If by 'the planet' you mean 'the large lump of rock orbiting the sun,' then you're right, at the current moment we couldn't destroy it. Although I would have to wonder what exactly 'destruction' would entail in this case? Would splitting it in half be sufficient? Or would we have to drop it into the sun?
If, however, you consider life to be in some way valuable, then you're just plain wrong. Given a year or two of serious, solid work, and some good planning, the United States could, using only its military budget (and not even all of that!) contrive to destroy every single living thing on Earth larger than one cell in size. They could probably even manage to do it without nuclear weapons, although it would of course be a lot easier with them.
Is it really such a stretch from 'we could completely destroy life on earth if we really set our minds to it' to 'we could seriously fuck up the ecosystem beyond all hope of repair if we're not careful'? I don't think so.
I'm not going to bother to do this line by line; that would take too long. I'm just going to chime in on the most egregious examples of intellectual dishonesty, the places where you're not using (largely incorrect) arguments, but are twisting words to demonize your opponent.
>> Human activity is certainly contributing to global warming, and we can do something about that activity.
>This is illustrative of the poor critical thinking skills exhibited by many environmentalists. You write that human > activity is "certainly" (if it was so certain, then why did you need to label it as such?) causing global warming, but > you have previously mentioned that your charges may be fabricated and that whether or not human activity causes > global warming doesn't matter anyway.
He says, earlier, that global warming may not be caused by humans. Now he says that humans are certainly contributing to it. You accuse him of contradicting himself.
I would spend time here explaining the difference between 'contributing to' something and 'causing' something, except that you are clearly intelligent enough to know it... you're just ignoring it so you can make your opponent look foolish. It doesn't work for anyone reading with any care, I'm afraid.
>> It is highly unlikely that everyone has got it all wrong and that there is no global warming at all.
> Which is not the argument, of course. The argument is this: There is no evidence that any current trends in global > warming are caused by human action.
I like that. It's clearly untrue that there is no evidence that global warming is caused by human action. There is plenty of evidence, albiet indirect and uncertain. There is also evidence to the contrary, equally indirect and uncertain. (And, of course, when you use the words 'caused by' you are including the implicit assumption that there must be only one cause of global warming, which is seeming increasingly unlikely.)
What you're saying is, 'Any evidence produced by environmentalists can be immediately discounted completely. Once this is done, there is no evidence that any current trends in global warming are caused by human action.'
Oh, I forgot one thing. 'Anyone who produces evidence that the current trends in global warming are caused by human action is, ipso facto, an environmentalist.'
>> If we convince ourselves that there is no problem and we turn out to be wrong the cost of that mistake will be >> extreme[ly] high.
> I think the problem is very clear: the environmentalist religion is filled with people who hate the free market, and > they have to find a way to destroy it.... > Environmentalism is a religion, and Gaea is its God.
You are a very strange man, but an interestingly consistant one. You are constantly accusing others of your own failings.
I could, for example, say that Libertarianism is a religion, and money and 'unfettered capitalism' are its gods. But I would really only make that accusation of the fringe of the Libertarian party to which you belong. And, like the stereotypical raving religious fanatic, you use every rhetorical tactic at your disposal to mock those who say things you don't like, but can make few actual substantive arguments because you're too busy with vitreol and spleen.
One person makes the argument that we are dumping a bunch of garbage into the atmosphere, and that we have very little idea what the consequences might be. You *could* argue in return that since we don't know the consequences, we should pretend that it is impossible that there could be any, and act accordingly. It's an amazingly stupid argument, but at least a self-consistant one.
Instead you call him a pinko commie rat-bastard who is out to destroy the free market (and, of course, America) with his ideas. Not a lot of substance there, and what there is sounds like it was dreamed up by McCarthy.
So what you're actually complaining about is the interface paradigm, really.
It's perfectly possible to make a carbon app look as much like a cocoa one as you could ever want to. However, there are two 'problems'. First, both of those carbon apps are descendants of MacOS 9 apps, and pretty close descendants at that. Nobody put in a whole lot of time to make them look different from the old ones. They also haven't had a whole lot of attention paid to them to make them fit perfectly into the MacOS X commons. That kind of thing comes for free (or at least very cheap) when you write new software, but takes a lot more work when you're trying to change over from one 'feel' to another.
Number two: the people who write in carbon tend to like the older interface paradigms more than they like the newer ones. You clearly like the newer paradigms. That's fine. But don't mistake this for universality, nor for limitations of Carbon. Cocoa is sweet, great. But carbon is a perfectly viable set of APIs. Saying that it's bad because it's based on the old, grotty Toolbox is like saying C++, Java, C#, and Objective C are bad because they're all based on old, grotty C. I admit that, like C++, Carbon could have been cleaned up better before it was released. But --especially considering its (intriguing) origins -- it seems to me to be quite a nice little package.
[Note: when I talk about the newer paradigms, I mean 'originated at NeXT 14 years ago instead of at Apple 20 years ago.']
Absolutely true, and completely irrelevant
on
Apple Responds to Adobe
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Fact: Adobe spends significantly more developing for two systems than they would developing for only one.
Fact: Adobe is in business to make money, and has, as most companies do, absolutely no loyalty to anyone except for its stockholders.
Fact: If Adobe were to stop developing for one platform or the other, while it was still a viable platform, it would earn itself enormous ill will, and someone would step in with a replacement. And a good chunk of people would buy the replacement. (Let's just not discuss the GNU replacement here, okay? It's not the point.)
From these three facts we can extrapolate a few things.
Extrapolation: Adobe will not stop making either Macintosh or Windows products while a sizable chunk of their income comes from the platform in question.
Extrapolation: If Adobe could keep all of their customers, while shifting development to one platform, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Extrapolation: The only way the above could happen would be if one of the platforms were to basically die, or everyone using that platform with Adobe software were to switch over to the other platform.
Extrapolation: Since they can't just discontinue their software on one platform without the above problem with it causing massive customer ill-will, the best way to bring about these circumstances is to make it more difficult to live on the platform they wish to kill, while simultaneously telling everyone how much better the other platform is.
Extrapolation: They aren't interested in trying to kill Windows.
I could have named off about 2/3 of your list without ever opening the app, so it's kind of hard to give you much credit.
Mail, Terminal, and TextEdit are direct derivatives of NeXT apps, and TextEdit is used for just about every demo of how easy it is to program in Cocoa that exists. OmniWeb is by the OmniGroup, a bunch of people dedicated to proving how wonderful Cocoa is.
Photoshop, FreeHand, BBEdit, and iTunes are all obvious and straightforward carbonizations of 9 apps. No points there, either.
As for the rest, I've just started looking through packages, and I will admit that I can't figure out how to figure it out. They all use some cocoa calls: even the two carbon apps that I checked have cocoa calls listed in them. How can I differentiate?
Plus, if you're going to talk about some of them being the result of, for example, Interface Builder, you have to bear in mind that IB works beautifully with Carbon. So be careful, because if what you're saying is 'I don't like non-interface-builder apps' then that's a completely different and basically unrelated discussion to Cocoa vs. Carbon.
In 1997, Adobe started trying to get all of its customers to switch over to Windows from the Mac. This was when the Mac was in a really bad way, and Adobe simply didn't want to support it.
Ever since then, Adobe has been treating the Mac as a second-class citizen. 'You could die someday', they seem to be saying, 'And we'd just as soon it were tomorrow.' It would be a lot cheaper for them not to have to develop two versions of any of their products, but until the number of Mac users in the businesses they sell to goes down, they can't jettison the Mac versions. So they've been gritting their teeth and bearing it.
And then Apple comes along and makes software that actually competes with them! WHILE they were wishing they could get rid of Apple. If Adobe were a person, that would be a perfect recipe for getting them amazingly mad. 'We wanted to screw you over, and were just waiting for any opportunity... and here you are, screwing US instead!'
Is it any surprise that Adobe will keep selling Mac software (because they have to), but use any convenient opportunity to get as many of their customers to use Windows as they can?
And I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that unless you actually go in and investigate the apps before you stick your neck out, you will be wrong somewhere between 33% of the time and 66% of the time.
Er. Um. Linux is consistent on the config file level?
Consistent across versions, I assume you mean. Because if you take a look at, say, the config file for inetd, and the config file for sendmail, and the config file for named, and you consider them 'consistent', I can't imagine what the common elements are.
They're all text files? They all can be edited with the same programs? They're all next to impossible to understand or edit unless you have a huge tutorial and a bunch of reference guides open while you're doing it?
That's a KIND of consistency, I guess.
(Sadly, even those generalizations are not really true. You CAN edit sendmail.cf, but of course you're not supposed to. You're supposed to edit the bunch of macro files and then compile them into a sendmail.cf. Sadly, I find those files even less intelligible than sendmail.cf itself.)
> I try to be open minded, but when you walk around with your foot hovering in front of > your mouth, eventually, someone is going to push it in.
Sadly, many of Microsoft's customers aren't going to realize that MS's foot is actually in its mouth until and unless they actually see the toes protruding from the rectum.
In both cases, the superior product destroyed by a group with dramatically more money for marketing and absolutely no interest in hewing close to the facts or winning on merit.
> Anyway, it's not Bush's job to make the world happy.
Not that I didn't violently disagree, nearly to the point of nausea, with the rest of your comment. But this bit requires a special response.
Basically what you're saying is, 'It doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, because we are more powerful than they are and we can do whatever we want.'
Sounds like democracy to you, does it? Sounds like an appropriate stance for an American president?
...that the nefarious left, in the shape of all of the people marching around and chanting slogans like 'no blood for oil', are fully aware that we're not at all interested in the oil in Iraq, that in fact we'd be doing exactly this same thing if there were no source of wealth at all in Iraq, and are instead protesting for some nefarious purpose of their own?
Ah, the left-wing conspiracy theory.
I know it's real... it's conveniently located in my breast pocket. Okay, so it's not a BIG conspiracy.
...who make me more and more scared for the future of America. You clearly know exactly what the country should be, and would be just as happy if you could run it the way you want, without recourse to such sad little things as elections and representational government.
And, more and more, with spin and with massive amounts of money, you're getting things your way. Now when I express my opinions I'm labelled a terrorist, and I'm actually scared to say them out loud at work because, frankly, I think I might be fired for it. And in this economic climate, that's no joke.
So thank you, Real Americans, for curtailing our freedoms more and more.
It may or may not conform to GNU's idea of 'free'... and we can argue back and forth about whether that's basically because GNU has always been determined to hate Apple, from day one, and will always be, no matter what Apple does.
But it doesn't matter, because he didn't say 'free'. Not as in beer, not as in speech, not as in political prisoners.
No, he said 'open source'. And, why lookie here... Apple's license is on the official list of 'open source licenses'.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
So stop with the trashing already. He said it was open source, it is open source.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because someone is a bigot doesn't mean they're a moron.
(Or perhaps he was joking.)
-fred
> We couldn't destroy the planet if we tried.
If by 'the planet' you mean 'the large lump of rock orbiting the sun,' then you're right, at the current moment we couldn't destroy it. Although I would have to wonder what exactly 'destruction' would entail in this case? Would splitting it in half be sufficient? Or would we have to drop it into the sun?
If, however, you consider life to be in some way valuable, then you're just plain wrong. Given a year or two of serious, solid work, and some good planning, the United States could, using only its military budget (and not even all of that!) contrive to destroy every single living thing on Earth larger than one cell in size. They could probably even manage to do it without nuclear weapons, although it would of course be a lot easier with them.
Is it really such a stretch from 'we could completely destroy life on earth if we really set our minds to it' to 'we could seriously fuck up the ecosystem beyond all hope of repair if we're not careful'? I don't think so.
-fred
I'm not going to bother to do this line by line; that would take too long. I'm just going to chime in on the most egregious examples of intellectual dishonesty, the places where you're not using (largely incorrect) arguments, but are twisting words to demonize your opponent.
...
>> Human activity is certainly contributing to global warming, and we can do something about that activity.
>This is illustrative of the poor critical thinking skills exhibited by many environmentalists. You write that human
> activity is "certainly" (if it was so certain, then why did you need to label it as such?) causing global warming, but
> you have previously mentioned that your charges may be fabricated and that whether or not human activity causes
> global warming doesn't matter anyway.
He says, earlier, that global warming may not be caused by humans. Now he says that humans are certainly contributing to it. You accuse him of contradicting himself.
I would spend time here explaining the difference between 'contributing to' something and 'causing' something, except that you are clearly intelligent enough to know it... you're just ignoring it so you can make your opponent look foolish. It doesn't work for anyone reading with any care, I'm afraid.
>> It is highly unlikely that everyone has got it all wrong and that there is no global warming at all.
> Which is not the argument, of course. The argument is this: There is no evidence that any current trends in global
> warming are caused by human action.
I like that. It's clearly untrue that there is no evidence that global warming is caused by human action. There is plenty of evidence, albiet indirect and uncertain. There is also evidence to the contrary, equally indirect and uncertain. (And, of course, when you use the words 'caused by' you are including the implicit assumption that there must be only one cause of global warming, which is seeming increasingly unlikely.)
What you're saying is, 'Any evidence produced by environmentalists can be immediately discounted completely. Once this is done, there is no evidence that any current trends in global warming are caused by human action.'
Oh, I forgot one thing. 'Anyone who produces evidence that the current trends in global warming are caused by human action is, ipso facto, an environmentalist.'
>> If we convince ourselves that there is no problem and we turn out to be wrong the cost of that mistake will be
>> extreme[ly] high.
> I think the problem is very clear: the environmentalist religion is filled with people who hate the free market, and
> they have to find a way to destroy it.
> Environmentalism is a religion, and Gaea is its God.
You are a very strange man, but an interestingly consistant one. You are constantly accusing others of your own failings.
I could, for example, say that Libertarianism is a religion, and money and 'unfettered capitalism' are its gods. But I would really only make that accusation of the fringe of the Libertarian party to which you belong. And, like the stereotypical raving religious fanatic, you use every rhetorical tactic at your disposal to mock those who say things you don't like, but can make few actual substantive arguments because you're too busy with vitreol and spleen.
One person makes the argument that we are dumping a bunch of garbage into the atmosphere, and that we have very little idea what the consequences might be. You *could* argue in return that since we don't know the consequences, we should pretend that it is impossible that there could be any, and act accordingly. It's an amazingly stupid argument, but at least a self-consistant one.
Instead you call him a pinko commie rat-bastard who is out to destroy the free market (and, of course, America) with his ideas. Not a lot of substance there, and what there is sounds like it was dreamed up by McCarthy.
Certainly is funny, though.
-fred
...that will enlarge your powerbook, with pills alone.
I get a lot of spam about it, so it must work, right?
-fred
So, one of you says, 'You need disk util to erase CD-RW disks'. The other says, 'No, you just right click on the CD-RW and select 'erase disk''.
Then the first one says, 'Oops, you're right.'
And the second says, 'Oops, I'm wrong.'
I don't have a CD-RW drive that works, so I'm beggin' ya, please, tell me who is actually right?
-fred
I personally can't come up with too many occasions where I'd need to have more than a couple of those puppies around.
Unless you get into some really interesting stuff at your lan parties.
-fred
So what you're actually complaining about is the interface paradigm, really.
It's perfectly possible to make a carbon app look as much like a cocoa one as you could ever want to. However, there are two 'problems'. First, both of those carbon apps are descendants of MacOS 9 apps, and pretty close descendants at that. Nobody put in a whole lot of time to make them look different from the old ones. They also haven't had a whole lot of attention paid to them to make them fit perfectly into the MacOS X commons. That kind of thing comes for free (or at least very cheap) when you write new software, but takes a lot more work when you're trying to change over from one 'feel' to another.
Number two: the people who write in carbon tend to like the older interface paradigms more than they like the newer ones. You clearly like the newer paradigms. That's fine. But don't mistake this for universality, nor for limitations of Carbon. Cocoa is sweet, great. But carbon is a perfectly viable set of APIs. Saying that it's bad because it's based on the old, grotty Toolbox is like saying C++, Java, C#, and Objective C are bad because they're all based on old, grotty C. I admit that, like C++, Carbon could have been cleaned up better before it was released. But --especially considering its (intriguing) origins -- it seems to me to be quite a nice little package.
[Note: when I talk about the newer paradigms, I mean 'originated at NeXT 14 years ago instead of at Apple 20 years ago.']
Anyway, those are the differences *I* see.
-fred
If it were a strict sort of parallel, it would make YOU more attractive TO XP, or possibly to your computer.
I hope you don't keep your computer in the bedroom...
-fred
No, that's a magazine.
-fred
Fact: Adobe spends significantly more developing for two systems than they would developing for only one.
Fact: Adobe is in business to make money, and has, as most companies do, absolutely no loyalty to anyone except for its stockholders.
Fact: If Adobe were to stop developing for one platform or the other, while it was still a viable platform, it would earn itself enormous ill will, and someone would step in with a replacement. And a good chunk of people would buy the replacement. (Let's just not discuss the GNU replacement here, okay? It's not the point.)
From these three facts we can extrapolate a few things.
Extrapolation: Adobe will not stop making either Macintosh or Windows products while a sizable chunk of their income comes from the platform in question.
Extrapolation: If Adobe could keep all of their customers, while shifting development to one platform, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Extrapolation: The only way the above could happen would be if one of the platforms were to basically die, or everyone using that platform with Adobe software were to switch over to the other platform.
Extrapolation: Since they can't just discontinue their software on one platform without the above problem with it causing massive customer ill-will, the best way to bring about these circumstances is to make it more difficult to live on the platform they wish to kill, while simultaneously telling everyone how much better the other platform is.
Extrapolation: They aren't interested in trying to kill Windows.
-fred
Sort of the point of slashdot, in fact.
-fred
I could have named off about 2/3 of your list without ever opening the app, so it's kind of hard to give you much credit.
Mail, Terminal, and TextEdit are direct derivatives of NeXT apps, and TextEdit is used for just about every demo of how easy it is to program in Cocoa that exists. OmniWeb is by the OmniGroup, a bunch of people dedicated to proving how wonderful Cocoa is.
Photoshop, FreeHand, BBEdit, and iTunes are all obvious and straightforward carbonizations of 9 apps. No points there, either.
As for the rest, I've just started looking through packages, and I will admit that I can't figure out how to figure it out. They all use some cocoa calls: even the two carbon apps that I checked have cocoa calls listed in them. How can I differentiate?
Plus, if you're going to talk about some of them being the result of, for example, Interface Builder, you have to bear in mind that IB works beautifully with Carbon. So be careful, because if what you're saying is 'I don't like non-interface-builder apps' then that's a completely different and basically unrelated discussion to Cocoa vs. Carbon.
-fred
In 1997, Adobe started trying to get all of its customers to switch over to Windows from the Mac. This was when the Mac was in a really bad way, and Adobe simply didn't want to support it.
Ever since then, Adobe has been treating the Mac as a second-class citizen. 'You could die someday', they seem to be saying, 'And we'd just as soon it were tomorrow.' It would be a lot cheaper for them not to have to develop two versions of any of their products, but until the number of Mac users in the businesses they sell to goes down, they can't jettison the Mac versions. So they've been gritting their teeth and bearing it.
And then Apple comes along and makes software that actually competes with them! WHILE they were wishing they could get rid of Apple. If Adobe were a person, that would be a perfect recipe for getting them amazingly mad. 'We wanted to screw you over, and were just waiting for any opportunity... and here you are, screwing US instead!'
Is it any surprise that Adobe will keep selling Mac software (because they have to), but use any convenient opportunity to get as many of their customers to use Windows as they can?
-fred
Adobe, which is a dedicated Apple developer, bashing Apple? That's news.
Apple defending itself? That's not news. I mean, who among you didn't expect this exact article to be out within a day or two?
-fred
... god kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.
-fred
I dare you.
And I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that unless you actually go in and investigate the apps before you stick your neck out, you will be wrong somewhere between 33% of the time and 66% of the time.
Leaning towards 50%.
-fred
Er. Um. Linux is consistent on the config file level?
Consistent across versions, I assume you mean. Because if you take a look at, say, the config file for inetd, and the config file for sendmail, and the config file for named, and you consider them 'consistent', I can't imagine what the common elements are.
They're all text files? They all can be edited with the same programs? They're all next to impossible to understand or edit unless you have a huge tutorial and a bunch of reference guides open while you're doing it?
That's a KIND of consistency, I guess.
(Sadly, even those generalizations are not really true. You CAN edit sendmail.cf, but of course you're not supposed to. You're supposed to edit the bunch of macro files and then compile them into a sendmail.cf. Sadly, I find those files even less intelligible than sendmail.cf itself.)
-fred
> I try to be open minded, but when you walk around with your foot hovering in front of
> your mouth, eventually, someone is going to push it in.
Sadly, many of Microsoft's customers aren't going to realize that MS's foot is actually in its mouth until and unless they actually see the toes protruding from the rectum.
-fred
In both cases, the superior product destroyed by a group with dramatically more money for marketing and absolutely no interest in hewing close to the facts or winning on merit.
Damn, that's eerie!
-fred
> Anyway, it's not Bush's job to make the world happy.
Not that I didn't violently disagree, nearly to the point of nausea, with the rest of your comment. But this bit requires a special response.
Basically what you're saying is, 'It doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, because we are more powerful than they are and we can do whatever we want.'
Sounds like democracy to you, does it? Sounds like an appropriate stance for an American president?
It would. To you.
-fred
...that the nefarious left, in the shape of all of the people marching around and chanting slogans like 'no blood for oil', are fully aware that we're not at all interested in the oil in Iraq, that in fact we'd be doing exactly this same thing if there were no source of wealth at all in Iraq, and are instead protesting for some nefarious purpose of their own?
Ah, the left-wing conspiracy theory.
I know it's real... it's conveniently located in my breast pocket. Okay, so it's not a BIG conspiracy.
-fred
...who make me more and more scared for the future of America. You clearly know exactly what the country should be, and would be just as happy if you could run it the way you want, without recourse to such sad little things as elections and representational government.
And, more and more, with spin and with massive amounts of money, you're getting things your way. Now when I express my opinions I'm labelled a terrorist, and I'm actually scared to say them out loud at work because, frankly, I think I might be fired for it. And in this economic climate, that's no joke.
So thank you, Real Americans, for curtailing our freedoms more and more.
-fred
>Besides, as I recall he also got less that 50% of the popular vote, meaning that the majority of people voted
>against him.
Clearly you don't recall terribly well, then, do you?
-fred
It may or may not conform to GNU's idea of 'free'... and we can argue back and forth about whether that's basically because GNU has always been determined to hate Apple, from day one, and will always be, no matter what Apple does.
But it doesn't matter, because he didn't say 'free'. Not as in beer, not as in speech, not as in political prisoners.
No, he said 'open source'. And, why lookie here... Apple's license is on the official list of 'open source licenses'.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
So stop with the trashing already. He said it was open source, it is open source.
-fred
...is with an airport card. Make it into an airport hub, and use the ethernet cable to hook to your DSL.
Works a treat, and cheaper than an Airport hub, if you've got the computer already.
-fred