it is admittedly disproportionate representation, since the true believers are still checking the Bible to figure out which of the Internets to sign up for. Right, so that would mean that you are talking to yourselves? Stupidity tends to be the result of a combination of genetic factors and upbringing where the former tends to have the most pronounced effect. It has nothing to do with what you believe in. The internet is an echo chamber where the emptiest pots make the most noise. This is precisely what I was was trying to get at. The most vocal atheists on the internet also seem to have the least amount of personal knowledge of the religions they attack. The fear you feel right now is fuelled by your own ignorance.
More republicans as they tend to be more religious ("sheep")...Hmmm. The whole stem cell thing however suggests more Democrats. But after becoming sheep, perhaps heathen Democrats will become bible banger Republicans. Of course, they might then suffer such cognitive dissonance that they'd commit suicide leading to more Democrats. But then suicide is a sin.... this is hard to calculate. Oh wait, no need. Contraception is a sin. We're doomed to be overrun by the uber-religious no matter how human the sheep become. Yawn. If this is true, why do all atheists use the same bloody rhetoric, straw man arguments and FUD where ever you go on the internet? Do you all have meetings to decide on what FUD to spread or is it just part of some sort of flock behaviour? Perhaps that would explain why that same FUD has to be debunked over and over again. Maybe you should start holding meetings to get your stories straight and maybe come up with some new original FUD.
I have one parting question. Are there really so many atheists on the internet or do you guys just go around signing up for multiple accounts everywhere? Perhaps that would explain the apparent group think phenomenon.
Name a bloddy carrier in the US that uses GSM other than AT&T with nationwide coverage. There is none. CDMA is a dead standard which is only used within North America. Apple was interested in going with the largest carrier in the US that supported the most popular international standard for cellphones.
It probably will be open to third-party developers who will license with Apple in the same way as developers license with Nintendo. No, you will not see homebrew open source software on the iPhone. By the same token, you also will not see trojans or viruses for it either.
Are you sure about that?
For a meager $399, I could get an Xbox360 with all these features AND dvd playback. It even does Hi-def downloads, Live Arcade games, and awesome AAA titles (GTA IV, Devil May Cry 4, (possibly) MGS and FF). That's got a remote, Windows Media connectivity, etc- and is expandable to play HD-DVD, potentially Blu-Ray in the future if it "wins".
First of all, you pulled that Blu-Ray thing out of your arse. MSFT has not been a Blu-Ray supporter and they will not do a 180 on that. Wishful thinking of a MSFT fanboy.
If you are not a gamer then games are moot or if you already have a PS3, then you have Blu-Ray and games taken care of.
A complicated remotes and Windows media connectivity are moot if you are an iTMS customer on either windows or mac.
It'll even play music off your iPod. Unless you buy ALL your tv off of iTunes, why would you get this? I'd just get a 360 for this money. Both are simple to use, also.
You have an interesting definition of simple. The Xbox360 will not play your iTMS purchases songs either.
You can probably rip those videos into WMV if you really set upon it. Again, you are pulling stuff out of your arse like the typical MSFT fanboy. WMV is irrelevant outside of windows media player.
Clearly, either of these devices can be modded- but I'm talking from a consumer standpoint. Are you really? What consumer would want to bother with hackish iPod support or trying to crack DRM and transcode video into WMV?
From a consumer standpoint, the Apple TV is the obvious choice for anyone who does not have their computer near by especially if they buy songs and/or videos from iTMS.
You don't get it. Having a different window manager is not going to make the applications any easier to your or the UI any less inconsistent. The problem is that some linux applications use KDE controls, others use Gnome while yet others use their own proprietary controls. Now before you all jump over me, I would consider controls proprietary if nobody else uses them regardless of whether source is available.
Linux lacks focus. I don't see a problem with people trying to innovate but the applications should have gravitated to one GUI toolkit by now. Forking Ubuntu as Kubuntu, Zubuntu, or BecauseIhateevetybodybuntu is part of the problem.
OS X apps benefit from having one toolkit that is robust and feature filled which tends to speed up development and provides a certain amount of UI consistency automatically.
Hmmm. I'm posting right now from my MBP connected to my wireless router. No problems here. I did not experience any lack of wireless network connectivity even though I was diligent in installing all updates as they came out.
If they migrate to Mac OSX, does that make it less likely that at some point in the future they would switch to Linux? If people are having a hard time convincing people to move from Windows to Linux, isn't the job going to be harder getting them to move from Mac to Linux? It isn't really Windows that is the challenge to Linux, it is Mac OSX. Is it really a great thing for Free/Open Source software that people that many who are migrating from Windows are choosing Mac OSX? It is a good thing for for the Open Source movement which include software under BSD licenses which promote interoperability through open and well documented standards and protocols but perhaps not so much for the RMS brand of FOSS.
Having said that, there is a great deal of benefit even the FOSS movement had reap from this shift. Having easily readable open standards can be an asset for any GNU project wishing to interoperate with other projects.
Many people seem to think of Linux or GNU software as the Open Source software movement but open source is not just about the GPL or about GPL'ed operating systems. I have quite a few GPL'ed OS X applications in my Applications folder. Open Source software with all its flavours of licenses is alive and well on OS X.
I think you will find that there is more Open Source software available for OS X than for windows and part of this had to do with Apple's culture of supporting and creating open source projects. Apple may never open source their top layer of their OS but they have open sourced the kernel and the bootstrap as well as several key server technologies such as the Quicktime Streaming Server.
That's not how it works--the artifacts are there when you download a song from iTunes, since they're encoded at 128k. Burning and ripping them at a higher bit rate doesn't improve anything. What is your point? Of course compressed songs will have compression artifacts. You could just re-encode to lossless, rip it to raw (WAV/AIFF) or just *gasp* listen to them on a CD playing device. Fair use does not guarantee you access to media free of artifacts or give you the magical ability to re-encode previously lossy media as lossy files without introducing or amplifying existing artifacts. Burning is as far as fair use is meant to go. Being able to rip from the CD without prosecution is a bonus given that you did not purchase the CD version. Technically, you are violating the license terms but the companies are looking the other way.
Where has this guy been? Xbox games only play on Xboxes and PS2 games only play on PS2/PS3. Windows media player, WMA/WMV and playsforsure is windows only. The last time I checked, not all iPod owners buy from iTMS and not all people buying from iTMS have an iPod. Need I mention that iTunes is not locked into OS X?
I'm not going to waste my time arguing on/., but FYI I work for a cosmologist. So in your mind you can think whatever the hell you want; I'll go publish a few papers. That's the fun thing about the internet. You can claim to be anything you want without having to prove yourself. This is especially true when you post as an anonymous coward.
To answer your first question "How do they know that the matter is not accounted for?", here's how we do it:
Step 1. Pick a galaxy
Step 2. Determine its distance using variable stars (stars that change in brightness in well-known methods).
Step 3. Determine the absolute magnitude of the galaxy (how bright it would appear if it was a fixed distance away).
Step 4. Determine how much total mass all the stars in that galaxy have in order to provide that brightness.
Step 5. Observe the doppler shift in the light from the edges of the galaxy (the side rotating toward you will appear bluer than normal, while the side rotating away from you will appear redder that normal) to determine the rotational speed of the galaxy.
Step 6. Determine how much mass must be in the galaxy in order to provide the necessary centripetal acceleration to create the observed rotational speed.
Step 7. Compare answers from Step 4 and Step 6.
Step 8. Smack yourself in the head when you realize the stars in the galaxy only account for less than 1% of the mass required to hold the galaxy together. That is all well and good but it may be that the need for "dark energy" and "dark matter" may be the result of sloppy science. If scientists cannot tell the difference between a distant giant galaxy and a nearby dwarf galaxy, how can you believe a word they say about missing mass?
Sorry, but I think you completely ignored what the GP said and basically spouted a nonsensical stream of verbal diarrhoea which vaguely sounds like you know what the hell you are talking about when you actually don't. The GP was questioning the use of dark energy and dark matter as a kludge to make General Relativity work.
In my mind, we should not be looking for convenient stop gap solutions pulled out of thin air for this discrepancy between what is observed and General relativity but rather looking for a new model of the universe that fits in with what is observed.
Many of us go to the movie theatres to enjoy movies we consider worth watching and pay 10 or more Canadian per ticket. Do they expect all of us to rush out and buy the DVD version of every single movie released? How do they calculate this "loss" in revenue exactly? Could it be that even people like me with an extensive "legal" DVD collection are not interested in some of the movies released each year because they were crap or not fitting with our taste in films?
I have also bought over 700 tracks on iTunes since it opened in Canada in December of 2004. Should I have been buying more music? What if I did not find some bands interesting? Stop producing so much crap and maybe you will see people willing to buy more music.
In a nutshell, piracy is not the problem. The problem is the content producers are not making much worth buying.
Classic theist bullshit fallacy. Anyone who doesn't believe must have too much pride!
Get real! Some people choose not to "believe" because it makes no sense. Because the religious are manipulated into things like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and 9/11.
Without religion, the world would be a much better place. Athiests and thiests alike believe in morality and that being a good person is a virtue. We don't need God commanding people to commit murder. Do away with all of religion and we will all be better off. Classic Atheist bullshit fallacy. The Crusades were a response to 400 years of aggression by an empire, which happened to be Muslim, against Europe. The Europeans took 4 centuries of aggression on the other cheek until they felt they would have to fight back by taking back the holy land. There is no doubt that mistakes were made by the Crusaders and many innocents were killed on their way to their stated target but it is illogical for you or anyone to judge them based on modern sensibilities and out of context. The Inquisition was another mistake but I doubt any of us could honestly say that we would not be tempted to seek revenge after centuries of Moorish rule. The Inquisition followed the Reconquista which had left Spain a kingdom with deep divisions on ethnic and religious lines. It should be noted that the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisi tion">Spanish Inquisition was carried out under the authority of the monarchy of Spain, not Papal authority. A modern fictional parallel would be the Battlestar Galactica episode Collaborators.
As for the rest of your comments, I'm going to quote them but ignore them as they speak to your character far worse than I could ever conceive.
Of course, there is software like NeoOffice, Pages and Keynote.
But people *want* MS Office, and in corporate environments, people *need* MS Office.
The OSX Version of MS Office is still not 100% compatible with the Windows version, but it's still better than NeoOffice. You obviously have not kept up with the news. NeoOffice 2.1 will be available as a free download to the public as of March 27th. It has full Aqua integration, Office 2007 format compatibility, Excel macro compatibility and is available as either a PPC or Intel binary for OS X.
Now let's compare that with MS Office 2004 and Office 2008. Office 2004 does not have Office 2007 format compatibility. It is PPC only and Office 2008 is over a year away and will drop Excel VBA macro compatibility.
I would choose either NeoOffice or the upcoming Aqua Open Office release over either Office 2004 or Office 2008.
-DRM
-Proprietary hardware What's proprietary hardware? Only intel can make intel CPUs and intel chipsets. Only NVidia can make Nvidia compatible gfx chipsets. Macs can use the same Ram, hard drives and optical drives as everyone else. Now they even have Intel CPUs in them like other brands. Where is your proof?
-Proprietary software What's wrong with that? Do you even know what proprietary means? A lot of "open source" programs have proprietary file formats of their own. Sorry, but source code is not the same as a documented open standard. MSFT and a bunch of other companies also have proprietary software even by your definition.
-Closed protocols
-Lock-ins MSFT's Playsforsure DRM has platform lockin. You cannot use an MTP only device with anything other than windows. MSFT's Zune only works with windows and the Zune software.
-selected compatibility Would you care to define what you mean by that? MSFT has selected compatibility with windows.
Anything good said about Apple in comparison to Microsoft is just hypocrisy. Except for human interfaces, that where they excel (ex iPod). Give us something solid, not just empty rhetoric and hyperbole.
Seriously, Linux may still not quite be there, but at the rate it is improving, it will exceed both Windows and OS X as a desktop platform within the next few years.
Doomed you say? How will linux exceed the competition when the linux commmunity is openly hostile toward new users and closed source software? Do all the linux geeks really expect everyone to RTFM and release all their software as open source?
You seem to think technical prowess of the desktop environment will somehow guarantee victory. What about software? Without software, any desktop environment you could think of will fail no matter how "cool" you think it is.
You call that simple? Are you related to Bill Gates? He does not need to understand what an elevator pitch is. You know aliens exist because?
You are making an awful to to assumptions there to support your "simple" explanation. I also noticed how you are judging other people to be inferior to yourself near the end like you are perfect or something. Here is a news flash. If "justice" rather than mercy were served, everyone of us humans would be going to hell. That's right, even someone you would consider the nicest and most pious human would be going straight to hell. You cannot "earn" back your innocence yourself, nobody can.
Do you want to know why the devil would punish any person that he could get his hands on? He hates every human being because we have a second chance at being reconciled with god but he does not. The devil is the enemy of humanity and his goal is to destroy and corrupt us any way he can.
Apparently some people are too wrapped up in their own little world to have noticed. Pride always blinds man to what is right in front of them. When was the last time a man stopped to ask for directions?
Please, have you ever interacted with a child as an adult? Children are full of wonder and a sense of awe and wonder at the world which they see differently than adults do. We lose that ability when we age but we sometimes re-aquire it in our old age. Analytical creatures? Human are not computers or robots. Even in adulthood, we do not see the world in black and white but in shades of colour.
I think you are missing out on a lot of the richness of life by trying to analyse and quantify all of life's experience.
Slashdot Mirror
it is admittedly disproportionate representation, since the true believers are still checking the Bible to figure out which of the Internets to sign up for. Right, so that would mean that you are talking to yourselves? Stupidity tends to be the result of a combination of genetic factors and upbringing where the former tends to have the most pronounced effect. It has nothing to do with what you believe in. The internet is an echo chamber where the emptiest pots make the most noise. This is precisely what I was was trying to get at. The most vocal atheists on the internet also seem to have the least amount of personal knowledge of the religions they attack. The fear you feel right now is fuelled by your own ignorance.
I have one parting question. Are there really so many atheists on the internet or do you guys just go around signing up for multiple accounts everywhere? Perhaps that would explain the apparent group think phenomenon.
It probably will be open to third-party developers who will license with Apple in the same way as developers license with Nintendo. No, you will not see homebrew open source software on the iPhone. By the same token, you also will not see trojans or viruses for it either.
Are you sure about that? For a meager $399, I could get an Xbox360 with all these features AND dvd playback. It even does Hi-def downloads, Live Arcade games, and awesome AAA titles (GTA IV, Devil May Cry 4, (possibly) MGS and FF). That's got a remote, Windows Media connectivity, etc- and is expandable to play HD-DVD, potentially Blu-Ray in the future if it "wins".
First of all, you pulled that Blu-Ray thing out of your arse. MSFT has not been a Blu-Ray supporter and they will not do a 180 on that. Wishful thinking of a MSFT fanboy.
If you are not a gamer then games are moot or if you already have a PS3, then you have Blu-Ray and games taken care of.
A complicated remotes and Windows media connectivity are moot if you are an iTMS customer on either windows or mac.
It'll even play music off your iPod. Unless you buy ALL your tv off of iTunes, why would you get this? I'd just get a 360 for this money. Both are simple to use, also.You have an interesting definition of simple. The Xbox360 will not play your iTMS purchases songs either. You can probably rip those videos into WMV if you really set upon it.
Again, you are pulling stuff out of your arse like the typical MSFT fanboy. WMV is irrelevant outside of windows media player. Clearly, either of these devices can be modded- but I'm talking from a consumer standpoint. Are you really? What consumer would want to bother with hackish iPod support or trying to crack DRM and transcode video into WMV?
From a consumer standpoint, the Apple TV is the obvious choice for anyone who does not have their computer near by especially if they buy songs and/or videos from iTMS.
Linux lacks focus. I don't see a problem with people trying to innovate but the applications should have gravitated to one GUI toolkit by now. Forking Ubuntu as Kubuntu, Zubuntu, or BecauseIhateevetybodybuntu is part of the problem.
OS X apps benefit from having one toolkit that is robust and feature filled which tends to speed up development and provides a certain amount of UI consistency automatically.
Well, I guess it's moot right now, since Apple broke it's wireless support thoroughly with the 2007-002 update back at the beginning of March, and has remained silent about addressing the problem since then. I've been back to wired connections for weeks now.
Hmmm. I'm posting right now from my MBP connected to my wireless router. No problems here. I did not experience any lack of wireless network connectivity even though I was diligent in installing all updates as they came out.Having said that, there is a great deal of benefit even the FOSS movement had reap from this shift. Having easily readable open standards can be an asset for any GNU project wishing to interoperate with other projects.
Many people seem to think of Linux or GNU software as the Open Source software movement but open source is not just about the GPL or about GPL'ed operating systems. I have quite a few GPL'ed OS X applications in my Applications folder. Open Source software with all its flavours of licenses is alive and well on OS X.
I think you will find that there is more Open Source software available for OS X than for windows and part of this had to do with Apple's culture of supporting and creating open source projects. Apple may never open source their top layer of their OS but they have open sourced the kernel and the bootstrap as well as several key server technologies such as the Quicktime Streaming Server.
Where has this guy been? Xbox games only play on Xboxes and PS2 games only play on PS2/PS3. Windows media player, WMA/WMV and playsforsure is windows only. The last time I checked, not all iPod owners buy from iTMS and not all people buying from iTMS have an iPod. Need I mention that iTunes is not locked into OS X?
Dark matter is just another modern replacement for aether.
If you have a problem with or disagree with their opinion, you should respond rather than abusing your mod points.
Step 1. Pick a galaxy
Step 2. Determine its distance using variable stars (stars that change in brightness in well-known methods).
Step 3. Determine the absolute magnitude of the galaxy (how bright it would appear if it was a fixed distance away).
Step 4. Determine how much total mass all the stars in that galaxy have in order to provide that brightness.
Step 5. Observe the doppler shift in the light from the edges of the galaxy (the side rotating toward you will appear bluer than normal, while the side rotating away from you will appear redder that normal) to determine the rotational speed of the galaxy.
Step 6. Determine how much mass must be in the galaxy in order to provide the necessary centripetal acceleration to create the observed rotational speed.
Step 7. Compare answers from Step 4 and Step 6.
Step 8. Smack yourself in the head when you realize the stars in the galaxy only account for less than 1% of the mass required to hold the galaxy together. That is all well and good but it may be that the need for "dark energy" and "dark matter" may be the result of sloppy science. If scientists cannot tell the difference between a distant giant galaxy and a nearby dwarf galaxy, how can you believe a word they say about missing mass?
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070312_giant _dwarf.html
I rest my case.
In my mind, we should not be looking for convenient stop gap solutions pulled out of thin air for this discrepancy between what is observed and General relativity but rather looking for a new model of the universe that fits in with what is observed.
The GP is a tired troll but Alienware is for people with too much money and no taste. They are as gaudy as some pimped out ricer.
I have also bought over 700 tracks on iTunes since it opened in Canada in December of 2004. Should I have been buying more music? What if I did not find some bands interesting? Stop producing so much crap and maybe you will see people willing to buy more music.
In a nutshell, piracy is not the problem. The problem is the content producers are not making much worth buying.
Get real! Some people choose not to "believe" because it makes no sense. Because the religious are manipulated into things like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and 9/11.
Without religion, the world would be a much better place. Athiests and thiests alike believe in morality and that being a good person is a virtue. We don't need God commanding people to commit murder. Do away with all of religion and we will all be better off. Classic Atheist bullshit fallacy. The Crusades were a response to 400 years of aggression by an empire, which happened to be Muslim, against Europe. The Europeans took 4 centuries of aggression on the other cheek until they felt they would have to fight back by taking back the holy land. There is no doubt that mistakes were made by the Crusaders and many innocents were killed on their way to their stated target but it is illogical for you or anyone to judge them based on modern sensibilities and out of context. The Inquisition was another mistake but I doubt any of us could honestly say that we would not be tempted to seek revenge after centuries of Moorish rule. The Inquisition followed the Reconquista which had left Spain a kingdom with deep divisions on ethnic and religious lines. It should be noted that the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquis
As for the rest of your comments, I'm going to quote them but ignore them as they speak to your character far worse than I could ever conceive.
But people *want* MS Office, and in corporate environments, people *need* MS Office.
The OSX Version of MS Office is still not 100% compatible with the Windows version, but it's still better than NeoOffice.
You obviously have not kept up with the news. NeoOffice 2.1 will be available as a free download to the public as of March 27th. It has full Aqua integration, Office 2007 format compatibility, Excel macro compatibility and is available as either a PPC or Intel binary for OS X.
Now let's compare that with MS Office 2004 and Office 2008. Office 2004 does not have Office 2007 format compatibility. It is PPC only and Office 2008 is over a year away and will drop Excel VBA macro compatibility.
I would choose either NeoOffice or the upcoming Aqua Open Office release over either Office 2004 or Office 2008.
-Proprietary hardware
What's proprietary hardware? Only intel can make intel CPUs and intel chipsets. Only NVidia can make Nvidia compatible gfx chipsets. Macs can use the same Ram, hard drives and optical drives as everyone else. Now they even have Intel CPUs in them like other brands. Where is your proof? -Proprietary software
What's wrong with that? Do you even know what proprietary means? A lot of "open source" programs have proprietary file formats of their own. Sorry, but source code is not the same as a documented open standard. MSFT and a bunch of other companies also have proprietary software even by your definition. -Closed protocols
-Lock-ins MSFT's Playsforsure DRM has platform lockin. You cannot use an MTP only device with anything other than windows. MSFT's Zune only works with windows and the Zune software. -selected compatibility Would you care to define what you mean by that? MSFT has selected compatibility with windows. Anything good said about Apple in comparison to Microsoft is just hypocrisy. Except for human interfaces, that where they excel (ex iPod).
Give us something solid, not just empty rhetoric and hyperbole.
Doomed you say? How will linux exceed the competition when the linux commmunity is openly hostile toward new users and closed source software? Do all the linux geeks really expect everyone to RTFM and release all their software as open source?Seriously, Linux may still not quite be there, but at the rate it is improving, it will exceed both Windows and OS X as a desktop platform within the next few years.
You seem to think technical prowess of the desktop environment will somehow guarantee victory. What about software? Without software, any desktop environment you could think of will fail no matter how "cool" you think it is.
You are making an awful to to assumptions there to support your "simple" explanation. I also noticed how you are judging other people to be inferior to yourself near the end like you are perfect or something. Here is a news flash. If "justice" rather than mercy were served, everyone of us humans would be going to hell. That's right, even someone you would consider the nicest and most pious human would be going straight to hell. You cannot "earn" back your innocence yourself, nobody can.
Do you want to know why the devil would punish any person that he could get his hands on? He hates every human being because we have a second chance at being reconciled with god but he does not. The devil is the enemy of humanity and his goal is to destroy and corrupt us any way he can.
Apparently some people are too wrapped up in their own little world to have noticed. Pride always blinds man to what is right in front of them. When was the last time a man stopped to ask for directions?
I think you are missing out on a lot of the richness of life by trying to analyse and quantify all of life's experience.
Pavel? Is that you? Stop with the "everything is virtual" already. We do not live in a Matrix. See you at work.