1) Lot's of software engineers do get paid by the hour, for similar reasons. It's not really always predictable work.
2) A lawyer has to deal with opposing counsel screwing up with his work. Usually software engineers don't have to deal with sentient beings in their computer adding bugs.
3) There is a huge difference in information accessibility. The information you need to know to, say, write a program is there and (relatively) easily accessible to you. The information you need to build a case may be in the minds and desks and file cabinets of someone who has every incentive to try to keep it from you. You may not have any idea until you get far into the discovery process how much a case will actually cost to litigate.
Laws are written by lawyers, voted in by politicians (80% of which are/were lawyers), and judged by judges who were lawyers.
Loopholes and vague wording are things that lawyers are GOOD at creating in our system. They are lawyers, they are supposed to be smart enough to make laws very clear; yet wherever you look, laws are written with loopholes and vague wording that permit loads of points of contention to which lawyers must be hired to resolve...
The law tries to be clear, but it never can be because it's fundamentally trying to encode all sorts of fuzzy human emotions/motivations/tendencies, etc.
Let's take your lawyer-free utopia. Rules are crystal clear and the process of checking whether a rule has been followed is straightforward and mechanical. How do you handle something like a fair use rule? A 30 second time limit? What if it's a 35 second clip that's on quietly in the background of an Indie movie? What if it's a 15 second clip of an advertisement lifted directly from a competing company's ad?
Look at laws that have crystal clear applications: statutory rape laws. Did they have sex? If yes, is she under 17? If yes, then guilty! No mind that it was her 18 year old boyfriend. How about drug possession? No need for judges to do the sentencing, we can simply make sentencing mechanical. 10 years for 10 grams, 100 years for 100 grams. No need to consider stuff like that the same amount of LSD can weigh a ton more when it's dissolved in sugar cubes rather than blotter paper.
The criminal justice system is one of those areas where lawyers and judges have been taken out of the loop, with 95% of cases being disposed of quickly through plea bargaining and sentencing being dictated by tables and formulas. It is also one of the most completely messed up, random, and downright unfair areas of the law.
Uh, it's not the tree huggers to blame for the US's industrial problems. The Europeans have even more stringent regulations than we do. The blame for the decline of American industry lies almost entirely with the labor unions that have made American labor completely unaffordable and companies using it completely uncompetitive.
Seriously. Yeah, its sad that there are some people whose obesity is caused by real problems, but most fat people are that way because they eat too much. It's obvious just by looking at Europe versus the USA. Genetically, the people are similar --- Americans came over here from Europe after all. So if there are way more fat people here, genetics can't be to blame.
I'll head to the nearest Wendy's or Subway sometimes when I'm too lazy to make lunch at home, and I'll be floored by how much food people order. I'm not exactly a big guy (5-9, 155 lbs), but being an active 24-year old male, I probably need more calories than most people. I'll order a 6" sub or a quarter-pounder burger, no sides, no soda. That's an appropriately-sized portion for me. Then I'll see some women four or five inches shorter than me order a 12" sub with extra meat, 3 cookies, and a soda (diet, of course), and wonder whether she knows why she's fat?
The way J2ME operates is far more sensible than a total ban. Every time an unsigned program wants to make use of a 'restricted' API, the user is prompted. This stops anything malicious from happening.
No, it doesn't. Most users will click "yes" to everything.
I starkly remember being driven to nausea over the smell of the water in the canals
Hell, I get driven to nausea walking through the streets of Atlanta, and in theory it's one of the richest cities in the country.
Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
·
· Score: 1
The democracy in the middle-east thing was not just an after-the-fact justification. It was the pipe-dream of a lot of neo-conservative intellectuals/think-tankers/politicians that ultimately lead to the precipitation of the war. Without the push from that particular bloc, it is unlikely the war would have started.
You underestimate the degree to which lobbying from particular groups impacts the political decision process. For example, lobbying from particular groups played a large role in getting Bush I into the first Gulf War. If a country goes to war without some sort of obvious precipitating event, then it doesn't just mean that they randomly ran the numbers and decided to take care of an enemy that had become too big of a threat. Government doesn't work that way. Somebody has to have the idea of taking a possible action, and has to do the work to get it through the natural resistance to inaction. Without that sort of event, we get a situation more like North Korea and Iran (do nothing), than Iraq.
The WMD issue was a premise to start a war that the administration had already been convinced to go into. We knew Saddam had a terrible human rights record. It's not like we care. We knew he had chemical weapons, because he'd used them against Iran. Why would we suddenly start caring in 2003, when weapons inspectors told us that he didn't have any more? If you remember watching the situation play out in 2003, between the unachievable deadlines and the massive rhetoric, it was obvious the administration wasn't even trying to avoid war.
Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
·
· Score: 1
Iraq was IMO (and with the benefit of hindsight) a hideous mistake.
This is somewhat OT, and it might sound like a "told you so", but please don't take it that way.
We did not need hindsight to tell us what was going to happen in Iraq. Anybody who knew anything about Iraq or Muslims in general could've told you what was going to happen. My dad works in international development, and so do most of his friends, and the stuff I was hearing from them back in '03 is exactly what is playing out in Iraq right now.
The problem is not that he didn't have the information we needed to make the right decision. The problem was willful ignorance and wishful thinking on the part of our decision makers. They wanted to go into Iraq to prove their pet theories about evangelical democracy, and they were not willing to let the voices of reason and experience get in the way of their little party. Even when they did listen to ideas from outside their little circle, it was from people like Chalabi and other expatriates who were willing to confirm their viewpoints because they had political axes of their own to grind.
There is a major moral lesson in Iraq, but I fear that most people have completely missed it. The neo-conservatives still hold on to their ideas about evangelical democracy, chalking up the failure in Iraq to flawed implementation (this is a popular defense among supporters of communism as well). The liberals see it as a confirmation of their ideas about pacifism and diplomacy. Both are wrong, and thus both will make similar mistakes in the future. The real lesson in Iraq is that you should never let your ideology get in the way of the facts. Abstract principles are useful to a degree, but historical trends and empirical evidence is what should be used to make the actual decisions.
This is incidentally my biggest problem with people like Ron Paul. They're ideologues, slaves to abstract principles. "The free market will always prevail" is a fantasy, just as "democracy will always prevail" is a fantasy. There are many examples of the free market failing, and centralized systems succeeding (eg: healthcare in the US versus healthcare in the UK). Modern economists, who like other academics owe their allegiance to the almighty empirical data point, have identified numerous cases in which the free market can lead to suboptimal results. They've backed these observations with case studies and theoretical models. Yet, Libertarians like Paul do not like to accept such results. They believe fervently in the Austrian School of economics, which is couched in an idea, derivation of theory solely from the first principles of human behavior, that went out of style in scientific fields centuries ago.
Uh, this is going to sound racist, but I found it a lot easier to be one of those open-minded liberals when I lived in Northern Virginia than now when I live in downtown Atlanta. I don't like thinking of myself as racist, I really don't, but almost six years of living here is turning me in to one. For example, if someone approaches me on the street, they either want money or directions. Almost invariably, white people want directions and black people want money. If someone is yelling in a restaurant or other public place, almost invariably it's a black person. I've never seen a white teen and his friends try to do acrobatics in a MARTA train, or break out a bucket of fried chicken and start eating... you get the idea.
The pro-IBM anti-Apple faction seems to be in love with the idea that IBM just got rid of some baggage by "dumping" Apple. Yet, since the Intel transition Apple is making money hand over first, and has a bigger market-share than ever. Their products since the transition have been better-received than Mac products have been in a long time.
The reality of the situation is a bit different than either the pro-IBM side or the pro-Apple side wants to admit. Basically, it became evident to everybody that PowerPC had no future on the desktop. IBM wanted to stop wasting money on a dead-end product, and Apple wanted to stop sourcing from a company that had only a half-hearted interest in their market. The switch was the right thing for both sides.
Poor people in the United States are a world apart from poor people in other parts of the world. Rural Americans might not be as progressive as those in urban areas, but they grow up with the same liberal ideas (personal freedom, importance of equality, etc) that everyone else does, largely thanks to the public school system and mass media. Nearly all Americans can read, they can write, they get a modicum of exposure to art and science.
The rural poor in the places we're talking about are a completely different story. Not only do they live in poverty, but almost everyone around them lives in poverty. Their society has no history of liberal thought, and there is no prosperity around them that would drive progressive thinking. In many places the majority of people cannot even read, and often someone who has just read one book, the Quran, is considered a "learned man".
Now, where there is a similarity between the two groups is the basic social conservatism that is endemic to the lower classes in any society. But remember that conservatism does not generally imply a desire to turn back progress, but rather a desire to maintain the status quo. And that is precisely what has happened in many of these poor countries. While the our economic prosperity allowed a social liberalism that progressed the society forward, their economic stagnation caused them to maintain a social status quo far out of date with what we consider contemporary. "Conservatives" in both societies push for maintaining the status quo, but because of the differing level of progress, their conservatives push to maintain a very different status quo than ours.
Uh, the original Cell used something like 70-80 watts. So right-out for a laptop. This new Cell might use something like 30-40, which is in the ballpark for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but something like the Air needs a processor with half that power usage.
Oh, and the performance would suck. Cell has only a single 3.2 GHz, in-order general-purpose core. The 7 SPEs are largely irrelevant for the kind of tasks run on laptops.
That's one possible way to interpret it. The Quran can also be interpreted in such ways. That's besides the point. The issue is not how a simple passage might be interpreted in a liberal, progressive society, but by how it might be interpreted in a poor, backwards one. There is no denying that the Bible contains more than enough fodder for such interpretations.
I can understand the sentiment of the "Holiday Tree" folks, though. My family is all agnostics, but we still buy a Christmas tree every year and give each other gifts, because in the United States Christmas is at least as much a cultural celebration, like New Year's, as it is a religious holiday. So I can see wanting to celebrate the holiday without celebrating the "Christ" aspect. That said, I think getting bent out of shape over names like that is stupid. I don't freak out over the Christ association as long as Christians promise not to freak out over my celebrating it despite not believing in him.
The real difference is that there aren't as many true believers among christians as there are among muslims (thank goodness). If christians believed as strongly as muslims do, then we would've had a crusade that would've killed hundreds of millions of people by now.
Yes! This is a key issue that I often overlooked. The warm, enveloping arms of the scientific enlightenment have gradually weened Christians in the West off their religious dogma. The church attendance rate here in the US, this most Christian of countries, is well below fifty percent. Many "Christians" have never read the Bible, in its entirety, because frankly, they don't need to. The "mainstream Christianity" espoused their priests and ministers bears little more resemblance to the religion described in the Bible than it does to the religion described in the Quran. It is, instead, an amalgam of some of the more palatable ideas cherry-picked from the Bible and some traditional American cultural norms. It is, basically, a 2000 year old religion molded and sanitized to fit within the intellectual constraints created by this country's Enlightenment-inspired foundation, along with the further progress afforded by a couple of hundred years of social liberalization.
The problem with that idea, "judging the tree by the fruit it bears" is that it's difficult to separate the concerns. The tree could be fine, for example, but the soil poor.
Technically speaking, executing homosexuals is a Biblically justifiable punishment:
" [27] And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. [28] And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; [29] Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, [30] Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, [31] Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: [32] Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them." (Romans I)
Kinda hard to take that out of context, don't you think?
Yet, Bible-readers here in the US manage to not go around killing gays (most of the time). What gives? What's the underlying root cause? I'd posit that the root cause is not Islam, but rather the fact that most Muslims are poor and backwards. Poor and backwards people do shitty things like this, and they'd be doing the same thing if they'd been reading a Bible instead of the Quran.
The idea of Jihad is not really unlike the ideas about defending your faith in any other religion. It doesn't say to exterminate all non-believers, but says that if non-believers threaten a community of believers, they have the right to fight back.
Beyond that, there are some pretty shitty things in both books. You can pick and choose parts of the Bible to make it palatable (ignore most of the Old Testament, ignore Revelations, ignore Matthew, etc), but you can do the same to the Quran too. And of course you can also pick and choose from both books to make them seem pretty horrible. The real issue here is, of course, that both books have numerous authors, so it's pointless to say that one has a violent viewpoint and the other does not. Some parts of the Bible express very violent views, and some express peaceful views. The same is true for the Quran. As for which parts of the books followers choose to act upon, well, that's kind of a separate issue.
I think your offense at the comparison is unjustified. It is true that a majority of Christians do not go and blow up abortion clinics, it is also true that the majority of Muslims do not go and blow up night clubs. At the same time, it is also true that the mainstream body of real Christian believers view gays and women who choose to have abortions with hostility, considering them to be immoral sinners. They might not condone those actions, but they do not go out of their way to condemn and stop them either. The mainstream body of Muslim believers are much the same way. By and large they do not actively condone terrorism, but they do look upon Westerners with hostility, considering them immoral sinners, and as such do not let out any vast cry of protest for the actions being carried out in the name of their religion.
At the same time, both groups manage to work themselves up into a good froth over far lesser perceived injustices. Christians raise a far greater cry whenever somebody renames "Christmas Break" to "Winter Holiday", or when some women gets taken off life support than they do when somebody blows up an abortion clinic in their name. Similarly, Muslims get bent out of shape over some pictures of Mohammed on a website, when they can hardly be bothered to muster up a similar reaction in response to a terrorist bombing.
All in all, I'd say the comparison is pretty damn apt. When you look down on other people for being somehow inferior to yourself, you can easily justify not treating them as you'd like to be treated. and you find it pretty hard to get worked up when an injustice is done to them. Like it or not, that's how the rank-and-file in both Christianity and Islam view everyone who is not like themselves.
This is a retarded argument. Yes, it's obviously a computer for somebody who has a computer at home, but needs computing power elsewhere too. So what's wrong with that? I use a MacBook as my primary machine, and I'd guess I spend at least half my time working on it outside my apartment. Eg: it's nice to be able to hack on some code over a cup of coffee in Starbucks.
Beyond that, it's not like Apple products are even a fashion statement anymore. Everybody and their mother has an Apple laptop and an iPhone. I still carry mine because they happen to be damn good laptops/cell phones.
Why does the desire for openness have to be a religious thing? There is a strong practical interest in not tying third world kids to the whims of a for-profit corporation in the USA. What happens when Microsoft/Intel decide to stop playing the charity game? This isn't just Wintel hating, it's basic logic --- as for profit corporations, Microsoft/Intel are _obliged by law_ to maximize their shareholder value. If that getting rid of a charitable program to take advantage of a perceived new market, then so be it. Now, I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with Microsoft/Intel entering new markets like this, but I think it's quite reasonable to believe that government dollars in those countries would be better spent on open things like OLPC, for the sake of prudent long-term planning.
It's arguable whether a lot of those are really cleaner in terms of overall contamination released into the environment. The production of solar panels, for example, creates and releases a lot more harmful chemicals into the environment than the operation of a nuclear plant. The nuclear plant waste may be nastier, but at least it's a relatively small amount that is contained.
There are also substantial ecological impacts to the other power generation schemes that have nothing to do with power. Hydro-electric requires the creation of dams that mess up the natural ecology of rivers. Wind turbines can interfere with the migration patterns of birds, etc.
Oh boo hoo, the young white male has such a hard life!
Try being a young asian/indian/arab male. You get most of the disadvantages of being a minority, along with most of the disadvantages of being a high-income demographic. Basically, you're too white enough to count towards "diversity" quotas, but not white enough to blend in at the airport.
But you know what? I don't complain about it. Because in all honestly I could've been born black, and then I'd have to deal with the statistical likelihood that I'd be making only half as much money as I do now. And that would suck more than being stared at when I'm in the airport security line!
Slashdot Mirror
1) Lot's of software engineers do get paid by the hour, for similar reasons. It's not really always predictable work.
2) A lawyer has to deal with opposing counsel screwing up with his work. Usually software engineers don't have to deal with sentient beings in their computer adding bugs.
3) There is a huge difference in information accessibility. The information you need to know to, say, write a program is there and (relatively) easily accessible to you. The information you need to build a case may be in the minds and desks and file cabinets of someone who has every incentive to try to keep it from you. You may not have any idea until you get far into the discovery process how much a case will actually cost to litigate.
Laws are written by lawyers, voted in by politicians (80% of which are/were lawyers), and judged by judges who were lawyers.
Loopholes and vague wording are things that lawyers are GOOD at creating in our system. They are lawyers, they are supposed to be smart enough to make laws very clear; yet wherever you look, laws are written with loopholes and vague wording that permit loads of points of contention to which lawyers must be hired to resolve...
The law tries to be clear, but it never can be because it's fundamentally trying to encode all sorts of fuzzy human emotions/motivations/tendencies, etc.
Let's take your lawyer-free utopia. Rules are crystal clear and the process of checking whether a rule has been followed is straightforward and mechanical. How do you handle something like a fair use rule? A 30 second time limit? What if it's a 35 second clip that's on quietly in the background of an Indie movie? What if it's a 15 second clip of an advertisement lifted directly from a competing company's ad?
Look at laws that have crystal clear applications: statutory rape laws. Did they have sex? If yes, is she under 17? If yes, then guilty! No mind that it was her 18 year old boyfriend. How about drug possession? No need for judges to do the sentencing, we can simply make sentencing mechanical. 10 years for 10 grams, 100 years for 100 grams. No need to consider stuff like that the same amount of LSD can weigh a ton more when it's dissolved in sugar cubes rather than blotter paper.
The criminal justice system is one of those areas where lawyers and judges have been taken out of the loop, with 95% of cases being disposed of quickly through plea bargaining and sentencing being dictated by tables and formulas. It is also one of the most completely messed up, random, and downright unfair areas of the law.
Uh, it's not the tree huggers to blame for the US's industrial problems. The Europeans have even more stringent regulations than we do. The blame for the decline of American industry lies almost entirely with the labor unions that have made American labor completely unaffordable and companies using it completely uncompetitive.
Seriously. Yeah, its sad that there are some people whose obesity is caused by real problems, but most fat people are that way because they eat too much. It's obvious just by looking at Europe versus the USA. Genetically, the people are similar --- Americans came over here from Europe after all. So if there are way more fat people here, genetics can't be to blame.
I'll head to the nearest Wendy's or Subway sometimes when I'm too lazy to make lunch at home, and I'll be floored by how much food people order. I'm not exactly a big guy (5-9, 155 lbs), but being an active 24-year old male, I probably need more calories than most people. I'll order a 6" sub or a quarter-pounder burger, no sides, no soda. That's an appropriately-sized portion for me. Then I'll see some women four or five inches shorter than me order a 12" sub with extra meat, 3 cookies, and a soda (diet, of course), and wonder whether she knows why she's fat?
The way J2ME operates is far more sensible than a total ban. Every time an unsigned program wants to make use of a 'restricted' API, the user is prompted. This stops anything malicious from happening.
No, it doesn't. Most users will click "yes" to everything.
Seriously. I mean:
I starkly remember being driven to nausea over the smell of the water in the canals
Hell, I get driven to nausea walking through the streets of Atlanta, and in theory it's one of the richest cities in the country.
The democracy in the middle-east thing was not just an after-the-fact justification. It was the pipe-dream of a lot of neo-conservative intellectuals/think-tankers/politicians that ultimately lead to the precipitation of the war. Without the push from that particular bloc, it is unlikely the war would have started.
You underestimate the degree to which lobbying from particular groups impacts the political decision process. For example, lobbying from particular groups played a large role in getting Bush I into the first Gulf War. If a country goes to war without some sort of obvious precipitating event, then it doesn't just mean that they randomly ran the numbers and decided to take care of an enemy that had become too big of a threat. Government doesn't work that way. Somebody has to have the idea of taking a possible action, and has to do the work to get it through the natural resistance to inaction. Without that sort of event, we get a situation more like North Korea and Iran (do nothing), than Iraq.
The WMD issue was a premise to start a war that the administration had already been convinced to go into. We knew Saddam had a terrible human rights record. It's not like we care. We knew he had chemical weapons, because he'd used them against Iran. Why would we suddenly start caring in 2003, when weapons inspectors told us that he didn't have any more? If you remember watching the situation play out in 2003, between the unachievable deadlines and the massive rhetoric, it was obvious the administration wasn't even trying to avoid war.
Iraq was IMO (and with the benefit of hindsight) a hideous mistake.
This is somewhat OT, and it might sound like a "told you so", but please don't take it that way.
We did not need hindsight to tell us what was going to happen in Iraq. Anybody who knew anything about Iraq or Muslims in general could've told you what was going to happen. My dad works in international development, and so do most of his friends, and the stuff I was hearing from them back in '03 is exactly what is playing out in Iraq right now.
The problem is not that he didn't have the information we needed to make the right decision. The problem was willful ignorance and wishful thinking on the part of our decision makers. They wanted to go into Iraq to prove their pet theories about evangelical democracy, and they were not willing to let the voices of reason and experience get in the way of their little party. Even when they did listen to ideas from outside their little circle, it was from people like Chalabi and other expatriates who were willing to confirm their viewpoints because they had political axes of their own to grind.
There is a major moral lesson in Iraq, but I fear that most people have completely missed it. The neo-conservatives still hold on to their ideas about evangelical democracy, chalking up the failure in Iraq to flawed implementation (this is a popular defense among supporters of communism as well). The liberals see it as a confirmation of their ideas about pacifism and diplomacy. Both are wrong, and thus both will make similar mistakes in the future. The real lesson in Iraq is that you should never let your ideology get in the way of the facts. Abstract principles are useful to a degree, but historical trends and empirical evidence is what should be used to make the actual decisions.
This is incidentally my biggest problem with people like Ron Paul. They're ideologues, slaves to abstract principles. "The free market will always prevail" is a fantasy, just as "democracy will always prevail" is a fantasy. There are many examples of the free market failing, and centralized systems succeeding (eg: healthcare in the US versus healthcare in the UK). Modern economists, who like other academics owe their allegiance to the almighty empirical data point, have identified numerous cases in which the free market can lead to suboptimal results. They've backed these observations with case studies and theoretical models. Yet, Libertarians like Paul do not like to accept such results. They believe fervently in the Austrian School of economics, which is couched in an idea, derivation of theory solely from the first principles of human behavior, that went out of style in scientific fields centuries ago.
Uh, this is going to sound racist, but I found it a lot easier to be one of those open-minded liberals when I lived in Northern Virginia than now when I live in downtown Atlanta. I don't like thinking of myself as racist, I really don't, but almost six years of living here is turning me in to one. For example, if someone approaches me on the street, they either want money or directions. Almost invariably, white people want directions and black people want money. If someone is yelling in a restaurant or other public place, almost invariably it's a black person. I've never seen a white teen and his friends try to do acrobatics in a MARTA train, or break out a bucket of fried chicken and start eating... you get the idea.
The pro-IBM anti-Apple faction seems to be in love with the idea that IBM just got rid of some baggage by "dumping" Apple. Yet, since the Intel transition Apple is making money hand over first, and has a bigger market-share than ever. Their products since the transition have been better-received than Mac products have been in a long time.
The reality of the situation is a bit different than either the pro-IBM side or the pro-Apple side wants to admit. Basically, it became evident to everybody that PowerPC had no future on the desktop. IBM wanted to stop wasting money on a dead-end product, and Apple wanted to stop sourcing from a company that had only a half-hearted interest in their market. The switch was the right thing for both sides.
Poor people in the United States are a world apart from poor people in other parts of the world. Rural Americans might not be as progressive as those in urban areas, but they grow up with the same liberal ideas (personal freedom, importance of equality, etc) that everyone else does, largely thanks to the public school system and mass media. Nearly all Americans can read, they can write, they get a modicum of exposure to art and science.
The rural poor in the places we're talking about are a completely different story. Not only do they live in poverty, but almost everyone around them lives in poverty. Their society has no history of liberal thought, and there is no prosperity around them that would drive progressive thinking. In many places the majority of people cannot even read, and often someone who has just read one book, the Quran, is considered a "learned man".
Now, where there is a similarity between the two groups is the basic social conservatism that is endemic to the lower classes in any society. But remember that conservatism does not generally imply a desire to turn back progress, but rather a desire to maintain the status quo. And that is precisely what has happened in many of these poor countries. While the our economic prosperity allowed a social liberalism that progressed the society forward, their economic stagnation caused them to maintain a social status quo far out of date with what we consider contemporary. "Conservatives" in both societies push for maintaining the status quo, but because of the differing level of progress, their conservatives push to maintain a very different status quo than ours.
Uh, the original Cell used something like 70-80 watts. So right-out for a laptop. This new Cell might use something like 30-40, which is in the ballpark for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but something like the Air needs a processor with half that power usage.
Oh, and the performance would suck. Cell has only a single 3.2 GHz, in-order general-purpose core. The 7 SPEs are largely irrelevant for the kind of tasks run on laptops.
That's one possible way to interpret it. The Quran can also be interpreted in such ways. That's besides the point. The issue is not how a simple passage might be interpreted in a liberal, progressive society, but by how it might be interpreted in a poor, backwards one. There is no denying that the Bible contains more than enough fodder for such interpretations.
They call December 25th "Holiday" :)
I can understand the sentiment of the "Holiday Tree" folks, though. My family is all agnostics, but we still buy a Christmas tree every year and give each other gifts, because in the United States Christmas is at least as much a cultural celebration, like New Year's, as it is a religious holiday. So I can see wanting to celebrate the holiday without celebrating the "Christ" aspect. That said, I think getting bent out of shape over names like that is stupid. I don't freak out over the Christ association as long as Christians promise not to freak out over my celebrating it despite not believing in him.
The real difference is that there aren't as many true believers among christians as there are among muslims (thank goodness). If christians believed as strongly as muslims do, then we would've had a crusade that would've killed hundreds of millions of people by now.
Yes! This is a key issue that I often overlooked. The warm, enveloping arms of the scientific enlightenment have gradually weened Christians in the West off their religious dogma. The church attendance rate here in the US, this most Christian of countries, is well below fifty percent. Many "Christians" have never read the Bible, in its entirety, because frankly, they don't need to. The "mainstream Christianity" espoused their priests and ministers bears little more resemblance to the religion described in the Bible than it does to the religion described in the Quran. It is, instead, an amalgam of some of the more palatable ideas cherry-picked from the Bible and some traditional American cultural norms. It is, basically, a 2000 year old religion molded and sanitized to fit within the intellectual constraints created by this country's Enlightenment-inspired foundation, along with the further progress afforded by a couple of hundred years of social liberalization.
The problem with that idea, "judging the tree by the fruit it bears" is that it's difficult to separate the concerns. The tree could be fine, for example, but the soil poor.
Technically speaking, executing homosexuals is a Biblically justifiable punishment:
"
[27] And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
[28] And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
[29] Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
[30] Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
[31] Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
[32] Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them." (Romans I)
Kinda hard to take that out of context, don't you think?
Yet, Bible-readers here in the US manage to not go around killing gays (most of the time). What gives? What's the underlying root cause? I'd posit that the root cause is not Islam, but rather the fact that most Muslims are poor and backwards. Poor and backwards people do shitty things like this, and they'd be doing the same thing if they'd been reading a Bible instead of the Quran.
The idea of Jihad is not really unlike the ideas about defending your faith in any other religion. It doesn't say to exterminate all non-believers, but says that if non-believers threaten a community of believers, they have the right to fight back.
Beyond that, there are some pretty shitty things in both books. You can pick and choose parts of the Bible to make it palatable (ignore most of the Old Testament, ignore Revelations, ignore Matthew, etc), but you can do the same to the Quran too. And of course you can also pick and choose from both books to make them seem pretty horrible. The real issue here is, of course, that both books have numerous authors, so it's pointless to say that one has a violent viewpoint and the other does not. Some parts of the Bible express very violent views, and some express peaceful views. The same is true for the Quran. As for which parts of the books followers choose to act upon, well, that's kind of a separate issue.
I think your offense at the comparison is unjustified. It is true that a majority of Christians do not go and blow up abortion clinics, it is also true that the majority of Muslims do not go and blow up night clubs. At the same time, it is also true that the mainstream body of real Christian believers view gays and women who choose to have abortions with hostility, considering them to be immoral sinners. They might not condone those actions, but they do not go out of their way to condemn and stop them either. The mainstream body of Muslim believers are much the same way. By and large they do not actively condone terrorism, but they do look upon Westerners with hostility, considering them immoral sinners, and as such do not let out any vast cry of protest for the actions being carried out in the name of their religion.
At the same time, both groups manage to work themselves up into a good froth over far lesser perceived injustices. Christians raise a far greater cry whenever somebody renames "Christmas Break" to "Winter Holiday", or when some women gets taken off life support than they do when somebody blows up an abortion clinic in their name. Similarly, Muslims get bent out of shape over some pictures of Mohammed on a website, when they can hardly be bothered to muster up a similar reaction in response to a terrorist bombing.
All in all, I'd say the comparison is pretty damn apt. When you look down on other people for being somehow inferior to yourself, you can easily justify not treating them as you'd like to be treated. and you find it pretty hard to get worked up when an injustice is done to them. Like it or not, that's how the rank-and-file in both Christianity and Islam view everyone who is not like themselves.
Muslims seem hell bent on catching up to Jews in forcing everyone to be "sensitive to their feelings"...
This is a retarded argument. Yes, it's obviously a computer for somebody who has a computer at home, but needs computing power elsewhere too. So what's wrong with that? I use a MacBook as my primary machine, and I'd guess I spend at least half my time working on it outside my apartment. Eg: it's nice to be able to hack on some code over a cup of coffee in Starbucks.
Beyond that, it's not like Apple products are even a fashion statement anymore. Everybody and their mother has an Apple laptop and an iPhone. I still carry mine because they happen to be damn good laptops/cell phones.
I seriously doubt that you won't just be able to take it into an Apple Store and get them to replace it for you right on the spot.
Why does the desire for openness have to be a religious thing? There is a strong practical interest in not tying third world kids to the whims of a for-profit corporation in the USA. What happens when Microsoft/Intel decide to stop playing the charity game? This isn't just Wintel hating, it's basic logic --- as for profit corporations, Microsoft/Intel are _obliged by law_ to maximize their shareholder value. If that getting rid of a charitable program to take advantage of a perceived new market, then so be it. Now, I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with Microsoft/Intel entering new markets like this, but I think it's quite reasonable to believe that government dollars in those countries would be better spent on open things like OLPC, for the sake of prudent long-term planning.
What's wrong with that? They get their drink first because they _ordered_ it first.
It's arguable whether a lot of those are really cleaner in terms of overall contamination released into the environment. The production of solar panels, for example, creates and releases a lot more harmful chemicals into the environment than the operation of a nuclear plant. The nuclear plant waste may be nastier, but at least it's a relatively small amount that is contained.
There are also substantial ecological impacts to the other power generation schemes that have nothing to do with power. Hydro-electric requires the creation of dams that mess up the natural ecology of rivers. Wind turbines can interfere with the migration patterns of birds, etc.
Oh boo hoo, the young white male has such a hard life!
Try being a young asian/indian/arab male. You get most of the disadvantages of being a minority, along with most of the disadvantages of being a high-income demographic. Basically, you're too white enough to count towards "diversity" quotas, but not white enough to blend in at the airport.
But you know what? I don't complain about it. Because in all honestly I could've been born black, and then I'd have to deal with the statistical likelihood that I'd be making only half as much money as I do now. And that would suck more than being stared at when I'm in the airport security line!