Apple has 2% of marketshare for lots of really complicated reasons having to do with market forces, the state of IBM, the technology inherent in the Macintosh during its first years, etc. it's not just because of lame ass and popular opinion.
I use Macs because Windows is a piece of shit, a lame series of shells that can't help but be buggy, difficult, and ugly. Not because it was trendy, but because the Mac OS has always been useful.
And wow, critiques of individualism coming from a Windows fan-boy that's worth a bag of snot.
I think you like PCs because that's what your parents and friends use, because that's what you're used to and you can't wrap your mind around anything else, like FreeBSD, UNIX, Linux, etc.
And by the way, why are you so uncomfortable with yourself that you're so worried about being in "an art class surrounded by fags?" Maybe you're just a dumb hick who secretly loves Will and Grace.
An art class would probably do you some good. Maybe you'd learn something.
The fact that YOUR machine "doesn't get choked by malware" is anecdotal at best and doesn't account for the millions of x86 PCs that are currently spewing out spam, or are hopelessly flumuxed by spyware, and the millions of users who have to put up with it.
Furthermore, the photo editing software, movie making software, etc. that comes standard with Windows XP is crap and can't hold a candle to the iApps IMHO.
Lastly, how much time do you spend running Ad-Aware--and since you're such a conscientious user, anti-virus, etc--or how much memory and processor resources to you give up to protect Windows from the world.
I would never call PC users dumb or cowards for deciding that their platform of choice was useful to them, I just happen to disagree. And while you call Mac users zealots, haven't you noticed that you fall upon the sacrificial altar for x86?
So congratulations for being one of the people who can build a PC box here's a cookie.
Does anyone read the moderator guidelines anymore? F*ck.
Halo 2 has better graphics and story, and some nice extras, but you're right there was nothing revolutionary about the game. However, the financial success is pretty impressive.
Hell, they could just lug their digital camera with them, and get mostly the same functionality...plus a camera!
Are you being intentionally obstuse?
The iPod Photo plays music, works as a firewire drive, hooks up to a TV to show photos on the fly, and can connect to a camera to download photos thereby freeing up the camera's memory for more pictures.
I think the iPod Photo does more than my camera, but my camera does one thing really, really well. It takes pictures.
Well of course, that's just stupid, I agree. And lots of people forget the Russians, and the Chinese, and even the Vietnamese. Officially, World War II started in 1939, but I tend to think it was the day France and others demanded reparations from Germany at the Treaty of Versaillies, but it wasn't their fault because they couldn't see the rise of Hitler, the efficiency of the Blitzkrieg, nor the Final Solution.
I would argue that the burning of a few public buildings is not exactly akin to the massive blitzkrieg backed by a significant industry.
Further, you miss the point, the French leadership had failed in their defense of France, and there was nothing left to do but surrender. The mistake had been made with the creation and maintenence of the Maginot line over and above any other kind of defenses. The French were simply out-classed by German technology.
The United States would not have faired much better, however the US was bigger, had more people, and was protected by the Atlantic--although German subs were detected around Florida and the East Coast.
Ummm....okay. France wasn't doing so well....having, I don't know, surrendered. And, as for Britian, they were getting pounded so badly even if the Nazi's never crossed the pond, the rest of Europe would have remained under Hitler's control.
This is of course ignoring the Russian who may have ended up with all of Germany, France, etc. under their control as they rolled across Europe. Of course it would have taken twice as long and millions more would have died.
Don't discount the US help in WW2. And for that matter, don't discount the help of Australians, Britians and Chinese in the Pacific theater either.
See, it was a World War. Almost everyone was involved.
English hasn't lost is literary roots, it's managed to preserve a series of synonyms for almost every world, thereby there are low, middle, and high-English ways to state just about everything. This comes from the post-French invasion of England, and the sudden influx of French. English became low-language, French-middle-high, and Latin-highest. This system continues to be used in English today, with additional words from other languages peppering low-and-middle English.
It is only recently that English has begun to create new words without using Latin and Greek roots.
So if terrorists want us to attack the entire Middle-East and thereby kill millions upon millions of people, throwing the world economy into the dark ages, etc. they should feign help from one country?
If a nuclear weapon goes off in L.A. tomorrow, whom do we attack? Pakistan? North Korea? India? Russia? France? Maybe, we should just attack everyone, maybe we should burn Saudi Arabia to a the world largest sheet of glass or irradiate Pongyang so hard Seoul has to be abandoned.
Yeah and our intelligence services are so distinctly honed that they were either tricked by a tin-pot dictator into believing that he was just inches away from his own nukes, or we've invaded a whole country and they can't find any evidence that he did have them. Either way, I don't think the fate of millions upon millions should be decided by the same people who didn't seem to think that the guy who was on a terrorist-watch-list outta' be....I don't know, say watched!
As for the shiver of apocalyptic pleasure that ran through your post about how much destructive power is held by the United States, you're sick.
This is real, these are real people living lives entirely separate for you and you would execute them because they live near someone you think had a hand in something as horrible as a mushroom cloud in an American city.
I'm tired of the apocalyptic weapon's porn that runs through this thread.
You're thinking just as the terrorists do, you're thinking in apocalyptic terms.
Just like Osama.
The sad mac or bomb also contained error codes that indicated--if you had some materials at hand, or a web-connection--whether you had bad memory, etc.
It seems you know less about the Macintosh operating systems than you think you do.
You can't patent books, artwork or music you tool. That's called copyright. Nor can you patent a guitar. You don't understand the differences between public domain, copyrights, or patents.
Who wants a computer that, when it detects a problem, displays a sad icon and won't let you do anything until you call it's 'parents'? (Yes, I realize it doesn't do this anymore, but this was how Macs used to report errors)
What the hell are you babbling about? You mean error -42, or the little bomb symbol that appeared until OS 9? You mean this is different from the blue screen of death?
Accessories, parts, and noone [sic] else's.You can buy other stuff.
I agree that Apple's secrecy borders on the bizarre sometimes, but it's also there for a reason.
But can't a company make money by persuing a general good, or does every corporation HAVE to be an evil, rapacious monster? Kaiser is a for-profit venture which makes money to serve the public good, the profit is merely a side-effect of their main goal. Non-for-profits use all the money beyond operating costs to fund their goals, this should be a slight differential in the structure of the financing and not a complete reconsideration of their ultimate goals.
A company that does cancer research and is solely interested in profit would never achieve any kind of findings because research is their revenue-stream, finding a cure to cancer would kill the company, therefore sole interest in profit would be a Bad Thing(TM)
So, any company should exist to achieve goals--best OS, best car, a cool search engine--and consider profit the end-result. Anything else is the modus of a drug dealer or an assassin, profit above all other moral considerations.
Ah yes, the Far Light, those freaks. I can't believe those people. Good thing WE are around to take the presidency and congress like some fat golden calf to parade around like the victorious manly-men we are.
Face it, Bush and company have seriously mishandled the North Korean situation and Iraq, so that now we are in poor positions on both: Iraq continues to pin our military down, sucking both our men and material dry, as well as the treasury, while on the other end of Asia, nut-job Kim Il Jong has been able to build nukes. How is this good? How does this prove that the Republican party can engage the world at this point? The rest of the world is pissed at us with remarkably few exceptions, the Saudi wahhabi party is still spewing their vitrol and funding various Jihadist groups, Pakistan is protecting men like Khan, who sold Pakistanian nuclear technology to N. Korea, Iran, etc., and we are engaged in a close-quarters battle in a formerly-contained Islamic country that is just short of toppling over into chaos.
Bush has mishandled each of this situations by failing to use all the very powerful tools at his disposal to the correct effects. You bring Clinton in, yep he had an agreement with N. Korea, and you'd think Bush to come up with something better than just letting the N. Koreans blow off the agreement and start churning out nukes.
Stop playing partisan politics and consider, truthfully, whether Bush and company have had an acceptable success in either of these two situations. Iraq may come together, but I think it will be in spite of Bush, Haliburton, and Rumsfeld. Iraq will come together because of brave Iraqi policemen, because of women who showed the purple stains of their fingers, and not because of Bush, who will of course garner all the credit.
The primordial soup was a process, a chemical shift catalyzed by a sudden strike of lightning in the right place, but natural. I think you're using the term "natural" in such broad terms to make the word useless; natural is a framework to describe the currently evolving system. How long does something have to be around to be natural? Is everything humans do natural? Then, we have to make another word for the rain forest in its current state, versus the rain forest after a slash-and-burn. Something has changed and I always thought natural versus unnatural was useful.
However, I will suggest for my purposes: general coexistence versus unique dissonance. We are a unique dissonance, strangely incapable of staying within boundaries that other species remain in. EVERY other species uses general coexistence, we are the one that does not belong; we are the vague vulgarity.
We appear cancerous in that we not only destroy the body, but ultimately ourselves--a cancer cell stops growing when it kills the body and therefore dies.
I never said the tsunami wasn't natural, it and our response is perfectly natural, consistent with our capacity to mourn, a capacity we've carried for at least hundreds of thousands of years.
But, we are part of a process, and I question our ability to alter that process' course, because to do so alters our environment, AKA that narrow little band of toxicity, heat, and radiation that we can survive in. We alter it too much, too cold or too hot, too toxic or not toxic enough and our bodies stop working. We could evolve, but not as fast as the changes that could come. There are after all, no guarantees.
There is also the possibility that we, as a species, may survive even great ecological calamities, but we will loose so much in the process that our great-great-grandchildren will wonder why we squandered what they would call a paradise. And we will wonder, with our uniqueness among other species, why did we follow the natural course to our very detriment. If being natural is to act in this fashion and we are able to make a choice--maybe we can't, but why if we could, would we make the choice to give up what we have now for flooded cities, rising cancer rates, and die-offs in exchange for a particular adherence to your natural behavior?
Maybe we are the great Gaia reboot, the global killer that moves life on Earth back to anaerobic bacteria. In this sense, we are perfectly natural and part of the system, but not particularly bright.
Maybe we are Shiva, the ender, who creates a world of ash so that Vishnu can recreate it. Maybe, we are one era's end.
Not necessarily, they don't care because they can't make the connection between their car and the smog, they usually blame everyone else. If you sealed someone in a room with a card and told them that it would run for one hour, and that a CXT would fill the room with carbon dioxide in 30 minutes, while a Toyota Prius would fill the room in 2 hours and then asked them to choose which car should join them in the sealed room, which would they pick?
People do care, they just haven't made the connection between their bling-bling laden pimped out H2 and their kid's asthma. We're dumb. Dumb, and dangerous and yet perfectly capable of great intelligence and grace if we'd just put down the Big Gulp, throw the cellphone out the window, turn off Howard Stern on XM radio and start thinking about the fuckin' world for two goddamn minutes.
There are 6.7 billion of us, how the hell are we going to sustain everything when all of us want 4 TVs, 2 cars, and endless amounts of processed cheese food?
Sigh, maybe most people don't care; I wish they did.
As for corporations, I'm not suggesting replacing them, but altering their legal status in some ways. Wealthy individuals are just as dangerous, but at least they can be prosecuted.
But, we are the ONLY species that can do this. Granted, even our inconveniencing of electrons is unnatural, but we must be careful not to do so much damage that our environment is simply unlivable. We are taking down farmland and orchards and replacing it with concrete and airconditioning, we are spending more time and money doing things that used to be free, or cheap, and we are finding ourselves accumulating diseases that used to be rare, and finding our cures--antibiotics--aren't working any more. I think we've passed the point where any other species would have been put into check and we don't see the effects even when they are clear and specific.
I think you're saying that all history is natural, that anything that happens: Nazi death camps, the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Velveta, is inherently natural. If this is true then we need another word to define those things which may be harmful to our own health and well-being and those that are not.
We are definitely unnatural, almost cancerous in our refusal to fit within the natural order, we act as Shiva, the destroyer and ender.
But, we have to realize, we will die too. We are just as subject to nature as everything else, just as fragile, just as mortal. The Pacific Tsunami proved that nature, in all its ferocity, can still hurt us. So, while we are separated, we are not separate.
I think you may need another term.
But, corporations offer unique protections so they, to use your example, can dump toxic chemicals and be fined only after a long trial and procedural, which a corporation can then hold in statis in court for years. An individual, caught dumping, say arsenic into a river, will be immediately arrested or fined.
Corporations have all the advantages of being treated, by the law, as an individual with none of the inherent liabilities.
Individuals are responsible for their actions, and that's what makes corporations so infuriating at times, people hide behind them and use them to defend their actions.
As for SUV and (?) private jet ownership, this is an entirely different problem, I think, that comes from the bizarre inability to see connections between say that smog bank over LA and their 10-mile-to-the-gallon CXT.
Humans are not that bright, and in large anonymous groups, we are downright dangerous. The key is to relate to the individual always, and not to the herd.
Every other creature, including ants--whose total biomass exceeds ours by a great deal--achieves equilibrium with the environment around it. It becomes exceedingly complicated, but all species are in some kind of equilibrium, unless that environment changes or the species is able to move to a new area, hence the rampant distructions caused by housecats in the Australian Outback.
The minute that humans stopped living in equilibrium with the surrounding environment and began to change that environment to our will, we ceased to be 'natural.' So, it wasn't fire, tools, it was agriculture.
Your point would be better served by not making the ridiculous point that is it "just us and the beavers now, screwing up the Earth for whales." Beavers can seem destructive, but are part of the natural system in the rivers and lakes of their habitat. Furthermore, Beavers are kept in check by predatory species and so are unable to destroy their environment to the point at which is becomes uninhabitable, but we manage to do this consistently.
Ever been to parts of the Ukraine, or the bottom of a strip mine? We can utterly lay waste to the environment and make it so bad we move, like the Simpson abandoning Springfield.
As for Mars, we need to consider all the implications, including the possibility of life. But, without it, we can create a whole new world. We also need to stop screwing with this one.
I don't know if this an entirely fair list, however honest that it is. All of these programs are specifically tasked for Windows and the Windows platform. You work in a very special industry, but what do you use to write email, surf the net, listen to music, maybe burn a CD or two? Ever wanted to work with digital video in HD quality? Got a digital camera? You need a Mac Mini.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has 2% of marketshare for lots of really complicated reasons having to do with market forces, the state of IBM, the technology inherent in the Macintosh during its first years, etc. it's not just because of lame ass and popular opinion.
I use Macs because Windows is a piece of shit, a lame series of shells that can't help but be buggy, difficult, and ugly. Not because it was trendy, but because the Mac OS has always been useful.
And wow, critiques of individualism coming from a Windows fan-boy that's worth a bag of snot.
I think you like PCs because that's what your parents and friends use, because that's what you're used to and you can't wrap your mind around anything else, like FreeBSD, UNIX, Linux, etc.
And by the way, why are you so uncomfortable with yourself that you're so worried about being in "an art class surrounded by fags?" Maybe you're just a dumb hick who secretly loves Will and Grace. An art class would probably do you some good. Maybe you'd learn something.
The fact that YOUR machine "doesn't get choked by malware" is anecdotal at best and doesn't account for the millions of x86 PCs that are currently spewing out spam, or are hopelessly flumuxed by spyware, and the millions of users who have to put up with it.
Furthermore, the photo editing software, movie making software, etc. that comes standard with Windows XP is crap and can't hold a candle to the iApps IMHO. Lastly, how much time do you spend running Ad-Aware--and since you're such a conscientious user, anti-virus, etc--or how much memory and processor resources to you give up to protect Windows from the world.
I would never call PC users dumb or cowards for deciding that their platform of choice was useful to them, I just happen to disagree. And while you call Mac users zealots, haven't you noticed that you fall upon the sacrificial altar for x86?
So congratulations for being one of the people who can build a PC box here's a cookie.
Does anyone read the moderator guidelines anymore? F*ck. Halo 2 has better graphics and story, and some nice extras, but you're right there was nothing revolutionary about the game. However, the financial success is pretty impressive.
Try Cowboy Beebop, Ghost in the Shell (including Stand Alone Complex), and Akira. 'nuff said.
Creative uses the same kind of battery, except Apple http//apple.com/support/ipod/service/battery.html has a program to replace the battery for $99. Or you can go out and buy your own high-capacity version for $29.99: http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Page.cfm?Parent= 1225&Title=iPod%20Batteries&Template=1
How much does a new Creative battery cost?
Are you being intentionally obstuse?
The iPod Photo plays music, works as a firewire drive, hooks up to a TV to show photos on the fly, and can connect to a camera to download photos thereby freeing up the camera's memory for more pictures.
I think the iPod Photo does more than my camera, but my camera does one thing really, really well. It takes pictures.
Americans can be total morons.
But, so can everyone else.
No matter where you go, there's always an asshole about.
Further, you miss the point, the French leadership had failed in their defense of France, and there was nothing left to do but surrender. The mistake had been made with the creation and maintenence of the Maginot line over and above any other kind of defenses. The French were simply out-classed by German technology.
The United States would not have faired much better, however the US was bigger, had more people, and was protected by the Atlantic--although German subs were detected around Florida and the East Coast.
So, there's your history lesson.
This is of course ignoring the Russian who may have ended up with all of Germany, France, etc. under their control as they rolled across Europe. Of course it would have taken twice as long and millions more would have died.
Don't discount the US help in WW2. And for that matter, don't discount the help of Australians, Britians and Chinese in the Pacific theater either.
See, it was a World War. Almost everyone was involved.
English hasn't lost is literary roots, it's managed to preserve a series of synonyms for almost every world, thereby there are low, middle, and high-English ways to state just about everything. This comes from the post-French invasion of England, and the sudden influx of French. English became low-language, French-middle-high, and Latin-highest. This system continues to be used in English today, with additional words from other languages peppering low-and-middle English. It is only recently that English has begun to create new words without using Latin and Greek roots.
If a nuclear weapon goes off in L.A. tomorrow, whom do we attack? Pakistan? North Korea? India? Russia? France? Maybe, we should just attack everyone, maybe we should burn Saudi Arabia to a the world largest sheet of glass or irradiate Pongyang so hard Seoul has to be abandoned.
Yeah and our intelligence services are so distinctly honed that they were either tricked by a tin-pot dictator into believing that he was just inches away from his own nukes, or we've invaded a whole country and they can't find any evidence that he did have them. Either way, I don't think the fate of millions upon millions should be decided by the same people who didn't seem to think that the guy who was on a terrorist-watch-list outta' be....I don't know, say watched!
As for the shiver of apocalyptic pleasure that ran through your post about how much destructive power is held by the United States, you're sick.
This is real, these are real people living lives entirely separate for you and you would execute them because they live near someone you think had a hand in something as horrible as a mushroom cloud in an American city.
I'm tired of the apocalyptic weapon's porn that runs through this thread.
You're thinking just as the terrorists do, you're thinking in apocalyptic terms. Just like Osama.
The sad mac or bomb also contained error codes that indicated--if you had some materials at hand, or a web-connection--whether you had bad memory, etc. It seems you know less about the Macintosh operating systems than you think you do.
So, please be quiet you goddamn coward.
What the hell are you babbling about? You mean error -42, or the little bomb symbol that appeared until OS 9? You mean this is different from the blue screen of death?
Accessories, parts, and noone [sic] else's.You can buy other stuff.
I agree that Apple's secrecy borders on the bizarre sometimes, but it's also there for a reason.
Read this: http://daringfireball.net/2005/01/the_rumor_game
But can't a company make money by persuing a general good, or does every corporation HAVE to be an evil, rapacious monster? Kaiser is a for-profit venture which makes money to serve the public good, the profit is merely a side-effect of their main goal. Non-for-profits use all the money beyond operating costs to fund their goals, this should be a slight differential in the structure of the financing and not a complete reconsideration of their ultimate goals.
A company that does cancer research and is solely interested in profit would never achieve any kind of findings because research is their revenue-stream, finding a cure to cancer would kill the company, therefore sole interest in profit would be a Bad Thing(TM)
So, any company should exist to achieve goals--best OS, best car, a cool search engine--and consider profit the end-result. Anything else is the modus of a drug dealer or an assassin, profit above all other moral considerations.
You should know better.
This is only one of the myraid of problems with a subscription-based service.
But then I have to use Windows Media Center.
Ah yes, the Far Light, those freaks. I can't believe those people. Good thing WE are around to take the presidency and congress like some fat golden calf to parade around like the victorious manly-men we are. Face it, Bush and company have seriously mishandled the North Korean situation and Iraq, so that now we are in poor positions on both: Iraq continues to pin our military down, sucking both our men and material dry, as well as the treasury, while on the other end of Asia, nut-job Kim Il Jong has been able to build nukes. How is this good? How does this prove that the Republican party can engage the world at this point? The rest of the world is pissed at us with remarkably few exceptions, the Saudi wahhabi party is still spewing their vitrol and funding various Jihadist groups, Pakistan is protecting men like Khan, who sold Pakistanian nuclear technology to N. Korea, Iran, etc., and we are engaged in a close-quarters battle in a formerly-contained Islamic country that is just short of toppling over into chaos. Bush has mishandled each of this situations by failing to use all the very powerful tools at his disposal to the correct effects. You bring Clinton in, yep he had an agreement with N. Korea, and you'd think Bush to come up with something better than just letting the N. Koreans blow off the agreement and start churning out nukes. Stop playing partisan politics and consider, truthfully, whether Bush and company have had an acceptable success in either of these two situations. Iraq may come together, but I think it will be in spite of Bush, Haliburton, and Rumsfeld. Iraq will come together because of brave Iraqi policemen, because of women who showed the purple stains of their fingers, and not because of Bush, who will of course garner all the credit.
However, I will suggest for my purposes: general coexistence versus unique dissonance. We are a unique dissonance, strangely incapable of staying within boundaries that other species remain in. EVERY other species uses general coexistence, we are the one that does not belong; we are the vague vulgarity.
We appear cancerous in that we not only destroy the body, but ultimately ourselves--a cancer cell stops growing when it kills the body and therefore dies.
I never said the tsunami wasn't natural, it and our response is perfectly natural, consistent with our capacity to mourn, a capacity we've carried for at least hundreds of thousands of years.
But, we are part of a process, and I question our ability to alter that process' course, because to do so alters our environment, AKA that narrow little band of toxicity, heat, and radiation that we can survive in. We alter it too much, too cold or too hot, too toxic or not toxic enough and our bodies stop working. We could evolve, but not as fast as the changes that could come. There are after all, no guarantees.
There is also the possibility that we, as a species, may survive even great ecological calamities, but we will loose so much in the process that our great-great-grandchildren will wonder why we squandered what they would call a paradise. And we will wonder, with our uniqueness among other species, why did we follow the natural course to our very detriment. If being natural is to act in this fashion and we are able to make a choice--maybe we can't, but why if we could, would we make the choice to give up what we have now for flooded cities, rising cancer rates, and die-offs in exchange for a particular adherence to your natural behavior?
Maybe we are the great Gaia reboot, the global killer that moves life on Earth back to anaerobic bacteria. In this sense, we are perfectly natural and part of the system, but not particularly bright.
Maybe we are Shiva, the ender, who creates a world of ash so that Vishnu can recreate it. Maybe, we are one era's end.
People do care, they just haven't made the connection between their bling-bling laden pimped out H2 and their kid's asthma. We're dumb. Dumb, and dangerous and yet perfectly capable of great intelligence and grace if we'd just put down the Big Gulp, throw the cellphone out the window, turn off Howard Stern on XM radio and start thinking about the fuckin' world for two goddamn minutes.
There are 6.7 billion of us, how the hell are we going to sustain everything when all of us want 4 TVs, 2 cars, and endless amounts of processed cheese food?
Sigh, maybe most people don't care; I wish they did. As for corporations, I'm not suggesting replacing them, but altering their legal status in some ways. Wealthy individuals are just as dangerous, but at least they can be prosecuted.
I think you're saying that all history is natural, that anything that happens: Nazi death camps, the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Velveta, is inherently natural. If this is true then we need another word to define those things which may be harmful to our own health and well-being and those that are not.
We are definitely unnatural, almost cancerous in our refusal to fit within the natural order, we act as Shiva, the destroyer and ender.
But, we have to realize, we will die too. We are just as subject to nature as everything else, just as fragile, just as mortal. The Pacific Tsunami proved that nature, in all its ferocity, can still hurt us. So, while we are separated, we are not separate. I think you may need another term.
But, corporations offer unique protections so they, to use your example, can dump toxic chemicals and be fined only after a long trial and procedural, which a corporation can then hold in statis in court for years. An individual, caught dumping, say arsenic into a river, will be immediately arrested or fined.
Corporations have all the advantages of being treated, by the law, as an individual with none of the inherent liabilities. Individuals are responsible for their actions, and that's what makes corporations so infuriating at times, people hide behind them and use them to defend their actions.
As for SUV and (?) private jet ownership, this is an entirely different problem, I think, that comes from the bizarre inability to see connections between say that smog bank over LA and their 10-mile-to-the-gallon CXT.
Humans are not that bright, and in large anonymous groups, we are downright dangerous. The key is to relate to the individual always, and not to the herd.
Your point would be better served by not making the ridiculous point that is it "just us and the beavers now, screwing up the Earth for whales." Beavers can seem destructive, but are part of the natural system in the rivers and lakes of their habitat. Furthermore, Beavers are kept in check by predatory species and so are unable to destroy their environment to the point at which is becomes uninhabitable, but we manage to do this consistently.
Ever been to parts of the Ukraine, or the bottom of a strip mine? We can utterly lay waste to the environment and make it so bad we move, like the Simpson abandoning Springfield. As for Mars, we need to consider all the implications, including the possibility of life. But, without it, we can create a whole new world. We also need to stop screwing with this one.
I don't know if this an entirely fair list, however honest that it is. All of these programs are specifically tasked for Windows and the Windows platform. You work in a very special industry, but what do you use to write email, surf the net, listen to music, maybe burn a CD or two? Ever wanted to work with digital video in HD quality? Got a digital camera? You need a Mac Mini.