This is exceptionally good news for Mac OS X. Linux and Mac OS X have a much stronger affinity than Windows-Mac or Windows-Linux (or Windows-anything).
As more users install Linux and move away from Windows they'll discover they don't need to upgrade their hardware as often. So they'll take the extra dough and get an iBook or a PowerBook. They'll discover very quickly that using "make" on the Mac is just like using "make" on Linux. They'll download the Mac OS X versions of all their favorite Linux stuff. They'll trip out on Path Finder. They'll be hooked by the superior window manager and rigorous attention to detail. In short, they'll start using the Mac even when they want to do Linux stuff. They'll VNC or SSH to the Linux box and tweak/etc while they read SlashDot in Safari and play a DVD in the corner.
At least, all the Linux geeks I know have gotten hooked on Mac OS X. And my Windows buddy keeps saying stuff like, "That's how it should be done! Those pathetic nerds in Redmond have had their thumbs up their arses for 10 years!"
The issue with designers is not customizability. It is a well-designed OS and software paradigm. Apple has it. Linux is still in the experimental stage when it comes to interfaces and developing UI guidelines. Applications don't have the requisite consistency and elegance that Apple fans like myself find invaluable. The Linux desktop is definitely usable, and it's even very approachable and discoverable for experienced desktop users. But it isn't up to the level of Mac OS X.
As for your characterization of Mac customizability, you have a lot to discover! There are thousands of applications, preference panes, screensaver modules, menu-bar add-ons, contextual-menu add-ons, daemons, etc., etc., that exist to customize the Mac OS X desktop. Konfabulator is a prime example! There are even alternative file managers like Path Finder if you need more power and geekiness than the built-in Finder provides. (Check both of these out, by the way. There is nothing comparable on Linux.)
Skinning alone is not the essence of customizability. I do like the fact that there are so many alternative window managers for Linux, and each one has a unique approach. Nautilus seemed especially interesting last time I saw it.
The next step is to begin working to genetically engineer plants that produce more of the kinds of materials that benefit the distillation and catalysis of ethanol. Corn is a poor energy source when you consider what it takes to grow it, and how devastating modern agriculture is to the soil.
Not to mention the fact that agriculture is essentially owned and regulated by Big Oil, who also own the companies that make seeds and the companies which make nitrogen fertilizers. No serious progress is likely to be made in agriculture or energy technology as long as the interests of Big Oil remain paramount.
The smart direction, I think, is to look at aquatic plants, algae, bacteria, and the like. If a bacterium or yeast could be developed to produce ethanol in sufficient quantity, and a closed system could be developed that takes in sunlight and produces all the kinds of things bacteria and yeasts produce - ethyl, nitrogen, methane, etc., it would go an amazingly long way towards improving the efficiency of these processes.
The trouble with our current crude methods is that they are simply unsustainable and produce far too much pollution and waste.
Recently a technique was developed to convert any kind of solid waste into constituent materials, including a rich form of oil. This project was undertaken with support from ButterBall because the costs of waste disposal for their turkey abattoirs are hilariously high.
Now imagine a similar kind of energy plant, except instead of slow-heating wastes and so forth, it has a chain of vats containing various forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms, simple plants, etc., in a closed ecosystem. Wastes and other materials from one vat are leeched out and channeled to the next vat in line. Nitrogen and CO2 are funneled to the plants, and their oxygen is fed to some single-celled creatures. Round it goes, probably feeding back into itself in a closed loop. Except, of course it isn't a closed loop. Free materials like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., are constantly being added to the system along with plenty of sunlight. The result is that you end up with a huge abundance of excess which can be siphoned off.
The grail of energy will be to engineer or discover bacteria capable of freeing hydrogen itself. Maybe some of those deep-sea hot vent varieties have some creative genetic ideas!
We are so used to thinking of energy in terms of limitations, and so there seems to be a rush to knock energy out quickly and with great force. The fact is, slower, gentler, more methodical methods are available using the power of living cells. We only have to learn how to utilize and program these molecular machines to do our bidding.
I have a friend who is utterly convinced that Free Energy Devices (also known as Zero-Point Energy Taps) are possible, they exist, and they are suppressed by Big Energy interests. I am naturally skeptical of the idea, but at the same time I'm open to the possibility, if only because at the atomic level everything is going a million miles an hour all the time. If you could tap that energy at the molecular scale I believe you could produce - essentially - a perpetual-energy device.
For example, if you were able to build a device on the nano-scale which captures electrons - like a cashmere sweater - and then instead of just forming a diffuse cloud of electrons were able to channel those electrons into a medium and hold them... well you get the idea. We know static is real, and we know a little bit of it can produce a pretty impressive shock. If a trillion of these devices could fit into a square foot then I imagine you could extract a pretty impressive amount of electrical energy.
There have to be thousands of ways to efficiently borrow excess energy. Another method that occurs to me is to layer materials in a manner such that electrons are caused to flow in a specific direction. I'd be interested to know if layering materials - let's say nickel and copper - can produce energy flow passively, or if a catalyst such as acid or NaCl is always required to "pull" electrons out.
Is that everything in the case? If there are more foibles I'd love to see them included.
I believe that one day all information theory will be centered around analogies derived from condiments. Of course this cannot occur until the Ketchup Renaissance and the Guacamole Reconstruction have played out.
I think it's cool that Microsoft is taking cues from the iApps - interesting that they want to integrate it so much into the operating system. Whereas so far Apple is stressing an application-centered solution on top of a more general-purpose filesystem, Microsoft is getting deeper into the integration game, getting into file metadata a la BeOS, and tracking files according to thematic relevance a la relational databases.
If the "smart desktop" idea catches on it will be interesting to see the response from developers on Mac OS X and Linux, as far as offering intelligent activity tracking. Somehow I see a twisty maze of documents and activities, all alike.
Should operating systems do all the work of organizing users files for them, concealing the filesystem behind a database veneer, or behind a purely task-oriented veneer? Should this kind of thing be left to application developers, like the maker of Path Finder?
Wouldn't Windows be more useful if it was a truly modular system that could be configured simply by stripping away unwanted components? Isn't that what makes Darwin so healthy in the enterprise market today?
Early in life we learn through intuition, but around 6 we become fixated on understanding through language, except for some very gifted or intuitive children. The addiction to language, and moreover to objects of desire, causes untold stupidity throughout many persons' lives. Not everyone can be a genius like my friend Fern here.
This version of Safari is starting to show signs of work on forms and controls. When you press the return key in a form the Submit button now lights up for a second, a subtle indicator to reinforce that the form was actually submitted. On the CSS front, font size specifiers now work in form buttons, but not typeface or weight. When they get form control color-specifiers working that'll be pretty nifty.
There is but One Rule for computational speed: "To make it go faster, make it do less."
WINE is smart because it re-implements many Windows DLLs natively. QEMU is smart because it caches and executes native code built from x86 code. Taken together the speed should be noticeably better than VirtualPC.
But the most optimal method by far would be to convert x86 binaries into PPC application packages that link to native libraries / frameworks corresponding to Windows DLLs. Such translated binaries would require no emulation layer, just the presence of the necessary libraries.
But can you imagine how complex it would be to convert x86 code into PPC code? And yet part of me thinks this brute-force method is almost trivial. It's simple enough to disassemble machine language. And one could certainly disassemble x86 code into a working C equivalent where C variables correspond to x86 registers.
Besides the fact that this would be an exacting and laborious task, what other barriers exist for this approach?
I'd prefer my reward as a cashier's check. I wish you the best of luck locating the offending lines of code that led to this outbreak. I look forward to their publication.
Actually, yes. This is precisely my idea of stupid. Only it's not SCO alone, but the system that allows these shenanigans to go on that's stupid. Currency which has no intrinsic value and derives from such blatant non-virtue? That's stoopid!
Google has a famous name, and anything they release to the press is going to get attention everywhere. All they need to do is refuse to comply, explain in a press release what SCO must do to bolster their claims before they will comply, and they will educate some of the public mind.
Google pretty much has to respond to this publicly, since they do have that IPO pending.
I think SCO has made their biggest mistake this time.
How things are used is an ethical question. Nevertheless things do exist which can be misused. That is a fact of life. I do not propose one misuse your ideas or mine, rather I propose they use them both to gain insight and develop a better heart. If your proactive belief in creation bolsters your connection to the divine, that is good. But ideas are only contingent to that aim. Again, it matters how we walk our walk, regardless of the talk that points our way.
Evolution happens in all systems, from universes to organisms to cultures and ideas. At least for some.
It has been my experience that those who maintain the "God" meme as their object of idolatry generally assign attributes to this meme. In literate societies these attributes are often gleaned from authoritative texts, such as the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. One then proceeds to emphasize those attributes which suit them personally. That is to say, one's ideas about "God" are mirrors of one's preferences - those attributes which one finds valuable in one's own culture.
During adolescence one's reasoning emerges as an extension of the metaphysical premises which they have uncritically accepted during their formative years. If one has been told by their preferred authoritative text that a force of personality called "God" created man in a flash, as the parable of Adam and Eve describes, and furthermore eschews the deeper meaning of this parable in favor of a literalist interpretation then one will be inclined to consider the concept of evolution as heretical, as you seem to.
The recordists of the Bible did a marvelous thing by transcribing the parables, folk tales, traditions, spoken histories, and cultural developments of the Middle East and Northern Africa. The cultural lessons of thousands of years are a valuable record. But these records should be taken in a highly critical manner as a matter of intellectual integrity and as a matter of responsible faith. One should not uncritically accept either the traditional account as presented in the Bible nor the equally obfuscated account which emerges from the fossil record through the application of our senses and reasoning.
(If your idea of faith is simply to kowtow to authority then you have been poorly instructed and need to talk to someone with insight. Perhaps you know a priest of your chosen faith who has quiescence and a sparkle in his eye. That's someone to hang with.)
Reasoning and observation are essential methods which we are obligated to apply, both as caretakers of our personal souls and caretakers of our world.
That being said, I feel you have been grossly irresponsible in applying your reasoning to the question of evolution.
First of all you are misrepresenting spontaneous generation to yourself. So-called "spontaneous generation" was a mistaken belief based on a failure to observe the evidence. People apparently believed that maggots and so forth spontaneously emerged from rotting meat, etc. This was disproved when it could be observed that flies were required to lay eggs first. That's the gist of this bit of folly.
Anyhow, the genesis of life from organic chemicals turns out to be very simple, and has been performed in chemistry classes by college students for decades. First fill a flask with the rarified gases which are known (from the fossil record) to have existed on Earth during the time when life most likely emerged. Next spark the mixture. After a few minutes the gases condense into a gooey brown sludge. When you analyze the sludge you find amino acids have been created. Self-replicating molecules very quickly develop from organic chemicals.
More experimentation reveals that it is quite simple for simple membranes to emerge from organic chemicals. Membranes which are polarized from the exterior to the interior.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the universe is somehow not divine and miraculous. The very existence of the universe, the complex elegance of its processes, the very fact of life and mind are awe-inspiring. This process, this experience, is the very stuff of existence. To those who have sought deeply and done the hard spiritual work, God is experienced as everything that exists in this eternal present moment.
The hard spiritual work is more than just agreeing with every word in the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc., as pious as you may feel doing it. If you're a Christian, follow Jesus' prayer instructions to the letter. Use the Lord's Prayer exclusively
Consistency. UI guidelines. Simplicity. Aesthetically informed developers. These are aspects of Mac OS X that the ad hoc community of Linux developers lacks in the desktop arena.
One can start up almost any unfamiliar Mac OS X application and find all the standard app features in seconds. Preferences in the application menu, help in the help menu, the same command shortcuts for new, open, close, save, quit, print, undo, copy, cut, paste, select all, find, find next, info, minimize, hide, switch windows, etc. The same behavior of key modifiers, such as shift to select a range, command to toggle selectedness, option to get extended behavior, shift to constrain proportions, option to snap-center, etc. Many of these standards developed in the apps of Aldus/Adobe. Taken together they compose a transactional language that Mac users expect and appreciate. A well-designed Mac application is one which adheres to the accepted standards and extends them elegantly.
I don't find the same level of consistency and simplicity on other platforms. Take a typical Windows application. The menus will sometimes contain items ambiguously named Preferences, Options, Settings, and Defaults. Sometimes the items are in the Options menu, sometimes the Edit menu, sometimes the File menu. Quite a few Linux desktop apps suffer from the same problem.
I haven't looked deeply into the development of KDE, Gnome, etc., but are there any guidelines extant for the way these UI toolkits are actually used? It seems to me that an established set of standards and practices is a necessary element. Otherwise Linux will just end up being a patchwork of ideas halfheartedly borrowed and extended from Windows and Mac OS... which to some extent it has.
Apple will provide updates to its bundled products, probably Jan 16, but maybe a little later. Apple wants everyone to have the latest version of iTunes. The newest version will have the best support for the Music Store. Apple wants everyone to have the latest iPhoto, especially considering the performance problems of earlier versions. (Though Steve didn't make any mention of improved performance, only improved capacity.)
Apple wants us to have the latest version of iMovie, so that will likely be downloadable. Will iDVD be free? Probably not. Will GarageBand be free? No, definitely not. The only way to get these free is to buy a new Mac. I wish I had the dough to get a dual G5. Maybe at the end of the year when the Dual 3 GHz machines are ripe....
This gag was done on St. Elsewhere. Doctor Ehrlich (Ed Begley, Jr.) demonstrates the taste test by dipping his finger in a sample. Then the senior Doctor Craig (Mark Daniels) says "nonsense!" and grabs the flask and dips his finger in the sample, tasting it himself.
Then Doctor Ehrlich, horrified by the result of his prank, admits, "Whoa! I switched fingers. I thought you knew."
That was a funny scene, but then most of the Ehrlich/Craig scenes were pretty funny.
As long as we're on the subject, could someone please do the world a favor and discredit the Protocols of Zion once and for all? It seems there are a few people in the world who still take this document seriously.
They'll likely try to culture some smallpox to get more material for the comparison. If they can't culture any of the old stuff they may still be able to cross the genetic material of the antiquated and modern strains - perhaps creating a super mutant strain - mua-ha-ha-hahaha!
...If SCO were forced to defend their rights under the GPL they couldn't continue to assert - as they have - that the GPL is invalid and probably illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exceptionally good news for Mac OS X. Linux and Mac OS X have a much stronger affinity than Windows-Mac or Windows-Linux (or Windows-anything).
/etc while they read SlashDot in Safari and play a DVD in the corner.
As more users install Linux and move away from Windows they'll discover they don't need to upgrade their hardware as often. So they'll take the extra dough and get an iBook or a PowerBook. They'll discover very quickly that using "make" on the Mac is just like using "make" on Linux. They'll download the Mac OS X versions of all their favorite Linux stuff. They'll trip out on Path Finder. They'll be hooked by the superior window manager and rigorous attention to detail. In short, they'll start using the Mac even when they want to do Linux stuff. They'll VNC or SSH to the Linux box and tweak
At least, all the Linux geeks I know have gotten hooked on Mac OS X. And my Windows buddy keeps saying stuff like, "That's how it should be done! Those pathetic nerds in Redmond have had their thumbs up their arses for 10 years!"
The issue with designers is not customizability. It is a well-designed OS and software paradigm. Apple has it. Linux is still in the experimental stage when it comes to interfaces and developing UI guidelines. Applications don't have the requisite consistency and elegance that Apple fans like myself find invaluable. The Linux desktop is definitely usable, and it's even very approachable and discoverable for experienced desktop users. But it isn't up to the level of Mac OS X.
As for your characterization of Mac customizability, you have a lot to discover! There are thousands of applications, preference panes, screensaver modules, menu-bar add-ons, contextual-menu add-ons, daemons, etc., etc., that exist to customize the Mac OS X desktop. Konfabulator is a prime example! There are even alternative file managers like Path Finder if you need more power and geekiness than the built-in Finder provides. (Check both of these out, by the way. There is nothing comparable on Linux.)
Skinning alone is not the essence of customizability. I do like the fact that there are so many alternative window managers for Linux, and each one has a unique approach. Nautilus seemed especially interesting last time I saw it.
The next step is to begin working to genetically engineer plants that produce more of the kinds of materials that benefit the distillation and catalysis of ethanol. Corn is a poor energy source when you consider what it takes to grow it, and how devastating modern agriculture is to the soil.
Not to mention the fact that agriculture is essentially owned and regulated by Big Oil, who also own the companies that make seeds and the companies which make nitrogen fertilizers. No serious progress is likely to be made in agriculture or energy technology as long as the interests of Big Oil remain paramount.
The smart direction, I think, is to look at aquatic plants, algae, bacteria, and the like. If a bacterium or yeast could be developed to produce ethanol in sufficient quantity, and a closed system could be developed that takes in sunlight and produces all the kinds of things bacteria and yeasts produce - ethyl, nitrogen, methane, etc., it would go an amazingly long way towards improving the efficiency of these processes.
The trouble with our current crude methods is that they are simply unsustainable and produce far too much pollution and waste.
Recently a technique was developed to convert any kind of solid waste into constituent materials, including a rich form of oil. This project was undertaken with support from ButterBall because the costs of waste disposal for their turkey abattoirs are hilariously high.
Now imagine a similar kind of energy plant, except instead of slow-heating wastes and so forth, it has a chain of vats containing various forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms, simple plants, etc., in a closed ecosystem. Wastes and other materials from one vat are leeched out and channeled to the next vat in line. Nitrogen and CO2 are funneled to the plants, and their oxygen is fed to some single-celled creatures. Round it goes, probably feeding back into itself in a closed loop. Except, of course it isn't a closed loop. Free materials like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., are constantly being added to the system along with plenty of sunlight. The result is that you end up with a huge abundance of excess which can be siphoned off.
The grail of energy will be to engineer or discover bacteria capable of freeing hydrogen itself. Maybe some of those deep-sea hot vent varieties have some creative genetic ideas!
We are so used to thinking of energy in terms of limitations, and so there seems to be a rush to knock energy out quickly and with great force. The fact is, slower, gentler, more methodical methods are available using the power of living cells. We only have to learn how to utilize and program these molecular machines to do our bidding.
I have a friend who is utterly convinced that Free Energy Devices (also known as Zero-Point Energy Taps) are possible, they exist, and they are suppressed by Big Energy interests. I am naturally skeptical of the idea, but at the same time I'm open to the possibility, if only because at the atomic level everything is going a million miles an hour all the time. If you could tap that energy at the molecular scale I believe you could produce - essentially - a perpetual-energy device.
For example, if you were able to build a device on the nano-scale which captures electrons - like a cashmere sweater - and then instead of just forming a diffuse cloud of electrons were able to channel those electrons into a medium and hold them... well you get the idea. We know static is real, and we know a little bit of it can produce a pretty impressive shock. If a trillion of these devices could fit into a square foot then I imagine you could extract a pretty impressive amount of electrical energy.
There have to be thousands of ways to efficiently borrow excess energy. Another method that occurs to me is to layer materials in a manner such that electrons are caused to flow in a specific direction. I'd be interested to know if layering materials - let's say nickel and copper - can produce energy flow passively, or if a catalyst such as acid or NaCl is always required to "pull" electrons out.
Is that everything in the case? If there are more foibles I'd love to see them included.
I believe that one day all information theory will be centered around analogies derived from condiments. Of course this cannot occur until the Ketchup Renaissance and the Guacamole Reconstruction have played out.
I think it's cool that Microsoft is taking cues from the iApps - interesting that they want to integrate it so much into the operating system. Whereas so far Apple is stressing an application-centered solution on top of a more general-purpose filesystem, Microsoft is getting deeper into the integration game, getting into file metadata a la BeOS, and tracking files according to thematic relevance a la relational databases.
If the "smart desktop" idea catches on it will be interesting to see the response from developers on Mac OS X and Linux, as far as offering intelligent activity tracking. Somehow I see a twisty maze of documents and activities, all alike.
Should operating systems do all the work of organizing users files for them, concealing the filesystem behind a database veneer, or behind a purely task-oriented veneer? Should this kind of thing be left to application developers, like the maker of Path Finder?
Wouldn't Windows be more useful if it was a truly modular system that could be configured simply by stripping away unwanted components? Isn't that what makes Darwin so healthy in the enterprise market today?
Check out The Degree Confluence Project for a more independent and manual approach. It's surprising how widely this project has covered already.
Early in life we learn through intuition, but around 6 we become fixated on understanding through language, except for some very gifted or intuitive children. The addiction to language, and moreover to objects of desire, causes untold stupidity throughout many persons' lives. Not everyone can be a genius like my friend Fern here.
A: Well, it's blue, and when you see it, you die.
Q: Do people see the blue screen of death often?
A: No one has ever lived to tell, but we believe so.
Q: How can I avoid the blue screen of death?
A: You can't. Eventually you will see it, and you will die.
Q: Who invented the Blue Screen of Death?
A: It has been with us for as long as anyone can remember.
This version of Safari is starting to show signs of work on forms and controls. When you press the return key in a form the Submit button now lights up for a second, a subtle indicator to reinforce that the form was actually submitted. On the CSS front, font size specifiers now work in form buttons, but not typeface or weight. When they get form control color-specifiers working that'll be pretty nifty.
There is but One Rule for computational speed: "To make it go faster, make it do less."
WINE is smart because it re-implements many Windows DLLs natively. QEMU is smart because it caches and executes native code built from x86 code. Taken together the speed should be noticeably better than VirtualPC.
But the most optimal method by far would be to convert x86 binaries into PPC application packages that link to native libraries / frameworks corresponding to Windows DLLs. Such translated binaries would require no emulation layer, just the presence of the necessary libraries.
But can you imagine how complex it would be to convert x86 code into PPC code? And yet part of me thinks this brute-force method is almost trivial. It's simple enough to disassemble machine language. And one could certainly disassemble x86 code into a working C equivalent where C variables correspond to x86 registers.
Besides the fact that this would be an exacting and laborious task, what other barriers exist for this approach?
I've located the main culprits responsible for the spread of this worm. Here's a map to their location.
I'd prefer my reward as a cashier's check. I wish you the best of luck locating the offending lines of code that led to this outbreak. I look forward to their publication.
...of course that doesn't stop any of us from wasting our time here!
Actually, yes. This is precisely my idea of stupid. Only it's not SCO alone, but the system that allows these shenanigans to go on that's stupid. Currency which has no intrinsic value and derives from such blatant non-virtue? That's stoopid!
Google has a famous name, and anything they release to the press is going to get attention everywhere. All they need to do is refuse to comply, explain in a press release what SCO must do to bolster their claims before they will comply, and they will educate some of the public mind.
Google pretty much has to respond to this publicly, since they do have that IPO pending.
I think SCO has made their biggest mistake this time.
...and remember kids, you can't spell scoliosis without SCO, and SCO is... has... like, a twisted spine and stuff.
How things are used is an ethical question. Nevertheless things do exist which can be misused. That is a fact of life. I do not propose one misuse your ideas or mine, rather I propose they use them both to gain insight and develop a better heart. If your proactive belief in creation bolsters your connection to the divine, that is good. But ideas are only contingent to that aim. Again, it matters how we walk our walk, regardless of the talk that points our way.
Evolution happens in all systems, from universes to organisms to cultures and ideas. At least for some.
It has been my experience that those who maintain the "God" meme as their object of idolatry generally assign attributes to this meme. In literate societies these attributes are often gleaned from authoritative texts, such as the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. One then proceeds to emphasize those attributes which suit them personally. That is to say, one's ideas about "God" are mirrors of one's preferences - those attributes which one finds valuable in one's own culture.
During adolescence one's reasoning emerges as an extension of the metaphysical premises which they have uncritically accepted during their formative years. If one has been told by their preferred authoritative text that a force of personality called "God" created man in a flash, as the parable of Adam and Eve describes, and furthermore eschews the deeper meaning of this parable in favor of a literalist interpretation then one will be inclined to consider the concept of evolution as heretical, as you seem to.
The recordists of the Bible did a marvelous thing by transcribing the parables, folk tales, traditions, spoken histories, and cultural developments of the Middle East and Northern Africa. The cultural lessons of thousands of years are a valuable record. But these records should be taken in a highly critical manner as a matter of intellectual integrity and as a matter of responsible faith. One should not uncritically accept either the traditional account as presented in the Bible nor the equally obfuscated account which emerges from the fossil record through the application of our senses and reasoning.
(If your idea of faith is simply to kowtow to authority then you have been poorly instructed and need to talk to someone with insight. Perhaps you know a priest of your chosen faith who has quiescence and a sparkle in his eye. That's someone to hang with.)
Reasoning and observation are essential methods which we are obligated to apply, both as caretakers of our personal souls and caretakers of our world.
That being said, I feel you have been grossly irresponsible in applying your reasoning to the question of evolution.
First of all you are misrepresenting spontaneous generation to yourself. So-called "spontaneous generation" was a mistaken belief based on a failure to observe the evidence. People apparently believed that maggots and so forth spontaneously emerged from rotting meat, etc. This was disproved when it could be observed that flies were required to lay eggs first. That's the gist of this bit of folly.
Anyhow, the genesis of life from organic chemicals turns out to be very simple, and has been performed in chemistry classes by college students for decades. First fill a flask with the rarified gases which are known (from the fossil record) to have existed on Earth during the time when life most likely emerged. Next spark the mixture. After a few minutes the gases condense into a gooey brown sludge. When you analyze the sludge you find amino acids have been created. Self-replicating molecules very quickly develop from organic chemicals.
More experimentation reveals that it is quite simple for simple membranes to emerge from organic chemicals. Membranes which are polarized from the exterior to the interior.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the universe is somehow not divine and miraculous. The very existence of the universe, the complex elegance of its processes, the very fact of life and mind are awe-inspiring. This process, this experience, is the very stuff of existence. To those who have sought deeply and done the hard spiritual work, God is experienced as everything that exists in this eternal present moment.
The hard spiritual work is more than just agreeing with every word in the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc., as pious as you may feel doing it. If you're a Christian, follow Jesus' prayer instructions to the letter. Use the Lord's Prayer exclusively
Do a Google search on "ice age" and correlate it with "volcanic activity" to get a clue.
Consistency. UI guidelines. Simplicity. Aesthetically informed developers. These are aspects of Mac OS X that the ad hoc community of Linux developers lacks in the desktop arena.
One can start up almost any unfamiliar Mac OS X application and find all the standard app features in seconds. Preferences in the application menu, help in the help menu, the same command shortcuts for new, open, close, save, quit, print, undo, copy, cut, paste, select all, find, find next, info, minimize, hide, switch windows, etc. The same behavior of key modifiers, such as shift to select a range, command to toggle selectedness, option to get extended behavior, shift to constrain proportions, option to snap-center, etc. Many of these standards developed in the apps of Aldus/Adobe. Taken together they compose a transactional language that Mac users expect and appreciate. A well-designed Mac application is one which adheres to the accepted standards and extends them elegantly.
I don't find the same level of consistency and simplicity on other platforms. Take a typical Windows application. The menus will sometimes contain items ambiguously named Preferences, Options, Settings, and Defaults. Sometimes the items are in the Options menu, sometimes the Edit menu, sometimes the File menu. Quite a few Linux desktop apps suffer from the same problem.
I haven't looked deeply into the development of KDE, Gnome, etc., but are there any guidelines extant for the way these UI toolkits are actually used? It seems to me that an established set of standards and practices is a necessary element. Otherwise Linux will just end up being a patchwork of ideas halfheartedly borrowed and extended from Windows and Mac OS... which to some extent it has.
Sorry, but you misconstrued Steve's comparison of flash-based players to the iPod mini - it was in terms of price-point, not specifications.
The iPod Specs Page contradicts your assertion. The iPod mini has a 4GB hard drive.Wrong!
Apple will provide updates to its bundled products, probably Jan 16, but maybe a little later. Apple wants everyone to have the latest version of iTunes. The newest version will have the best support for the Music Store. Apple wants everyone to have the latest iPhoto, especially considering the performance problems of earlier versions. (Though Steve didn't make any mention of improved performance, only improved capacity.)
Apple wants us to have the latest version of iMovie, so that will likely be downloadable. Will iDVD be free? Probably not. Will GarageBand be free? No, definitely not. The only way to get these free is to buy a new Mac. I wish I had the dough to get a dual G5. Maybe at the end of the year when the Dual 3 GHz machines are ripe....
This gag was done on St. Elsewhere. Doctor Ehrlich (Ed Begley, Jr.) demonstrates the taste test by dipping his finger in a sample. Then the senior Doctor Craig (Mark Daniels) says "nonsense!" and grabs the flask and dips his finger in the sample, tasting it himself.
Then Doctor Ehrlich, horrified by the result of his prank, admits, "Whoa! I switched fingers. I thought you knew."
That was a funny scene, but then most of the Ehrlich/Craig scenes were pretty funny.
As long as we're on the subject, could someone please do the world a favor and discredit the Protocols of Zion once and for all? It seems there are a few people in the world who still take this document seriously.
They'll likely try to culture some smallpox to get more material for the comparison. If they can't culture any of the old stuff they may still be able to cross the genetic material of the antiquated and modern strains - perhaps creating a super mutant strain - mua-ha-ha-hahaha!
...If SCO were forced to defend their rights under the GPL they couldn't continue to assert - as they have - that the GPL is invalid and probably illegal.