No, of course not. That just because we think something will happen doesn't make it impossible for something else to happen.
In your case, that "something else" defies conservation of energy.
Except for the fact that our theory of star lifecycle falls apart for known cases, which is why I mentioned quasars. You're taking the currently best-accepted model and asserting that we understand completely how it works and that it's true, which we clearly don't and it isn't.
When applied to stars as mundane as our sun, it holds up very well.
This is ridiculous. We predict that most of the time that a given thing will happen...and it does. We also predict that very rarely, that given thing will not happen. You said that it was *impossible* for it to happen.
Yes, it is impossible for my chair to convert its thermal energy into kinetic energy and go flying around. You're taking the fact that entropy is related to statistics and then assuming that the law itself must only apply on a statistical basis. That's utterly and completely incorrect.
That certainly isn't necessarily the case. Bob finishes his AI and dies, the AI grows up, and can find no traces of Bob other than his magnum opus-- it.
The AI also has no other means of explaining its creation, i.e. it could not have simply popped into existence as a result of a natural process. CPU's don't grow on trees. Unfortunately for intelligent design advocates, this is not the case for biological organisms. Abiogenesis, evolution and the laws of physics all provide natural mechanisms which would lead to the existence of humans. Your analogy simply does not work.
You ignored my counterargument -- that you have no grounds for claiming that the drawbacks of such a design change do not outweigh the benefits.
It doesn't. A good possibility of choking to death while performing a routine operation like eating is a stupid design because it combines two unrelated functions and in this case, two functions which would readily interfere with each other.
If we had treads, we'd be pretty poor at clambering over rocks, and if we had four legs, we'd lack the fine dexterity that allows us to work with tools.
On what do you base this? Are you seriously suggesting that having an extra pair of legs would impair our ability to work with tools, which relies very extensively on our hands? On that note, why don't we have more arms? We could work with more tools more efficiently.
Furthermore, evolution is not mutually exclusive with intelligent design -- evolution is a mechanism, intelligent design a source. If I write an AI and use some datafiles, and the AI discovers those datafiles and thinks to itself "Ah, clearly I come from datafiles, rather than from some form of intelligent design", it would be making an incorrect assumption.
Intelligent design is a useless addition to the theory. Yet again, it does not improve the theory's predictive accuracy in any way, and it's a redundant term.
Why? I have plenty of sperm. To make an egg more easily be reached by foreign material would more easily expose the reproductive mechanism to parasites or viruses.
Why are sperm not stronger then?
Again, I ask -- why do you consider it necessary to consider the human being without his brain?
I'm not arguing that the inability to function without a brain is a sign of unintelligent design; I'm arguing that the inability to easily replace the brain is a sign of unintelligent design.
Well, I guess it all depends on what you consider "good", but I'm not sure that I'd *want* to have someone else's brain transplanted into my head. So far, you've generally been using a God concept that a traditional Christian would buy into -- one who seems to be interested in improvin
Like sailing around the flat world is impossible, or warping time is impossible?
Warping time is possible and happens routinely. What's your point? That just because we don't know for absolute certain that something is impossible must make it possible by default? Please. Take a physics course sometime.
For that matter, you have no idea whether the Sun has expended all its fuel. You have a suspicion -- there's a lot of energy hitting us, and people theorize that the Sun has N units of energy left and that it will stop at some point, but we certainly don't know. There are a lot of people wondering how quasars keep blasting out energy after they really shouldn't based on our assumptions. Maybe you're right about the Sun, and maybe not.
No, we do know. We were able to show that the sun uses nuclear fusion to produce its energy, and we understand how this process works. You're equating scientific theories with educated guesses, which tells me that you know precisely dick about how science works.
The second law of thermodynamics is a purely statistical law. We have a model of particle motion that says it's pretty unlikely, but certainly possible for the second law of thermodynamics to not occur for a given situation. This is *exactly* the sort of thing that we would predict would fail given an infinite set of attempts at breaking it.
Whether or not a law is statistical in nature does not have any bearing on whether it is statistical in application. The second law has been shown time and time again to be a very accurate description of what we observe in nature.
lready said that I'm not arguing in favor of intelligent design or creationism. I *do* like arguing against claims that I feel are definitely too strong. As for your ID claim, that's clearly false -- here's a counterexample. Bob makes an AI (I'll assume that you don't have any problem with him doing that, and that we can treat this as a reasonable working assumption). The AI grows and designs and builds a new computer system beyond Bob's ability to (directly) produce. The AI would be incorrect to believe that it is therefore not the product of intelligent design.
The AI can also observe an interact with Bob. We cannot observe or interact with God. Your analogy is flawed.
That is one interpretation. However, people rarely simply up and choke to death -- we have pretty hardwired systems to avoid choking to death, including the gag and choke reflexes. There is the problem that growing an extra eating aparatus produces another system that must be cared for, carried around, fed and maintained, and is vulnerable to damage. Who's to say that it's a good decision to avoid using the same orifice to eat and breathe?
Having another tube for eating eliminates a fatal flaw and adds robustness. If a piece of food doesn't go down all the way, it constricts airflow, leading to a fatality. That's a stupid design. Having workarounds for a stupid design is not equivalent to an intelligent design.
When a mechanical or electrical engineer churns out a specimen of homo sapiens, you can then use this argument with justification.
Oh please. Engineers follow universal principles of design robustness and stability. Did you know that we would be much faster and more efficient with our movement if we had treads, or more than two legs? So why don't we have 4 legs? Because our evolutionary ancestors did not. Now I'll patiently wait for you to trip all over yourself trying to reconcile this simple oversight with intelligent design.
Yes, and it's also damned unlikely to happen. By avoiding having to attempt to attack the common cold, we retain an extremely effective level of generic ability to fight disease, can reproduce when transferring a smaller set of undamaged DNA (you don't need this "anti-cold code"), and for that matter, are equipped with a brain
When it's physically possible. The sun simply defying every known law of physics and continuing to burn after it has expended all its fuel is impossible. Life forming from a combination of chemicals by chance is possible and permissible by the laws of nature. Nice job at completely misrepresenting my argument.
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment. What we currently call the universe is not "infinite" in size. It's bounded (really, really freaking big, and been expanding since the Big Bang, but still finite) I figured you were talking about inifinite complexity. Is the universe not a continuum, filled with infinite complexity? Why is it that, somewhere in there, we don't see a spark that starts the entire thing blazing? Inifinite possibilities for it to happen, as there are an infinite number of positions for a particle to happen, infinite configurations of the system.
In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen, somewhere. Does this mean that my chair could possibly convert all of its thermal energy into kinetic energy and go flying around my apartment? No. That's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Well, I suppose it's all relative. It's like arguing whether something is "big" or not. Not much point. My original point was that we frequently overlook how robust we are, and that when you suddenly realize it, it's pretty impressive. I don't think you can argue on absolute terms at all one way or the other.
Bullshit. Intelligent design has very specific implications, meaning that we should hold the human body accountable to the same (or higher, if the designer is omniscient) standards that we hold any modern piece of technology to. We generally consider a lack of robustness and the possibility of complete destruction when performing a routine task (humans can die from eating because we use the same pipe for breathing as ingesting solid food) to be indicative of total incompetence. Why is this "intelligent designer" held to lower standards than modern-day mechanical and electrical engineers, even though the "intelligent designer" is supposed to be a code-word for God?
The fact that you're alive says that you're winning a lot more than you're losing.
That's thanks almost 100% in part to modern medication, which a good chunk of the world does not have. Without it, we'd be fucked. Without modern medicine, we can die from a common cold.
As I said, it's all relative. I'd have a hard time designing such a robust system.:-)
Irrelevant. The intelligent designer is purported to be omnipotent and omniscient. He has no such excuse.
Slice your P4 in half and then talk about "strange disorders".:-)
You can replace a CPU with very little effort. You cannot do so with a human brain, which does the central processing and data storage. Imagine how much flack any computer company would take for shipping a system in which the CPU and hard drive were inseparable. Yet, when it comes to the human body, this kind of design indicates intelligence.
Huh? No, I don't give a damn one way or the other about the existence of God or creationism or all that. I think it's pretty established that you aren't going to know one way or the other, and that arguing about it is a pretty moot point, and that it's a pretty good guess that the best way to function is to assume that things are pretty much as we see them.
I can confidently argue that there is no god, since those making the claim have not satisfied the burden of proof. We're never going to know for sure if there is an invisible, intangible family of unicorns living under my carpet, but that doesn't make the idea worthy of serious consideration.
As far as I can tell, you simply don't want creationists to "
But this article [breakpoint.org] raises an interesting consideration. When I was in junior high, we took a brief field trip to collect pond water to view under microscopes, and one of the most interesting things was how those little critters with the thing called a flagellum would zoom around. This article brings up the point that this device, which is not exclusive to pond scum, is "irreducibly complex": it is made up of several parts, none of which separately would be of beneficial use to the creature employing it (in fact, such a creature would probably die off under natural selection.) The odds of a mutation creating all parts simultaneously are astronomical, and consequently, the only accepted theory that can sanely describe such a thing is intelligent design, which has been hinted at in many different real-life examples as well as probabistically explained by Pascal's Wager.
Intelligent design explains nothing. Please tell me how it increases the predictive capacity of any scientific theory in any way. All the intelligent design pushers do is observe something and say, "Aha! It must have been designed that way, or else it wouldn't work that way!" In other words, it's a tautology.
Furthermore, in an infinite universe, astronomical odds mean nothing. It had to happen somewhere in the universe; intelligent life just happened to happen here. Unfortunately for us, we're just as screwed when the sun burns out.
This theory is currently derided and discriminated against in favor of older theories, mind you, much as Galileo was in favor of the theory that the Earth was flat, because it threatens to dredge up the uncomfortable unknown. But like any theory, the more evidence that is found to support it particularly to the exclusion of existing theories, the more likely it is correct. So as skeptical as I am of intelligent design, I can't help but notice how much of our biological model it predicts. Has anybody heard anything more about this?
It's a load of horseshit. It does not add to the predictive capacity of any scientific theory and is completely circular in its logic. If human beings were intelligently designed, do you think we'd be using the same pipe for breathing and swallowing solid food, thus introducing a potential choking hazard? Or would we have blind spots in our eyes? Wouldn't our bodies be robust, meaning that any part can fail with the rest continuing on? Any flaws of this magnitude in any modern piece of technology would be considered completely unacceptable and the result of inexcusable incompetence on the part of the designer. All of the glaring flaws in the human body are easily explainable by evolutionary theory, but intelligent design is helpless to explain them without assuming that the designer is a complete retard.
Intelligent design is simply creationism in a clown suit, just like Windows 3.1 was to DOS.
If Apple want to be taken seriously in the enterprise, they'd damn well better patch 10.2. Of course, I'm not going to take a mere two days as confirmation that they never intend to do so. It wouldn't surprise me if they did cut 10.2's life-line, though. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is going on over there. They can't seriously expect everyone to upgrade to 10.3 the second it comes out, especially server administrators. It's attitudes like this that keep Apple out of the enterprise; they can't conceive of a scenario where an earlier version of an OS would be acceptable for server use.
Appeal to science as religion. We don't know how it works, but we should assume that everything behaves according to fixed explainable laws.
That's not even a real fallacy; that's bullshit that you made up to sound like you know what you're talking about. The most parsimonious explanation is that every phenomenon that is observable has observable mechanisms. That is Occam's Razor, not a fallacy.
Now this is a perfectly valid philosophical view, and it may very well be right. But there is *nothing* about science that assumes that it can explain everything. There are good philosophical arguments both ways.
When a scientist observes something, he immediately assumes that the mechanism behind that phenomenon was natural. The philosophical arguments against this approach violate centuries of the scientific method constantly being right and the logical principle of parsimony. Science's goal is to explain everything observable, not everything period (i.e., what happens after we die, the meaning of life, et cetera). If something can be observed, then there is a scientist trying to find a natural mechanism behind it. It's worked quite well so far.
For the record, I am not a religious person, and am not bringing up these facts to justify my beliefs. Quite the opposite, I am bringing it up to defend science. Too many scientist, like this poster, cannot seem to seperate the incredably usefull tool of science from theirphilosphical belief that everything in the world operates according to fixed laws. Armed with the false idea that this belief is scientific, they then attack anyone who has different beliefs from them, in the name of science. Having some experince with bible-belt high schoolers I know for a fact that this attitude hurts science greatly, and adds to the animosity between groups.
Who cares? If people are ignorant of science, then that's their problem. Science never assumes supernatural mechanisms for anything. Period.
Now, back on topic, I didn't say that we should assume that it is metaphysical - I clearly presented the two possibilities that should be questioned. Since we cannot directly disprove either, and only one can be proven, that is what we should work on. Not because the scientific answer is the only *possible* answer, but because it is the only one that can be found if it even exists.
If a theory does not carry the capacity to be disproved, it is logically invalid because it cannot be tested for predictive accuracy. The scientific method has worked exceedingly well for the past few centuries, so why should we throw it to the wind for this particular problem? Because it might make some religious people depressed and angry with its results?
Appeal to ignorance. Science cannot explain it now, therefore we should assume that the unknown mechanisms guiding the process are magical and metaphysical. Science always assumes a natural mechanism for every observed phenomenon, so your assertion is scientifically invalid.
That's because Windows apps tend to lack a basic UI consistency. The only constant I see in every Windows app is a massive clusterfuck of toolbars. Overall, I can't exactly see what's wrong with the iTunes interface on Windows. That kind of interface is easy on any platform.
A group of people managing to learn a convention does not make that convention intuitive. Intuitiveness is dictated by how quickly people can pick up that convention. Put a bunch of computer n00bs in front of Macs and PC's and then tell them to find their way around, and you'll see which one is more intuitive.
Right-click on a blank spot on your Windows application bar, click on "Tile Windows Horizontally" (or vertically.) Look familiar?
Not in the least. That resizes the windows and completely fucks up my workspace, not like Expose, which shows me all my windows with their proper proportions and allows me to bring one to the front while having all other maintain their sizes and positions.
Face it, they've had 1/2 of Expose for years, it's just a matter of putting the other windows back to their old size and maximizing the clicked window to match the feature.
No, they've had a shit feature that I'd never use because my windows are sized the way I like them to be sized and it fucks that up. It also does not allow this to be done on an application-specific basis, like Expose. For fuck's sake, would it be so difficult for Windows users to give Apple at least a little credit when it's due?
Are we joking here? They tested 4 applications with 2 tests per application. How about some tests in scientific computing? Those are the people who are really going to love 64-bit. Their test notes were ridiculously vague, and make independent verification almost impossible. "We exported to the QuickTime format"? What the Hell does that mean? What video codec? What audio codec? Was it just video encoding? Did the two labs even use the same codec? Were there filters applied?
I'll wait for someone like ArsTechnica to do a review of the two systems rather than accept the conclusions of people who think that media frameworks are synonymous with video codecs.
This is what most people don't get about the PowerPC instruction set. It's 64-bit, and the 32-bit set used by previous generations is just a subset of the PowerPC spec. Thus, a 64-bit PowerPC chip will run 32-bit applications and operating systems with only very minor changes. Panther is not a 64-bit OS; it's 32-bit, but it runs on a 64-bit PowerPC because of the intelligent design of the PowerPC spec. x86-64 is nice, but it still requires a very, very large retooling of the operating system to support it. Panther's support for the G5 was a relatively minor project for Apple. Windows XP's support for x86-64 is not. I'd much rather move into the 64-bit era with PowerPC, which was designed from the beginning to be 64-bit, than x86 and x86-64.
An interesting comparison come up between "In God We Trust" and "under God". If you take a strict literal interpretation fo the Constitution "In God We Trust" is OK because it was put on the dollar by some one designing it, and as far as I know, there is no law requiring that on currency.
On the other hand "under God" was added as an Act of Congress. Which is pretty much as close as you can get to violating "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".
Using that line of reasoning, you could justify George W. Bush issuing a presidential pardon to all Christians who are in jail because Congress isn't doing it. The Annals of Congress make it clear that the framers intended for the government to be completely neutral on the subject of religion, neither endorsing nor condemning any specific religion or general set of religious beliefs. It would be impossible to have a free and equal society if the government respected one set of religious beliefs over another, therefore it is inconsistent with the original vision the framers had.
I think it's a matter of timing. Back when the "under God" words were added to the Pledge back in the 50's I would have agreed that it was improper and it should have gone to the courts back then.
Yes, but now that people have become accustomed to the religious bigotry that it endorses, it should stay. Fantastic. Would you use the same argument to preserve slavery since it had been around for so long, longer than the phrase "under God" in the Pledge?
I find it offensive that they want to declare it unconstitutional now. Yes, I believe in God. But God is with us regardless of whether or not we have the "under God" words in the Pledge. But at this point removing those words--or ANY words--from the Pledge is like removing a few words from the Star Spangled Banner. Just don't touch it.
Appeal to tradition. The phrase was added under the context of discriminating against atheists, who were subject to automatic association with communists, for the purpose of differentiating America (A Christian nation, so claimed McCarthy) from the "godless" communist atheists. That phrase is a throwback to a shameful time in American history where civil rights were thrown to the wind in lieu of paranoia, and you want to keep relics from it around? Please learn to see past your own beliefs about invisible men in the sky. The US government is not supposed to endorse any form or religious belief. If the Pledge contained the phrase, "One nation, under no God, because gods are figments of your imagination," it would be just as wrong, and the theists would be the ones pissing and moaning about persecution. Reverting the pledge to the original wording allows the government to stay silent on religion, like it should.
Please also note that, if the Supremes rule that the 9th Circuit Court was correct, then that does not make it illegal for you to say the Pledge with the words "under God" included. It simply and rightfully prohibits the government from endorsing religious beliefs by including the phrase in the official version of the Pledge.
I am optimistic the Supreme Court will recognize that the Pledge, in its entirety, is part of our national culture. For better or worse, whatever religious overtones "under God" may have should have been argued nearly half a century ago before it became a part of our culture.
More appealing to tradition. Slavery was a part of our culture too. Doesn't it bother you that your arguments of "it's part of our tradition" could have been used to keep slavery around? Oh that's right, you're part of the majority and completely insensitive to governmentally-endorsed discrimination against minorities. I completely forgot.
Just like "In God We Trust" on dollar bills. Probably improper, I probably wouldn't have put it there myself, nor does it change my life drastically whether it's there or not. But now that it's there, leave it alone. Don't mess with our culture and traditions.
"In God We Trust" was added under the same contexts that "under God" was. Both phrases specifically denote the Christian god, and don't delude yourself into thinking that "God can mean anything anyone can want it to mean." It can't, legally, because I can't make a new religion based on worshiping my penis and expect the government to give me tax exempt status. Furthermore, no other religion refers to its deity as just "God" with a capital "G." Jews refer to Yahweh, and Muslims refer to Allah. Not only does it discriminate against atheists, it discriminates against religions which do not worship deities, like certain sects of Buddhism.
You're not listening. The acceptance of Internet Explorer shows that people will take whatever garbage is put in front of them when they boot up their machines; this shouldn't surprise anyone. If Mozilla was there instead of Explorer, people would use that instead of running off the download Internet Explorer. They wouldn't give a shit about Mozilla's standards compliance or its more advanced features; they'd just use it because it's there and it works.
It's called "blowing the whistle." Perhaps you've heard of it; it used to be considered a public duty. Now it's something to be frowned upon, apparently. If there's a flaw in the current version of SSH, which I have, I want to know about it so I can determine whether or not the risk is severe enough for me to shut off SSH until a patch arrives. Publicly posting notification of such flaws compels the developers behind the project to get off their asses and fix it. Unless, of course, those developers are Microsoft. Illegal monopolies must get special exemptions when it comes to responsibility for their software, I guess.
Not to rain on your parade or anything, but if Mozilla and no other browser was on the desktop right when people booted their new computer up, it'd have a nice, fat marketshare. Nice job trying to oversimplify things, though. What you call "marketing" I call "Microsoft illegally leveraging its dominant marketshare in one sector to create dominance in another." Honestly, when was the last time you saw a commercial for Internet Explorer? Ma and Pa will use whatever is put in front of them.
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In your case, that "something else" defies conservation of energy.
When applied to stars as mundane as our sun, it holds up very well.
Yes, it is impossible for my chair to convert its thermal energy into kinetic energy and go flying around. You're taking the fact that entropy is related to statistics and then assuming that the law itself must only apply on a statistical basis. That's utterly and completely incorrect.
The AI also has no other means of explaining its creation, i.e. it could not have simply popped into existence as a result of a natural process. CPU's don't grow on trees. Unfortunately for intelligent design advocates, this is not the case for biological organisms. Abiogenesis, evolution and the laws of physics all provide natural mechanisms which would lead to the existence of humans. Your analogy simply does not work.
It doesn't. A good possibility of choking to death while performing a routine operation like eating is a stupid design because it combines two unrelated functions and in this case, two functions which would readily interfere with each other.
On what do you base this? Are you seriously suggesting that having an extra pair of legs would impair our ability to work with tools, which relies very extensively on our hands? On that note, why don't we have more arms? We could work with more tools more efficiently.
Intelligent design is a useless addition to the theory. Yet again, it does not improve the theory's predictive accuracy in any way, and it's a redundant term.
Why are sperm not stronger then?
I'm not arguing that the inability to function without a brain is a sign of unintelligent design; I'm arguing that the inability to easily replace the brain is a sign of unintelligent design.
Warping time is possible and happens routinely. What's your point? That just because we don't know for absolute certain that something is impossible must make it possible by default? Please. Take a physics course sometime.
No, we do know. We were able to show that the sun uses nuclear fusion to produce its energy, and we understand how this process works. You're equating scientific theories with educated guesses, which tells me that you know precisely dick about how science works.
Whether or not a law is statistical in nature does not have any bearing on whether it is statistical in application. The second law has been shown time and time again to be a very accurate description of what we observe in nature.
The AI can also observe an interact with Bob. We cannot observe or interact with God. Your analogy is flawed.
Having another tube for eating eliminates a fatal flaw and adds robustness. If a piece of food doesn't go down all the way, it constricts airflow, leading to a fatality. That's a stupid design. Having workarounds for a stupid design is not equivalent to an intelligent design.
Oh please. Engineers follow universal principles of design robustness and stability. Did you know that we would be much faster and more efficient with our movement if we had treads, or more than two legs? So why don't we have 4 legs? Because our evolutionary ancestors did not. Now I'll patiently wait for you to trip all over yourself trying to reconcile this simple oversight with intelligent design.
When it's physically possible. The sun simply defying every known law of physics and continuing to burn after it has expended all its fuel is impossible. Life forming from a combination of chemicals by chance is possible and permissible by the laws of nature. Nice job at completely misrepresenting my argument.
In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen, somewhere. Does this mean that my chair could possibly convert all of its thermal energy into kinetic energy and go flying around my apartment? No. That's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Bullshit. Intelligent design has very specific implications, meaning that we should hold the human body accountable to the same (or higher, if the designer is omniscient) standards that we hold any modern piece of technology to. We generally consider a lack of robustness and the possibility of complete destruction when performing a routine task (humans can die from eating because we use the same pipe for breathing as ingesting solid food) to be indicative of total incompetence. Why is this "intelligent designer" held to lower standards than modern-day mechanical and electrical engineers, even though the "intelligent designer" is supposed to be a code-word for God?
That's thanks almost 100% in part to modern medication, which a good chunk of the world does not have. Without it, we'd be fucked. Without modern medicine, we can die from a common cold.
Irrelevant. The intelligent designer is purported to be omnipotent and omniscient. He has no such excuse.
You can replace a CPU with very little effort. You cannot do so with a human brain, which does the central processing and data storage. Imagine how much flack any computer company would take for shipping a system in which the CPU and hard drive were inseparable. Yet, when it comes to the human body, this kind of design indicates intelligence.
I can confidently argue that there is no god, since those making the claim have not satisfied the burden of proof. We're never going to know for sure if there is an invisible, intangible family of unicorns living under my carpet, but that doesn't make the idea worthy of serious consideration.
Furthermore, in an infinite universe, astronomical odds mean nothing. It had to happen somewhere in the universe; intelligent life just happened to happen here. Unfortunately for us, we're just as screwed when the sun burns out. It's a load of horseshit. It does not add to the predictive capacity of any scientific theory and is completely circular in its logic. If human beings were intelligently designed, do you think we'd be using the same pipe for breathing and swallowing solid food, thus introducing a potential choking hazard? Or would we have blind spots in our eyes? Wouldn't our bodies be robust, meaning that any part can fail with the rest continuing on? Any flaws of this magnitude in any modern piece of technology would be considered completely unacceptable and the result of inexcusable incompetence on the part of the designer. All of the glaring flaws in the human body are easily explainable by evolutionary theory, but intelligent design is helpless to explain them without assuming that the designer is a complete retard.
Intelligent design is simply creationism in a clown suit, just like Windows 3.1 was to DOS.
You're right. There really is not 1,100 G5 cluster. It's all a giant hoax.
More importantly, can it resize an iPhoto or Safari window smoothly? :)
If Apple want to be taken seriously in the enterprise, they'd damn well better patch 10.2. Of course, I'm not going to take a mere two days as confirmation that they never intend to do so. It wouldn't surprise me if they did cut 10.2's life-line, though. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is going on over there. They can't seriously expect everyone to upgrade to 10.3 the second it comes out, especially server administrators. It's attitudes like this that keep Apple out of the enterprise; they can't conceive of a scenario where an earlier version of an OS would be acceptable for server use.
Get the Ogg QuickTime component. It will allow iTunes to play Ogg Vorbis stuff.
Let's not forget those unfortunate folks with anterograde amnesia, who cannot form new memories.
Appeal to ignorance. Science cannot explain it now, therefore we should assume that the unknown mechanisms guiding the process are magical and metaphysical. Science always assumes a natural mechanism for every observed phenomenon, so your assertion is scientifically invalid.
Fortunately, the United States is not a communist regime like the Federation, so we don't have to obey their legal decisions.
That's because Windows apps tend to lack a basic UI consistency. The only constant I see in every Windows app is a massive clusterfuck of toolbars. Overall, I can't exactly see what's wrong with the iTunes interface on Windows. That kind of interface is easy on any platform.
Only half-kidding. Scrolling in Panther is smooth, but resizing still sucks.
A group of people managing to learn a convention does not make that convention intuitive. Intuitiveness is dictated by how quickly people can pick up that convention. Put a bunch of computer n00bs in front of Macs and PC's and then tell them to find their way around, and you'll see which one is more intuitive.
Are we joking here? They tested 4 applications with 2 tests per application. How about some tests in scientific computing? Those are the people who are really going to love 64-bit. Their test notes were ridiculously vague, and make independent verification almost impossible. "We exported to the QuickTime format"? What the Hell does that mean? What video codec? What audio codec? Was it just video encoding? Did the two labs even use the same codec? Were there filters applied?
I'll wait for someone like ArsTechnica to do a review of the two systems rather than accept the conclusions of people who think that media frameworks are synonymous with video codecs.
This is what most people don't get about the PowerPC instruction set. It's 64-bit, and the 32-bit set used by previous generations is just a subset of the PowerPC spec. Thus, a 64-bit PowerPC chip will run 32-bit applications and operating systems with only very minor changes. Panther is not a 64-bit OS; it's 32-bit, but it runs on a 64-bit PowerPC because of the intelligent design of the PowerPC spec. x86-64 is nice, but it still requires a very, very large retooling of the operating system to support it. Panther's support for the G5 was a relatively minor project for Apple. Windows XP's support for x86-64 is not. I'd much rather move into the 64-bit era with PowerPC, which was designed from the beginning to be 64-bit, than x86 and x86-64.
It's called Yellow Dog Linux, genius.
Please also note that, if the Supremes rule that the 9th Circuit Court was correct, then that does not make it illegal for you to say the Pledge with the words "under God" included. It simply and rightfully prohibits the government from endorsing religious beliefs by including the phrase in the official version of the Pledge. More appealing to tradition. Slavery was a part of our culture too. Doesn't it bother you that your arguments of "it's part of our tradition" could have been used to keep slavery around? Oh that's right, you're part of the majority and completely insensitive to governmentally-endorsed discrimination against minorities. I completely forgot. "In God We Trust" was added under the same contexts that "under God" was. Both phrases specifically denote the Christian god, and don't delude yourself into thinking that "God can mean anything anyone can want it to mean." It can't, legally, because I can't make a new religion based on worshiping my penis and expect the government to give me tax exempt status. Furthermore, no other religion refers to its deity as just "God" with a capital "G." Jews refer to Yahweh, and Muslims refer to Allah. Not only does it discriminate against atheists, it discriminates against religions which do not worship deities, like certain sects of Buddhism.
You're not listening. The acceptance of Internet Explorer shows that people will take whatever garbage is put in front of them when they boot up their machines; this shouldn't surprise anyone. If Mozilla was there instead of Explorer, people would use that instead of running off the download Internet Explorer. They wouldn't give a shit about Mozilla's standards compliance or its more advanced features; they'd just use it because it's there and it works.
It's called "blowing the whistle." Perhaps you've heard of it; it used to be considered a public duty. Now it's something to be frowned upon, apparently. If there's a flaw in the current version of SSH, which I have, I want to know about it so I can determine whether or not the risk is severe enough for me to shut off SSH until a patch arrives. Publicly posting notification of such flaws compels the developers behind the project to get off their asses and fix it. Unless, of course, those developers are Microsoft. Illegal monopolies must get special exemptions when it comes to responsibility for their software, I guess.
Not to rain on your parade or anything, but if Mozilla and no other browser was on the desktop right when people booted their new computer up, it'd have a nice, fat marketshare. Nice job trying to oversimplify things, though. What you call "marketing" I call "Microsoft illegally leveraging its dominant marketshare in one sector to create dominance in another." Honestly, when was the last time you saw a commercial for Internet Explorer? Ma and Pa will use whatever is put in front of them.