No, it's the "NEARLY" equal amounts that's the key here. There was a slight surplus of "regular" matter vs. antimatter, & this minuscule surplus is what we have today. Matter & antimatter annihilate each other on contact (or, rather, just turn into so many high-energy photons), so the antimatter presumably went rather quickly, almost immediately after it was formed. There might still be some antimatter floating around, but only in infinitesimal amounts & produced very recently.
Scientifically, this slight surplus of matter vs. antimatter is quite interesting. Why should there be? And if there is an inequality, why should it be such a small proportion, rather than, say, twice as much (or 10^9 as much) matter vs. antimatter? There might be some notions on this, but I don't keep up on this stuff.
A measly 5 percentage points from "shoving religion into classes nationwide"? You're making the EXTREMELY questionable assumption that "the know-nothings and American Taliban (dominionists, christian reconstructionists, etc) " are:
(a) near, if not in excess of, 51% of the voters, &
(b) unified & organized enough to pursue a common agenda.
As best as I can tell, the largest & best-organized religion in the US is the Roman Catholic Church, which is a little above 20% of the population, & has no beef either with evolution or the value of pi. The fundamentalists are largely in the Evangelical Protestant wing of Christianity, which is much more given to being a bunch of independent congregations, & not necessarily united beyond a few general doctrinal principles. And, despite the best efforts of the last 40 years, school curricula are still largely determined at the state or local levels; your illusory "dominionists" wouldn't be able to advance their doctrines too far, even if they do take over the US Department of Education. And, given the suspicion & resentment many Christian fundamentalists have to the national government, their first reactions might be to gut those federal programs anyway, making it quite difficult for anyone to easily achieve dominance over the nation's schools.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's only a matter of time (and regulation). So, you can't be corrupted by power unless you do it in the manner as specified by current law?
If there has been deficit spending for 50 years how did the US go from a deficit to a surplus during the 90s?
The short version I heard is that in the early 90s Congress & the elder Bush hammered out a plan to try to at least keep deficits from getting larger (where he broke the "no new taxes" pledge; possibly very wise, but it hurt him later). Clinton essentially followed this plan, too (whatever ideas he had about spending/taxing more were frustrated after 1994). Then the economy grew a fraction of a percentage point more each year than originally forecast, & this meant that a lot more money than anticipated got into the US Treasurey from taxes. So, an overall policy of keeping deficits to a tolerable level ended up getting us very nice surpluses for a few years.
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that apple can develop features faster and better than microsoft, and with what I assume are less resources. How can apple promise a feature like spotlight and develop it in a less than a year and a half, for example, and windows users are still waiting. In fact, most if the features of vista have been available for years on os x, the vista release date keeps slipping and the feature list keeps atrophying, and apple jumps another light year ahead of microsoft with each point release of os X. At this rate, windows will NEVER catch up. os x is just getting much better too fast. So my question is again, what are the stats on how much apple spends on os x development for such monumental gains, and why cannot microsoft with all its money hire the developers needed to, if not catch up, at least keep pace with apple?
Apple & MS are rather different beasts, so comparing them is a bit difficult. Because MS's main market is the business sector, it has to telegraph its moves way, way in advance so that its main customers (corporate clients) can mesh their upgrades with that of MS's. Another consequence of MS's business orientation is that backwards compatibility is one of the top requirements, so it has to keep pulling along all this ancient legacy code into the latest version of Windows, & I have no doubt that this sucks up all sorts of developer resources by itself. (I won't get into all the driver/hardware headaches brought about by all the niche PC & peripheral manufacturers on the planet.)
As for Apple, it's more oriented towards the home consumer, & in this market, you don't announce something's ready till it is done, finished, tested, & debugged to death. If it doesn't work out of the box (without reading the fcsking manual), most customers simply will return it as "broken", so first impressions are pretty much the only chance it has to prove something. So, we don't really hear much (outside of unreliable rumors sites) about new features till Apple's ready to roll them out. And if some nifty whiz-bang code can't be made to work in time for the next OS release, it simply (& quietly) gets yanked from the code base, & no one outside of a few development teams in Apple will be the wiser.
We don't have a good idea of just how competent Apple's developers are in comparison to Microsoft's; we simply hear a lot less of Apple's failures than we do MS's.
"Not especially. There's never been a full retail copy of Mac OS X available. The most Apple made available is an all upgrade that works on any system that previously ran Mac OS (i.e. any Macintosh)."
Wrong, I fear. If you buy the $129 box of Mac OS X, it's the full version. You can wipe all your hard drives clean (or put in brand-new ones, boot off the CD, & then install onto your computer & get every last lickable bit of it.
"Comparisons to Microsoft are interesting, but not valid. You can not buy a Mac without a license for some variety of Mac OS."
Technically correct, but difficult. You'd have to look around a bit to buy a name-brand computer, new, without Windows on it. The homebuilt/whitebox industry is the biggest exception, & where you do get the furthest away from the Mac world in terms of how you can get your machine. But Apple doesn't seem to be gunning for that market anyway.
Yeah, someone from the 1920's would be amazed at the people walking around while talking on their cell phones... and by seeing people of color eating side by side with white folk.
Cell phones, probably. But not necessarily by people from different races mixing in public. It did happen in Northern cities, particularly in places like public transport, which was too crowded to allow for separate sections.
Women in the workforce? Dressed like chippies? With skirts above the knee?
I suspect that this has actually been in development for quite a while as some nighttime/hobby project of one or more programmers at Apple that got "outed" somehow, & then became an official project. Kind of like the Graphing Calculator of the original PowerPC Macs...
Before you throw your printer away, though, check out Gimp-Print for Mac OS X. This is a really nifty open-source set of drivers for something like 600 printers in the latest release. I can still use my old Epson Color Stylus 600 on OS 10.3, thanks to that, saving me the purchase of a new inkjet (& the funky DCMA-protected ink cartridges they require). Gimp-Print & a USB-to-parallel cable will let you use all sorts of otherwise unsupported printers on a Mac.
With broadband it should be possible to synch with a friend's computer - my password, files stored there encrypted. Just make a little mutual agreement that he can store up to a gb with me, I store up to a gb with him or whatever else we agree on. Need more back-up? Get a gb from 4-5 friends. All auto-synched (if both online), no particular interface, just a special dir "My important documents" or whatever. Drag, drop & forget.
Yeah, & when you forget your password, all your GBs of data are now gone, even if the data are perfectly stored with no errors. "Unreadable media" doesn't mean just a funny-sized disk or tape cartridge that won't fit into modern drives.
Designed to be the least efficient arrangement? Only if you're typing with 1 hand. The most common characters were scattered to different parts of the keyboard so that mechanical type carriages wouldn't get jammed, thus allowing typists to speed up. Another complaint, that the left hand is unduly favored, isn't quite so either, when you realize that the right hand is more likely to be free to hit the space bar or the old-style carriage return?again, speeding up the typing process for touch typists.
Granted, since we're no longer using mechanical typewriters, the reason for QWERTY isn't as compelling, but it was far better than anything else when it was devised, which made it the standard (at least in English-speaking countries) to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's the "NEARLY" equal amounts that's the key here. There was a slight surplus of "regular" matter vs. antimatter, & this minuscule surplus is what we have today. Matter & antimatter annihilate each other on contact (or, rather, just turn into so many high-energy photons), so the antimatter presumably went rather quickly, almost immediately after it was formed. There might still be some antimatter floating around, but only in infinitesimal amounts & produced very recently. Scientifically, this slight surplus of matter vs. antimatter is quite interesting. Why should there be? And if there is an inequality, why should it be such a small proportion, rather than, say, twice as much (or 10^9 as much) matter vs. antimatter? There might be some notions on this, but I don't keep up on this stuff.
I did something like that inadvertently once, when I used the word "perforce" in an email to my boss. Freaked him out, it did.
...and a 60% bonus chance of suffering from irritable bowel.
That's because they're causing it!
A measly 5 percentage points from "shoving religion into classes nationwide"? You're making the EXTREMELY questionable assumption that "the know-nothings and American Taliban (dominionists, christian reconstructionists, etc) " are: (a) near, if not in excess of, 51% of the voters, & (b) unified & organized enough to pursue a common agenda. As best as I can tell, the largest & best-organized religion in the US is the Roman Catholic Church, which is a little above 20% of the population, & has no beef either with evolution or the value of pi. The fundamentalists are largely in the Evangelical Protestant wing of Christianity, which is much more given to being a bunch of independent congregations, & not necessarily united beyond a few general doctrinal principles. And, despite the best efforts of the last 40 years, school curricula are still largely determined at the state or local levels; your illusory "dominionists" wouldn't be able to advance their doctrines too far, even if they do take over the US Department of Education. And, given the suspicion & resentment many Christian fundamentalists have to the national government, their first reactions might be to gut those federal programs anyway, making it quite difficult for anyone to easily achieve dominance over the nation's schools.
Sure do. But not these ones.
"These are not the bacteria you are looking for..."
What we could do is to put a copyright on the ziggurat & then we can hit the Egyptians for "derivative works"!
No monument? What would get erected, then?
The short version I heard is that in the early 90s Congress & the elder Bush hammered out a plan to try to at least keep deficits from getting larger (where he broke the "no new taxes" pledge; possibly very wise, but it hurt him later). Clinton essentially followed this plan, too (whatever ideas he had about spending/taxing more were frustrated after 1994). Then the economy grew a fraction of a percentage point more each year than originally forecast, & this meant that a lot more money than anticipated got into the US Treasurey from taxes. So, an overall policy of keeping deficits to a tolerable level ended up getting us very nice surpluses for a few years.
Apple & MS are rather different beasts, so comparing them is a bit difficult. Because MS's main market is the business sector, it has to telegraph its moves way, way in advance so that its main customers (corporate clients) can mesh their upgrades with that of MS's. Another consequence of MS's business orientation is that backwards compatibility is one of the top requirements, so it has to keep pulling along all this ancient legacy code into the latest version of Windows, & I have no doubt that this sucks up all sorts of developer resources by itself. (I won't get into all the driver/hardware headaches brought about by all the niche PC & peripheral manufacturers on the planet.)
As for Apple, it's more oriented towards the home consumer, & in this market, you don't announce something's ready till it is done, finished, tested, & debugged to death. If it doesn't work out of the box (without reading the fcsking manual), most customers simply will return it as "broken", so first impressions are pretty much the only chance it has to prove something. So, we don't really hear much (outside of unreliable rumors sites) about new features till Apple's ready to roll them out. And if some nifty whiz-bang code can't be made to work in time for the next OS release, it simply (& quietly) gets yanked from the code base, & no one outside of a few development teams in Apple will be the wiser.
We don't have a good idea of just how competent Apple's developers are in comparison to Microsoft's; we simply hear a lot less of Apple's failures than we do MS's.
Wrong, I fear. If you buy the $129 box of Mac OS X, it's the full version. You can wipe all your hard drives clean (or put in brand-new ones, boot off the CD, & then install onto your computer & get every last lickable bit of it.
"Comparisons to Microsoft are interesting, but not valid. You can not buy a Mac without a license for some variety of Mac OS."
Technically correct, but difficult. You'd have to look around a bit to buy a name-brand computer, new, without Windows on it. The homebuilt/whitebox industry is the biggest exception, & where you do get the furthest away from the Mac world in terms of how you can get your machine. But Apple doesn't seem to be gunning for that market anyway.
Depends; are they African or European pterodactyls?
Yeah, someone from the 1920's would be amazed at the people walking around while talking on their cell phones ... and by seeing people of color eating side by side with white folk.
Cell phones, probably. But not necessarily by people from different races mixing in public. It did happen in Northern cities, particularly in places like public transport, which was too crowded to allow for separate sections.
Women in the workforce? Dressed like chippies? With skirts above the knee?
Women did have jobs, at least till they got married. I don't know what a "chippie" is, but skirt hems did reach at least the bottom of the knee in the later '20s. http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/westspringfieldhs/academ ic/english/1project/99gg/99gg2/clothe2.htm
Kids with metal stuck through their skin?
I'm still a little shocked today. Actually, grossed out.
I suspect that this has actually been in development for quite a while as some nighttime/hobby project of one or more programmers at Apple that got "outed" somehow, & then became an official project. Kind of like the Graphing Calculator of the original PowerPC Macs...
Better start filling out those grant applications.
I told you not to try measuring how fast it was spreading!
> So market share increase makes you evil? By that measure Apple must be the kindest computer company ever!
Hey, you're forgetting whoever's doing Amiga these days!
You obviously haven't checked your E-mail lately.
Gives a whole new meaning to "hanging chads", don't you think?
Before you throw your printer away, though, check out Gimp-Print for Mac OS X. This is a really nifty open-source set of drivers for something like 600 printers in the latest release. I can still use my old Epson Color Stylus 600 on OS 10.3, thanks to that, saving me the purchase of a new inkjet (& the funky DCMA-protected ink cartridges they require). Gimp-Print & a USB-to-parallel cable will let you use all sorts of otherwise unsupported printers on a Mac.
Or, for fun, read As the Apple Turns. I don't know of any Wintel equivalent of this; the closest I get is a John Dvorak rant.
Yeah, & when you forget your password, all your GBs of data are now gone, even if the data are perfectly stored with no errors. "Unreadable media" doesn't mean just a funny-sized disk or tape cartridge that won't fit into modern drives.
Why is everyone looking at me like that?
Granted, since we're no longer using mechanical typewriters, the reason for QWERTY isn't as compelling, but it was far better than anything else when it was devised, which made it the standard (at least in English-speaking countries) to this day.