Yeesh. I'm not sure what's funnier here. being deliberately misunderstood or being semi- paraphrased and then told that I'm wrong while the paraphrased version is right.
First of all, Darwin didn't actually have a proper means of speciation. Mendelian genetics gave the later biologists the key mechanisms.
Agreed. Nevertheless, what they tried to teach me in school was that natural selection explained evolution of species. No, this wasn't in the deep south or the bible belt.
Now, of course, evolution, like any scientific theory, isn't complete. But if that's an argument against evolution, then it's an argument against all scientific theories.
But I wasn't arguing against evolution. Read the friggin first paragraph. I was arguing that there are a lot of holes and things unexplained in the various available theories about how, when, why the evolution of new species happens and is triggered. Neither was I arguing that there is such a thing as "intelligent design".
A theory does not have to be complete to useful, and scientists don't disagree on the mechanisms so much as they disagree on which are the most important.
Wow, so they don't agree on which methods actually create new species. I'll have to double check but has anyone anywhere observed the evolution of a new speceis that they can trace from the species it evolved from, and how it happened? Yes, it's obvious that more and more complex forms of life have evolved over time, but can anyone agree on how?
I agree that I believe evolution to be a real fact. I also do not believe that the world was created "as is" 4 billion years ago in 7 days. I think you'd find the vast majority of scientists agree with you that far.
There are definitely some issues with "natural selection as a means for speciation" that desperately need to be addressed. As a result, biologists have come up with other explanations that only vaguely resemble the natural selection theories of Darwin as a cause of speciation. There is nowhere near as much agreement on what the mechanisms are for speciation and what triggers evolutionary changes.
That said, the question of whether or not there is a creator of any sort is up for grabs. The question of whether we were merely lucky to live in a universe so well suited for life, if all universes are equally well suited for reasons unexplained, or if something living at some other level of existence arranged it that way is also up for grabs. You don't even have to believe in anything supernatural like an omnipotent/omniscient god, heaven, and hell, to accept that something like this is possible.
Some of the things that really impress me, searching and Dashboard aside, are the extensions to the GUi-handled user permissions and proxying.
Creating limited user accounts is nothing new on the Mac or OSX, and windows has had parental blocklists for IE since, IIRC IE5.
I can't tell if the methodology for creating the blocklists on the Mac will be easier or harder than IE/win, but unlike my children's w98 box, it will only apple to THEIR accounts.
The OS will also log all websites visited, will also allow AIM blocklists via iChat, and email blocklists/whitelists for mail, with redirection to the parental accounts for approval.
It will also log all iChat threads.
In addition, the previously existing feature of specifying exactly which apps an individual user can and cannot run, are still present.
I'm tempted to get an mac mini and hand my 400/sawtooth over to the girls...
Every new software markets itself as the solution to all your problems. Win 95 was supposed to the holy grail. No wait, it still uses DOS in the background. It'll be 98. Nope. 2000. Nope. ME. God no. XP. Okay we're getting there. Longhorn will have all these features. Well, maybe not this feature or that one. Overpromising isn't unique to Apple or MS. At least Apple doesn't tease with all the features it said it would build but then withdraws them later.
Actually, they used to. Remember what OS8 was supposed to be?
I used to use a PDA quite a bit when I was working in an environment that it just wasn't practical to bring my laptop into on a regular basis. I could take notes and synch them to my computer later, play games when bored, didn't have to rewrite multiple entries as I tore out pages of material that were mostly crossed out/checked off, etc.
Now, as a computer tech, I always have my laptop with me, so the "Dorkalator" got sidelined....
What brought it back was using it as an e-book reader for ebooks I'd downloaded from baen.....
Re:Yeah, but its the typical Mac-fanboi argument
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
*shrug*
There definitely are some aspects where PC's aren't faster even at significantly higher clock speeds.
One very recent example... I was using both my athlonXP 1500 (running at over 1.3GHz) and my powerma G4/400 (sawtooth/AGP) to rip a bunch of my CD's this last weekend. Both were using iTunes at the same setting, and the XP machine had a faster system bus, memory and CD-ROM drive.
Yes, I know, iTunes may not be as optimized for Windows as it is for Mac OS X (though after several generations of iTunes for windows I don't think there's that much a difference anymore) and doubling/tripling the clock speed doesn't mean twice as fast a computer due to the various performance bottlenecks, and this is hardly scientific (though I did have a large, fairly random sample base) but...
...The 400 MHz G4 not only kept up with the 1.3GHz WinXP machine insofar as encoding speed, but regularly was slightly faster. Most of this was due to the better vector processor, granted, but still.....
Dells come loaded with a bunch of "helper" applications that, frankly, get in the way. For most people's needs (And I speak from personal experience teaching people how to burn CD's at home) It is far easier to use the built-in XP tools for copying data files to a CD than the what dell provides. For other stuff, nero seems to be easier for Novices to pick up than the dell-provided roxio (again i speak from personal experiece). The photo apps and such "work" (and IMO not as well as iPhoto), but the music apps just aren't as good as iTunes (IMO) and the various diagnostic, troubleshooting, and "dell help" apps annoy the living crap out of every client I've dealt with.
At that they're still better than most vendors.
no, none of it is spyware, the spyware comment wa because windows machines tend to pick them up quite quickly, so that even if you avoid the spyware you stiill have a bunch of crappy apps on a dell that I'd rather, for the most part, do without.
In Mail app for OSX, messages for every mail account are tracked and go into entirely seperate inboxes (if you look at your library folder in your home directory and dig into the mail folder, you will see entirely seperate directories for each account), different trash boxes, different drafts boxes, etc.
How they are displayed is an entirely different story. If you click on your inbox, it shows ALL of your mail from ALL of your inboxes. If you have more than one mail account, that overall inbox will have an expansion caret that alloews you to filter your view by inbox, choosing any one inbox (or group of inboxes) so you only view the mail from the account(s) you want.
It's done in a very intuitive manner. Between that and the superb junk-mail filtering I grind my teeth when I have to use Entourage for an account.
The funny thing is that Edison did get involved in a huge commercial/patent war over the delivery of electricity with Westinghouse, who was using Tesla's AC power delivery system.
one side effect was the invention of the electric chair, when Edison tried to "prove" that AC was deadlier.
I'll agree that you can selectively wed through and give permissions to just the keys needed to run some program. In larger organizations it's even worthwhile.
In dealing with smaller companies with 3-10 users, with as few as one or as many as all 10 or so people using programs like ACT! and Quickbooks, the time required to suss out exactly what set of permissions are required for their version of their program is often far more than it's worth to them. In many cases there's more than one program that needs it, in some oddball combination. And there's always several people who have the owners ear that "can't do what they want" so rather than spend the time required to figure out what's needed
For them it is not worth the time. Even when you determine that a couple poeple's habits will regularly get crapware on the comp and result in more money in the long haul lost cleaning up after the mess.
Actually it also makes perfect sense if you think there are people out there who think government should stop us from doing things that may harm us.
Given the number of people who try to nerf over our lives in the name of everything from minimizing lawsuit, insurance and medical expenses to whatever other reason what have you for preotecting us from our own decisions... *shrug*
I think they've been watching too many movies. I highly doubt that most downloading of corporate data happens in a down-to-the-second race against corporate security. I think it's much more likely that most data is stolen by those with official access and all the time in the world. And I may be naive, but I think a corporate spy would be able to think of a better way to export data than an iPod.
When I took the purchase to the installer shop in the back, I had to walk out the front door, and around the entire frigging building to the shop in the back.
Could I step through the convenient door leading STRAIGHT into the car shop? Even with a manager watching me?
No.
Why?
By policy they were not allowed to unlock that door and allow passage through. This policy was put into place due to employee theft.
This difference of belief we have here is a function of social liberalism/conservatism. Liberals hate it when someone tries to enforce an arbitrary code of conduct on them. Conservatives want their own arbitrary code of conduct enforced on other people. To be honest, I view the conservative position as utterly idiotic. The idea that other people should presume to know what's better for me than I do when I am not afflicted by anything that would impair judgement and I'm not impacting any unwilling third party negatively is ludicrous. Obviously, society needs to protect itself to a reasonable extent, and that's when we hit laws. The argument is over just how much society needs to be saved from itself.
Oddly enough, there are enough so-called "liberals" out there who know better than I do what's good for me, will tell me so, and if I was in the wrong "socially progressive" place and decided that I knew best and acted that way instead of in the "progressive, approved" manner, may end up in a world of hurt.
Such speeched are common among the old soviet communist tracts, as well as among many radical groups. Forex, recently , Hillary Clinton at a fund-raiser for Barbara Boxer.
:
"Many of you are well enough off that... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you,"
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," the former first lady admitted.
Of course she knows what teh common good is better than we do and should trust her judgement.
I've tried to operate like that before, but there is still so much software (especially games, an amazing percentage of the ones from MS even) that just don't WORK unless you have admin priviledges.
I found this out when setting up a non-admin account for my self to use. Ended up using my admin account more often than not to play the games I wanted to.
As of a year ago the Palm desktop installer and hotsync stuff needed to be installed using admin permissions, IN THE ACCOUNT OF THE USER USING THE PALM.
And it's arguably easier to hit a 2d target than a 3d target.....
Re:Arguments in favour of manned spaceflight
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1
That assumes erroneously that scientific development that will help in space exploration won't happen without space exploration. Every advance in computers, advanced materials, nanotech, etc. can help future space missions, even if they're not created with space exploration in mind.
It may be an erroneous assumption on his part, but OTOH, knowing how to best assemble the newer tech will still require a test bed - sending people into space to see what works best and improve things from there.
in other words, learning to do it the best and most efficient way, with the best and most efficient designs for the jobs at hand requires that we actually go out there and learn 1) The best methods for 2) the job at hand. Not what we THINK the job will be, but what we discover it really is when we go and try to work in this environment.
It'd be a safe bet that it won't be until the fourth generation of designs (counting mercury/apollo as the first, current shuttle tech as the second) that we really have stuff designed to work best the way we really need to. After we create the third generation from what we already know and see how that works out for real.
As someone who has used word, indesign, pagemaker, and quark, i can tell you that for constructing huge books, especially where you have detailed table of contents, footnotes, refrences, indexes, etc., that none of the other programs does that as well as Framemaker does out of the box, and while I think the asking price is wayyy too steep, it's even more for a page-layout program with the plugins to handle half of the otherwise unavailable FM-type functionality.
The thing I still miss the most when doing page layout is stuff built like automatically updating page numbers and positions in the table of contents, updating index positions and page numbers, etc.
I'd say the "liberals against free speech" thing is because a lot of so-called 'liberals' really aren't 'liberals'.
Part of the problem is that many of the most radical so-called liberals are fanatically wedded to an ideology... and any fact or event they encounter is twisted through the filter of this ideology to fit, or ignored, or worse, agressively attacked as 'wrong' or 'improper'. In certain environments this will lead to people purging out or even killing those with differing views, or whom they hate.
This is NOT a problem limited to so-called 'liberals'... some conservative groups and fanatical religious followers have these traits as well.
As you implied, a 'real' liberal would be for free speech, and more importantly, would be willing to adjust his worldview when new facts came along. A real liberal would look at the world through an open, though critical ("is what I think consistent with what I "know"?) mind.
Complaining to Wal-mart may be the right answer. these guys are the 800-lb gorilla of retail, and many retail trends come and go because Wally-world wants it that way (barcoding, anyone?)
Concluded Jacobs, "This cat-and-mouse game that hackers and others like to play with owners of digital property is over. No matter what their credentials or rationale, it is wrong to use one's knowledge and the cover of academia to facilitate piracy and theft of digital property. SunnComm is taking a stand here because we believe that those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used. Owning copying technology is not an unconditional 'free pass' to replicate or distribute protected work."
..and I'm confused as to how this gives them the right to install stuff on my computer.. How can I use the "ultimate authority" to decide how my computer is used if the protection scheme doesn't ask my permission....
After all I if I did buy the thing I may forget after a couple years that the "CD" installs malware and drop it into a drive one day.
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Agreed. Nevertheless, what they tried to teach me in school was that natural selection explained evolution of species. No, this wasn't in the deep south or the bible belt.
But I wasn't arguing against evolution. Read the friggin first paragraph. I was arguing that there are a lot of holes and things unexplained in the various available theories about how, when, why the evolution of new species happens and is triggered. Neither was I arguing that there is such a thing as "intelligent design".
Wow, so they don't agree on which methods actually create new species. I'll have to double check but has anyone anywhere observed the evolution of a new speceis that they can trace from the species it evolved from, and how it happened? Yes, it's obvious that more and more complex forms of life have evolved over time, but can anyone agree on how?
I agree that I believe evolution to be a real fact. I also do not believe that the world was created "as is" 4 billion years ago in 7 days. I think you'd find the vast majority of scientists agree with you that far.
There are definitely some issues with "natural selection as a means for speciation" that desperately need to be addressed. As a result, biologists have come up with other explanations that only vaguely resemble the natural selection theories of Darwin as a cause of speciation. There is nowhere near as much agreement on what the mechanisms are for speciation and what triggers evolutionary changes.
That said, the question of whether or not there is a creator of any sort is up for grabs. The question of whether we were merely lucky to live in a universe so well suited for life, if all universes are equally well suited for reasons unexplained, or if something living at some other level of existence arranged it that way is also up for grabs. You don't even have to believe in anything supernatural like an omnipotent/omniscient god, heaven, and hell, to accept that something like this is possible.
Yeah, i'm an agnostic.
Some of the things that really impress me, searching and Dashboard aside, are the extensions to the GUi-handled user permissions and proxying.
Creating limited user accounts is nothing new on the Mac or OSX, and windows has had parental blocklists for IE since, IIRC IE5.
I can't tell if the methodology for creating the blocklists on the Mac will be easier or harder than IE/win, but unlike my children's w98 box, it will only apple to THEIR accounts.
The OS will also log all websites visited, will also allow AIM blocklists via iChat, and email blocklists/whitelists for mail, with redirection to the parental accounts for approval.
It will also log all iChat threads.
In addition, the previously existing feature of specifying exactly which apps an individual user can and cannot run, are still present.
I'm tempted to get an mac mini and hand my 400/sawtooth over to the girls...
Actually, they used to. Remember what OS8 was supposed to be?
I'm glad they learned their lesson.
After my first dose with one of those I always asked for needles.
I couldn't stand the guys with a shaky hand...
IIRC, damage increaces more than proportionately in relationship to the weight.
I used to use a PDA quite a bit when I was working in an environment that it just wasn't practical to bring my laptop into on a regular basis. I could take notes and synch them to my computer later, play games when bored, didn't have to rewrite multiple entries as I tore out pages of material that were mostly crossed out/checked off, etc.
Now, as a computer tech, I always have my laptop with me, so the "Dorkalator" got sidelined....
What brought it back was using it as an e-book reader for ebooks I'd downloaded from baen.....
*shrug*
...The 400 MHz G4 not only kept up with the 1.3GHz WinXP machine insofar as encoding speed, but regularly was slightly faster. Most of this was due to the better vector processor, granted, but still.....
There definitely are some aspects where PC's aren't faster even at significantly higher clock speeds.
One very recent example... I was using both my athlonXP 1500 (running at over 1.3GHz) and my powerma G4/400 (sawtooth/AGP) to rip a bunch of my CD's this last weekend. Both were using iTunes at the same setting, and the XP machine had a faster system bus, memory and CD-ROM drive.
Yes, I know, iTunes may not be as optimized for Windows as it is for Mac OS X (though after several generations of iTunes for windows I don't think there's that much a difference anymore) and doubling/tripling the clock speed doesn't mean twice as fast a computer due to the various performance bottlenecks, and this is hardly scientific (though I did have a large, fairly random sample base) but...
Obviously I was unclear :P
Dells come loaded with a bunch of "helper" applications that, frankly, get in the way. For most people's needs (And I speak from personal experience teaching people how to burn CD's at home) It is far easier to use the built-in XP tools for copying data files to a CD than the what dell provides. For other stuff, nero seems to be easier for Novices to pick up than the dell-provided roxio (again i speak from personal experiece). The photo apps and such "work" (and IMO not as well as iPhoto), but the music apps just aren't as good as iTunes (IMO) and the various diagnostic, troubleshooting, and "dell help" apps annoy the living crap out of every client I've dealt with.
At that they're still better than most vendors.
no, none of it is spyware, the spyware comment wa because windows machines tend to pick them up quite quickly, so that even if you avoid the spyware you stiill have a bunch of crappy apps on a dell that I'd rather, for the most part, do without.
Not to mention the fact you get a TON of software with the Mini and OSX. How much software comes with the Dell? Yeah, thought so...
Unfortunately you get wayyyy too much, and what you get sucks to use, even if you exclude the spyware...
There is a better way of doing this.
In Mail app for OSX, messages for every mail account are tracked and go into entirely seperate inboxes (if you look at your library folder in your home directory and dig into the mail folder, you will see entirely seperate directories for each account), different trash boxes, different drafts boxes, etc.
How they are displayed is an entirely different story. If you click on your inbox, it shows ALL of your mail from ALL of your inboxes. If you have more than one mail account, that overall inbox will have an expansion caret that alloews you to filter your view by inbox, choosing any one inbox (or group of inboxes) so you only view the mail from the account(s) you want.
It's done in a very intuitive manner. Between that and the superb junk-mail filtering I grind my teeth when I have to use Entourage for an account.
The funny thing is that Edison did get involved in a huge commercial/patent war over the delivery of electricity with Westinghouse, who was using Tesla's AC power delivery system. one side effect was the invention of the electric chair, when Edison tried to "prove" that AC was deadlier.
I'll agree that you can selectively wed through and give permissions to just the keys needed to run some program. In larger organizations it's even worthwhile.
In dealing with smaller companies with 3-10 users, with as few as one or as many as all 10 or so people using programs like ACT! and Quickbooks, the time required to suss out exactly what set of permissions are required for their version of their program is often far more than it's worth to them. In many cases there's more than one program that needs it, in some oddball combination. And there's always several people who have the owners ear that "can't do what they want" so rather than spend the time required to figure out what's needed
For them it is not worth the time. Even when you determine that a couple poeple's habits will regularly get crapware on the comp and result in more money in the long haul lost cleaning up after the mess.
Given the number of people who try to nerf over our lives in the name of everything from minimizing lawsuit, insurance and medical expenses to whatever other reason what have you for preotecting us from our own decisions... *shrug*
I think they've been watching too many movies. I highly doubt that most downloading of corporate data happens in a down-to-the-second race against corporate security. I think it's much more likely that most data is stolen by those with official access and all the time in the world. And I may be naive, but I think a corporate spy would be able to think of a better way to export data than an iPod.
...but not too many cooler ones....
I bought a set of car speakers at BB once.
When I took the purchase to the installer shop in the back, I had to walk out the front door, and around the entire frigging building to the shop in the back.
Could I step through the convenient door leading STRAIGHT into the car shop? Even with a manager watching me?
No.
Why?
By policy they were not allowed to unlock that door and allow passage through. This policy was put into place due to employee theft.
This difference of belief we have here is a function of social liberalism/conservatism. Liberals hate it when someone tries to enforce an arbitrary code of conduct on them. Conservatives want their own arbitrary code of conduct enforced on other people. To be honest, I view the conservative position as utterly idiotic. The idea that other people should presume to know what's better for me than I do when I am not afflicted by anything that would impair judgement and I'm not impacting any unwilling third party negatively is ludicrous. Obviously, society needs to protect itself to a reasonable extent, and that's when we hit laws. The argument is over just how much society needs to be saved from itself.
... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you,"
Oddly enough, there are enough so-called "liberals" out there who know better than I do what's good for me, will tell me so, and if I was in the wrong "socially progressive" place and decided that I knew best and acted that way instead of in the "progressive, approved" manner, may end up in a world of hurt.
Such speeched are common among the old soviet communist tracts, as well as among many radical groups. Forex, recently , Hillary Clinton at a fund-raiser for Barbara Boxer. :
"Many of you are well enough off that
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," the former first lady admitted.
Of course she knows what teh common good is better than we do and should trust her judgement.
I've tried to operate like that before, but there is still so much software (especially games, an amazing percentage of the ones from MS even) that just don't WORK unless you have admin priviledges.
I found this out when setting up a non-admin account for my self to use. Ended up using my admin account more often than not to play the games I wanted to.
As of a year ago the Palm desktop installer and hotsync stuff needed to be installed using admin permissions, IN THE ACCOUNT OF THE USER USING THE PALM.
And it's arguably easier to hit a 2d target than a 3d target.....
That assumes erroneously that scientific development that will help in space exploration won't happen without space exploration. Every advance in computers, advanced materials, nanotech, etc. can help future space missions, even if they're not created with space exploration in mind.
It may be an erroneous assumption on his part, but OTOH, knowing how to best assemble the newer tech will still require a test bed - sending people into space to see what works best and improve things from there.
in other words, learning to do it the best and most efficient way, with the best and most efficient designs for the jobs at hand requires that we actually go out there and learn 1) The best methods for 2) the job at hand. Not what we THINK the job will be, but what we discover it really is when we go and try to work in this environment.
It'd be a safe bet that it won't be until the fourth generation of designs (counting mercury/apollo as the first, current shuttle tech as the second) that we really have stuff designed to work best the way we really need to. After we create the third generation from what we already know and see how that works out for real.
As someone who has used word, indesign, pagemaker, and quark, i can tell you that for constructing huge books, especially where you have detailed table of contents, footnotes, refrences, indexes, etc., that none of the other programs does that as well as Framemaker does out of the box, and while I think the asking price is wayyy too steep, it's even more for a page-layout program with the plugins to handle half of the otherwise unavailable FM-type functionality.
The thing I still miss the most when doing page layout is stuff built like automatically updating page numbers and positions in the table of contents, updating index positions and page numbers, etc.
I'd say the "liberals against free speech" thing is because a lot of so-called 'liberals' really aren't 'liberals'.
Part of the problem is that many of the most radical so-called liberals are fanatically wedded to an ideology... and any fact or event they encounter is twisted through the filter of this ideology to fit, or ignored, or worse, agressively attacked as 'wrong' or 'improper'. In certain environments this will lead to people purging out or even killing those with differing views, or whom they hate.
This is NOT a problem limited to so-called 'liberals'... some conservative groups and fanatical religious followers have these traits as well.
As you implied, a 'real' liberal would be for free speech, and more importantly, would be willing to adjust his worldview when new facts came along. A real liberal would look at the world through an open, though critical ("is what I think consistent with what I "know"?) mind.
Come to think of it...
wouldn't it be great if this WAS the "general purpose licence" and all other licences were exceptions to this???
Complaining to Wal-mart may be the right answer. these guys are the 800-lb gorilla of retail, and many retail trends come and go because Wally-world wants it that way (barcoding, anyone?)
Concluded Jacobs, "This cat-and-mouse game that hackers and others like to play with owners of digital property is over. No matter what their credentials or rationale, it is wrong to use one's knowledge and the cover of academia to facilitate piracy and theft of digital property. SunnComm is taking a stand here because we believe that those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used. Owning copying technology is not an unconditional 'free pass' to replicate or distribute protected work."
..and I'm confused as to how this gives them the right to install stuff on my computer.. How can I use the "ultimate authority" to decide how my computer is used if the protection scheme doesn't ask my permission....
After all I if I did buy the thing I may forget after a couple years that the "CD" installs malware and drop it into a drive one day.