Congrats on the new job! After you've been doing it for a few years you too will have windows update horror stories to tell
Thank you, but I have been doing this job since last century, and in the industry since the 80s. The last time I had something get stuffed up by Windows Update was on Windows 2000.
I do admit that in the early days of automatic updates I switched it off and worked to my own update schedule so my systems wouldn't get hosed. But sometime during the life of XP I gave up my paranoia and just let the automation do its thing. It helps to keep your installations fairly generic if you want to avoid obscure third party software from causing problems with patches.
Seriously? You are saying that over 50% of Microsoft updates break the system? I administer around 50 Windows computers and never have updates break anything. Now I feel sorry for the other guy out there who handles 51 Windows systems who must have everything break all the time!
Which also hides the tabs, essentially crippling the browser. Yeah, no, we do need something better than that, really.
That's true. Of the limited set of browsers that I have tested, only Internet Explorer seemed to get this right. If you move the mouse to the top of the screen the window chrome (not the browser) is displayed briefly and this includes the tabs. If you want to disable this, then you have to start the browser in kiosk mode using the -k command line option. In the browser Chrome, it just displays an "Exit Full Screen (F11)" link.
Is it possible that your extensive testing of "almost any browser" extended to, and no further than, Firefox?
On Windows, it also works in Internet Explorer (going back to at least version 6), Chrome, and K-Meleon. They all use the F11 key. I can't test Safari, Opera nor other operating systems until I get off my lazy butt and go to work!
If you want to be as safe as apple's walled garden, stay within the official marketplaces and you get that.
The other alternative would be if the OS asked for user permission before an application could access the internet (just one time, not every time). This is what my old Nokia (running Symbian) used to do. It works the same way as how the iPhone prompts to allow programs to use location services.
I am more worried that a program leaks data or uses all my download quota much more than whether it knows where I am.
But this is starting to sound harder than a single command compared to Linux, isn't it now;)
On the other hand, I don't recall ever having to issue this command after an update. The updates tend to handle it themselves. The ones that require reboots are a lot less common than they used to be.
Well you can have both, with netbooks that have 8 and 9 hours battery life. But you correct that I shouldn't have said that all notebooks should be that small. I would just like to have more than just one common option in the thin, non-Atom category.
If you look in Windows Task Manager you can see the processes and services running on your computer. Helpers/updaters/taskbar icons don't appear magically on screen. They have corresponding entries in the task manager lists. If it is a service, then the net start/stop code that I posted will work fine. If it is a process, then you can kill it with the "End Task" option. You might claim that this is not trivial way of restarting, but then neither is having type type "/sbin/service restart thing-i-just-fixed" like the grandparent suggested.
Besides, any decent updater will run a separate process so that it can restart the code that it is updating automatically.
It is true that Windows can't overwrite DLLs that are in use, but I just had to reinstall an old XP system (including uninstalling the pre-installed bloatware then installing apps, drivers and service packs) and it was suprising how few times I had to reboot. Quite often when third party programs say you have to reboot after an install, it is simply not true.
Point me to non-Apple version of the 13" MacBook Air.
Oh please. Four years before the original Macbook Air was released my Toshiba Portege R100 was about the same height (18mm) and weight (1.04kg) but with the bonus of a user-replaceable battery. Admittedly, that was only 12.1" screen.
What I don't understand if they could build a computer that small and light back in 2004, why aren't they all that size these days?
Such a shame, the first one had so much potential but was partially spoiled by terrible map design and an awful lot of player deaths
That is interesting, because I actually expected to die more often than I did. But I don't have a problem with dying in a game anyway. That might be because I started playing games in the 80s when finishing a game was not a forgone conclusion (when you died you had to start again).
I really enjoyed Mirror's Edge, especially when you turned off the red colouring that pointed where to go all the time. That made it way too easy and it spoiled the tension when you had to think on your feet - or in midair.
I knew that it was short before I bought it, so I didn't get disappointed by the length. (It helped that I got it on sale for $5!)
Unfortunately, good phones only go so far when nobody's buying them. People don't want good phones, they want flashy apps.
This recent story would seem to indicate otherwise. Dumbphones are cheap, tiny and durable. There will always be a market for that.
I carry around two phones, one personal and one for business. My personal dumbphone has survived through 3 different business smartphones and it is still going strong. The batteries still last a week, while I can hardly get my iPhone to last more than a day. Maybe that is why the manufactures prefer smartphones - they don't last nearly as long and so you have to keep buying new ones.
Gee, they really have it in for Nokia. Symbian is "ailing" at slightly less than 2 million units less than the market leader. I bet Microsoft would like its mobile platform to be ailing by that much!
They are apparently a "struggling mobile firm", while at the same time it "retains solid market share" and sales of units are "still growing well". While nobody would argue that Nokia's marketshare hasn't slipped, it does seem to be too much damnation of what is "still the number one handset manufacturer".
After raising two children, losing my wife ten years ago, and looking forward to my 58th birthday next month, I do believe in a higher power. Nothing else makes sense.
That doesn't necessarily have to be related to this gene. It is quite common for people to turn to religion as they get older. When you are in your twenties, you still feel immortal. You can happily disprove the existence of God because it seems so academic. Once you start approaching the age that gets very similar to the average lifespan of a male (currently 67.2 years) then the afterlife seems a lot more important. For you, it probably became important and immediate when you lost your wife. A great loss forces you to re-evaluate your beliefs. It is a great comfort to know that your loved one still exists somewhere and is happy. Science will never provide that comfort.
I learned that science is very good at explaining how, but falls on its face when it comes to why.
That is absolutely correct. Science doesn't ever come close to explaining the existential questions. But when "how" and "why" are the same question it does a better job than religion. For example, "Why did my crops fail?" is better answered by science than by sacrificing animals (or humans) to some god.
The problem you get with saying that a higher power made us when asking "why do we exist" is that you can't ever answer the question "why does the higher power exist". At some point, something has to exist without a reason. It could be a god, or it could be the universe, with its physical laws that resulted in human beings.
I come out of a family with a long tradition of strict religion but me and both my siblings are non religious.
Maybe there was a genetic mutation and now your family is evolving! Mind you, if you now find that you don't have a large family then your genes will be less likely to survive than those branches of your family that are still heavily religious and breed like rabbits. Darwin's survival of the fittest will be proven again!
But seriously, your problem here is that a predisposition towards religion does not mean that you will be compelled to become religious. There is not a strict one-to-one correlation that says that if you are religious that you will have this gene, and that if you have this gene then you will be religious. Additionally, you ignored the quote from the article that said: "But while fertility is determined by culture, an individualâ(TM)s predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics, in addition to their upbringing."
This is just another way to spread the fear against muslims and other religious groups.
What fear is being spread here? Someone has been looking at how particular genetic traits spread and came up with a fairly obvious scenario (once you think about it). Did anyone talk about how to stop this worrying trend? Or that this is a bad thing at all? No. Science is all about looking at something and saying "Oh, that is interesting". It is not out to judge you.
Maybe this particular gene doesn't make you religious after all. Perhaps it manifests a paranoia that you are being persecuted. If that is the case, then I am afraid to say that you have still got it.
And what do Atheists have? The big bang theory, the theory of evolution, etc. Yes its all based on empirical evidence, but it is an origin story just the same as Adam and Eve is an origin story. And all Atheists, every single one of them believes in it 100%.
I doubt that this is true. Atheists do not all believe one thing. There is no central church with a bible to tell them what to think.
I imagine that there are some people who don't believe in God that must also have an aversion to told that they are related to monkeys (or any animals). We humans like to think ourselves better than animals. And we need to, so that we can continue killing and eating animals, as well as keeping them as slave labour.
Besides, even if it was true that they all believe it 100%, the difference is that with science you can believe something until some other more compelling idea comes along that has more evidence to support it. That is why atheism and science cannot be considered to be religious movements. While some individuals might be unwilling to change their minds, the majority are not stuck believing things that have been shown to be untrue. They will move their ideas to where ever the evidence takes them.
And that is why its such a big problem with New Atheists attacking the Christians. It isn't framing things in terms of keeping science separate from belief. Now its the Atheist origin story vs. the Christian origin story. And if the Atheists get their origin story taught in school then why can't Christians have theirs taught in school?
Ah, I see. That is why you have been going on about "New Atheism" (with capitals) like it is a single body of people. You want to cast the people who believe in evolution as the same type of non-critical thinking person from the anti-evolution crowd. You want people to ignore evidence because you can't fight against that. Instead, you want to frame the debate as simply an ideological one with both sides having equal weight. Because if both sides are equal then you can say that they should have equal time in class. And you did say that.
Shame on you! You are deliberately trying to mislead everyone by inventing a pretend opposition rather than having to deal with the real issues. You ignore all the evidence that science has to offer, like being able to see evolution happening in a laboratory, or plotting the change in species over time from the remains that we dig up, or having to constantly change medicines because viruses evolve to be immune to the old ones.
This isn't about atheism. This is about science. News flash: some scientists are also Christians, and some Christians accept that the theory of evolution is well reasoned and supported by the evidence.
As far as I know, Christians wanted to stop evolution being taught in schools in the 1920s. But after the Scopes Monkey Trial public opinion changed and people turned against laws preventing the teaching of evolution. And evolution was being taught in more and more schools.
So what changed the trend of evolution being taught in more schools? What shifted public opinion against evolution being taught in schools? It was backlash against Atheists.
No, there is no backlash. These so-called New Atheists really don't exist. If they did, where would you find them? Do they picket out the front of churches like the Christians picket abortion clinics and movies that they don't like? Do they stack the church boards so they can change the church policy like the Christians stack school boards?
No, it was the establishment of the Intelligent Design movement that changed everything. Once the states were told by the supreme court that they could not ban evolution from being taught in schools for religious reasons because that was against the constitution, the anti-evolution crowd began to re-invent their movement as a secular one. After trying out some terms like Scientific Creationism (which didn't work in court because it still had the name creationism), they eventually went with Intelligent Design.
This is purely a religious movement hiding their real beliefs for legal reasons. These people who had successfully made laws to ban evolution in the past never stopped working towards their goals. It was not some mythical anti-atheist backlash that brought this controversy back. It was the tireless efforts of a group of people who were not going to let the US constitution stop them from forcing their beliefs on others.
We lost 10 years of W3C work thanks to WHATWG and their html5 junk
Well, that was the problem. If it hadn't taken 10 years to go from version 1 to version 2 then perhaps another group would not have had time to come in and steal their thunder.
Actually, the W3C was crucial to preventing MSFT from just turning IE into a Frontpage renderer.
It was a pity that it didn't stop Netscape from becoming the pile of steaming crud that it ended up being (prior to Mozilla). What Microsoft did was no different to what Netscape did. If Netscape had won the war, then we would be complaining how much Netscape Navigator and Netscape One were tied together.
All Microsoft needed was a competitor to force it to maintain some sort of compatibilty. With Netscape out of action for so long, that role went to W3C. But it was during this period that development of the web pretty much stopped. Java and Flash "improved" some things, but it wasn't until Mozilla came back - specifically with the (at the time) less bloated Firefox - that things started moving again.
But the thing that really gave the web a kick start was the proprietary extension XMLHTTP that Microsoft made to create AJAX. In typical fashion, W3C jumped on this and standardised it 7 years later.
The reason that teaching evolution have become controversial is because of the New Atheists. People like you who want to "tell the religious freaks that would have us living in the dark ages to fuck off and die". See that sort of rhetoric makes religious people rightfully feel nervous. They feel like they are under attack by atheists.
Oh no, we can't have that now can we? So what do those nice religious people say that the infidels - I mean atheists? They say they will burn in hell. Maybe they need to bring back the inquisition to torture a bit of faith into them. It is definitely those evil atheists that are the problem!
Do you seriously think that they started teaching evolution in school just to spite the Christians? Did the textbooks start out by saying "In this chapter we will prove that God doesn't exist"? No, it was the Christians who brought religion into this debate when they began banning evolution in schools. They cast the first stone. They are the ones who attacked science because it interfered with what they had been taught in the academic halls of Sunday School.
So how are we supposed to react? Are we to stop teaching reality? Are we to make concessions and water down the facts that they don't like? Should this be a back door for the church to bring their unproven and disproven ideas into school so they can indoctrinate kids into their religion? What possible and reasonable response could there be other than to say "No, you can't censor the world".
Science and education shouldn't be restricted to what people made up 2000 years ago when they didn't know why the world existed as it did. Teaching science as it is known today is not attacking religion. If religion is making claims that have proven to be inaccurate, then surely it is up to them to sort it out rather than attempt to adapt the world to match their preconception. Can you see why non-religious people might get a bit miffed?
People should be able to have whatever religious beliefs that they want, as long as they don't try to stop me from eating pork, or gays living together, or non-believers from being able to do non-church things on Sunday, or schools from teaching current facts, or from all of us being able to live in the real world. Over the centuries, there have been so many ways that religion has forced everybody into their way of thinking. Why is it that athiests should not be allowed to stand up for their rights, for what they believe?
I stopped being a Christian because I saw the whole thing as being a few people at the top telling everyone else what to think for their own personal gain. I stopped being an atheist for the same reason.
So what are you then? And do you really base your philosophy on the actions of others? Did God stop existing because some Christians are jerks? Did he start existing again once you realised that anybody can be a jerk?
I can't remember if W3C has ever really successfully moved the HTML language ahead. Much of the early improvements were due to Netscape and Microsoft throwing new features around willy-nilly. A bunch of those features would be chosen to be part of the standard, while the rest (layers, blink, marquee) would fade away into disuse. As soon as the major players focused more on following the standards rather than setting them, then everything seemed to just grind to a halt. It wasn't until browser makers started to come up with their own ideas again (WHATWG) that W3C seem to once again bebin to wake up.
The answer to good, standards-based improvements in the web is not massive versions of HTML and CSS that never get finished, and it is not a living standard that never gets finished. It is small, targetted minor versions. We should get a roadmap of what each minor version of HTML 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 etc will address. For example, 5.1 could focus on the local storage, 5.2 could be better form elements, and 5.3 could reintroduce the blink tag (maybe not). CSS 3.1 might concentrate on better print support (let's give TeX a run for its money), 3.2 might do columns, and 3.3 could give us a style for blinking (oh wait, it already has it).
The best type of standards body is a small, nimble group of interested people (like we have with Apple, Google, Opera and Mozilla). Sure they might get caught up with difficult decisions like the video tag, but W3C seem to have that dilema with EVERYTHING, even the non-controversial tags.
Time Warner is listed at 2400kbps; that's 300KB/s. I regularly grab large files at 2-3MB/s (big B). I'd like to know more about their testing methods because these seem a bit suspect.
Well, I suspect that they tested it by streaming from their servers, not downloading files from other unnamed servers. There are so many varying factors that you can't just assume that it is throttling if you don't get full speed access to Netflix. If you try tracerouting to different sites you can find wildly different network topology resulting in vastly different download speeds. Perhaps the pipe going to the popular site Netflix has much higher usage that the one going to the site from which you download your files.
I went from an nVidia card to the 5770 purely because I didn't want to heat up my computer room just by having the computer on. (I also went for a low powered CPU for the same reason).
I live in Australia and which gets rather hot around here. I found that it doesn't matter how much better the performance is of one card if it makes the room so oppressively hot that I just don't want to use the computer in the first place. With my current setup, I can use the PC on the hottest day and still have the room only 1 or 2 degrees higher than the rest of the house. It is also nice that I often have to look at the computer lights to know if the PC is on, as compared with than being able to hear the fans from another room.
During winter I have been known to turn on my old computer just to warm the place up. It really does make a difference!
Slashdot Mirror
Congrats on the new job! After you've been doing it for a few years you too will have windows update horror stories to tell
Thank you, but I have been doing this job since last century, and in the industry since the 80s. The last time I had something get stuffed up by Windows Update was on Windows 2000.
I do admit that in the early days of automatic updates I switched it off and worked to my own update schedule so my systems wouldn't get hosed. But sometime during the life of XP I gave up my paranoia and just let the automation do its thing. It helps to keep your installations fairly generic if you want to avoid obscure third party software from causing problems with patches.
Seriously? You are saying that over 50% of Microsoft updates break the system? I administer around 50 Windows computers and never have updates break anything. Now I feel sorry for the other guy out there who handles 51 Windows systems who must have everything break all the time!
Which also hides the tabs, essentially crippling the browser. Yeah, no, we do need something better than that, really.
That's true. Of the limited set of browsers that I have tested, only Internet Explorer seemed to get this right. If you move the mouse to the top of the screen the window chrome (not the browser) is displayed briefly and this includes the tabs. If you want to disable this, then you have to start the browser in kiosk mode using the -k command line option. In the browser Chrome, it just displays an "Exit Full Screen (F11)" link.
Is it possible that your extensive testing of "almost any browser" extended to, and no further than, Firefox?
On Windows, it also works in Internet Explorer (going back to at least version 6), Chrome, and K-Meleon. They all use the F11 key. I can't test Safari, Opera nor other operating systems until I get off my lazy butt and go to work!
If you want to be as safe as apple's walled garden, stay within the official marketplaces and you get that.
The other alternative would be if the OS asked for user permission before an application could access the internet (just one time, not every time). This is what my old Nokia (running Symbian) used to do. It works the same way as how the iPhone prompts to allow programs to use location services.
I am more worried that a program leaks data or uses all my download quota much more than whether it knows where I am.
But this is starting to sound harder than a single command compared to Linux, isn't it now ;)
On the other hand, I don't recall ever having to issue this command after an update. The updates tend to handle it themselves. The ones that require reboots are a lot less common than they used to be.
Well you can have both, with netbooks that have 8 and 9 hours battery life. But you correct that I shouldn't have said that all notebooks should be that small. I would just like to have more than just one common option in the thin, non-Atom category.
If you look in Windows Task Manager you can see the processes and services running on your computer. Helpers/updaters/taskbar icons don't appear magically on screen. They have corresponding entries in the task manager lists. If it is a service, then the net start/stop code that I posted will work fine. If it is a process, then you can kill it with the "End Task" option. You might claim that this is not trivial way of restarting, but then neither is having type type "/sbin/service restart thing-i-just-fixed" like the grandparent suggested.
Besides, any decent updater will run a separate process so that it can restart the code that it is updating automatically.
It is true that Windows can't overwrite DLLs that are in use, but I just had to reinstall an old XP system (including uninstalling the pre-installed bloatware then installing apps, drivers and service packs) and it was suprising how few times I had to reboot. Quite often when third party programs say you have to reboot after an install, it is simply not true.
Fortunately Linux doesn't have three zillion things running in the background that can't easily be restarted, unlike Windows.
Quite right, because Windows doesn't have a restart option like Linux. You have to manually type it as
net stop "service" && net start "service"
That is so much harder.
Point me to non-Apple version of the 13" MacBook Air.
Oh please. Four years before the original Macbook Air was released my Toshiba Portege R100 was about the same height (18mm) and weight (1.04kg) but with the bonus of a user-replaceable battery. Admittedly, that was only 12.1" screen.
What I don't understand if they could build a computer that small and light back in 2004, why aren't they all that size these days?
Such a shame, the first one had so much potential but was partially spoiled by terrible map design and an awful lot of player deaths
That is interesting, because I actually expected to die more often than I did. But I don't have a problem with dying in a game anyway. That might be because I started playing games in the 80s when finishing a game was not a forgone conclusion (when you died you had to start again).
I really enjoyed Mirror's Edge, especially when you turned off the red colouring that pointed where to go all the time. That made it way too easy and it spoiled the tension when you had to think on your feet - or in midair.
I knew that it was short before I bought it, so I didn't get disappointed by the length. (It helped that I got it on sale for $5!)
Unfortunately, good phones only go so far when nobody's buying them. People don't want good phones, they want flashy apps.
This recent story would seem to indicate otherwise. Dumbphones are cheap, tiny and durable. There will always be a market for that.
I carry around two phones, one personal and one for business. My personal dumbphone has survived through 3 different business smartphones and it is still going strong. The batteries still last a week, while I can hardly get my iPhone to last more than a day. Maybe that is why the manufactures prefer smartphones - they don't last nearly as long and so you have to keep buying new ones.
they loose porn, they eventually get off the barracks and pacify people.
To "loose porn" would be to remove the staples from your playboy magazine. You should have said "they lose porn".
Everybody seems to have a problem with those two words.
Gee, they really have it in for Nokia. Symbian is "ailing" at slightly less than 2 million units less than the market leader. I bet Microsoft would like its mobile platform to be ailing by that much!
They are apparently a "struggling mobile firm", while at the same time it "retains solid market share" and sales of units are "still growing well". While nobody would argue that Nokia's marketshare hasn't slipped, it does seem to be too much damnation of what is "still the number one handset manufacturer".
After raising two children, losing my wife ten years ago, and looking forward to my 58th birthday next month, I do believe in a higher power. Nothing else makes sense.
That doesn't necessarily have to be related to this gene. It is quite common for people to turn to religion as they get older. When you are in your twenties, you still feel immortal. You can happily disprove the existence of God because it seems so academic. Once you start approaching the age that gets very similar to the average lifespan of a male (currently 67.2 years) then the afterlife seems a lot more important. For you, it probably became important and immediate when you lost your wife. A great loss forces you to re-evaluate your beliefs. It is a great comfort to know that your loved one still exists somewhere and is happy. Science will never provide that comfort.
I learned that science is very good at explaining how, but falls on its face when it comes to why.
That is absolutely correct. Science doesn't ever come close to explaining the existential questions. But when "how" and "why" are the same question it does a better job than religion. For example, "Why did my crops fail?" is better answered by science than by sacrificing animals (or humans) to some god.
The problem you get with saying that a higher power made us when asking "why do we exist" is that you can't ever answer the question "why does the higher power exist". At some point, something has to exist without a reason. It could be a god, or it could be the universe, with its physical laws that resulted in human beings.
I come out of a family with a long tradition of strict religion but me and both my siblings are non religious.
Maybe there was a genetic mutation and now your family is evolving! Mind you, if you now find that you don't have a large family then your genes will be less likely to survive than those branches of your family that are still heavily religious and breed like rabbits. Darwin's survival of the fittest will be proven again!
But seriously, your problem here is that a predisposition towards religion does not mean that you will be compelled to become religious. There is not a strict one-to-one correlation that says that if you are religious that you will have this gene, and that if you have this gene then you will be religious. Additionally, you ignored the quote from the article that said: "But while fertility is determined by culture, an individualâ(TM)s predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics, in addition to their upbringing."
This is just another way to spread the fear against muslims and other religious groups.
What fear is being spread here? Someone has been looking at how particular genetic traits spread and came up with a fairly obvious scenario (once you think about it). Did anyone talk about how to stop this worrying trend? Or that this is a bad thing at all? No. Science is all about looking at something and saying "Oh, that is interesting". It is not out to judge you.
Maybe this particular gene doesn't make you religious after all. Perhaps it manifests a paranoia that you are being persecuted. If that is the case, then I am afraid to say that you have still got it.
And what do Atheists have? The big bang theory, the theory of evolution, etc. Yes its all based on empirical evidence, but it is an origin story just the same as Adam and Eve is an origin story. And all Atheists, every single one of them believes in it 100%.
I doubt that this is true. Atheists do not all believe one thing. There is no central church with a bible to tell them what to think.
I imagine that there are some people who don't believe in God that must also have an aversion to told that they are related to monkeys (or any animals). We humans like to think ourselves better than animals. And we need to, so that we can continue killing and eating animals, as well as keeping them as slave labour.
Besides, even if it was true that they all believe it 100%, the difference is that with science you can believe something until some other more compelling idea comes along that has more evidence to support it. That is why atheism and science cannot be considered to be religious movements. While some individuals might be unwilling to change their minds, the majority are not stuck believing things that have been shown to be untrue. They will move their ideas to where ever the evidence takes them.
And that is why its such a big problem with New Atheists attacking the Christians. It isn't framing things in terms of keeping science separate from belief. Now its the Atheist origin story vs. the Christian origin story. And if the Atheists get their origin story taught in school then why can't Christians have theirs taught in school?
Ah, I see. That is why you have been going on about "New Atheism" (with capitals) like it is a single body of people. You want to cast the people who believe in evolution as the same type of non-critical thinking person from the anti-evolution crowd. You want people to ignore evidence because you can't fight against that. Instead, you want to frame the debate as simply an ideological one with both sides having equal weight. Because if both sides are equal then you can say that they should have equal time in class. And you did say that.
Shame on you! You are deliberately trying to mislead everyone by inventing a pretend opposition rather than having to deal with the real issues. You ignore all the evidence that science has to offer, like being able to see evolution happening in a laboratory, or plotting the change in species over time from the remains that we dig up, or having to constantly change medicines because viruses evolve to be immune to the old ones.
This isn't about atheism. This is about science. News flash: some scientists are also Christians, and some Christians accept that the theory of evolution is well reasoned and supported by the evidence.
As far as I know, Christians wanted to stop evolution being taught in schools in the 1920s. But after the Scopes Monkey Trial public opinion changed and people turned against laws preventing the teaching of evolution. And evolution was being taught in more and more schools.
So what changed the trend of evolution being taught in more schools? What shifted public opinion against evolution being taught in schools? It was backlash against Atheists.
No, there is no backlash. These so-called New Atheists really don't exist. If they did, where would you find them? Do they picket out the front of churches like the Christians picket abortion clinics and movies that they don't like? Do they stack the church boards so they can change the church policy like the Christians stack school boards?
No, it was the establishment of the Intelligent Design movement that changed everything. Once the states were told by the supreme court that they could not ban evolution from being taught in schools for religious reasons because that was against the constitution, the anti-evolution crowd began to re-invent their movement as a secular one. After trying out some terms like Scientific Creationism (which didn't work in court because it still had the name creationism), they eventually went with Intelligent Design.
This is purely a religious movement hiding their real beliefs for legal reasons. These people who had successfully made laws to ban evolution in the past never stopped working towards their goals. It was not some mythical anti-atheist backlash that brought this controversy back. It was the tireless efforts of a group of people who were not going to let the US constitution stop them from forcing their beliefs on others.
We lost 10 years of W3C work thanks to WHATWG and their html5 junk
Well, that was the problem. If it hadn't taken 10 years to go from version 1 to version 2 then perhaps another group would not have had time to come in and steal their thunder.
Actually, the W3C was crucial to preventing MSFT from just turning IE into a Frontpage renderer.
It was a pity that it didn't stop Netscape from becoming the pile of steaming crud that it ended up being (prior to Mozilla). What Microsoft did was no different to what Netscape did. If Netscape had won the war, then we would be complaining how much Netscape Navigator and Netscape One were tied together.
All Microsoft needed was a competitor to force it to maintain some sort of compatibilty. With Netscape out of action for so long, that role went to W3C. But it was during this period that development of the web pretty much stopped. Java and Flash "improved" some things, but it wasn't until Mozilla came back - specifically with the (at the time) less bloated Firefox - that things started moving again.
But the thing that really gave the web a kick start was the proprietary extension XMLHTTP that Microsoft made to create AJAX. In typical fashion, W3C jumped on this and standardised it 7 years later.
The reason that teaching evolution have become controversial is because of the New Atheists. People like you who want to "tell the religious freaks that would have us living in the dark ages to fuck off and die". See that sort of rhetoric makes religious people rightfully feel nervous. They feel like they are under attack by atheists.
Oh no, we can't have that now can we? So what do those nice religious people say that the infidels - I mean atheists? They say they will burn in hell. Maybe they need to bring back the inquisition to torture a bit of faith into them. It is definitely those evil atheists that are the problem!
Do you seriously think that they started teaching evolution in school just to spite the Christians? Did the textbooks start out by saying "In this chapter we will prove that God doesn't exist"? No, it was the Christians who brought religion into this debate when they began banning evolution in schools. They cast the first stone. They are the ones who attacked science because it interfered with what they had been taught in the academic halls of Sunday School.
So how are we supposed to react? Are we to stop teaching reality? Are we to make concessions and water down the facts that they don't like? Should this be a back door for the church to bring their unproven and disproven ideas into school so they can indoctrinate kids into their religion? What possible and reasonable response could there be other than to say "No, you can't censor the world".
Science and education shouldn't be restricted to what people made up 2000 years ago when they didn't know why the world existed as it did. Teaching science as it is known today is not attacking religion. If religion is making claims that have proven to be inaccurate, then surely it is up to them to sort it out rather than attempt to adapt the world to match their preconception. Can you see why non-religious people might get a bit miffed?
People should be able to have whatever religious beliefs that they want, as long as they don't try to stop me from eating pork, or gays living together, or non-believers from being able to do non-church things on Sunday, or schools from teaching current facts, or from all of us being able to live in the real world. Over the centuries, there have been so many ways that religion has forced everybody into their way of thinking. Why is it that athiests should not be allowed to stand up for their rights, for what they believe?
I stopped being a Christian because I saw the whole thing as being a few people at the top telling everyone else what to think for their own personal gain. I stopped being an atheist for the same reason.
So what are you then? And do you really base your philosophy on the actions of others? Did God stop existing because some Christians are jerks? Did he start existing again once you realised that anybody can be a jerk?
I can't remember if W3C has ever really successfully moved the HTML language ahead. Much of the early improvements were due to Netscape and Microsoft throwing new features around willy-nilly. A bunch of those features would be chosen to be part of the standard, while the rest (layers, blink, marquee) would fade away into disuse. As soon as the major players focused more on following the standards rather than setting them, then everything seemed to just grind to a halt. It wasn't until browser makers started to come up with their own ideas again (WHATWG) that W3C seem to once again bebin to wake up.
The answer to good, standards-based improvements in the web is not massive versions of HTML and CSS that never get finished, and it is not a living standard that never gets finished. It is small, targetted minor versions. We should get a roadmap of what each minor version of HTML 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 etc will address. For example, 5.1 could focus on the local storage, 5.2 could be better form elements, and 5.3 could reintroduce the blink tag (maybe not). CSS 3.1 might concentrate on better print support (let's give TeX a run for its money), 3.2 might do columns, and 3.3 could give us a style for blinking (oh wait, it already has it).
The best type of standards body is a small, nimble group of interested people (like we have with Apple, Google, Opera and Mozilla). Sure they might get caught up with difficult decisions like the video tag, but W3C seem to have that dilema with EVERYTHING, even the non-controversial tags.
Time Warner is listed at 2400kbps; that's 300KB/s. I regularly grab large files at 2-3MB/s (big B). I'd like to know more about their testing methods because these seem a bit suspect.
Well, I suspect that they tested it by streaming from their servers, not downloading files from other unnamed servers. There are so many varying factors that you can't just assume that it is throttling if you don't get full speed access to Netflix. If you try tracerouting to different sites you can find wildly different network topology resulting in vastly different download speeds. Perhaps the pipe going to the popular site Netflix has much higher usage that the one going to the site from which you download your files.
I went from an nVidia card to the 5770 purely because I didn't want to heat up my computer room just by having the computer on. (I also went for a low powered CPU for the same reason).
I live in Australia and which gets rather hot around here. I found that it doesn't matter how much better the performance is of one card if it makes the room so oppressively hot that I just don't want to use the computer in the first place. With my current setup, I can use the PC on the hottest day and still have the room only 1 or 2 degrees higher than the rest of the house. It is also nice that I often have to look at the computer lights to know if the PC is on, as compared with than being able to hear the fans from another room.
During winter I have been known to turn on my old computer just to warm the place up. It really does make a difference!
That's not a consumer graphics card, though.
But you have now gone from saying that mid-range is not defined by the consumer to saying that the top of the range is defined by the consumer.