Re:Let it rest in peace!
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Almost. It went like this:
If Commodore owned the KFC franchise, they'd advertise it as lukewarm dead bird.
Having said that, I'd certainly pay a few hundred bucks to run a 680x0 emulated AmigaDOS v2 or v3 in a window on my Macbook. I wrote a lot of Amiga code. Wrote the first Amiga CAD system, in fact, a PCB layout engine; sat in the CBM booth at the spring COMDEX in Atlanta in 1986, demoing the shipping product to interested parties. Interesting times. Still have all manner of code archived here and there.
But deal with new hardware? My 4000 and several 2000's lying around here all still work fine, so.... nah.:)
There is a way to stop spam. It's simple, too. Stop using direct email - don't give out an email address. Ever.
Next time around, we need to develop a technology so that it isn't open to everyone and their brother, his 4th cousin, and that guy who knows your 4th cousin and the fellow who took out that guy's trash.
Web-based contact forms that require humans aren't a bad idea for now. You know... "Randomly ordered/which kitten has the string from the yarn wrapped around its ear?/" one time, and "/which alligator has one eye closed/" in the next, and so on for many, many examples where each image contains considerable random cruft so that they can't be checksummed or etc and marked by a human for a one-time recognition a machine can use. Until Ai comes, that'll work for incoming message traffic if you do it well. Give 'em a URL where your answer will be posted when they send it, and they can check there for an answer if they're so motivated. A program could manage that without being annoying.
'course, then you need a website. Sigh. yeah, what we need is a whole new technology. Key based.
P.S. In your what-Apple-does-wrong bit, you left off my personal favourite. No #*/!@ delete key!
There's a two-handed workaround on the laptops, function+delete is "delete", where delete by itself is "backspace." You probably knew that, but just in case...
What about it? My Mac laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM, which is quite a bit of hardware 3D power. Not sure why boot camp would have any kind of monopoly on this as compared to Parallels - can you explain? I mean, Parallels is running in a window normally, but it's got fullscreen mode if you want, so I can see several paths to full use of the 3D capabilities.
Are you saying that Parallels is inherently unable to use this capability?
Of course. But the odds here are the same as for claims of an invisible pink unicorn that dances in your attic. Meaning, they are almost certain to be wrong. It is never a good idea to place confident bets on propositions that have absolutely no supporting evidence. I'd add to that, in the specific case of Christianity, its really a bad bet when no evidence has come to light after nearly two millennia of trying to uncover some.
But science can't tell them that they are wrong.
Science can't tell you there aren't invisible dancing pink unicorns in your attic, either. Does that mean they are there? Or that the odds favor the idea that they are there? Of course not. It isn't up to science to prove that some particular claim completely lacking in evidence isn't so, it is up to the claimant to prove that it is so by bringing evidence to the table, and at this important task all religions have failed utterly across the entire history of mankind. That's not what I'd call a confidence inspiring record.
In the meantime the religious claim to have revelation from God himself. If you want proof then you can't really do better than relevation from God, eh?
Unfortunately, the "claim of the religious" is not evidence. At least, not until they can put some evidence on the table, which, as I noted above, they have not done.
The atheists keep telling us how stupid we are
Not this atheist. I regard religion as very clever indeed. Just for the record. Some religious people are stupid; so are some atheists. Likewise, both categories contain very bright people. Intelligence is not a defining characteristic with regard to theism/atheism in my opinion.
many, if not most, of us have direct experience of God (including me).
So you say, and that's fine, as far as it goes. I am all for you being free to believe whatever it is you want to believe as an adult. I have considerable qualms about exposing young children (pre-teen) to religion, but my feeling that parents should have the right to bring up their children any way they prefer to is stronger than my feeling that it is immoral to expose a child to an idea that cannot be proven as if it was undeniable truth.
We don't believe because we just decide to make that irrational 'leap', but because God has revealed it to us individually.
Again, so you say. Unfortunately, the nature of this, like all religion, is simply another variant on "we don't need to show you any evidence." That puts these ideas squarely in the realm of attic-dwelling dancing pink unicorns.
Your objections are probably valid but not if God is revealing stuff to us individually and directly.
My objections are valid either way. I take no firm stance on the existence of god, though I observe the odds are terribly low, on the same order as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the unicorn I like to posit. Who could, after all, actually be jigging in your attic this very moment in a glorious pink tutu.:) I am a classic atheist; 'a' meaning "without" and 'theist' meaning "one with belief in a god or gods." I am without belief. I am not without imagination or the ability to accept that nature sometimes does award reality to situations with quite long odds. However - and this is critical - when nature does so, so far at least, it has done so in such a way as to leave evidence supporting that situation all around in the form of natural laws, physical instances, and so forth. Religions - all of them - are notably lacking in this regard.
My objections bear on the idea that religionists keep putting forward that god, or gods, are a reasonable part of reali
Oh, I don't know, just off the top of my head, it would let you run Windows-only games, that don't run well otherwise, directly on the hardware
Me, I don't play high performance games on PCs. Just chess. I have game consoles (ps2, ps3, XB, 360, GC, Wii) shoe-horned into a very large screen component TV setup and am very pleased with them. Also... playing back animations under Parallels on my 17-inch Macbook Pro dual-core 2.33 GHz is considerably faster than playing them back on my 3 GHz Dell running Windows. Not sure how much Parallels impacts software performance. I certainly haven't noticed any such thing. Have you actually experienced problems with games (or other software) under Parallels?
The trouble is that Apple apparently had no choice
The trouble, such as it was, was that nothing was ready to announce, which is to say, ship. It's all vaporware, albeit very likely to appear eventually vaporware.
Leopard wasn't ready; iPhone wasn't ready; iTV wasn't ready; no improvements to the laptops, minis, desktops... nothing. Not even an iPod variant. So what was Apple to do in the face of high customer expectations, ongoing stock and accounting scandals? Announce vaporware, that's what, and that's precisely what they did. And Apple stock went up that day, because people are gullible. Now the common folk have had a little time to stare at their completely empty hands, and they're beginning to mutter "say... where's my stuff?" Doesn't matter that they were told it wouldn't come until later. People expect a lot from Apple, especially at "announcement time", and when they get nothing... well, they tend to notice.
That announcement was worse than nothing to me and people like me; I am no fan of telephones (mostly just another way for people to interrupt you), nor do I think that touch-pads are good for dialing, nor do I think that LCD's are very useful in sunlight, nor am I impressed by the use of OSX in a venue where I can't add software, nor do I see what iTV will do for me that will be useful beyond the usual stack of DVR, satellite and other gear I already own.
I am very interested in Leopard, but of that there was no sign. So... bleagh.
And surely 30 bucks is better than 500 or 600 for a whole other computer.
Hmm. Well, I'm not sure what benefits, if any, bootcamp (free or at $30) offers over Parallels at $60; while I am quite certain of a very long (and quite relevant to me) list of advantages Parallels has over bootcamp.
So I guess this is about as much news as changes to Safari — because I don't use that either. Once I tried Omniweb, I basically never had a reason to go back. It kicks Safari's butt right off the face of the planet, particularly in the area of tab features and controlling how individual web sites are allowed to act.
I sure wish Apple would concentrate on fixing the basics instead of duplicating functionality available in far more sophisticated forms from third parties; for instance, the Terminal's character addressing modes haven't been working 100% for the last three years, the system-wide implementation of function keys is a disaster, the single button on laptops is insufficient to the task of dealing with the full range of two button operations any windows laptop can pull off (and yes, I know all about the two finger emulation... try a right button drag and let me know how that works out for you) and why, on a laptop wider than my PC's keyboard, can't Apple be bothered to put a numeric pad? And why on a dual core, high speed laptop, running what is nominally supposed to be a modern multitasking OS, do I *ever* see that *&^&$^$ beachball when doing I/O? And why can't I refresh a network share?
I'm a huge Apple fan, really I am, but it just seems to me that they could do better - and bootcamp doesn't appear to be worth the time they are spending on it. Maybe I'm missing something. Why - anyone - is bootcamp better than Parallels? I'm booting linux, win98, winxp all in windows on my laptop using Parallels. Concurrently. They run great. What would using bootcamp gain me? I mean, besides losing the incredible convenience of OSX running alongside those other OS's, and vice-versa?
After some (fuzzy, very difficult to define) line where the collection of cells begins to think, yes, I do oppose abortion for the purpose of ridding oneself of the child. I also oppose the creation of unwanted children, and consider such conception as an inherently negative action taken against the children the fetus will grow up to become. I do not oppose abortion in the case where the mother's life is threatened.
Its difficult to call the religious stupid when it was a catholic monk who is the father of modern genetics and a catholic priest who first proposed the big bang.
Yes. Stupid is the wrong word. Gullible, confused, misguided, fearful, focused on the wrong issues - those are the right words. Very bright people often fall into these same error prone modes of thought. Stupidity is not the only hallmark of religion, though it certainly can be one; you can also come across some fairly dim people who will reject religion out of hand as ridiculous, so again, stupidity is simply not a perfect indicator either way.
Further I haven't made any of this up. Its christian theology.
The point is, other people appear to have made it up. It isn't in any way obviously related to any truth; it's not based on fact; it is evidence-free reporting of stories. Just because something is written down in an old book, or spoken by someone you think well of, that doesn't mean that those words represent reality in any way, shape or form.
But, if you could do something so that people were not able to make the bad choice at all, would you do it?
As a direct answer, probably not. I'm not sure that you can prevent choice in any case, or execution of choice (action.) If you try, they'll probably fight you on principle and do it anyway, find a way around the "safeguards", etc. You can react when people make a choice and take action on it; and in many cases, you should. In my view of the optimum world, my rights end where yours begin, and if I step over that line, society has a good case to get rid of me.
Suppressing choice, either by law or by technology, has a way of going afoul of many things, not the least of which are personal liberty and people's safety.
In the extreme case, a guy with a gun is robbing a bank and has hostages. Now, he can choose to shoot the hostages, or he can choose not to shoot the hostages. If you had the opportunity to shoot the robber dead so he can't choose to shoot the hostages, would you?
I would even shoot through the hostages to take him out. Any time hostages are used successfully as a line of defense, more hostages will be taken as part of the lesson learned in that event. The robber is outside the pale; he has violated the rights of others by extending his actions where they must not go. He's a valid target now. The hostages are consequences of his choice to take them, and the fact that if they are treated as an impediment to his apprehension or elimination, they will be used to hurt others in the future. In other words, if taking hostages never works, and further, makes it even rougher on the hostage-takers, very few people will take hostages.
People can choose to drink and drive or not drink or not drive. If there was an inexpensive, perfect piece of technology that was convenient and stopped some people from driving drunk and never stopped sober people from driving, would you require people to install it in their cars?
No. There may be valid reasons why a person may need to drive drunk to save lives, move their vehicle around on their own land, etc. My take is that driving needs to be an action (like 99% of all actions) where a person's responsibility is to avoid trampling on the rights of others, knowing that society has severe consequences prepared if that line is crossed. Drinking isn't a problem. Driving isn't a problem. The combination isn't a problem. The problem is when other people's rights are trampled upon. So trying to use technology to eliminate drinking and driving is the wrong path. In my opinion.
Yes, people have choice. But some people will choose to do bad things. Saying that the murderer is responsible for killing the victim doesn't stop people from killing victims.
No, it doesn't. Neither do laws, neither will any technology I am aware of. However, eliminating the criminal will stop them from doing it again, and as far as I am concerned, that is the right choice as soon as we can be sure we have the right "criminal." At this time, I do not support the death penalty because we make so many mistakes in identifying the perpetrator. Life imprisonment unless they can prove they didn't do it, instead. The very day we can know they did it, we kill them.
When thinking of a (presently imaginary) technology used to "stop killing", it is also important to realize that there are many valid scenarios that involve killing. If you enter my home in the dead of night, you've violated my rights and I can kill you. If you attack my family on the street, you've violated their and my rights and I can kill you. If you've taken hostages, you've violated their rights and I can kill you. If you are about to poison a water source, you're going to be violating many people's rights, and I can kill you to stop you. If you attempt to hijack an aircraft, you've violated the othe
What you're saying is if the bullets reach the right people for the right reason then guns can be good, but if the slugs hit the wrong person or for the wrong reason then they're bad.
No. I'm not saying that at all.
I'm saying that people are good or bad, people's actions are good or bad, and it hasn't got a single thing to do with cars, bullets, or highways. That's just evasive nonsense, mumbo jumbo from addled thinkers (or those seeking to escape responsibility.) We're human. We can choose. Choose well, and bear responsibility for good; choose poorly, and bear responsibility for bad. Technology isn't the culprit here. It's you. It's me. It's people.
People make choices. They're responsible for those choices. Highways, guns and communications are not. Any philosophical mumbo jumbo that says the more choices are available the more blame the choices carry, is completely and utterly worthless. Likewise, when technology can amplify a choice we make, we carry additional responsibility; the technology carries none at all. This has been true since the first rock was used with intent to kill.
Responsibility is the lost idea in modern civilization. People do anything to avoid it, to slough it off onto someone else. Well, I'm here to tell you straight out that the existence of a gun makes you no less culpable when you kill someone because it is physically easier to do, and no more respectable when you refrain in the face of whatever tempts you. It is no more or less about you and me than it was a thousand years ago. Science and technology are neutral. We have the power to turn them in either direction. We always have. There's no one here but us, and objects don't make choices. As the power is ours, so is the responsibility. 100%.
Also: If you let media change your mind, that's your responsibility. Media can only be "active" through your actions. In other words, you can always choose. Some choices are more difficult than others, certainly, but who ever promised you an easy ride? If anyone did, they were lying and you were a fool to believe them. Just about every choice you make carries responsibility with it. There's no way out. You can't blame the Internet, highways or weapons for your problems. Your problems come from human sources, at least those that aren't sourced by the ongoing processes of nature. Technology, science... these are the last places to look to place blame.
Certainly. Presumption isn't always a bad thing, as long as you understand what you're doing. Furthermore, it is presumption subject to future modification, something science excels at. It is precisely the same type of presumption that applies to invisible pink dancing unicorns that live in your attic. No evidence can be obtained to support the idea no matter how hard one tries, historically speaking, so the reasonable presumption is then that the idea is most likely not describing reality. There is no significant difference between the idea of god and the idea of the attic-dwelling IPDU.
Science isn't the beginning and the end. Even science has foundations, rather like the one's you mention, but also including the existence or non-existence of God
Nonsense. Science is a set of methods, or more broadly, it is commonly thought of as the collection of results from applying those methods. None of that includes God (or gods) in any meaningful way. See your history, particularly Francis Bacon.
That question comes before science, and isn't part of science. Which would make sense if a God/god/gods created science. Just as philosophy comes before science. And mathemetics. Science is runt of the litter, but someone put an axe in its cloven foot.
Science and mathematics are the only ones in that "litter" that ever grew up to be more than clueless puppies, actually. Religion was stillborn with regard to evidence and reality, and philosophy spends most of its time chasing its own tail. No matter how hard you think about something stupid, or untrue, it won't change to something brilliant or true. Reality is what it is, and no amount of reputation, admiration, or even worship, will change the basic facts of existence.
Is [goatse.cx] that [tubgirl.com] so [lemonparty.org]?
Absolutely. I'm not in the least offended by what other people choose to do to themselves and with intelligently consenting partners. Amused sometimes, but not offended. I'm only offended by what people do to non-consenting partners or partners who cannot consent in a reasonably intelligent fashion. And in such cases, it is useful to know what is going on.
And technology does do bad things, for one we're helluva lot better at polluting the planet than we were without technology
You said yourself: "we're helluva lot better at polluting the planet"... the culprit isn't technology. The culprit is people. Technology can clean up pollution, even eliminate it at its source in some cases. You're blaming the gun for the thoughts and actions of the person who decided to fire it, which is wrong. Guns and technology have no way to say "No, wait, don't do that!" It's not the same as when Bush orders a cop to pick someone up without a warrant; the action is evil, and the cop is evil for obeying because that cop could (and should) have said "no, this is wrong" and aborted the process. The lesson is: You can't blame intermediaries in any human action unless those intermediaries are also human.
Or another totalitarian regime backed up by massive databases, computer checks and surveilance cameras. KGB or Stasi would just drool over the possibilities they'd have today.
Well, we call that the Government of the United States of America; they used to be controlled by a document we call the constitution, which laid a very nice groundwork for a government, but that era appears to be completely over.
Witness Commerce clause absurdities, 2nd amendment erosion, ex post facto law and punishment, phone tapping, mail opening, "free speech zones", theft of land for tax revenue, government backing of religion in multiple venues, loss of habeas corpus, torture... and all these changes made in how we operate without the (supposedly) required constitutional hoop-jumping. The only question that remains is, what new way will they find to foul our nest?
How close are we, really, to becoming something that in no serious way resembles what the founders put in place? As this happens, from where does the government derive its authority? If it won't obey the constitution (and that seems very clear indeed), then how is the government going to justify any action it takes? I really don't understand how a government official can look a run of the mill citizen in the eye today. But again, we're talking about the actions of human beings, not the capabilities of a government. Just because you have databases doesn't mean you have to make no-fly lists; you could have a list of people who need cancer surgery, instead.
Technology, inanimate objects, ideas - even horrifying ideas - these aren't the enemy. People without ethics that take other people's rights into account, or with canned ethics based on apocalyptic religious bullshit like G. W. Bush, those people are the problem.
Since he appears to presume the non-existence of God then he is most unscientific.
Nonsense. When there is no evidence for any one item, event or personage, the reasonable default position is non-existence.
If you want to bring the presumption of a god or gods into science, then you have the obligation to bring evidence, theory, repeatability. Without that, you have nothing scientific. You just have an idea you like to think about.
Religion does not intersect with science at this time. Perhaps it will someday.
Religion in the sense of dogma. "It can't be done", "hopeless", etc. as described in the summary. Rather than try to actually examine the issue at hand, those people took the dogma and tread water. The Chinese researcher used science and got the results the others were taking from the book of common presumption. It's a religious approach against a scientific approach in the most common sense of the word. With the caveat that we assume that the story is true, of course. This is slashdot...:)
We gain the obvious: The more we know, the better off we are. All science contributes to rolling back the veil of the unknown, and (eventually) almost all science benefits us. Encryption research is no exception. Suppressing research in favor of the dogma of the day is old-school religious thinking. Not a good way to go.
Besides; my suspicion is that if she's gone and cracked it, the odds are at least reasonable that the NSA and crew already had, anyway — it's not like they would tell us if they had. Time to move on.
Also no. Banks should be using https/html and https/cgi. I don't rent my cpu out to them, and I don't want their code running on my computer. That goes for everyone else, too. As soon as you presume you can run a "client" application on my machine, you may be impacting other things I am doing without my permission. If you don't have the CPU power you need to run your operation, I decline to run it for you except in special cases that I will pick according to my own needs.
And hey, as a bonus, your stuff will work for everyone who can read your language(s), no platform specific issues at all. Isn't that cool?
Seriously, this whole "surfer as slave CPU" trend has gone entirely too far.
Being there didn't help me count; but the number of deaths I am aware of is four. The aftermath is, as near as I can tell, summed up very accurately at this site. While you're there, take a good look at the "criminals" those national guardsmen executed. The most pitiful excuses for people "serving their country" I can imagine. Scum.
And of course, as we now know, the Vietnam war was undertaken under false pretenses, just like the current Iraq war. The gulf of Tonkin (sp?) incident was falsified. Those kids were protesting having to die for that war, being unable to vote or drink, but being perfectly acceptable cannon fodder; they had every right to raise hell. Constitutionally and otherwise. Bad enough that some paid with their lives, but worse.... it had little effect. A couple of songs, and off the nation went, same thing, different day.
And people wonder why I'm gloomy about the Iraq war.
The guardsmen were completely out of range of anything anyone could have thrown in the class of a brick or a bottle containing fluids and trailing cloth at the time they fired. They had no legitimate reason - I repeat - no legitimate reason - to fire. As far as anything left on the ground goes, Gasoline or high proof liquor (as some were) molotov cocktails are no threat on the ground. They're dangerous when they are thrown. If they break on the ground (presumably from the heat of the burning cloth... unlikely, but possible), you can walk away from them.
Now I am sure a great many soldiers would never dream of harming their own citizens. However I bet there are some that would follow any order they were given.
...brings to mind the Kent State murders^wshootings by the national guard. They had no trouble at all firing on those "dirty hippies." They never paid any significant penalty at law for it, either. I was there.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost. It went like this:
If Commodore owned the KFC franchise, they'd advertise it as lukewarm dead bird.
Having said that, I'd certainly pay a few hundred bucks to run a 680x0 emulated AmigaDOS v2 or v3 in a window on my Macbook. I wrote a lot of Amiga code. Wrote the first Amiga CAD system, in fact, a PCB layout engine; sat in the CBM booth at the spring COMDEX in Atlanta in 1986, demoing the shipping product to interested parties. Interesting times. Still have all manner of code archived here and there.
But deal with new hardware? My 4000 and several 2000's lying around here all still work fine, so.... nah. :)
There is a way to stop spam. It's simple, too. Stop using direct email - don't give out an email address. Ever.
Next time around, we need to develop a technology so that it isn't open to everyone and their brother, his 4th cousin, and that guy who knows your 4th cousin and the fellow who took out that guy's trash.
Web-based contact forms that require humans aren't a bad idea for now. You know... "Randomly ordered /which kitten has the string from the yarn wrapped around its ear?/" one time, and "/which alligator has one eye closed/" in the next, and so on for many, many examples where each image contains considerable random cruft so that they can't be checksummed or etc and marked by a human for a one-time recognition a machine can use. Until Ai comes, that'll work for incoming message traffic if you do it well. Give 'em a URL where your answer will be posted when they send it, and they can check there for an answer if they're so motivated. A program could manage that without being annoying.
'course, then you need a website. Sigh. yeah, what we need is a whole new technology. Key based.
There's a two-handed workaround on the laptops, function+delete is "delete", where delete by itself is "backspace." You probably knew that, but just in case...
Ok, I got it. To you, "inherently unable" means "next beta"... that's a new use of "inherently" to me, but that's OK. :)
So what Parallels is saying is that next beta, his objection becomes inherently moot, and my 3D hardware will work. :)
Me, I'm more interested in the current beta, with PC apps running side by side with Mac apps. Now that is trick.
What about it? My Mac laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM, which is quite a bit of hardware 3D power. Not sure why boot camp would have any kind of monopoly on this as compared to Parallels - can you explain? I mean, Parallels is running in a window normally, but it's got fullscreen mode if you want, so I can see several paths to full use of the 3D capabilities.
Are you saying that Parallels is inherently unable to use this capability?
Yes, but to put not too fine a point on it, it isn't February yet. Or June. :)
Of course. But the odds here are the same as for claims of an invisible pink unicorn that dances in your attic. Meaning, they are almost certain to be wrong. It is never a good idea to place confident bets on propositions that have absolutely no supporting evidence. I'd add to that, in the specific case of Christianity, its really a bad bet when no evidence has come to light after nearly two millennia of trying to uncover some.
Science can't tell you there aren't invisible dancing pink unicorns in your attic, either. Does that mean they are there? Or that the odds favor the idea that they are there? Of course not. It isn't up to science to prove that some particular claim completely lacking in evidence isn't so, it is up to the claimant to prove that it is so by bringing evidence to the table, and at this important task all religions have failed utterly across the entire history of mankind. That's not what I'd call a confidence inspiring record.
Unfortunately, the "claim of the religious" is not evidence. At least, not until they can put some evidence on the table, which, as I noted above, they have not done.
Not this atheist. I regard religion as very clever indeed. Just for the record. Some religious people are stupid; so are some atheists. Likewise, both categories contain very bright people. Intelligence is not a defining characteristic with regard to theism/atheism in my opinion.
So you say, and that's fine, as far as it goes. I am all for you being free to believe whatever it is you want to believe as an adult. I have considerable qualms about exposing young children (pre-teen) to religion, but my feeling that parents should have the right to bring up their children any way they prefer to is stronger than my feeling that it is immoral to expose a child to an idea that cannot be proven as if it was undeniable truth.
Again, so you say. Unfortunately, the nature of this, like all religion, is simply another variant on "we don't need to show you any evidence." That puts these ideas squarely in the realm of attic-dwelling dancing pink unicorns.
My objections are valid either way. I take no firm stance on the existence of god, though I observe the odds are terribly low, on the same order as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the unicorn I like to posit. Who could, after all, actually be jigging in your attic this very moment in a glorious pink tutu. :) I am a classic atheist; 'a' meaning "without" and 'theist' meaning "one with belief in a god or gods." I am without belief. I am not without imagination or the ability to accept that nature sometimes does award reality to situations with quite long odds. However - and this is critical - when nature does so, so far at least, it has done so in such a way as to leave evidence supporting that situation all around in the form of natural laws, physical instances, and so forth. Religions - all of them - are notably lacking in this regard.
My objections bear on the idea that religionists keep putting forward that god, or gods, are a reasonable part of reali
Me, I don't play high performance games on PCs. Just chess. I have game consoles (ps2, ps3, XB, 360, GC, Wii) shoe-horned into a very large screen component TV setup and am very pleased with them. Also... playing back animations under Parallels on my 17-inch Macbook Pro dual-core 2.33 GHz is considerably faster than playing them back on my 3 GHz Dell running Windows. Not sure how much Parallels impacts software performance. I certainly haven't noticed any such thing. Have you actually experienced problems with games (or other software) under Parallels?
The trouble, such as it was, was that nothing was ready to announce, which is to say, ship. It's all vaporware, albeit very likely to appear eventually vaporware.
Leopard wasn't ready; iPhone wasn't ready; iTV wasn't ready; no improvements to the laptops, minis, desktops... nothing. Not even an iPod variant. So what was Apple to do in the face of high customer expectations, ongoing stock and accounting scandals? Announce vaporware, that's what, and that's precisely what they did. And Apple stock went up that day, because people are gullible. Now the common folk have had a little time to stare at their completely empty hands, and they're beginning to mutter "say... where's my stuff?" Doesn't matter that they were told it wouldn't come until later. People expect a lot from Apple, especially at "announcement time", and when they get nothing... well, they tend to notice.
That announcement was worse than nothing to me and people like me; I am no fan of telephones (mostly just another way for people to interrupt you), nor do I think that touch-pads are good for dialing, nor do I think that LCD's are very useful in sunlight, nor am I impressed by the use of OSX in a venue where I can't add software, nor do I see what iTV will do for me that will be useful beyond the usual stack of DVR, satellite and other gear I already own.
I am very interested in Leopard, but of that there was no sign. So... bleagh.
Hmm. Well, I'm not sure what benefits, if any, bootcamp (free or at $30) offers over Parallels at $60; while I am quite certain of a very long (and quite relevant to me) list of advantages Parallels has over bootcamp.
So I guess this is about as much news as changes to Safari — because I don't use that either. Once I tried Omniweb, I basically never had a reason to go back. It kicks Safari's butt right off the face of the planet, particularly in the area of tab features and controlling how individual web sites are allowed to act.
I sure wish Apple would concentrate on fixing the basics instead of duplicating functionality available in far more sophisticated forms from third parties; for instance, the Terminal's character addressing modes haven't been working 100% for the last three years, the system-wide implementation of function keys is a disaster, the single button on laptops is insufficient to the task of dealing with the full range of two button operations any windows laptop can pull off (and yes, I know all about the two finger emulation... try a right button drag and let me know how that works out for you) and why, on a laptop wider than my PC's keyboard, can't Apple be bothered to put a numeric pad? And why on a dual core, high speed laptop, running what is nominally supposed to be a modern multitasking OS, do I *ever* see that *&^&$^$ beachball when doing I/O? And why can't I refresh a network share?
I'm a huge Apple fan, really I am, but it just seems to me that they could do better - and bootcamp doesn't appear to be worth the time they are spending on it. Maybe I'm missing something. Why - anyone - is bootcamp better than Parallels? I'm booting linux, win98, winxp all in windows on my laptop using Parallels. Concurrently. They run great. What would using bootcamp gain me? I mean, besides losing the incredible convenience of OSX running alongside those other OS's, and vice-versa?
After some (fuzzy, very difficult to define) line where the collection of cells begins to think, yes, I do oppose abortion for the purpose of ridding oneself of the child. I also oppose the creation of unwanted children, and consider such conception as an inherently negative action taken against the children the fetus will grow up to become. I do not oppose abortion in the case where the mother's life is threatened.
Yes. Stupid is the wrong word. Gullible, confused, misguided, fearful, focused on the wrong issues - those are the right words. Very bright people often fall into these same error prone modes of thought. Stupidity is not the only hallmark of religion, though it certainly can be one; you can also come across some fairly dim people who will reject religion out of hand as ridiculous, so again, stupidity is simply not a perfect indicator either way.
The point is, other people appear to have made it up. It isn't in any way obviously related to any truth; it's not based on fact; it is evidence-free reporting of stories. Just because something is written down in an old book, or spoken by someone you think well of, that doesn't mean that those words represent reality in any way, shape or form.
As a direct answer, probably not. I'm not sure that you can prevent choice in any case, or execution of choice (action.) If you try, they'll probably fight you on principle and do it anyway, find a way around the "safeguards", etc. You can react when people make a choice and take action on it; and in many cases, you should. In my view of the optimum world, my rights end where yours begin, and if I step over that line, society has a good case to get rid of me.
Suppressing choice, either by law or by technology, has a way of going afoul of many things, not the least of which are personal liberty and people's safety.
I would even shoot through the hostages to take him out. Any time hostages are used successfully as a line of defense, more hostages will be taken as part of the lesson learned in that event. The robber is outside the pale; he has violated the rights of others by extending his actions where they must not go. He's a valid target now. The hostages are consequences of his choice to take them, and the fact that if they are treated as an impediment to his apprehension or elimination, they will be used to hurt others in the future. In other words, if taking hostages never works, and further, makes it even rougher on the hostage-takers, very few people will take hostages.
No. There may be valid reasons why a person may need to drive drunk to save lives, move their vehicle around on their own land, etc. My take is that driving needs to be an action (like 99% of all actions) where a person's responsibility is to avoid trampling on the rights of others, knowing that society has severe consequences prepared if that line is crossed. Drinking isn't a problem. Driving isn't a problem. The combination isn't a problem. The problem is when other people's rights are trampled upon. So trying to use technology to eliminate drinking and driving is the wrong path. In my opinion.
No, it doesn't. Neither do laws, neither will any technology I am aware of. However, eliminating the criminal will stop them from doing it again, and as far as I am concerned, that is the right choice as soon as we can be sure we have the right "criminal." At this time, I do not support the death penalty because we make so many mistakes in identifying the perpetrator. Life imprisonment unless they can prove they didn't do it, instead. The very day we can know they did it, we kill them.
When thinking of a (presently imaginary) technology used to "stop killing", it is also important to realize that there are many valid scenarios that involve killing. If you enter my home in the dead of night, you've violated my rights and I can kill you. If you attack my family on the street, you've violated their and my rights and I can kill you. If you've taken hostages, you've violated their rights and I can kill you. If you are about to poison a water source, you're going to be violating many people's rights, and I can kill you to stop you. If you attempt to hijack an aircraft, you've violated the othe
Read and learn.
No. I'm not saying that at all.
I'm saying that people are good or bad, people's actions are good or bad, and it hasn't got a single thing to do with cars, bullets, or highways. That's just evasive nonsense, mumbo jumbo from addled thinkers (or those seeking to escape responsibility.) We're human. We can choose. Choose well, and bear responsibility for good; choose poorly, and bear responsibility for bad. Technology isn't the culprit here. It's you. It's me. It's people.
People make choices. They're responsible for those choices. Highways, guns and communications are not. Any philosophical mumbo jumbo that says the more choices are available the more blame the choices carry, is completely and utterly worthless. Likewise, when technology can amplify a choice we make, we carry additional responsibility; the technology carries none at all. This has been true since the first rock was used with intent to kill.
Responsibility is the lost idea in modern civilization. People do anything to avoid it, to slough it off onto someone else. Well, I'm here to tell you straight out that the existence of a gun makes you no less culpable when you kill someone because it is physically easier to do, and no more respectable when you refrain in the face of whatever tempts you. It is no more or less about you and me than it was a thousand years ago. Science and technology are neutral. We have the power to turn them in either direction. We always have. There's no one here but us, and objects don't make choices. As the power is ours, so is the responsibility. 100%.
Also: If you let media change your mind, that's your responsibility. Media can only be "active" through your actions. In other words, you can always choose. Some choices are more difficult than others, certainly, but who ever promised you an easy ride? If anyone did, they were lying and you were a fool to believe them. Just about every choice you make carries responsibility with it. There's no way out. You can't blame the Internet, highways or weapons for your problems. Your problems come from human sources, at least those that aren't sourced by the ongoing processes of nature. Technology, science... these are the last places to look to place blame.
Certainly. Presumption isn't always a bad thing, as long as you understand what you're doing. Furthermore, it is presumption subject to future modification, something science excels at. It is precisely the same type of presumption that applies to invisible pink dancing unicorns that live in your attic. No evidence can be obtained to support the idea no matter how hard one tries, historically speaking, so the reasonable presumption is then that the idea is most likely not describing reality. There is no significant difference between the idea of god and the idea of the attic-dwelling IPDU.
Nonsense. Science is a set of methods, or more broadly, it is commonly thought of as the collection of results from applying those methods. None of that includes God (or gods) in any meaningful way. See your history, particularly Francis Bacon.
Science and mathematics are the only ones in that "litter" that ever grew up to be more than clueless puppies, actually. Religion was stillborn with regard to evidence and reality, and philosophy spends most of its time chasing its own tail. No matter how hard you think about something stupid, or untrue, it won't change to something brilliant or true. Reality is what it is, and no amount of reputation, admiration, or even worship, will change the basic facts of existence.
Absolutely. I'm not in the least offended by what other people choose to do to themselves and with intelligently consenting partners. Amused sometimes, but not offended. I'm only offended by what people do to non-consenting partners or partners who cannot consent in a reasonably intelligent fashion. And in such cases, it is useful to know what is going on.
You said yourself: "we're helluva lot better at polluting the planet"... the culprit isn't technology. The culprit is people. Technology can clean up pollution, even eliminate it at its source in some cases. You're blaming the gun for the thoughts and actions of the person who decided to fire it, which is wrong. Guns and technology have no way to say "No, wait, don't do that!" It's not the same as when Bush orders a cop to pick someone up without a warrant; the action is evil, and the cop is evil for obeying because that cop could (and should) have said "no, this is wrong" and aborted the process. The lesson is: You can't blame intermediaries in any human action unless those intermediaries are also human.
Well, we call that the Government of the United States of America; they used to be controlled by a document we call the constitution, which laid a very nice groundwork for a government, but that era appears to be completely over.
Witness Commerce clause absurdities, 2nd amendment erosion, ex post facto law and punishment, phone tapping, mail opening, "free speech zones", theft of land for tax revenue, government backing of religion in multiple venues, loss of habeas corpus, torture... and all these changes made in how we operate without the (supposedly) required constitutional hoop-jumping. The only question that remains is, what new way will they find to foul our nest?
How close are we, really, to becoming something that in no serious way resembles what the founders put in place? As this happens, from where does the government derive its authority? If it won't obey the constitution (and that seems very clear indeed), then how is the government going to justify any action it takes? I really don't understand how a government official can look a run of the mill citizen in the eye today. But again, we're talking about the actions of human beings, not the capabilities of a government. Just because you have databases doesn't mean you have to make no-fly lists; you could have a list of people who need cancer surgery, instead.
Technology, inanimate objects, ideas - even horrifying ideas - these aren't the enemy. People without ethics that take other people's rights into account, or with canned ethics based on apocalyptic religious bullshit like G. W. Bush, those people are the problem.
Nonsense. When there is no evidence for any one item, event or personage, the reasonable default position is non-existence.
If you want to bring the presumption of a god or gods into science, then you have the obligation to bring evidence, theory, repeatability. Without that, you have nothing scientific. You just have an idea you like to think about.
Religion does not intersect with science at this time. Perhaps it will someday.
Religion in the sense of dogma. "It can't be done", "hopeless", etc. as described in the summary. Rather than try to actually examine the issue at hand, those people took the dogma and tread water. The Chinese researcher used science and got the results the others were taking from the book of common presumption. It's a religious approach against a scientific approach in the most common sense of the word. With the caveat that we assume that the story is true, of course. This is slashdot... :)
We gain the obvious: The more we know, the better off we are. All science contributes to rolling back the veil of the unknown, and (eventually) almost all science benefits us. Encryption research is no exception. Suppressing research in favor of the dogma of the day is old-school religious thinking. Not a good way to go.
Besides; my suspicion is that if she's gone and cracked it, the odds are at least reasonable that the NSA and crew already had, anyway — it's not like they would tell us if they had. Time to move on.
Science, 1. Religion, 0.
Also no. Banks should be using https/html and https/cgi. I don't rent my cpu out to them, and I don't want their code running on my computer. That goes for everyone else, too. As soon as you presume you can run a "client" application on my machine, you may be impacting other things I am doing without my permission. If you don't have the CPU power you need to run your operation, I decline to run it for you except in special cases that I will pick according to my own needs.
And hey, as a bonus, your stuff will work for everyone who can read your language(s), no platform specific issues at all. Isn't that cool?
Seriously, this whole "surfer as slave CPU" trend has gone entirely too far.
Being there didn't help me count; but the number of deaths I am aware of is four. The aftermath is, as near as I can tell, summed up very accurately at this site. While you're there, take a good look at the "criminals" those national guardsmen executed. The most pitiful excuses for people "serving their country" I can imagine. Scum.
And of course, as we now know, the Vietnam war was undertaken under false pretenses, just like the current Iraq war. The gulf of Tonkin (sp?) incident was falsified. Those kids were protesting having to die for that war, being unable to vote or drink, but being perfectly acceptable cannon fodder; they had every right to raise hell. Constitutionally and otherwise. Bad enough that some paid with their lives, but worse.... it had little effect. A couple of songs, and off the nation went, same thing, different day.
And people wonder why I'm gloomy about the Iraq war.
The guardsmen were completely out of range of anything anyone could have thrown in the class of a brick or a bottle containing fluids and trailing cloth at the time they fired. They had no legitimate reason - I repeat - no legitimate reason - to fire. As far as anything left on the ground goes, Gasoline or high proof liquor (as some were) molotov cocktails are no threat on the ground. They're dangerous when they are thrown. If they break on the ground (presumably from the heat of the burning cloth... unlikely, but possible), you can walk away from them.