'd like to think that our government is built more upon the thoughts of Locke who said the social contract is produced according to the consent of the governed, and that the govenrment is always accountable to the people. This is much more appealing to me, for one, and it seems that this idea of the social contract is the one our framers used to shape the constitution.
We should take this more on a case-by-case basis. I think universal respect for an abstract national identity, not concrete members of the government apparatus such as its military, is what defines nationalism and what makes it potentially so harmful - once you settle into abstraction, it's much easier to bear the cost of lives in the name of an ideal. In America we've (sort of) been able to distinguish between criticizing our leaders and criticizing the military, though the lines are blurred at the very top. In this case it is the leaders who are to blame because they willfully deceived (it seems) troops, who bore the entire human cost of this deception (the more trivial monetary cost is borne by us and our descendants.) This is a different situation unlike National Socialism, where people's individualism were systematically eroded, but the policy of the totalitarian state was in open view and the soldiers and the populace failed to see the moral implications, and even eagerly gave themselves up to the cost. In our society we do have the right to dissent, and we have legal means to change the mission if we see that it's not just. As such, if we believe that our soldiers have been deceived by our leaders, we ought to criticize the leaders, and not the soldiers for disagreeing with us - they disagree with us, we think, because they've been lied to. In any case we are in a murky moral situation where the answers are not clear - I have no idea what to do about Iraq. But what should be clear be now is that whatever happens, it should happen under different leadership.
Obviously, you didn't read it carefully enough either. This is interesting, since you seem to feel quite superior to the rest of us that think it's a very relevant piece of work.
Surveillance and control are intimately linked. Once you remove the barriers against observation, you also remove the barriers against control. This would be one of the main themes of that entire book.
It is very relevant because in our hyper-informational society, it is becoming easier to surveille people than ever, and information is being used *against* us as opposed to *for us*.
The government should not be able to leverage what you do in your private life, what you do with your property, what you do with your money, against you, as long as you're not harming anyone else with your actions - and even when we do harm other people, we have institutions in place to protect ourself against the government - habeas corpus, the right to not incriminate ourselves, etc. It's the government that should be transparent and open to surveillance - not the populace. This is, after all, a *democracy* where the people, not any autocratic police government, are in power.
If at any moment it is possible that you are being observed by someone - anyone - aren't you less inclined to exercise your freedoms? I certainly am.
Well, both precedents were established, since the men tried at Nuremberg both gave orders and received them. If I understand correctly it was determined that your culpability wasn't covariant with your geographic distance from the crime, provided you were in the direct chain of command. People who gave orders and those who received them were both complicit.
You bring up a lot of good points. I don't think I, or anybody, can answer any of your questions conclusively, because contrary to what most people like to believe, "evil" is almost never done knowingly. People are constantly redefining what "good" is to encompass their own beliefs. If we agree to say (charitably) that people always act in rational accordance with their beliefs, then it follows that people never do anything believing that either it or its consequences are fundamentally evil. At some level people always believe that what they are doing constitutes some "good" - even at a barely conscious level. This fact explains why we've been conditioned to buy into static definitions of good and evil - such definitions give us the resolution to act on behalf of our beliefs. This makes psychological sense, since our behavior is determined initially by what elicits thoughts and feelings of "good" - this is how it is reinforced.
Unfortunately, this is exactly why evil happens. The Nazis believed that ridding the world of the Jews was good. Likewise, the Romans believed that invading foreign territories and killing off their inhabitants was good. With this in mind it is hard to say whether it is reasonable to act on any belief at all, since all beliefs are subject to error. So your question is very difficult: is someone who commits to anything and kills on its behalf honorable and heroic or a fool and taking a grave moral risk? Most people think that believing in something and acting on its behalf is inherently respectable - but they fail to take into account the fact that it is exactly *this* capacity that allows the most egregious evil to occur. So, no, I don't necessarily think that both sides of a conflict inherently demand respect and admiration. On the other hand, I believe that our soldiers demand respect from *us* because - in their minds - they are sacrificing their lives in part *for us*, even if their mission is corrupt or misguided. At some point soldiers do have the responsibility to abort a mission if they see that its goals are contrary to their personal morals - but like anything this is their determination, not ours. It is their prerogative to act with their own agency and to reject a prescribed morality that they see as evil.
Yes, responsibility for individual's own actions rests squarely on his own shoulders. There is no where else to locate the primary burden of responsibility.
The problem is that every decision a human being makes is based on a certain level of trust: trust that your senses aren't lying to you, that your reasoning is correct and faculties are in tact, and that you are not being willfully deceived by those who give you the information on which you base your judgements.
So in response to this:
Somehow in this country we have decided that soldiers are sacred, and that an individual is not morally culpable if he willingly gives up his own freedom of conscience with knowledge and hands it over to the President.
It's not so much that we have decided that they aren't morally culpable - of course they are. However, since World War II, it's been almost universally agreed upon that those who give orders are, at the very least, just as responsible for the consequences as those who execute them. In many cases, it turns out that they are even more responsible. Orders discharged down the chain of command usually never encounter resistance from an ethical consideration - hence, the term "banality of evil," the justification of "I was just doing my job." Those who give orders, after all, define what the mission is, and are charged with justifying the purpose for the mission to their subordinates. Moreover in the military the chain of command is sacrosanct, and the circumstances are stacked against a soldier refusing to perform a mission, It's much more difficult for a soldier to think clearly about the ethical ramifications of his undertaking - his risks are much more immediate than those of the chiefs of staff and think tank theorists who dreamt it up from an armchair.
Soldiers are willing to take on the risk of losing their lives - that is a sacred sacrifice, one that we all should admire and respect, even if we don't agree with its premise. But they are willing to do so because they trust that any mission given to them by their leaders is worthy of that sacrifice. Any leader who doesn't take into consideration the human cost, or even worse is willing to bear such a human cost for an unworthy mission, is either evil or insane.
They're supposed to be doing both, I would imagine That's probably the whole point behind the quota. But if they identify false threats because they've been asked to meet a quota, then they're overloading the counter-terrorism effort with bad information, and that's just going to slow us down and decrease effectiveness overall by forcing us to analyze non-threats.
I don't know if quotas are always ineffective I think quotas increase effectiveness for law enforcement where the expected number of law violations is realistically going to be greater than the set quota, like with traffic violations. But with something like terrorist activity where the expected result of terrorist monitoring is one or two suspicious people, tops, the quota is just going to falsely inflate the amount of suspicious behavior reported and going to mislead authorities and ultimately hurt us all. They should be instead concentrating on hiring and training people who are quick and alert - this is a job that takes skill in order to be able to identify true threats.
My point, which you obtusely missed, was that the parent post said that scientists such as he would not allow their preconceived notions to allow them to miss the truth when proven scientifically. In the same post he stated that a scientific proving of the existance of God would not change his POV. Therefore, he contradicted himself---I was merely underscoring that. Of course, when one sets the criteria of proof, anything can be avoided.
And my point was that none of these questions cannot *ever* be settled one way or the other by science - in a sense that religion and science talk past each other, the only real confusion is that which takes place when people try to replace science with a literal reading of scripture. There is no real conflict there, a belief in God is not mutually exclusive with a respect or love for science. In other words, I was trying to reframe the parent's argument to make a stronger point.
What Science can't do is prove God exists? I disagree. It is a logical fallacy to force the other side to prove a negative, but Science can't prove God does not exist any more than it can
Good, we agree then. I said the following in my post:
Scientists cannot prove that God, a supernatural entity, exists or doesn't exist, or any of those other questions
*Everything* you know is of course an inference made on the premise that you trust that your sensory perception is not in error, which is a "leap"(most would say justified) of faith . So yes, everything that counts as knowledge is actually simply a justified belief. But the criterion for justification in science is different from that in religion. Not only that, but religion changes the definition of "know" from "justified belief" to "justified, infallible, true belief." So religion claims knowledge where science claims belief. This definition of knowledge is *built* into science - otherwise science wouldn't produce anything of value, because it has to be flexible to replace bad or insufficient theories with better ones.
There is direct evidence supporting evolution. Micro-evolution happens all the time - microbes become resistant to antibiotics, viruses (while only half-alive) mutate in ways to improve their chances for survival. There have been macro-evolutionary changes in species dating from the industrial revolution. See the book The Beak of the Finch. IIRC there have been reports of new divergences occuring in species in Canada as well.
Look, I'm not an atheist - I should have made this clearer. At the very least I'm an agnostic, if not a deist or theist. What I'm arguing against is not an inference establishing the existence of God but everything thing that comes *after* that inference is made. That is, all of the assumptions about moral values and the veracity of religious myth set down thousands of years ago with in many cases no more evidence than the advice of the cleric or parent who passed down scripture. This is what largely constitutes religious organization and defines religious conflict. This is where the confusion, ignorance, and violence come in. We can't make assumptions about God's moral values because we have no logical justification for those assumptions. While God's existence can be inferred, what can't be inferred is what God wants us to do with our lives. Every version of that story has been invented out of whole cloth. Atheists seem to mistakenly channel their resentment towards such religious posturing into a wholesale denial of a creator. I don't think this is logical any more than you do.
And while the mere existence of God isn't scientifically relevant, it is philosophically relevant and also a logical inference assuming our premise holds true that every effect has a cause. Everything in the realm of transcendental and analytic notions belongs to philosophy
Hmm, if scientific findings proved the Bible correct, then:
1. God exists---based on scientific finding;
2. Man screwed the pooch in Eden---based on scientific finding;
3. Jesus was the redeemer---based on scientific finding.
4. The "way the universe is" would hold that we owe allegiance to God.
Nonsense. Scientists cannot prove that God, a supernatural entity, exists or doesn't exist, or any of those other questions. Science will never assert the existence of a supernatural entity, because such a hypothesis is by definition untestable. God is unpredictable, and does not obey the causal forces of the universe. This is not just a scientific problem - it's an epistemological one. God is by definition not available to science, existing, allegedly, outside the materialistic world. The most science can do is hypothesize and demonstrate that the literal events of the Bible happened as narrated in its verse. I think this is what the parent meant to say. And so far, science has shown exactly the opposite.
How is Evolution any different? Since Evolution is a continuing process, could you please demonstrate an intermediate step where one lower-order species is becoming a higher species? And, I would like to point out that the nature of life is to harmonize with the environment, and we are not doing that---which suggests we are an evolutionary dead-end.
Who said the nature of life is to harmonize with the environment? If the environment includes other species, then the relationship between life and its environment is a complex and primarily *agonistic* one, only intermittently harmonic. Harmonize up until the point where survival is guaranteed; harmony is the aim only if the environment is threatening the possibility of extinction. Species are in a constant state of flux. There has been plenty of unearthed intermediary fossils. The chain of evolution is the biological equivalent of a line(or, as the case may be, a tree). Can you find me the smallest point on a geometric line? No. Because a line has an infinite number of points; similarly, evolution has a vast number of incremental steps that involve the minutest changes from organism to organism. We're not going to be able to find examples of every mutation that resulted in homo sapiens. So far, the evidence unearthed approximates the evolutionary predictions made by Darwin's theory of natural selection and shows incremental changes. This is why it is such a powerful theory, because it *predicts* the existence of niches and organisms with specific characteristics to fill those niches. The Bible, according to some, predicts a second coming of Christ and the apocalypse. It turns out evolution has happened and the apocalypse hasn't. But I guarantee you if tomorrow there was earth-shattering evidence that the entire mechanism behind our conception of evolution is false, we would have to reformulate our theory, whereas the fundamentalists stick to their guns no matter how much their beliefs collapse under the weight of evidence. There's not some huge anti-religious conspiracy going on among scientists, many scientists are faithful. But the criterion for truth in science is simply different than that of religion. The one thing true scientists will *never* do is assert the existence of a supernatural entity to explain observed phenomenon.
But, applying your assumption as to the scientific validity of the Bible's message, the truth would require you to shatter your own preconceived notion. This is something your post shows you are not willing to do. Of course, truth is allegedly subjective. So, by your reckoning, scientists just want to know "truth," which is not always consistent with facts. Adherents to religion accept a truth and admit that truth is accepted without all the facts---we accept the truth based on inferences.
It's not this simple, but if I understand correctly, if the amyloid clears out and there hasn't been significant brain tissue degeneration due to prolonged nerve dysfunction, then areas of their brain that were "clogged" up should function correctly again. This means remembering things that had been forgotten, among other things. In human memory, unlike in computer memory, recall and storage are practically one in the same thing - so if you can't remember something, it isn't meaningfully different from losing that memory. This is because "remembering" something means sending an impulse through a synaptically defined memory, an arrangement of neurons and chemicals that literally constitute what that memory is.
we run up credit card debt at 20-30% interest (the mafia gives better rates).
Actually, the mafia has a tiered compounding interest rate for all of their loans..I've seen their policy. IIRC, the rate chart looks something like this:
1 week: Veiled threat to kill your family. 2 weeks: Tiretreads of a '76 Buick LeSabre or 82' Cadillac Deville over your arm 3 weeks: A lead pipe to the knee cap or lower back - your choice 4 weeks: Gunshot wound to your shoulder, courtesy of Bambino "the Stallion" Carmatsi 5 weeks: A free face stabbing
The chart I saw only has listing for the five weeks, but I hear they have long-term plans as well.
I think in this case, up close means (as a guesstimate) 1.6 kpc = 4.9370884 × 10^19 meters away.
So I guess the summary is using "up close" as a relative term. Or like with most/. headlines they didn't really think about the words they were using while they wrote it. It's not "news for English majors" after all.
and protein folding, rocket engineering, and military battlefield simulations, and automobile computers, and telephone switching, and cell phone software - woah...practically everything in the economy nowadays involves a software problem.......does that mean Microsoft should be dominating all those software markets too? The consumer market for software is not just one industry, but many industries.
Sure, Microsoft is shrewd at annhilating competition sometimes. But the beauty of capitalism is that even though every transaction is ultimately motivated by self-interest, each transaction benefits both sides - the buyer and the seller - not just the seller. And with the kind of dirty attitude Microsoft displays, it appears that the company views the consumer as a means to an end, not an end in itself. They are not concerned with the interests of the consumer. If they were, they wouldn't be so hell-bent on destroying Google. Rather, they would observe that Google is good at what it does, and so a) they should either stay out of the enterprise search business altogether or 2) try to keep healthy competition with Google alive so as to serve the costumers along with themselves. And I'm not talking the kind of lop-sided competition Microsoft forced Apple into during the 90's.
Unfortunately, this kind of equanimous attitude doesn't really play a role among corporate strategists, and hasn't for quite some time. Instead, the prevailing attitude seems to be: overwhelm your opponents so they die; enter new markets and conquer them; don't do *one* thing really well - do many things moderately well, or even poorly. Eventually this kind of attitude is not meaningfully different from a conspiracy against the consumer. It's sad that this is the way it's going, not just with Microsoft but with other corporate giants. The whole point of the antitrust ruling and antitrust legislation was to stop this kind of behavior.
And I think that this behavior has its origin in a kind of slave morality that entrepeneurs have. The market is hard to survive in. Businesses start off small. They have fight their way tooth and nail to the top. But once they get there, they should shift their attitude to one commensurate with their new situation. After all, they are no longer in an environment where the market is a threatening force. They are no longer burdened by the possibility of extinction. However, you see it over and over again: people, having achieved power, fail to shift their attitude. In some sense, they still view themselves as the little guy, threatened by competition. They need to keep expanding into new markets, because if they don't they will be crushed. There is some very basic confusion going on, and it's built in to the way corporations are structured - executives are hired and fired based on their ability to devise new ways to crush competition. If they fail to return staggering growth, they are gone.
Unfettered growth for a select few corporations doesn't help anyone. It stifles innovation, obstructs the free market, and skews the overall composition of our society against the individual.
Ok, no name calling or other ad hominems. Here's what I mean to say: Your tone was agitated to a degree incommensurate with the tone of my post - considering I don't think I said anything too controversial . I'm no polemicist. You also invented a crisis for Apple where there is none - Apple's computer business is getting better year by year, all the more because of the Intel transition and the halo effect from the iPod.
I know how awesome Cocoa is to develop for. I use it every day. Doesn't matter one bit. If a commercial software house (one with suits who make the real decisions, like 99% of large software producers out there) sees that it can save significant costs by dropping a Mac-specific port without losing any revenue, they will do it in a heartbeat. Doesn't matter what the developers say. They can beg and plead all they want, the suits will not listen. The bottom line is king.
Your point? If there's seamless integration with Windows, you will *still* run the application, even if there is no port, in the Mac - that would be the entire point of providing Windows applications. But once users recognize that the Mac experience is better after they've seen the two compared side-by-side, users who can afford to pay the price premium for the better user experience will flock to the platform. You see: not only can the Mac run novel Macintosh programs, and POSIX-compliant programs, X11, Gnome, KDE and Java programs, it can *also* run Windows programs - quickly. Basically, every program ever written for the personal computer will run at high performance on the Mac.
Seriously, think about it for a second. Windows owns 90+% of the market. Any company that wants major profits is required to develop for Windows. You can't develop for Windows using Cocoa because Yellow Box was never carried forward this far (unless that's Steve's big surprise for WWDC - fully functioning Yellow Box on Windows). So you are stuck with the MFC et al.
I am thinking about it, but it's not making sense. Right now it's true that any company that wants *massive* profits writes for Windows. But saying that this will always be the case is very short-sighted. In fact, what you say is exactly *why* providing Windows compatibility for OS X is important - because that's where the most applications are. Again, the goal here is to aquire more users first - and if you promise users that there will be *no loss* of functionality in a switch from Windows to Mac, they will be more inclined to buy Mac hardware. Why? Apple would offer to Windows users something that they don't have - a smoother user experience, a much broader support for applications(again, with Windows compatibility that brings the sum total of applications you can run to POSIX, X11(Gnome, KDE) applications, Cocoa applications, Java applications, and most importantly Windows applications). Right now a major barrier to adoption of Macs is the fact that you automatically *lose* the potential to run some applications if you purchase one. Boot Camp diminishes that barrier, but in my opinion not enough. Virtualization removes that barrier completely. That turns the removes the barrier from the Mac and more importantly places it in front of users switching *against* Windows - who now will not be able to run applications inside Windows.
I think porting Yellow Box to Windows would be counterproductive, especially if done incorrectly. That's one of the main draws to the Mac platform *for developers* and for users - and a selling point for Apple is the iLife suite, etc. If it enables Microsoft to support all of those applications in Windows, Apple shoots itself in the foot by sacrificing one of its major attractions and literally handing over part of its better developer-user experience to Windows, not to mention all the applications that are only for Mac(quite a few at this point) that cannot be found on Windows. The goal here is to make Windows look inferior to Mac OS X. This won'
Parallels Workstation is powered by a lightweight hypervisor, which is a thin software layer between Primary OS and host computer. The lightweight hypervisor directly controls some of the host machine's hardware resources and provides a "hypercall" interface to it for both virtual machine monitors (VMMs) and primary OS eliminating overhead and improving virtual machine speed, performance and isolation. Parallels Workstation's lightweight hypervisor also enables full support for hardware virtualization technologies like Intel Virtualization Technology ("VT") and AMD SVM (Secure Virtual Machine).
" Parallels Desktop enables Mac users to access Windows programs without giving up the functionality, power and usability of their Mac OS X desktops," said Nick Dobrovolskiy, CEO of Parallels. "We've broken through the barrier that previously kept Mac and Windows from effectively working together side-by-side, simultaneously, on one computer."
Parallels near-native performance and rock-solid stability is driven by its hypervisor-powered virtualization engine, and full support for Intel® Virtualization Technology, which is included in all new Mac Mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro computers.
So, no, you are wrong. The primary OS and the guest OS are both inserted on top of the Parallels hypervisor. They run side-by-side. This would be why it's called "Parallels" and not "Serials." Thanks for playing.
Relax - no need to be an alarmist jackass. I was just throwing out possibilities. This would be what +5 interesting is most often used for. Anyway, you admit to being wrong about the Intel transition, and likewise you are wrong about this.
But as long as you've set up a straw man argument to knock down(of course I know that Apple's not going to license OS X, or remove the incentive to make OS X apps run directly on Cocoa), however, I might as well tell you about 1) my real suggestion and 2) how wrong you are.
There's no way that Windows compatibility would destroy the incentive to make OS X apps. First, there's going to be a performance hit no matter how seamless you make the experience. This is why people developed for OS X Cocoa and Carbon when Classic was still running inside of virtualization - to run a classic app you had to wait for Mac OS 9 to boot inside of OS X, wait for the application to start up, and the interface was cludgy, ugly and cumbersome compared to the snappy, anti-aliased Aqua interface.. Plus, developing for Cocoa is a *dream*. People who make performance applications are going to want to develop products in a way that gives users the best experience possible. If they make an app that has to be run inside Windows, existing Mac users are going to be frustrated by the boot up process and the application and they are going to give that product a bad reputation. Moreover, Apple can make the Windows experience work as seamlessly as it wants - I'm not going to say that they're *necessarily* going to make it completely seamless. I was just suggesting that possibility. In fact they might make Windows run inside a window like Parallels, or make the Windows windows appear using the disgusting "blue bubble" or Windows classic interface inside of Mac OS X. The degree of integration is entirely up to them - I'm just suggesting that they've already gestured towards a higher level of Windows compatibility, so it doesn't seem farfetched to say they would integrate the possibility of running Windows applications in some way directly into the OS.
The "cliff" you talk about is a little farther away than you think. The only thing that has changed with the Intel transition is the processor - and all of the benefits that come with it. It's just a brand of chip however. Apple tied OS X to its hardware even when it was on the PowerPC. So Apple is in full command of what it is doing - it is taking very deliberate steps towards mounting a more efffective competition to the Windows platform. Sure, it's a risk- but what good business decision isn't? They're slowly(or rather quickly, it seems) positioning themselves to combat Microsoft in a side by side user comparison - and they're confident that OS X's user experience can defeat Windows in such a comparison. I think so too. OS X just works - it's a better product, point blank. The platform is tightly integrated. There are no driver hassles. There are much fewer application errors. The system is more secure - no malware, viruses, etc. The benefits go on and on. And anyway the ultimate goal for Apple is not *First* to attract more developers, it's to attract more users and sell more hardware - after all, in this case there is to be demand for a developer's product before there is a supply. Again, this is going to happen when people are able to compare the two platforms - Windows and OS X- side by side, and opt for the latter. The developers will come after that. It's not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
This is where the electronic infrastructure that our society is adopting starts to bite us in the ass. While it is true that it is possible to tamper with paper voting, tt is much easier to tamper with purely electronic voting because unlike paper, a digital record can vanish with literally *no record* that it ever existed, and it has to operate in a closed system. There is no way to 100% absolutely ensure that our r esults are being counted correctly, and this is the place where oversight is required most. It is in ALL of our interests to make sure that the elections are legitimate, and when roadblocks are put up against taking logical steps to achieve this certainty, it arouses quite a lot of suspicion. This should be our #1 priority as a country. Not #2, or #10. #1. Without certiably legitimate elections being undertaken, every other issue we have to deal with is mostly irrelevant because we no longer have any say in the government.
Do we trust the elected federal and state officials to oversee their own elections? I certainly don't. The fact that we still do this is just plain ridiculous. I'm not accusing people of voter fraud or intentional disenfranchisement - although I do suspect some goes on, if only "just in case." I'm just saying that these are common sense measures that should be taken immediately so that there is virtually NO way to doubt the result of our elections, which are the most important public mechanism we have in this country. Why can we secure our banks and not our elections? It's absurd that we don't have these things in place.
The first thing we need is an independent election commission with BIPARTISAN appointments of extremely credible appointees crossing every section of society, much like Mexico(where there are even now accusations of electoral fraud). The source code and hardware design for the voting machines should be OPEN to the p ublic, and not closed proprietary products invented by ONE corporation.
We also need people to be able to take home a legible copy of their electronically printed ballot with a counterfeit-proof watermark on it so that everyone can prove whom they voted for and certify that their vote was counted correctly. We need the physical counting to be played on television and overseen by the independent commission, not done in a closed room where no one from the outside can see what's going on inside. We can't count electronic votes - we have to count paper ballots, even if they are print-outs from an electronic machine.
I'm serious - we need to be anal about this. Literally every single step of the process needs to observed independently by people not in any way biased by the outcome of the process, from physically building the voting machines to loading the software onto them to conducting the election. This is just too important.
Why aren't we anal already? I don't know, but it seems it's probably because there are plenty of interests stacked against this type of reform. Why is it that every time someone asks Congress(both the US Congress and state Congress) to start major election reform they seem quite reluctant to take the measures necessary? Why is this? I doubt it's because of budget considerations, since we seem perfectly willing to spend $8 billion a month on a war in a far off country. Why do the American people tolerate a closed election process on EITHER side of the spectrum? Everybody deserves to have their vote counted! Everyone should demand that they know for certain that their vote was counted.
Yeah, I was worried you might misunderstand me. I'm worried about what the people we need to persuade to land-slide an election in our direction will think of us if they associate us with that kind of utterance. No matter how reasonable your position is, we need to show that we're more rational than the people we're moving against, and openly discussing social darwinist positions, ones that involve "weeding out" the crazies is not going to accomplish that. The crazies are irrelevant as long as they're not in power. Unfortunately, they are in power, and we actually have to debate them in the public forum. Don't give them any more ammunition than they already have. The point is you wouldn't be this frustrated if people you agreed with were in power - and frustration is not really an appealing thing to watch from the outside, especially if people don't understand where you're coming from.
The people who are relevant are those whose consent we need to govern. "We" in this case means moderates or liberals.
Anyway, feel free to shoot your mouth off anytime you please, as you probably aren't running for office. I'm just saying, providing a stimulus and excuse for knee-jerk, red-faced rage among us moderates or liberals is not going to help any of us get elected.
Huh...what should we call tbat mechanism? wait..I think I have one... Social darwinism. Oh wait - that doesn't work.
please, people, tone down your rhetoric a little bit. I'm on your side, but thanks to this kind of discourse we're starting to look really crazy now. i know it's because we're frustrated, but is "He should really die" and "We should let everyone whom we think stupid or disagrees with us die" (I assume this is what you mean by "weeding" out) going to help us change things? It's just going to provide fodder for the radical right to throw at us, sucking the life and meaning out of any debate with them(as if there was any to begin with.) I don't think you would being saying these things if the people in power were people you agree with.
I think it would, as long as, as another poster said, the rocket didn't accelerate that object past the escape velocity of the entire system. And it might not move the entire object, but it would certainly change the shape of the object - objects do not have to be rigidly connected, just physically connected(i would consider a malleable substance, such as silly putty, able to constitute an object.) All objects exert a gravitational force on other objects. Objects are pretty much artificial distinctions anyway - differentiation between objects is an aspect of cognition, not physical reality, because all objects as other people said are infinitely reducible. Distinctions and separations between objects are actually just other objects.
The large object being considered here may not be chemically connected(although it is, locally), but it certainly is physically connected - the entire thing moves together because it's bound up by gravity. So if you move one piece, (assuming you move it slowly enough) the whole thing will move.
Fundamental disagreement. Observation and manipulation are practically the same thing for 99% of people. It's well known that bringing a camera into a situation changes the dynamic of that situation. If you tell me point blank you wouldn't act any differently when being observed than when not beign observed, then either 1) you are lying or 2) you're not human. If you didn't find Minority Report principally spooky, well, then, we have bigger problems.
That's a pretty scary life. Remember, not a
ll of us believe in that kind of God, and not all of us feel comfortable with being observed. If you think we should be, you are suggesting nothing other than a technocratic or theocratic state, and religious law should be the governing force, not civil law.
Please go back to civics class - I think you missed the part where we talked about the constitution. "Good behavior" isn't set in stone, and beyond the basic questions of public safety, it is not something the government gets to decide. That's a cultural question, not a governmental one. Every major social change the country has seen has been because of "bad behavior." Even our revolution was a giant - and illegal - conspiracy against an occupying power -and you don't fundamentally respect our freedom to assembly, and freedoms of speech - our freedmo to say anything at all in our own homes? The point is that there is a distinction between conduct and speech, and there is a more important distinction between private and public life. For further information and rebuttals to your other arguments, see my reply to another person with a similar argument below.
Civil law would be impossible without some observation, but it is possible without *every kind* of observation. If you're speeding on a public road, you are being observed. If you are stealing money from a bank, you are being observed. All of these are *public* matters that endanger public safety and public wellbeing. What you do in your home is deliberately priveleged so that the government doesn't extend any excessive means of observation or control into your private(and FREE) life.
What are these barriers that we're putting up? Any comparison between now and five years ago will result in the discovery that we have if anything *fewer* barriers against government observation than we started with.
Wha? Observe = collect and process. The government has access to all of our "tubes" if it wants it - the only thing preventing it from accessing our phones, internet, etc is the LAW. As we have seen witht he wiretaps, etc, people are taking liberties with that law. I put to you that it's not subjective - that would be the confusion here. Our leaders are asking us to exchange our liberty for our security. That's a situation ripe for abuse and manipulation. Moreover, any erosion of our constitutional liberties does *us* harm, against the ideal our constitution sets up, which eventually motivates further action against us. We've seen it already. United States citizens have been detained without trial for 4 years in an off-shore prison. What the hell is going on? The founder of the ACLU said that the hard part with defending liberties is that you end up defending scoundrels. Those are the people who lose their rights first.
Good for you, you are a stronger man than I. You feel free to speak your thoughts in any situation or context - 99% of people don't agree, rightly. Question: If you're being watched by the government or anyone else for that matter, you would honestly feel perfectly free say "I want to assassinate the ?" I'm not saying that you would say that - I'm just trying to ascertain that you would feel *free* to say that. It's perfectly within your rights to say that - that's free speech, not conduct, as long as you don't act on it. But the government can use it against you in as many ways as it wants to. Why do you think there's even a distinction made in our society between private/public? This sounds a lot like that flawed argument, "If I'm not doing anything wrong, there's no reason to worry that the government is watching me." Are you really that confident in your knowledge of the law and trusting of the people who enforce it to gather and report evidence honestly, without any agenda whatsoever?
Maybe you only read books one and two of the Republic. That definition of justice is brought up by one of the interlocutors and is eventually rejected by Socrates/Plato. It is replaced by this one: "Justice in the city/individual is the having and doing of one's own." Following this, each person in the government has a job that is defined by intrinsic qualities, according to a tri-partide definition of the human being, the rational, the spirited, and the base: the philosopher king, the guardians, etc.... Now the ideal city of Plato's may resemble a facist one, but it's a 2000 year old philosophical system and it's built on a flawed premise: that there are these abstract, objective "forms" of concepts like justice, heroism, the good, that float around in an objective, non-physical space which is available to humans but only through extensive rational thought. It's a pretty idea, but it doesn't really make any empirical sense. Frankly, it's silly. And do we ever trust a philosopher who thinks the best thing we can do is to make a philosopher all-powerful? Don't get me wrong, I love the Republic. But, seriously?
The Leviathan. Wow, seems you have a lot of respect for it. You would be right if our founding document was the Leviathan. It's not. It's the constitution, and that's what's being pissed on. I'd like to think that our government is built more upon the thoughts of Locke who said the social contract is produced according to the consent of the governed, and that the govenrment is always accountable to the people. This is much more appealing to me, for one, and it seems that this idea of the social contract is the one our framers used to shape the constitution.
We should take this more on a case-by-case basis. I think universal respect for an abstract national identity, not concrete members of the government apparatus such as its military, is what defines nationalism and what makes it potentially so harmful - once you settle into abstraction, it's much easier to bear the cost of lives in the name of an ideal. In America we've (sort of) been able to distinguish between criticizing our leaders and criticizing the military, though the lines are blurred at the very top. In this case it is the leaders who are to blame because they willfully deceived (it seems) troops, who bore the entire human cost of this deception (the more trivial monetary cost is borne by us and our descendants.) This is a different situation unlike National Socialism, where people's individualism were systematically eroded, but the policy of the totalitarian state was in open view and the soldiers and the populace failed to see the moral implications, and even eagerly gave themselves up to the cost. In our society we do have the right to dissent, and we have legal means to change the mission if we see that it's not just. As such, if we believe that our soldiers have been deceived by our leaders, we ought to criticize the leaders, and not the soldiers for disagreeing with us - they disagree with us, we think, because they've been lied to. In any case we are in a murky moral situation where the answers are not clear - I have no idea what to do about Iraq. But what should be clear be now is that whatever happens, it should happen under different leadership.
Obviously, you didn't read it carefully enough either. This is interesting, since you seem to feel quite superior to the rest of us that think it's a very relevant piece of work.
Surveillance and control are intimately linked. Once you remove the barriers against observation, you also remove the barriers against control. This would be one of the main themes of that entire book.
It is very relevant because in our hyper-informational society, it is becoming easier to surveille people than ever, and information is being used *against* us as opposed to *for us*.
The government should not be able to leverage what you do in your private life, what you do with your property, what you do with your money, against you, as long as you're not harming anyone else with your actions - and even when we do harm other people, we have institutions in place to protect ourself against the government - habeas corpus, the right to not incriminate ourselves, etc. It's the government that should be transparent and open to surveillance - not the populace. This is, after all, a *democracy* where the people, not any autocratic police government, are in power.
If at any moment it is possible that you are being observed by someone - anyone - aren't you less inclined to exercise your freedoms? I certainly am.
Well, both precedents were established, since the men tried at Nuremberg both gave orders and received them. If I understand correctly it was determined that your culpability wasn't covariant with your geographic distance from the crime, provided you were in the direct chain of command. People who gave orders and those who received them were both complicit.
You bring up a lot of good points. I don't think I, or anybody, can answer any of your questions conclusively, because contrary to what most people like to believe, "evil" is almost never done knowingly. People are constantly redefining what "good" is to encompass their own beliefs. If we agree to say (charitably) that people always act in rational accordance with their beliefs, then it follows that people never do anything believing that either it or its consequences are fundamentally evil. At some level people always believe that what they are doing constitutes some "good" - even at a barely conscious level. This fact explains why we've been conditioned to buy into static definitions of good and evil - such definitions give us the resolution to act on behalf of our beliefs. This makes psychological sense, since our behavior is determined initially by what elicits thoughts and feelings of "good" - this is how it is reinforced.
Unfortunately, this is exactly why evil happens. The Nazis believed that ridding the world of the Jews was good. Likewise, the Romans believed that invading foreign territories and killing off their inhabitants was good. With this in mind it is hard to say whether it is reasonable to act on any belief at all, since all beliefs are subject to error. So your question is very difficult: is someone who commits to anything and kills on its behalf honorable and heroic or a fool and taking a grave moral risk? Most people think that believing in something and acting on its behalf is inherently respectable - but they fail to take into account the fact that it is exactly *this* capacity that allows the most egregious evil to occur. So, no, I don't necessarily think that both sides of a conflict inherently demand respect and admiration. On the other hand, I believe that our soldiers demand respect from *us* because - in their minds - they are sacrificing their lives in part *for us*, even if their mission is corrupt or misguided. At some point soldiers do have the responsibility to abort a mission if they see that its goals are contrary to their personal morals - but like anything this is their determination, not ours. It is their prerogative to act with their own agency and to reject a prescribed morality that they see as evil.
The problem is that every decision a human being makes is based on a certain level of trust: trust that your senses aren't lying to you, that your reasoning is correct and faculties are in tact, and that you are not being willfully deceived by those who give you the information on which you base your judgements.
So in response to this:
It's not so much that we have decided that they aren't morally culpable - of course they are. However, since World War II, it's been almost universally agreed upon that those who give orders are, at the very least, just as responsible for the consequences as those who execute them. In many cases, it turns out that they are even more responsible. Orders discharged down the chain of command usually never encounter resistance from an ethical consideration - hence, the term "banality of evil," the justification of "I was just doing my job." Those who give orders, after all, define what the mission is, and are charged with justifying the purpose for the mission to their subordinates. Moreover in the military the chain of command is sacrosanct, and the circumstances are stacked against a soldier refusing to perform a mission, It's much more difficult for a soldier to think clearly about the ethical ramifications of his undertaking - his risks are much more immediate than those of the chiefs of staff and think tank theorists who dreamt it up from an armchair.
Soldiers are willing to take on the risk of losing their lives - that is a sacred sacrifice, one that we all should admire and respect, even if we don't agree with its premise. But they are willing to do so because they trust that any mission given to them by their leaders is worthy of that sacrifice. Any leader who doesn't take into consideration the human cost, or even worse is willing to bear such a human cost for an unworthy mission, is either evil or insane.
They're supposed to be doing both, I would imagine That's probably the whole point behind the quota. But if they identify false threats because they've been asked to meet a quota, then they're overloading the counter-terrorism effort with bad information, and that's just going to slow us down and decrease effectiveness overall by forcing us to analyze non-threats.
I don't know if quotas are always ineffective I think quotas increase effectiveness for law enforcement where the expected number of law violations is realistically going to be greater than the set quota, like with traffic violations. But with something like terrorist activity where the expected result of terrorist monitoring is one or two suspicious people, tops, the quota is just going to falsely inflate the amount of suspicious behavior reported and going to mislead authorities and ultimately hurt us all. They should be instead concentrating on hiring and training people who are quick and alert - this is a job that takes skill in order to be able to identify true threats.
And my point was that none of these questions cannot *ever* be settled one way or the other by science - in a sense that religion and science talk past each other, the only real confusion is that which takes place when people try to replace science with a literal reading of scripture. There is no real conflict there, a belief in God is not mutually exclusive with a respect or love for science. In other words, I was trying to reframe the parent's argument to make a stronger point.
Good, we agree then. I said the following in my post:
*Everything* you know is of course an inference made on the premise that you trust that your sensory perception is not in error, which is a "leap"(most would say justified) of faith . So yes, everything that counts as knowledge is actually simply a justified belief. But the criterion for justification in science is different from that in religion. Not only that, but religion changes the definition of "know" from "justified belief" to "justified, infallible, true belief." So religion claims knowledge where science claims belief. This definition of knowledge is *built* into science - otherwise science wouldn't produce anything of value, because it has to be flexible to replace bad or insufficient theories with better ones.
There is direct evidence supporting evolution. Micro-evolution happens all the time - microbes become resistant to antibiotics, viruses (while only half-alive) mutate in ways to improve their chances for survival. There have been macro-evolutionary changes in species dating from the industrial revolution. See the book The Beak of the Finch. IIRC there have been reports of new divergences occuring in species in Canada as well.
Look, I'm not an atheist - I should have made this clearer. At the very least I'm an agnostic, if not a deist or theist. What I'm arguing against is not an inference establishing the existence of God but everything thing that comes *after* that inference is made. That is, all of the assumptions about moral values and the veracity of religious myth set down thousands of years ago with in many cases no more evidence than the advice of the cleric or parent who passed down scripture. This is what largely constitutes religious organization and defines religious conflict. This is where the confusion, ignorance, and violence come in. We can't make assumptions about God's moral values because we have no logical justification for those assumptions. While God's existence can be inferred, what can't be inferred is what God wants us to do with our lives. Every version of that story has been invented out of whole cloth. Atheists seem to mistakenly channel their resentment towards such religious posturing into a wholesale denial of a creator. I don't think this is logical any more than you do.
And while the mere existence of God isn't scientifically relevant, it is philosophically relevant and also a logical inference assuming our premise holds true that every effect has a cause. Everything in the realm of transcendental and analytic notions belongs to philosophy
Nonsense. Scientists cannot prove that God, a supernatural entity, exists or doesn't exist, or any of those other questions. Science will never assert the existence of a supernatural entity, because such a hypothesis is by definition untestable. God is unpredictable, and does not obey the causal forces of the universe. This is not just a scientific problem - it's an epistemological one. God is by definition not available to science, existing, allegedly, outside the materialistic world. The most science can do is hypothesize and demonstrate that the literal events of the Bible happened as narrated in its verse. I think this is what the parent meant to say. And so far, science has shown exactly the opposite.
Who said the nature of life is to harmonize with the environment? If the environment includes other species, then the relationship between life and its environment is a complex and primarily *agonistic* one, only intermittently harmonic. Harmonize up until the point where survival is guaranteed; harmony is the aim only if the environment is threatening the possibility of extinction. Species are in a constant state of flux. There has been plenty of unearthed intermediary fossils. The chain of evolution is the biological equivalent of a line(or, as the case may be, a tree). Can you find me the smallest point on a geometric line? No. Because a line has an infinite number of points; similarly, evolution has a vast number of incremental steps that involve the minutest changes from organism to organism. We're not going to be able to find examples of every mutation that resulted in homo sapiens. So far, the evidence unearthed approximates the evolutionary predictions made by Darwin's theory of natural selection and shows incremental changes. This is why it is such a powerful theory, because it *predicts* the existence of niches and organisms with specific characteristics to fill those niches. The Bible, according to some, predicts a second coming of Christ and the apocalypse. It turns out evolution has happened and the apocalypse hasn't. But I guarantee you if tomorrow there was earth-shattering evidence that the entire mechanism behind our conception of evolution is false, we would have to reformulate our theory, whereas the fundamentalists stick to their guns no matter how much their beliefs collapse under the weight of evidence. There's not some huge anti-religious conspiracy going on among scientists, many scientists are faithful. But the criterion for truth in science is simply different than that of religion. The one thing true scientists will *never* do is assert the existence of a supernatural entity to explain observed phenomenon.
It's not this simple, but if I understand correctly, if the amyloid clears out and there hasn't been significant brain tissue degeneration due to prolonged nerve dysfunction, then areas of their brain that were "clogged" up should function correctly again. This means remembering things that had been forgotten, among other things. In human memory, unlike in computer memory, recall and storage are practically one in the same thing - so if you can't remember something, it isn't meaningfully different from losing that memory. This is because "remembering" something means sending an impulse through a synaptically defined memory, an arrangement of neurons and chemicals that literally constitute what that memory is.
Actually, the mafia has a tiered compounding interest rate for all of their loans..I've seen their policy. IIRC, the rate chart looks something like this:
1 week: Veiled threat to kill your family.
2 weeks: Tiretreads of a '76 Buick LeSabre or 82' Cadillac Deville over your arm
3 weeks: A lead pipe to the knee cap or lower back - your choice
4 weeks: Gunshot wound to your shoulder, courtesy of Bambino "the Stallion" Carmatsi
5 weeks: A free face stabbing
The chart I saw only has listing for the five weeks, but I hear they have long-term plans as well.
I think in this case, up close means (as a guesstimate) 1.6 kpc = 4.9370884 × 10^19 meters away.
/. headlines they didn't really think about the words they were using while they wrote it. It's not "news for English majors" after all.
So I guess the summary is using "up close" as a relative term. Or like with most
and protein folding, rocket engineering, and military battlefield simulations, and automobile computers, and telephone switching, and cell phone software - woah...practically everything in the economy nowadays involves a software problem.......does that mean Microsoft should be dominating all those software markets too? The consumer market for software is not just one industry, but many industries.
Sure, Microsoft is shrewd at annhilating competition sometimes. But the beauty of capitalism is that even though every transaction is ultimately motivated by self-interest, each transaction benefits both sides - the buyer and the seller - not just the seller. And with the kind of dirty attitude Microsoft displays, it appears that the company views the consumer as a means to an end, not an end in itself. They are not concerned with the interests of the consumer. If they were, they wouldn't be so hell-bent on destroying Google. Rather, they would observe that Google is good at what it does, and so a) they should either stay out of the enterprise search business altogether or 2) try to keep healthy competition with Google alive so as to serve the costumers along with themselves. And I'm not talking the kind of lop-sided competition Microsoft forced Apple into during the 90's.
Unfortunately, this kind of equanimous attitude doesn't really play a role among corporate strategists, and hasn't for quite some time. Instead, the prevailing attitude seems to be: overwhelm your opponents so they die; enter new markets and conquer them; don't do *one* thing really well - do many things moderately well, or even poorly. Eventually this kind of attitude is not meaningfully different from a conspiracy against the consumer. It's sad that this is the way it's going, not just with Microsoft but with other corporate giants. The whole point of the antitrust ruling and antitrust legislation was to stop this kind of behavior.
And I think that this behavior has its origin in a kind of slave morality that entrepeneurs have. The market is hard to survive in. Businesses start off small. They have fight their way tooth and nail to the top. But once they get there, they should shift their attitude to one commensurate with their new situation. After all, they are no longer in an environment where the market is a threatening force. They are no longer burdened by the possibility of extinction. However, you see it over and over again: people, having achieved power, fail to shift their attitude. In some sense, they still view themselves as the little guy, threatened by competition. They need to keep expanding into new markets, because if they don't they will be crushed. There is some very basic confusion going on, and it's built in to the way corporations are structured - executives are hired and fired based on their ability to devise new ways to crush competition. If they fail to return staggering growth, they are gone.
Unfettered growth for a select few corporations doesn't help anyone. It stifles innovation, obstructs the free market, and skews the overall composition of our society against the individual.
Your point? If there's seamless integration with Windows, you will *still* run the application, even if there is no port, in the Mac - that would be the entire point of providing Windows applications. But once users recognize that the Mac experience is better after they've seen the two compared side-by-side, users who can afford to pay the price premium for the better user experience will flock to the platform. You see: not only can the Mac run novel Macintosh programs, and POSIX-compliant programs, X11, Gnome, KDE and Java programs, it can *also* run Windows programs - quickly. Basically, every program ever written for the personal computer will run at high performance on the Mac.
I am thinking about it, but it's not making sense. Right now it's true that any company that wants *massive* profits writes for Windows. But saying that this will always be the case is very short-sighted. In fact, what you say is exactly *why* providing Windows compatibility for OS X is important - because that's where the most applications are. Again, the goal here is to aquire more users first - and if you promise users that there will be *no loss* of functionality in a switch from Windows to Mac, they will be more inclined to buy Mac hardware. Why? Apple would offer to Windows users something that they don't have - a smoother user experience, a much broader support for applications(again, with Windows compatibility that brings the sum total of applications you can run to POSIX, X11(Gnome, KDE) applications, Cocoa applications, Java applications, and most importantly Windows applications). Right now a major barrier to adoption of Macs is the fact that you automatically *lose* the potential to run some applications if you purchase one. Boot Camp diminishes that barrier, but in my opinion not enough. Virtualization removes that barrier completely. That turns the removes the barrier from the Mac and more importantly places it in front of users switching *against* Windows - who now will not be able to run applications inside Windows.
I think porting Yellow Box to Windows would be counterproductive, especially if done incorrectly. That's one of the main draws to the Mac platform *for developers* and for users - and a selling point for Apple is the iLife suite, etc. If it enables Microsoft to support all of those applications in Windows, Apple shoots itself in the foot by sacrificing one of its major attractions and literally handing over part of its better developer-user experience to Windows, not to mention all the applications that are only for Mac(quite a few at this point) that cannot be found on Windows. The goal here is to make Windows look inferior to Mac OS X. This won'
From this press-release on Parallels' web site:
So, no, you are wrong. The primary OS and the guest OS are both inserted on top of the Parallels hypervisor. They run side-by-side. This would be why it's called "Parallels" and not "Serials." Thanks for playing.
Relax - no need to be an alarmist jackass. I was just throwing out possibilities. This would be what +5 interesting is most often used for. Anyway, you admit to being wrong about the Intel transition, and likewise you are wrong about this.
But as long as you've set up a straw man argument to knock down(of course I know that Apple's not going to license OS X, or remove the incentive to make OS X apps run directly on Cocoa), however, I might as well tell you about 1) my real suggestion and 2) how wrong you are.
There's no way that Windows compatibility would destroy the incentive to make OS X apps. First, there's going to be a performance hit no matter how seamless you make the experience. This is why people developed for OS X Cocoa and Carbon when Classic was still running inside of virtualization - to run a classic app you had to wait for Mac OS 9 to boot inside of OS X, wait for the application to start up, and the interface was cludgy, ugly and cumbersome compared to the snappy, anti-aliased Aqua interface.. Plus, developing for Cocoa is a *dream*. People who make performance applications are going to want to develop products in a way that gives users the best experience possible. If they make an app that has to be run inside Windows, existing Mac users are going to be frustrated by the boot up process and the application and they are going to give that product a bad reputation. Moreover, Apple can make the Windows experience work as seamlessly as it wants - I'm not going to say that they're *necessarily* going to make it completely seamless. I was just suggesting that possibility. In fact they might make Windows run inside a window like Parallels, or make the Windows windows appear using the disgusting "blue bubble" or Windows classic interface inside of Mac OS X. The degree of integration is entirely up to them - I'm just suggesting that they've already gestured towards a higher level of Windows compatibility, so it doesn't seem farfetched to say they would integrate the possibility of running Windows applications in some way directly into the OS.
The "cliff" you talk about is a little farther away than you think. The only thing that has changed with the Intel transition is the processor - and all of the benefits that come with it. It's just a brand of chip however. Apple tied OS X to its hardware even when it was on the PowerPC. So Apple is in full command of what it is doing - it is taking very deliberate steps towards mounting a more efffective competition to the Windows platform. Sure, it's a risk- but what good business decision isn't? They're slowly(or rather quickly, it seems) positioning themselves to combat Microsoft in a side by side user comparison - and they're confident that OS X's user experience can defeat Windows in such a comparison. I think so too. OS X just works - it's a better product, point blank. The platform is tightly integrated. There are no driver hassles. There are much fewer application errors. The system is more secure - no malware, viruses, etc. The benefits go on and on. And anyway the ultimate goal for Apple is not *First* to attract more developers, it's to attract more users and sell more hardware - after all, in this case there is to be demand for a developer's product before there is a supply. Again, this is going to happen when people are able to compare the two platforms - Windows and OS X- side by side, and opt for the latter. The developers will come after that. It's not the other way around.