not exactly...I'm not much of a computer person, but even I cd figure out how to partition the disk and put win2K on my spring 2001 hp laptop running ME. I'm sure all the/. geeks will love the reason why: after ME crashed and I had to do a clean install, I decided having two independent OSs, I cd use one as a backup if the primary crashed (which actually worked - when ME crashed again, it was really easy to use the MS tool that recovers files from the.cab folders. I forget what the command is, but you startup the broken OS, get an error that such and such file is gone, boot in the good one, get the file, repeat untill fixed
as a non computer person, i never cd figure out why there was not a 3rd party software to get USB into NT - was it really that hard to do? this has bothered me foryears (since our startup bought 50 dell boxes with NT4 and USB ports !!)
aside from all the silly, kee jerk reactions about inproper use of terminology, or what fork means, no one* seems to be addressing the central point, which seems reasonable: is Linux heading toward multiple, slightly compatible/incompatible flavors, AND is this worse then other OS/packages... Just because they are biased, does not mean they cant be correct. If the Linux/OSS community's only response to "is your software splitting..." is "You are a fudster, go away"....well, if OSS doesn't want corporate dollars, thats fair.
I remember in the old days, when we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow barefoot, there was a company called heathkit, that sold kits to build your own radios. a large part of thier biz was supplying kids, who grew up to be the geeks and engineers and scientists who drove the 70s/80s/90s tech revolutions. I see one of the roles of linux as the equiv - something for todays kids, who will be tomorrows leaders, to play with. the question is, can OSS be more ?
There are many different types of customers, and many ways to sell to them, and many ways to do a startup.
But, in the end, startup implies money in to generate sales in the future. So, you have to always be asking yourself, what problem am i solving for the customer, because if I am not solving a problem, why are they giving me money ? Once you frame the question that way, your options usually narrow.
I do not know about software, but in my field, biotech, it is almost imposssible to overestimat the amount of work requried to actually bring a product to market - QC studies, labels for the boxes, checking that the plastic bags dont outgass something that discolors your product, etc etc. This stuff takes a lot of time and effort, and you need not brilliance but people who come in and do this 9/5 - dont knock those people, they make the world go round. If you want to sell widgets to customers, don't underestimate marketing. I know it looks stupid - and it is stupid. But , look in the mirror and ask yourself, why, REALLY why, did I buy the last five purchases for my computer, or stereo, or whatever. I think if you are honest with yourself, you will find that your vaunted "reasons", carefully thought out, ususally were framed and driven by those "stupid" marketers (eg, if you made a specification driven purchase, are those specs really relevant, or are they marketing constructs). Like any stero system costing more then, say 2 or 3 grand - you are not paying for performance, but for some sort of ego drive created and fed by marketing. It is a very humbling experince for a geek/techie/scientist/engineer to go thru this exercise. A good marketer also knows what people are buying and why, and what new features they will pay for. A marketing person tells you one good feature that someone will actually pay for, they have earned their money for the year. W
Is this not why guilds were formed, to prevent desperate starving workers from undercutting each other ?
If the developers had a union, and you had to charge for software, what would happen ?
The history of public tv/radio suggests that free software is not going to survive (ducks) - after all, NPR gave up (or failed) to support itself from listeners (ducks again)(the super odious macneill leherer snooze hours use of att was a big step here) (ducks again) (I do not think that firefox or open office, to take two well known examples, are really "open source" as both derive a large amount of code from closed sources, going back to netscape and sun)
Seriously, How about well designed web pages, written by someone with a good grasp of english grammer, well laid out according to a std plan (no white text/black background, no stupid cutsey blinking lights, etc) How about patented common gui; people really hate learning new guis, so if there was a std model, I mean a real std model, that was patented, and you enforced money for software with it..
ad supported software ? surely, there has to be a better solution to doc exchange then acrobat
4 ordinary users like me, customizable is worht about 2cents, on a good day. (joelonosoftware has a good rant about this )
YOu know how much time I, and people like me want to spend learning about OSs ? zero
their is a good analogy: suppose ford or chevy announced a new line of cars with a great *feature - you had to go out and set the timing each morning, depending on your weather and the options that came with your car, so you could get an extra 2 mpg. I think we all know how that wd fly
software is used because it solves a problem for the customer. FF is used because of tabbed browsing and bookmark tabs to a folder; all that stuff about open source and security and bloat is completely irrelevant to 90% of the users. similarly, *nix will NEVER SUCCED UNTILL IT DOES SOMETHING I CARE ABOUT (I = normal people like me) we do not care about bloat or saving a few hundred meg, or about the evil MS empire or about eulas or about open source or any of that stuff; it is irrelevant and before u flame me, even keeks shd know that telling someone they r wrong rarely works
the/. community wants to make *nix succed ? how about easy backups (the existing backup solutions to MS such as retrospect, suck) how about some way of breaking the info to user data rate imposed by screens how about some way of putting my computer on a disk, so I can plug into any terminal how about good filters on google - there is an app that wd drive linux
firefox is a success because it does somethign for people that ie does not: tabbed browsing and bookmark tabs in folder success outside of geek world is built on very simple things that sarisfy problems. (marketing 11) open office does not solve a problem - it is just an alternative and as noted it has the problem of people who have built excel macros
100s of/. posts, and not one saying, heres a web site lists 800 devices, cf the # with linux and the # with MS drivers...
I can only assume that part of the core of the argument - that windows is better becuase it has drivers for stupid people like me (by the way what is a driver and why do i need them...)
Lotta snide, sarcastic, know it all responses, but very little int eh way of documentatin on what % of new devices are ok with linux, as opposed to MS.
Precisely, you agree with me. the issue is not the optical detector, it is the specificity ofthe chemistry - how do you detect glucose in a sea of other molecules. simply saying chemical reactionw ith polymers is to recapitulate a lot of failed work. I suggest you get a few copies of Analytical Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society, and read about glucose sensors
most imp handhelds ? what about the sword, the tinderbox, flint, the hoe, (lotta sexism on/. in that one or needle and thread not showing up high) canteen
of course if u r talking number of individuals vs length of time, more recent will always win due to demographrics
shd be read after reading this article. I mean, who on earth is silly enuf to take this seriously ? if u really think this is worth arguing about, let me know, i have some ocean front property in floriday u can have for a buck an acre.
Non invasive detection of blood glucose, by some sort of optical/spectral means, has been the subject of intense research in both the academic and commerical sectors (lotta money/nobel prize here)
The problem is, that any optical signal you can obtain has a LOT of noise, and not much info on glucose levels. That is, you have a very noisy signal that varys (in every way - amplitude, magnitude, ) a LOT with time, and in this signal is some *very small, varying component tht is glucose levels (u can increase the signal to noise with certain tricks, but they dont relate to holograms, for instance using a wavelength of light that glucose interacts with strongly).
I don't see how adding a hologram to the system helps.
U r 100% right that paper and film have a proven track record, which is more then u can say for anyting digial (proven = > 100 years) Analog is also inherently superior to dig for archive in that partial loss is only partial loss. The required equipment could be built in volume at a reasonable price (and even custom glass lens are not that $$, as you can see from say photonics magazine), but as u c every day in cameras, you can mold pretty good lens out of polycarbonate or coc cheaply). The cost of 35 or 64 mm movie film is cheap, etc IN VOLUME which raises the question,if this is real, why is kodak or someone like that not doing this. I dont know the size of the data archive market, but it has to be at least a few hundred MM a year, small but i think just large enough to interest a company like kodak or fuji or agfa or even a zombie like polaroid.
but..you still have analog to dig to get the data back, and you have the horrendous problem of cataloging analog data for a digital world and you have the prolbem of the declining cost of storage...which is probably the largest arguemtn, from an ROI standpoint, against film IMHO this whole archive thing is silly..you do what every/. reader does, you transfer to new, much larger media every 5 years
given the constant recalls that cost in the 100 MM+ range in the auto industry (as one example) one can only conclude that stupidity lazyness and incompetenace are rampant (not to mention poor spelling)
or lawnmowers: i bought a 250 dollar lawnmower from sears last year, and "badly designed" is an understatement (not to pick on sears - just an example that comes to mind)
or vacumn cleaners: for years, the american consumer had to buy house vacumn cleaners where there was a 2Cent plastic fan tht generated the airflow that generated the suction, and thefan was placed BEFORE the filter, so if you sucked up a penny, crack, no fan blade, toss the sucker. then some braniac figured out you could put the fan on the other side of the filter
but people are never smart; lazy ness and incompetence are sop.
this arguement that somehow software projects are more beset by lazyness stupidity or whathave you strikes me as not a good arguemtn for programmers to be advancing, even if it were true.
No, it is not ok, because the sticker is not trying to get the students to question and think for themselves. The stickers are put their by stupid uneducated (becasuse if they actually read about ID, they would see that it is just nonsense, total dreck) bigoted (they want their religion imposed on others because they think it is better) hypocritical (afraid to say the previous) people.
Let me emphasise: it is not tolerance to question a theory when you dishonestly propse an alternative that is garbage, like, say polywater, or tealeaf reading.
u assume i am against the stickers. actually, i am for them, because in any honest discussion, the kids wd see that "intelligent design" is lies and deceit, not science at all, and this might lead a few to question the rest of religious nonsense that they are taught.
I agree that the state is imposing its view;that does not mean the parents are honest - Of course, what the parents shd be doing is asking why the state control apparatus denies them adequate medical care, etc (chomskyism here) but they have been brainwashed into thinking that religion is the answer; in this sense the liberals are part, as you correctly note, of the state control apparatus which strives to prevent these people from wondering about why there is no decent medical care etc. U r also completely wrong in assuming evolution = godless; as can easily be shown in that he catholic church endorses evolution; u r right in noting that this is about POWER - the state allows people to exercise power in this domain to keep them from asking why their r no jobs, etc
for most of your post I agree with the thrust that evolution is, for whatever reason, part of hte HAL (humanist liberal atheist) critique of religion and these people are right to be angry.
the neanderthal was a joke (neanderthal-evolution -kinda poor, )
this is the first google link i clicked for "dictionary bigoted"
[adj] blindly and obstinately attached to some creed or opinion and intolerant toward others; "a bigoted person"; "an outrageously bigoted point of view" blindly and obstinately attached...intolernat" pretty fair summation. I have no doubt many of these people are, in other parts of hteir lives, kind, etc etc, but in this respect they are bigots.
I think the many posts and replies on what is a "theory" are sort of missing th point. Lets go back and look at what happened in Georgia: 2,000 parents complained about how textbooks dealt with evolution. They did not complain about math, or english grammar, or anything else they complained about evolution Now it could be these are highly logical geeks parsing the word "theory" right the reason they complained is that they are bible based people who seek to impose their particular religious beliwefs on others. Like most people, they want the schools to teach thir children what they believe in. Cant say that is all bad, even if i do think they are bigoted neanderthals
the software user interface for most wireless hardware is so bad, so poorly written, so intimidating, that I pray to god that the defaults will get me thru the day.
This is clearly a case where customer service is a zero priority.
Maybe the avg/. geek, who is clearly a log or two off normal, can deal with this stuff, but I would bet 10 dollars that a survey of avg users would find
a lot of frustration.
the issue is not long term changes, but changes on timescales relevant to peoples lives, eg ~ 1 - 50 years
income data (provide alt if u dont like it) at http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h03.html
seems to support my arg, that over a timescale relevant to peoples lives, there has been little change in icome in the lower two quintiles
samuelson http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_rp.php?id =50
again, at least in the short term (100 year) foreign trade can be a net neg, also, as is usual in macroeconomics, "net" could, at least in theory, imply that the US gets a benefit if 1,000,000 blue collar workers at 20K a year are laid off, and 1,000 wall street investment bankers make an extra 20 MM a year (or whatever the math is); again, not relevant to peoples lives
1) the list of FORMER competitors of MS is a long one..anyone remember DR-DOS, which always got better reviews in the trade journals ? Lets add borland, lotus, star office, etc etc. A rationale person has some humility and or fear when confronted with a proven champion, regardless of the methods the champion uses.
2) Unlike other companies, MS can survive a disaster - (either DOS 4 or 5) was a dog that would have killed any other company; MS survived to fight another day (eg, borland died when they were late with one product). I'm sure/. readers can supply many other examples of companies that died when there single flagship product was late or buggy; only MS can live to fight another day, with its cash flow and monomply posistions.
3) IMHO, MS has developed an unusual corp ability - the ability to throw money at a problem and solve it. IF gates and ballmer were really interested, they could release a new IE next year.
4) Gates is laughing at/. and firefox cause they are playing the wrong game. I don't think he cares a flying f*ck about technical superiority, or bloat or stuff like that; he cares about market share. For all we know, he may be happy that the 10% of the market consisting of geeks is distracted by linux and firefox - it never makes economic sense for a biz to care about more then 80% of the market.
5) there is something kinda pathetic and geekish and teenagerish in this constant gloating about bugs in MS products. Maybe worm writers don't write for *nix because that is not where the market is - if you r interested in making money, an not tech bragging writes, why wd u care about the geeks using linux. no money and hard to cheat - just not a soft target (the same principal by which "insurgents" choose unarmored Iraqis over armored mobile americans. Untill there is some reasonably similar user base, any comparision of worms or bugs or whatever you want to call them, between nix and ms, is meanignleess. Its sort of like comparing gas mileage between GM and solectra. Just not a comparison that has meaning in the real world of sales and market share.
6) Since the game gates is playing is market share and sales and PROFITS, maybe he is not that interested in the OS or the browser - maybe they think OSs and Browsers will become commodity objects, and the money is in apps. think about ibm selling its pc division - companies exist to make money, not technically superior produdts. Sometimes you can win on technical superiority; sometimes not
It should be obvious to anyone who can add 2+2 that if you have large wage differentials, then the nature of capitlism is to take advantage of those wage differentials and LOWER everyone's living std.
The failure to acknowledge this is, to my mind, proof enough that the "science" of economics is a net negative on the store of human knowledge.
But i digress.
There is one simple, low cost, easy anwer: raise them up to our level.
And to all those/. posters who argue that outsourcing is a 2way street and not bad (eg, toyota plants in Kentucky).... go find the statistics on the change in inflation adjusted take home pay for the bottom two quintiles in the american workforce (e.g., people in the lower 40% of hte workforce by pay) over the last 30 years... you will find that for very large numbers of americans, things are not going the right way.
And as to the ludicrous arguments that more and better education and working more productively will keep us ahead of the Chinese and Indians: How on earth does anyone take this seriously !!! It implys that the average american is smarter and harder working then other people, and that we have a better more foucsed educational system..phuleeze
Final note: even paul samuleson can learn to add; the "dean" of orthodoxy apparently thinks foreign trade is bad (any one have a link to his article in an academic journal ?)
Sorry to be so sarcastic, but this seems so obvious...capitilism, by its nature is heartless and vicious, and the intrinsic nature of capitilism is to race to the bottom. It is sort of like the stock bubble of 2000: no one listened to the old timers. well the economy is the same thing: unrestrained capitilism leads to disaster. No doubt a lesson that will be appreciated in the next depression (before you say something, remeber how optimistic people were about hte stock market)
Slashdot Mirror
not exactly...I'm not much of a computer person, but even I cd figure out how to partition the disk and put win2K on my spring 2001 hp laptop running ME. I'm sure all the /. geeks will love the reason why: after ME crashed and I had to do a clean install, I decided having two independent OSs, I cd use one as a backup if the primary crashed (which actually worked - when ME crashed again, it was really easy to use the MS tool that recovers files from the .cab folders. I forget what the command is, but you startup the broken OS, get an error that such and such file is gone, boot in the good one, get the file, repeat untill fixed
as a non computer person, i never cd figure out why there was not a 3rd party software to get USB into NT - was it really that hard to do?
this has bothered me foryears (since our startup bought 50 dell boxes with NT4 and USB ports !!)
aside from all the silly, kee jerk reactions about inproper use of terminology, or what fork means, no one* seems to be addressing the central point, which seems reasonable: is Linux heading toward multiple, slightly compatible/incompatible flavors, AND is this worse then other OS/packages...
Just because they are biased, does not mean they cant be correct.
If the Linux/OSS community's only response to "is your software splitting..." is "You are a fudster, go away"....well, if OSS doesn't want corporate dollars, thats fair.
I remember in the old days, when we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow barefoot, there was a company called heathkit, that sold kits to build your own radios. a large part of thier biz was supplying kids, who grew up to be the geeks and engineers and scientists who drove the 70s/80s/90s tech revolutions.
I see one of the roles of linux as the equiv - something for todays kids, who will be tomorrows leaders, to play with.
the question is, can OSS be more ?
There are many different types of customers, and many ways to sell to them, and many ways to do a startup.
But, in the end, startup implies money in to generate sales in the future. So, you have to always be asking yourself, what problem am i solving for the customer, because if I am not solving a problem, why are they giving me money ? Once you frame the question that way, your options usually narrow.
I do not know about software, but in my field, biotech, it is almost imposssible to overestimat the amount of work requried to actually bring a product to market - QC studies, labels for the boxes, checking that the plastic bags dont outgass something that discolors your product, etc etc. This stuff takes a lot of time and effort, and you need not brilliance but people who come in and do this 9/5 - dont knock those people, they make the world go round.
If you want to sell widgets to customers, don't underestimate marketing. I know it looks stupid - and it is stupid. But , look in the mirror and ask yourself, why, REALLY why, did I buy the last five purchases for my computer, or stereo, or whatever. I think if you are honest with yourself, you will find that your vaunted "reasons", carefully thought out, ususally were framed and driven by those "stupid" marketers (eg, if you made a specification driven purchase, are those specs really relevant, or are they marketing constructs). Like any stero system costing more then, say 2 or 3 grand - you are not paying for performance, but for some sort of ego drive created and fed by marketing.
It is a very humbling experince for a geek/techie/scientist/engineer to go thru this exercise.
A good marketer also knows what people are buying and why, and what new features they will pay for. A marketing person tells you one good feature that someone will actually pay for, they have earned their money for the year.
W
Is this not why guilds were formed, to prevent desperate starving workers from undercutting each other ?
If the developers had a union, and you had to charge for software, what would happen ?
The history of public tv/radio suggests that free software is not going to survive (ducks) - after all, NPR gave up (or failed) to support itself from listeners (ducks again)(the super odious macneill leherer snooze hours use of att was a big step here) (ducks again)
(I do not think that firefox or open office, to take two well known examples, are really "open source" as both derive a large amount of code from closed sources, going back to netscape and sun)
Seriously, How about well designed web pages, written by someone with a good grasp of english grammer, well laid out according to a std plan (no white text/black background, no stupid cutsey blinking lights, etc)
How about patented common gui; people really hate learning new guis, so if there was a std model, I mean a real std model, that was patented, and you enforced money for software with it..
ad supported software ? surely, there has to be a better solution to doc exchange then acrobat
4 ordinary users like me, customizable is worht about 2cents, on a good day. (joelonosoftware has a good rant about this )
/. community wants to make *nix succed ? how about easy backups (the existing backup solutions to MS such as retrospect, suck)
YOu know how much time I, and people like me want to spend learning about OSs ? zero
their is a good analogy: suppose ford or chevy announced a new line of cars with a great *feature - you had to go out and set the timing each morning, depending on your weather and the options that came with your car, so you could get an extra 2 mpg.
I think we all know how that wd fly
software is used because it solves a problem for the customer. FF is used because of tabbed browsing and bookmark tabs to a folder; all that stuff about open source and security and bloat is completely irrelevant to 90% of the users.
similarly, *nix will NEVER SUCCED UNTILL IT DOES SOMETHING I CARE ABOUT (I = normal people like me)
we do not care about bloat or saving a few hundred meg, or about the evil MS empire or about eulas or about open source or any of that stuff; it is irrelevant
and before u flame me, even keeks shd know that telling someone they r wrong rarely works
the
how about some way of breaking the info to user data rate imposed by screens
how about some way of putting my computer on a disk, so I can plug into any terminal
how about good filters on google - there is an app that wd drive linux
firefox is a success because it does somethign for people that ie does not: tabbed browsing and bookmark tabs in folder
success outside of geek world is built on very simple things that sarisfy problems.
(marketing 11)
open office does not solve a problem - it is just an alternative
and as noted it has the problem of people who have built excel macros
100s of /. posts, and not one saying, heres a web site lists 800 devices, cf the # with linux and the # with MS drivers...
I can only assume that part of the core of the argument - that windows is better becuase it has drivers for stupid people like me (by the way what is a driver and why do i need them ...)
Lotta snide, sarcastic, know it all responses, but very little int eh way of documentatin on what % of new devices are ok with linux, as opposed to MS.
Precisely, you agree with me.
the issue is not the optical detector, it is the specificity ofthe chemistry - how do you detect glucose in a sea of other molecules.
simply saying chemical reactionw ith polymers is to recapitulate a lot of failed work.
I suggest you get a few copies of Analytical Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society, and read about glucose sensors
most imp handhelds ? /. in that one or needle and thread not showing up high)
what about the sword, the tinderbox, flint, the hoe, (lotta sexism on
canteen
of course if u r talking number of individuals vs length of time, more recent will always win due to demographrics
shd be read after reading this article. I mean, who on earth is silly enuf to take this seriously ? if u really think this is worth arguing about, let me know, i have some ocean front property in floriday u can have for a buck an acre.
I suppose if u had super small (~ 100 nanometer) particles of ice, you would have a stable suspension in air - so it wd be sort of gaseous ice
Non invasive detection of blood glucose, by some sort of optical/spectral means, has been the subject of intense research in both the academic and commerical sectors (lotta money/nobel prize here) The problem is, that any optical signal you can obtain has a LOT of noise, and not much info on glucose levels. That is, you have a very noisy signal that varys (in every way - amplitude, magnitude, ) a LOT with time, and in this signal is some *very small, varying component tht is glucose levels (u can increase the signal to noise with certain tricks, but they dont relate to holograms, for instance using a wavelength of light that glucose interacts with strongly). I don't see how adding a hologram to the system helps.
and, PHOTOGRAPH everything during construction - once that stucco goues up, you will never remember where everything is and how it is laid out
U r 100% right that paper and film have a proven track record, which is more then u can say for anyting digial (proven = > 100 years) Analog is also inherently superior to dig for archive in that partial loss is only partial loss.
/. reader does, you transfer to new, much larger media every 5 years
The required equipment could be built in volume at a reasonable price (and even custom glass lens are not that $$, as you can see from say photonics magazine), but as u c every day in cameras, you can mold pretty good lens out of polycarbonate or coc cheaply). The cost of 35 or 64 mm movie film is cheap, etc IN VOLUME
which raises the question,if this is real, why is kodak or someone like that not doing this.
I dont know the size of the data archive market, but it has to be at least a few hundred MM a year, small but i think just large enough to interest a company like kodak or fuji or agfa or even a zombie like polaroid.
but..you still have analog to dig to get the data back, and you have the horrendous problem of cataloging analog data for a digital world and you have the prolbem of the declining cost of storage...which is probably the largest arguemtn, from an ROI standpoint, against film
IMHO this whole archive thing is silly..you do what every
I recall reading in the 80s that K&E was dumping all the elaborate brass ruling engines used for making slide rules....darn those bowmar brains !!
given the constant recalls that cost in the 100 MM+ range in the auto industry (as one example) one can only conclude that stupidity lazyness and incompetenace are rampant (not to mention poor spelling)
or lawnmowers: i bought a 250 dollar lawnmower from sears last year, and "badly designed" is an understatement (not to pick on sears - just an example that comes to mind)
or vacumn cleaners: for years, the american consumer had to buy house vacumn cleaners where there was a 2Cent plastic fan tht generated the airflow that generated the suction, and thefan was placed BEFORE the filter, so if you sucked up a penny, crack, no fan blade, toss the sucker.
then some braniac figured out you could put the fan on the other side of the filter
but people are never smart; lazy ness and incompetence are sop. this arguement that somehow software projects are more beset by lazyness stupidity or whathave you strikes me as not a good arguemtn for programmers to be advancing, even if it were true.
No, it is not ok, because the sticker is not trying to get the students to question and think for themselves.
The stickers are put their by stupid uneducated (becasuse if they actually read about ID, they would see that it is just nonsense, total dreck) bigoted (they want their religion imposed on others because they think it is better) hypocritical (afraid to say the previous) people.
Let me emphasise: it is not tolerance to question a theory when you dishonestly propse an alternative that is garbage, like, say polywater, or tealeaf reading.
u assume i am against the stickers.
actually, i am for them, because in any honest discussion, the kids wd see that "intelligent design" is lies and deceit, not science at all, and this might lead a few to question the rest of religious nonsense that they are taught.
I agree that the state is imposing its view;that does not mean the parents are honest -
Of course, what the parents shd be doing is asking why the state control apparatus denies them adequate medical care, etc (chomskyism here) but they have been brainwashed into thinking that religion is the answer; in this sense the liberals are part, as you correctly note, of the state control apparatus which strives to prevent these people from wondering about why there is no decent medical care etc.
U r also completely wrong in assuming evolution = godless; as can easily be shown in that he catholic church endorses evolution; u r right in noting that this is about POWER - the state allows people to exercise power in this domain to keep them from asking why their r no jobs, etc
for most of your post I agree with the thrust that evolution is, for whatever reason, part of hte HAL (humanist liberal atheist) critique of religion and these people are right to be angry.
the neanderthal was a joke (neanderthal-evolution -kinda poor, )
this is the first google link i clicked for "dictionary bigoted"
[adj] blindly and obstinately attached to some creed or opinion and intolerant toward others; "a bigoted person"; "an outrageously bigoted point of view"
blindly and obstinately attached...intolernat" pretty fair summation. I have no doubt many of these people are, in other parts of hteir lives, kind, etc etc, but in this respect they are bigots.
I think the many posts and replies on what is a "theory" are sort of missing th point.
Lets go back and look at what happened in Georgia:
2,000 parents complained about how textbooks dealt with evolution. They did not complain about math, or english grammar, or anything else
they complained about evolution
Now it could be these are highly logical geeks parsing the word "theory"
right
the reason they complained is that they are bible based people who seek to impose their particular religious beliwefs on others.
Like most people, they want the schools to teach thir children what they believe in.
Cant say that is all bad, even if i do think they are bigoted neanderthals
the software user interface for most wireless hardware is so bad, so poorly written, so intimidating, that I pray to god that the defaults will get me thru the day. This is clearly a case where customer service is a zero priority. Maybe the avg /. geek, who is clearly a log or two off normal, can deal with this stuff, but I would bet 10 dollars that a survey of avg users would find
a lot of frustration.
the issue is not long term changes, but changes on timescales relevant to peoples lives, eg ~ 1 - 50 years income data (provide alt if u dont like it) at http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h03.html
seems to support my arg, that over a timescale relevant to peoples lives, there has been little change in icome in the lower two quintiles
samuelson http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_rp.php?id =50
again, at least in the short term (100 year) foreign trade can be a net neg, also, as is usual in macroeconomics, "net" could, at least in theory, imply that the US gets a benefit if 1,000,000 blue collar workers at 20K a year are laid off, and 1,000 wall street investment bankers make an extra 20 MM a year (or whatever the math is); again, not relevant to peoples lives
1) the list of FORMER competitors of MS is a long one..anyone remember DR-DOS, which always got better reviews in the trade journals ? Lets add borland, lotus, star office, etc etc. A rationale person has some humility and or fear when confronted with a proven champion, regardless of the methods the champion uses.
/. readers can supply many other examples of companies that died when there single flagship product was late or buggy; only MS can live to fight another day, with its cash flow and monomply posistions.
/. and firefox cause they are playing the wrong game. I don't think he cares a flying f*ck about technical superiority, or bloat or stuff like that; he cares about market share. For all we know, he may be happy that the 10% of the market consisting of geeks is distracted by linux and firefox - it never makes economic sense for a biz to care about more then 80% of the market.
2) Unlike other companies, MS can survive a disaster - (either DOS 4 or 5) was a dog that would have killed any other company; MS survived to fight another day (eg, borland died when they were late with one product). I'm sure
3) IMHO, MS has developed an unusual corp ability - the ability to throw money at a problem and solve it. IF gates and ballmer were really interested, they could release a new IE next year.
4) Gates is laughing at
5) there is something kinda pathetic and geekish and teenagerish in this constant gloating about bugs in MS products. Maybe worm writers don't write for *nix because that is not where the market is - if you r interested in making money, an not tech bragging writes, why wd u care about the geeks using linux. no money and hard to cheat - just not a soft target (the same principal by which "insurgents" choose unarmored Iraqis over armored mobile americans.
Untill there is some reasonably similar user base, any comparision of worms or bugs or whatever you want to call them, between nix and ms, is meanignleess. Its sort of like comparing gas mileage between GM and solectra. Just not a comparison that has meaning in the real world of sales and market share.
6) Since the game gates is playing is market share and sales and PROFITS, maybe he is not that interested in the OS or the browser - maybe they think OSs and Browsers will become commodity objects, and the money is in apps.
think about ibm selling its pc division - companies exist to make money, not technically superior produdts. Sometimes you can win on technical superiority; sometimes not
It should be obvious to anyone who can add 2+2 that if you have large wage differentials, then the nature of capitlism is to take advantage of those wage differentials and LOWER everyone's living std. The failure to acknowledge this is, to my mind, proof enough that the "science" of economics is a net negative on the store of human knowledge. But i digress. There is one simple, low cost, easy anwer: raise them up to our level. And to all those /. posters who argue that outsourcing is a 2way street and not bad (eg, toyota plants in Kentucky).... go find the statistics on the change in inflation adjusted take home pay for the bottom two quintiles in the american workforce (e.g., people in the lower 40% of hte workforce by pay) over the last 30 years... you will find that for very large numbers of americans, things are not going the right way.
And as to the ludicrous arguments that more and better education and working more productively will keep us ahead of the Chinese and Indians: How on earth does anyone take this seriously !!! It implys that the average american is smarter and harder working then other people, and that we have a better more foucsed educational system..phuleeze
Final note: even paul samuleson can learn to add; the "dean" of orthodoxy apparently thinks foreign trade is bad (any one have a link to his article in an academic journal ?)
Sorry to be so sarcastic, but this seems so obvious...capitilism, by its nature is heartless and vicious, and the intrinsic nature of capitilism is to race to the bottom. It is sort of like the stock bubble of 2000: no one listened to the old timers. well the economy is the same thing: unrestrained capitilism leads to disaster. No doubt a lesson that will be appreciated in the next depression (before you say something, remeber how optimistic people were about hte stock market)