What we are saying is that there are tangible, actual gains that can be had through conservation.
The tangible gains are easing some of the pain of rising energy costs through locally lower energy demand. But the global energy demand will continue to increase, and so will costs, and ultimately you're still hosed. Some people using slightly less energy isn't going to change the fact that we're running out of sources for it. It's just going to shift the curves a little bit over.
If you can realize a tangible gain, and do things better than your neighbor, nevermind the next country over, why not do it?
Because "every little bit" does not matter. The savings to be had through conservation, even if tangible to the individual, are peanuts in comparison to the global energy balance. There is no point in going to all the trouble when it isn't going to make a lick of difference, ultimately. You might chip away at the edges of the boulder, but that won't stop it from crushing you.
The mathematics are simple. The energy equation has to balance, demand has to equal supply. The technology to drastically increase our supply is within reach, and that solution requires little to no social engineering. The technology to drastically decrease our demand is not within reach, and achieving and maintaining a low demand will require massive social reengineering not to mention large-scale changes to infrastructure.
Also the real metric is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per person not necissarily GDP/person
Yes, and the US's per-capita PPP is still almost 40% higher than that of the UK, Germany, or France. To put it another way, the US is richer (per-capita) than the UK, Germany, and France by about the same factor as the UK, Germany, and France are richer than Greece, Slovenia, and Kuwait.
If the developing world is inefficient - so what?
The energy problem is a global one and the pool of fossil fuels is a global one. We could halve our energy demand and ultimately our energy costs would still explode because the developing world would continue to use up the available reserves. And halving our energy use through conservation is a fantasy in and of itself. In reality, we're talking more like 5-10% if conservation is wildly successful, and all that's going to do is make the crunch a little easier for a while. It's not going to really _solve_ anything.
There is no reason why the U.S. can't be as efficient as Europe, we just have to have some zoning laws and a gas tax
You can tax gasoline all you want, but you can't change the fact that Atlanta is a city with 1/4 the population of Paris in an area 4x the size. What you're talking about is physically ripping apart and rebuilding our cities, and relocating tens of millions of people. It's pure fantasy.
I find it interesting that you call it the 'gravity' problem, as though we should all stay on the ground, and not use airplanes, because they were hard to conceive of in the first place.
I'm not saying that we should stay on the ground, I'm saying that flapping your arms really hard is not a solution to the "flying" issue. Physics keeps that from being realistic. Similarly, conservation is not a solution to the "energy" issue. Society keeps that from being realistic.
We are by no means 'stuck' with the structure we have; only our conditioning to accept the status quo suggests that we are.
It's not a matter of conditioning, it's a matter of logistics. Even halving the energy usage of the United States (to reach the level of Europe) through conservation is going to take an unprecedented physical reorganization. We're talking about rebuilding hundreds of cities, razing tens of thousands of suburbs, and relocating tens of millions of people. It's just not gonna happen. And ultimately, even halving our energy usage won't be enough in the long term. India and China are going to eat up whatever we save and more. To really create a sustainable system through conservation and our current renewable energy sources, we're going to have to drastically cut-back in the developed world, freeze the advancement of the developing world (sorry, you're stuck being poor!), and halt worldwide population growth. It's pure fantasy.
The solution is not to use less energy. It cannot be. The history of the world shows an incredibly close correlation between progress and energy consumption, and trying to fight history is almost as stupid as trying to fight gravity. The solution is to find more and more powerful sources of energy.
First, the energy efficiency of Europe isn't really going to help anything in the long run. Incredibly successful conservation programs might buy 10% or so in the developed world, but that reduction will be wiped out many times over by the increases in energy use in the developing world.
Second, European standard of living is indeed lower than the American standard of living, at least from the point of view of per-capita GDP (PPP). In any case, as you rightly perceived, the United States is simply not set up to make public or human-powered transport feasible. That's something that can't really be changed, and thus it is not particularly useful to point out the energy efficiency of Europe in demanding that the US improve its own energy efficiency.
The dichotomy is not false. It's going to take a lot more than a few hybrid cars to solve the energy problem. For conservation to have a real impact on worldwide energy consumption, we need a change in lifestyle equivalent to your second case. If you just chip away at energy use a few percent here or there, nothing is really going to change. We'll just slightly delay the inevitable.
I agree with your points in general, and I want to address one thing specifically:
Several European towns and cities attempted to curb their consumption levels earlier this decade if i remember an article i read.
Which is neat, but every reduction in energy use of some progressive European town is offset many times over by the huge increases in energy consumption of the developing world. India and China together have about five times the population of the EU. As they develop, their per-capita energy usage is going to approach that of the developed world, and the total increase in energy use is going to absolutely dwarf any reductions made from conservation.
Energy conservation is absolutely useless as a tool for addressing the overall worldwide energy problem. It has a certain utility in improving economic efficiency in the face of rising energy prices, until a cheaper, more plentiful source of energy is found, but will do absolutely nothing to address the problem itself.
The fact that the vast majority of American cities are simply not built for pedestrians. I live in midtown Atlanta, and between the terrible and unreliable public transportation and the layout of the city itself, a car is almost a necessity unless you want to waste enormous amounts of time getting from place to place.
Most of these issues are intrinsic to the design of the American landscape. Spending the better part of a century with cheap and convenient individual transportation has resulted in the physical structure of the country being hostile to other transportation paradigms. Yes, there are other places in the world that do not have these issues, but that's not very relevant. The structure we have now is something we're pretty stuck with. Reshaping it in any significant way would be unimaginably expensive, and enormously disruptive.
Conservation is theoretically nice solution, but not one that is practically applicable. It's what I call the "gravity" problem. Yeah, it would be nice for people building airplanes and rockets if gravity didn't exist, but talking about all the cool things you could design in the absence of gravity is pointless --- the physical world is the way it is and there is no changing it. Similarly, people's behavior is what it is. There is centuries of inertia behind it, and its not changing any time soon. Indeed, all those people who are walking and biking in India and China are switching to gas-powered cars as their economies and standards of living improve! The only sensical engineering solution is to deal with the reality you're given, and try to make the best of it. In this case, it means that the solution is not using less energy, but finding more potent and plentiful sources of energy. Nuclear power certainly fits that bill.
If the cost is cutting back our consumption, is that so much to ask?
Yes. Consumption is what drives economies forward. The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact (not just nibble away at the problem near the edges) would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures.
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - Abelson & Susman
From a theoretical point of view, assembly knowledge isn't particularly useful because it doesn't lend itself to rigorous analysis (the "science" part of "computer science"). From a practical point of view, since very few programs are written in assembly language anymore, knowledge of it has limited utility. Further, from a practical point of view, I'd much rather deal with a programmer who can explain his work in terms of data structures and algorithms than one that is stuck thinking in terms of registers and memory locations.
There is certainly a place for assembly knowledge*. It's just a niche, and not a particularly important one anymore. Meanwhile, there are lots and lots of diverse applications for the theory they teach you in those classes instead of assembly. In my own work, I've had to bust out the graph theory way more often than I've had to bust out my knowledge of asm tricks for fast line-rendering...
*) Interestingly enough, one of those places is inside the language runtimes of high-level languages. There are usually lots of neat tricks inside those things (eg: using the NaN space of double-precision floats to store unions of floats and 51-bit integers without extra variant tags!)
It doesn't really look any fundamentally different --- the buttons are just in different places. The whole concept of a GUI-oriented equation editor just doesn't make sense. It's acceptable when you need to enter a couple of equations, but for _real_ work, no way. In a science/engineering paper you may need to enter mathematics in every other sentence. Going into a whole separate mode to do it totally ruins your workflow.
As for Word as a whole --- there is no way in hell I'm ever coming near it again. After having worked on several 50-100 page research papers in Word over the last four or five years, I'm done. I did it at the time because I was working with other people who didn't know TeX, but after those experiences I've realized it would be faster to just transcribe other peoples' work from Word into TeX than to try and do any copyediting in Word itself. Its interface is obtuse, its behavior is unpredictable, and its output is ugly. The fact that so many people use it for anything more than quick memos absolutely boggles my mind.
It's called TeX, learn it once, and reap the benefits for the rest of your life. Instead of dicking around with Equation Editor's error-prone, piece of shit GUI, you can typeset good looking mathematics very quickly and easily. Plus, it's trivial to integrate with other tools. For example, when I work on a simulation in Matlab, I have the program generate TeX code and EPS images for the results and dump them into a file. Then I use \input{} to refer to those results from the main body of my paper. This way if I rerun the simulation for whatever reason, the paper automatically picks up the updated results. Also, TeX's code display facilities allow me to make nice code listings that are again kept up to date with the actual Matlab code of the simulation. Also, on top of all that, TeX outputs professional-looking PDFs, not the raggedy-text shit that Word excretes.
Before you complain about TeX being complicated: even my younger brother, whose still in high-school, figured out (with no help from me!) what a piece of shit Equation Editor is, and switched to TeX. Equation Editor, like Word itself, is barely sufficient for writing high-school lab reports, much less university-level science and engineering work!
You forgot about DLLs spread randomly throughout Windows/System32. Also, copying the registry to a new install in its entirety is a foolish thing to do. Moreover, while the registry itself may be in on file, any application entry within it is scattered hither and yon.
Lol. I was Class of '06 at Tech, and I remember helping all the people on my hall with Intro to CS. I actually like Scheme quite a bit, but I definitely think it's inappropriate to teach it to a bunch of engineers that will never really appreciate it. That said, maybe it would've been better if they were forced to appreciate advanced CS concepts. Maybe then when they wouldn't write such goddamn horrible Matlab code.
The costs of abusing alcohol are temporal. The costs of sinning are potentially eternal. The fact that so many Catholics sin so cavalierly suggests that, deep down, they really don't believe in the fires of hell.
Individuals read and interpret the Bible, understand the worship service, form their own denominations, etc. I disagree, though, that this means that Christianity has become diluted
Of course it's become diluted. The Bible clearly states that masturbation is wrong. Yet, I'd be willing to bet that most Christian males in Western countries masturbate. The Bible repeatedly states that premarital sex is a crime, yet in the West premarital sex is the norm! How do you rationalize this behavior? Simple: people say they believe in the basic tenants of Christianity, but they don't. They pick and choose the parts of the Bible that are agreeable to them, a process which itself makes no sense if you consider the Bible to be a divine work inspired by an omnipotent being! Nobody fears God anymore, because they believe in a kind, friendly God who is accepting of their lifestyle, and is willing to overlook all but the most basic rules in the Bible. This is not the Christian God!
Most US Christians don't worry about losing their souls by using birth control, but I bet a lot more would worry about losing their souls by committing murder.
The Quran says not to kill people too, and so do the Ten Commandments. General stuff like that isn't what defines Christianity, distinguishing it from other religions. In fact, you're reinforcing the point I'm making. Christianity, as defined by the Bible, is a big religion, with lot's of elements. In Catholicism, in particular, these aspects are even highly-codified. Over time, people stop believing in more in more of these aspects, while retaining only the basic ones that are compatible with modern society. This is absolutely dilution of peoples' belief in the religion.
I'll agree that the New Testament is on the whole less violent than the Quran, but unfortunately, there is no religion that writes Old Testament out entirely. Just because most Christians choose to ignore the horrible things in the Old Testament does not make it any less of a part of the overall Christian doctrine.
As for the birth control issue, I'm not equating one's position on birth control with being Christian. I'm equating one's position on birth control with being Catholic. If you really believe that Jesus is divine and anointed Peter to speak for him on Earth and that the Pope is the spiritual successor to Peter, how can you possibly rationalize adopting a position on birth control that the papacy has repeatedly denounced as being sinful? If you don't believe in the primacy of the Pope, then you're not Catholic, by the very definition of Catholic dogma.
Bettle B made a good point, but I also want to add something. I think in general it's better to look at religion as a reflection of society, than something that molds society. Ostensibly, societies derive their values from religion, but to be completely realistic, more often society leverages religion to enforce the values that they already hold. So in the context of the Arab period of enlightenment, it is useful to look at not the religious angle, but the political and economic events that underly them.
The Islamic Empire (a political phenomenon) brought civilization and urbanization to a region that had been largely nomadic. It brought, at least for a time, stability, security, and wealth. The culture of Islam was, at the time, more contemporary and metropolitan than its contemporaries (remember, we're talking about a period when Europe was in the Dark Ages). These ingredients were all important for the cultural renaissance that occurred in the period. As the civilization declined, wealth, stability, and security were lost, and at that point Islam was used to enforce the conservative social order that naturally arises from such an impoverished state.
Neither Islam nor Christianity have changed substantially in the last 500-1000 years. Neither the Bible nor the Quran have gone through a new edition. What has changed is how literally followers of the religion adhere to the now antiquated doctrines. The vast majority of Western Christians aren't really all that Christian. They don't attend Church regularly, they don't follow most of the teachings of the Bible, etc. They have a vague belief in God and Christ and doing good work, but for all their specificity such beliefs are probably closer to those of a modern, progressive Muslim than to the beliefs of the more ardent believers within their own religion. The litmus test for me is really the whole issue with the Catholic Church and birth control. The Pope, the designated representative of God on Earth, says that contraception is wrong yet most Catholics still use it. This is a very fundamental test of belief. If you honestly believe that there is an all-powerful being who controls heaven and earth and that Jesus died for your sins and left Peter as his successor, and that the current Pope is the spiritual successor of Peter and speaks with all of his authority, then you cannot possibly rationalize the use of birth control. LIke it or not, most modern Catholics do not really believe in Catholicism --- they believe in something similar, but diluted enough for modern sensibilities.
It is this "dilution" that is desperately missing from the Islamic world. We have a population that feels at most mild guilt for skipping Church, and they have a population that fears for their eternal soul for missing prayers, and that's the problem.
I don't think the Church (or the Mosque or the Synagogue) should get credit for the achievements of its members! It was the Christian Church that put Galileo under house arrest. It was a Christian (Newton), that came up with the fundamentals of classical mechanics. There is an important distinction to be made.
There are multiple periods during which certain parts of the Middle East were prominent civilizations, advanced for their time. The period that occurred most recently was under the Islamic empire. The person who is considered the "father of algebra" had the full name Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
As for your theory as a whole, you ignore some important facts. For example, Christian scholars were instrumental in preserving the knowledge of the Roman Empire through the dark ages. Also, theology has been an important component of the thinking of many of history's greatest minds. When you look at the figures behind the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, the vast majority of them were not atheists.
That said, I do agree that organized religion has done a lot of harm to science as well. On the whole, I'd agree that it's been more good than bad.
You don't get something for nothing. To fit the same amount of HD content onto a standard DVD with MPEG4, you have to use a vastly higher compression ratio, reducing quality significantly.
The iPhone fills a major gap in the US market --- a consumer-oriented smartphone. Here, you basically have Treo's, Blackberry's, some Windows Mobile devices, and the iPhone. My dad has a Treo, and it's a nice device, but multimedia and websurfing on it is nothing like it is on the iPhone. On the other hand, for keeping appointments and contacts, the Treo wins hands-down. The Windows Mobile devices are good for portable-Office stuff, but the interfaces are so damn cumbersome (and they're quite expensive compared to the iPhone as well). I haven't used a recent Blackberry, so I won't comment on it, but its multimedia capabilities have historically been lacking. And of course on top of all of that there is the good old Apple integration and ease-of-use. I've helped my dad muddle through Palm Desktop and ActiveSync over the years, and honestly ease of use of my iPhone/MacBook combo is in a completely different league.
That, of course, is the US market. I don't really keep tabs of what's been going on with Nokia and Sony. I hear they have some nice stuff, but they get almost no play in the US market on mainstream carriers.
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What we are saying is that there are tangible, actual gains that can be had through conservation.
The tangible gains are easing some of the pain of rising energy costs through locally lower energy demand. But the global energy demand will continue to increase, and so will costs, and ultimately you're still hosed. Some people using slightly less energy isn't going to change the fact that we're running out of sources for it. It's just going to shift the curves a little bit over.
If you can realize a tangible gain, and do things better than your neighbor, nevermind the next country over, why not do it?
Because "every little bit" does not matter. The savings to be had through conservation, even if tangible to the individual, are peanuts in comparison to the global energy balance. There is no point in going to all the trouble when it isn't going to make a lick of difference, ultimately. You might chip away at the edges of the boulder, but that won't stop it from crushing you.
The mathematics are simple. The energy equation has to balance, demand has to equal supply. The technology to drastically increase our supply is within reach, and that solution requires little to no social engineering. The technology to drastically decrease our demand is not within reach, and achieving and maintaining a low demand will require massive social reengineering not to mention large-scale changes to infrastructure.
Also the real metric is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per person not necissarily GDP/person
Yes, and the US's per-capita PPP is still almost 40% higher than that of the UK, Germany, or France. To put it another way, the US is richer (per-capita) than the UK, Germany, and France by about the same factor as the UK, Germany, and France are richer than Greece, Slovenia, and Kuwait.
If the developing world is inefficient - so what?
The energy problem is a global one and the pool of fossil fuels is a global one. We could halve our energy demand and ultimately our energy costs would still explode because the developing world would continue to use up the available reserves. And halving our energy use through conservation is a fantasy in and of itself. In reality, we're talking more like 5-10% if conservation is wildly successful, and all that's going to do is make the crunch a little easier for a while. It's not going to really _solve_ anything.
There is no reason why the U.S. can't be as efficient as Europe, we just have to have some zoning laws and a gas tax
You can tax gasoline all you want, but you can't change the fact that Atlanta is a city with 1/4 the population of Paris in an area 4x the size. What you're talking about is physically ripping apart and rebuilding our cities, and relocating tens of millions of people. It's pure fantasy.
I find it interesting that you call it the 'gravity' problem, as though we should all stay on the ground, and not use airplanes, because they were hard to conceive of in the first place.
I'm not saying that we should stay on the ground, I'm saying that flapping your arms really hard is not a solution to the "flying" issue. Physics keeps that from being realistic. Similarly, conservation is not a solution to the "energy" issue. Society keeps that from being realistic.
We are by no means 'stuck' with the structure we have; only our conditioning to accept the status quo suggests that we are.
It's not a matter of conditioning, it's a matter of logistics. Even halving the energy usage of the United States (to reach the level of Europe) through conservation is going to take an unprecedented physical reorganization. We're talking about rebuilding hundreds of cities, razing tens of thousands of suburbs, and relocating tens of millions of people. It's just not gonna happen. And ultimately, even halving our energy usage won't be enough in the long term. India and China are going to eat up whatever we save and more. To really create a sustainable system through conservation and our current renewable energy sources, we're going to have to drastically cut-back in the developed world, freeze the advancement of the developing world (sorry, you're stuck being poor!), and halt worldwide population growth. It's pure fantasy.
The solution is not to use less energy. It cannot be. The history of the world shows an incredibly close correlation between progress and energy consumption, and trying to fight history is almost as stupid as trying to fight gravity. The solution is to find more and more powerful sources of energy.
First, the energy efficiency of Europe isn't really going to help anything in the long run. Incredibly successful conservation programs might buy 10% or so in the developed world, but that reduction will be wiped out many times over by the increases in energy use in the developing world.
Second, European standard of living is indeed lower than the American standard of living, at least from the point of view of per-capita GDP (PPP). In any case, as you rightly perceived, the United States is simply not set up to make public or human-powered transport feasible. That's something that can't really be changed, and thus it is not particularly useful to point out the energy efficiency of Europe in demanding that the US improve its own energy efficiency.
The dichotomy is not false. It's going to take a lot more than a few hybrid cars to solve the energy problem. For conservation to have a real impact on worldwide energy consumption, we need a change in lifestyle equivalent to your second case. If you just chip away at energy use a few percent here or there, nothing is really going to change. We'll just slightly delay the inevitable.
I agree with your points in general, and I want to address one thing specifically:
Several European towns and cities attempted to curb their consumption levels earlier this decade if i remember an article i read.
Which is neat, but every reduction in energy use of some progressive European town is offset many times over by the huge increases in energy consumption of the developing world. India and China together have about five times the population of the EU. As they develop, their per-capita energy usage is going to approach that of the developed world, and the total increase in energy use is going to absolutely dwarf any reductions made from conservation.
Energy conservation is absolutely useless as a tool for addressing the overall worldwide energy problem. It has a certain utility in improving economic efficiency in the face of rising energy prices, until a cheaper, more plentiful source of energy is found, but will do absolutely nothing to address the problem itself.
What actually necessitates a car?
The fact that the vast majority of American cities are simply not built for pedestrians. I live in midtown Atlanta, and between the terrible and unreliable public transportation and the layout of the city itself, a car is almost a necessity unless you want to waste enormous amounts of time getting from place to place.
Most of these issues are intrinsic to the design of the American landscape. Spending the better part of a century with cheap and convenient individual transportation has resulted in the physical structure of the country being hostile to other transportation paradigms. Yes, there are other places in the world that do not have these issues, but that's not very relevant. The structure we have now is something we're pretty stuck with. Reshaping it in any significant way would be unimaginably expensive, and enormously disruptive.
Conservation is theoretically nice solution, but not one that is practically applicable. It's what I call the "gravity" problem. Yeah, it would be nice for people building airplanes and rockets if gravity didn't exist, but talking about all the cool things you could design in the absence of gravity is pointless --- the physical world is the way it is and there is no changing it. Similarly, people's behavior is what it is. There is centuries of inertia behind it, and its not changing any time soon. Indeed, all those people who are walking and biking in India and China are switching to gas-powered cars as their economies and standards of living improve! The only sensical engineering solution is to deal with the reality you're given, and try to make the best of it. In this case, it means that the solution is not using less energy, but finding more potent and plentiful sources of energy. Nuclear power certainly fits that bill.
If the cost is cutting back our consumption, is that so much to ask?
Yes. Consumption is what drives economies forward. The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact (not just nibble away at the problem near the edges) would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures.
Then I gather you have not really programmed much, have you? Like in assembler, say 8-bit, or something similar? Just another pie-eater, ha?
I've written an assembler, for x86 no less. MOD/RM and SIB ain't got nothing on me.
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - Abelson & Susman
From a theoretical point of view, assembly knowledge isn't particularly useful because it doesn't lend itself to rigorous analysis (the "science" part of "computer science"). From a practical point of view, since very few programs are written in assembly language anymore, knowledge of it has limited utility. Further, from a practical point of view, I'd much rather deal with a programmer who can explain his work in terms of data structures and algorithms than one that is stuck thinking in terms of registers and memory locations.
There is certainly a place for assembly knowledge*. It's just a niche, and not a particularly important one anymore. Meanwhile, there are lots and lots of diverse applications for the theory they teach you in those classes instead of assembly. In my own work, I've had to bust out the graph theory way more often than I've had to bust out my knowledge of asm tricks for fast line-rendering...
*) Interestingly enough, one of those places is inside the language runtimes of high-level languages. There are usually lots of neat tricks inside those things (eg: using the NaN space of double-precision floats to store unions of floats and 51-bit integers without extra variant tags!)
It doesn't really look any fundamentally different --- the buttons are just in different places. The whole concept of a GUI-oriented equation editor just doesn't make sense. It's acceptable when you need to enter a couple of equations, but for _real_ work, no way. In a science/engineering paper you may need to enter mathematics in every other sentence. Going into a whole separate mode to do it totally ruins your workflow.
As for Word as a whole --- there is no way in hell I'm ever coming near it again. After having worked on several 50-100 page research papers in Word over the last four or five years, I'm done. I did it at the time because I was working with other people who didn't know TeX, but after those experiences I've realized it would be faster to just transcribe other peoples' work from Word into TeX than to try and do any copyediting in Word itself. Its interface is obtuse, its behavior is unpredictable, and its output is ugly. The fact that so many people use it for anything more than quick memos absolutely boggles my mind.
It's called TeX, learn it once, and reap the benefits for the rest of your life. Instead of dicking around with Equation Editor's error-prone, piece of shit GUI, you can typeset good looking mathematics very quickly and easily. Plus, it's trivial to integrate with other tools. For example, when I work on a simulation in Matlab, I have the program generate TeX code and EPS images for the results and dump them into a file. Then I use \input{} to refer to those results from the main body of my paper. This way if I rerun the simulation for whatever reason, the paper automatically picks up the updated results. Also, TeX's code display facilities allow me to make nice code listings that are again kept up to date with the actual Matlab code of the simulation. Also, on top of all that, TeX outputs professional-looking PDFs, not the raggedy-text shit that Word excretes.
Before you complain about TeX being complicated: even my younger brother, whose still in high-school, figured out (with no help from me!) what a piece of shit Equation Editor is, and switched to TeX. Equation Editor, like Word itself, is barely sufficient for writing high-school lab reports, much less university-level science and engineering work!
You forgot about DLLs spread randomly throughout Windows/System32. Also, copying the registry to a new install in its entirety is a foolish thing to do. Moreover, while the registry itself may be in on file, any application entry within it is scattered hither and yon.
Lol. I was Class of '06 at Tech, and I remember helping all the people on my hall with Intro to CS. I actually like Scheme quite a bit, but I definitely think it's inappropriate to teach it to a bunch of engineers that will never really appreciate it. That said, maybe it would've been better if they were forced to appreciate advanced CS concepts. Maybe then when they wouldn't write such goddamn horrible Matlab code.
You're right. I used the term "Christianity" inconsistently. I was referring to the Christian population and its beliefs and practices.
The costs of abusing alcohol are temporal. The costs of sinning are potentially eternal. The fact that so many Catholics sin so cavalierly suggests that, deep down, they really don't believe in the fires of hell.
Individuals read and interpret the Bible, understand the worship service, form their own denominations, etc. I disagree, though, that this means that Christianity has become diluted
Of course it's become diluted. The Bible clearly states that masturbation is wrong. Yet, I'd be willing to bet that most Christian males in Western countries masturbate. The Bible repeatedly states that premarital sex is a crime, yet in the West premarital sex is the norm! How do you rationalize this behavior? Simple: people say they believe in the basic tenants of Christianity, but they don't. They pick and choose the parts of the Bible that are agreeable to them, a process which itself makes no sense if you consider the Bible to be a divine work inspired by an omnipotent being! Nobody fears God anymore, because they believe in a kind, friendly God who is accepting of their lifestyle, and is willing to overlook all but the most basic rules in the Bible. This is not the Christian God!
Most US Christians don't worry about losing their souls by using birth control, but I bet a lot more would worry about losing their souls by committing murder.
The Quran says not to kill people too, and so do the Ten Commandments. General stuff like that isn't what defines Christianity, distinguishing it from other religions. In fact, you're reinforcing the point I'm making. Christianity, as defined by the Bible, is a big religion, with lot's of elements. In Catholicism, in particular, these aspects are even highly-codified. Over time, people stop believing in more in more of these aspects, while retaining only the basic ones that are compatible with modern society. This is absolutely dilution of peoples' belief in the religion.
I'll agree that the New Testament is on the whole less violent than the Quran, but unfortunately, there is no religion that writes Old Testament out entirely. Just because most Christians choose to ignore the horrible things in the Old Testament does not make it any less of a part of the overall Christian doctrine.
As for the birth control issue, I'm not equating one's position on birth control with being Christian. I'm equating one's position on birth control with being Catholic. If you really believe that Jesus is divine and anointed Peter to speak for him on Earth and that the Pope is the spiritual successor to Peter, how can you possibly rationalize adopting a position on birth control that the papacy has repeatedly denounced as being sinful? If you don't believe in the primacy of the Pope, then you're not Catholic, by the very definition of Catholic dogma.
That's actually a fair point, and I was being somewhat inconsistent in my postings on the subject.
Give up dude, you're arguing with a moron.
Bettle B made a good point, but I also want to add something. I think in general it's better to look at religion as a reflection of society, than something that molds society. Ostensibly, societies derive their values from religion, but to be completely realistic, more often society leverages religion to enforce the values that they already hold. So in the context of the Arab period of enlightenment, it is useful to look at not the religious angle, but the political and economic events that underly them.
The Islamic Empire (a political phenomenon) brought civilization and urbanization to a region that had been largely nomadic. It brought, at least for a time, stability, security, and wealth. The culture of Islam was, at the time, more contemporary and metropolitan than its contemporaries (remember, we're talking about a period when Europe was in the Dark Ages). These ingredients were all important for the cultural renaissance that occurred in the period. As the civilization declined, wealth, stability, and security were lost, and at that point Islam was used to enforce the conservative social order that naturally arises from such an impoverished state.
Neither Islam nor Christianity have changed substantially in the last 500-1000 years. Neither the Bible nor the Quran have gone through a new edition. What has changed is how literally followers of the religion adhere to the now antiquated doctrines. The vast majority of Western Christians aren't really all that Christian. They don't attend Church regularly, they don't follow most of the teachings of the Bible, etc. They have a vague belief in God and Christ and doing good work, but for all their specificity such beliefs are probably closer to those of a modern, progressive Muslim than to the beliefs of the more ardent believers within their own religion. The litmus test for me is really the whole issue with the Catholic Church and birth control. The Pope, the designated representative of God on Earth, says that contraception is wrong yet most Catholics still use it. This is a very fundamental test of belief. If you honestly believe that there is an all-powerful being who controls heaven and earth and that Jesus died for your sins and left Peter as his successor, and that the current Pope is the spiritual successor of Peter and speaks with all of his authority, then you cannot possibly rationalize the use of birth control. LIke it or not, most modern Catholics do not really believe in Catholicism --- they believe in something similar, but diluted enough for modern sensibilities.
It is this "dilution" that is desperately missing from the Islamic world. We have a population that feels at most mild guilt for skipping Church, and they have a population that fears for their eternal soul for missing prayers, and that's the problem.
I don't think the Church (or the Mosque or the Synagogue) should get credit for the achievements of its members! It was the Christian Church that put Galileo under house arrest. It was a Christian (Newton), that came up with the fundamentals of classical mechanics. There is an important distinction to be made.
There are multiple periods during which certain parts of the Middle East were prominent civilizations, advanced for their time. The period that occurred most recently was under the Islamic empire. The person who is considered the "father of algebra" had the full name Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
As for your theory as a whole, you ignore some important facts. For example, Christian scholars were instrumental in preserving the knowledge of the Roman Empire through the dark ages. Also, theology has been an important component of the thinking of many of history's greatest minds. When you look at the figures behind the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, the vast majority of them were not atheists.
That said, I do agree that organized religion has done a lot of harm to science as well. On the whole, I'd agree that it's been more good than bad.
You don't get something for nothing. To fit the same amount of HD content onto a standard DVD with MPEG4, you have to use a vastly higher compression ratio, reducing quality significantly.
The iPhone fills a major gap in the US market --- a consumer-oriented smartphone. Here, you basically have Treo's, Blackberry's, some Windows Mobile devices, and the iPhone. My dad has a Treo, and it's a nice device, but multimedia and websurfing on it is nothing like it is on the iPhone. On the other hand, for keeping appointments and contacts, the Treo wins hands-down. The Windows Mobile devices are good for portable-Office stuff, but the interfaces are so damn cumbersome (and they're quite expensive compared to the iPhone as well). I haven't used a recent Blackberry, so I won't comment on it, but its multimedia capabilities have historically been lacking. And of course on top of all of that there is the good old Apple integration and ease-of-use. I've helped my dad muddle through Palm Desktop and ActiveSync over the years, and honestly ease of use of my iPhone/MacBook combo is in a completely different league.
That, of course, is the US market. I don't really keep tabs of what's been going on with Nokia and Sony. I hear they have some nice stuff, but they get almost no play in the US market on mainstream carriers.