Being obscene is a crime in most places. The only differences are (1) what counts as obscenity, and (2) the penalties.
"India has many laws that are rooted in the prude thinking that is pretty much common there"
The same can be said for many countries when seen from the viewpoint of more liberal ones. Inhabitants of much of Europe for example regard the fact that women in the US can be arrested for going topless on public beaches as laws that are rooted in prudishness that appears to be extremely common there.
"That is just as awkward and amateurish. It identifies the almost irrelevant sex of the 'suspect' while omitting detail germane to the issues of jurisdiction and ethics."
The term "Indian" always has referred to things from India, e.g. Indian elephant. It's an accident of history that natives of the Americas also became called Indians, because Columbus was seeking alternative routes to India, China, the Spice Islands and other sources of expensive stuff, and although he knew the Earth was round, he thought it was much smaller than it is, so he initially believed the Caribbean islands were parts of India (hence the name "West Indies").
"The word "desktop" connotes work, and while PCs are certainly used to help people perform "work""
Personal Computers were all about work when the term was coined. Home computers were called "home computers", and tended to be sold without what were then expensive peripherals such as disk drives and dedicated monitors (although these could sometimes be added). It was actually quite unusual for the first personal computers to have any graphics capabilities at all: CP/M machines were usually connected to serial text terminals, and IBM's later offering initially came with a Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) that was also only capable of displaying text. Sound was likewise limited to a device that was intended for emitting beeps (although programmers became adept at coaxing a lot more out of the IBM PC's less than spectacular sound hardware).
"Multimedia and the idea of convergence really started to chip away at the idea that a PC is a virtual desktop"
The term "ready for the desktop" is used to denote a machine that's fit to be used _on_ a desktop by the sort of people who usually sit at desks in offices instead of being put in a server room, factory floor, pocket, sound or movie studio, or the inside of another machine (embedded system). It has nothing whatsoever to do with the increasingly old desktop GUI metaphor, especially nowadays when it's rare for any of the so-called "desktops" to bear even a remote resemblance to the top of a desk with some stuff on it.
"Keep the Desktop at work"
That's the environment Xerox originally intended to use it in, and Apple's Lisa (and later Mac) that were inspired by them were also primarily intended to be business machines.
Red Hat and IBM make money off enterprise customers who buy support contracts (and pricey hardware in IBM's case) for servers; RH gave up on any hopes of earning money from desktop Linux several years ago, and IBM no longer make personal computers, so they have no interest in it either.
Novell started making money this year after a long period of losing it. Again, the vast bulk comes from enterprise customers running servers -- their income from desktop users is negligible.
As Loki and others have shown, it's extremely difficult to make enough money selling commercial software to desktop Linux users to support even a small company, let alone cover the porting, marketing, and support costs of larger ones.
"check the Ubuntu forums: there's no real consistency in comments about the readniess of Ubuntu for the mainstream: some computer illiterates say it's ready, some don't. Some geeks say it's ready, some don't."
People post inconsistent opinions on MS and Apple forums too, though. OS X 10.5 is the bee's knees, OS X 10.5 is a buggy piece of crap and I hate the transparent UI bits; Windows Vista is so great that I'd gladly sell my own liver and give the money to Microsoft, Windows Vista is a slow resource-hogging POS. And as with Ubuntu, both positive and negative comments come from newbies, geeks, and everyone in between.
"I don't think [Apple] realize the importance of gaining support from users in the Linux-sphere compared to the ease with which they could do it."
Alternatively, Apple may have done a cost / benefit analysis, and concluded that people who use Linux are unlikely to buy iPods or music from the iTunes store, so there's no real point in porting iTunes to it.
"Much like you only have to agree to the Windows EULA if you choose to turn the PC on"
You don't need a third party agreement to start and drive the motor vehicle itself. The EULA governs _where_ you can drive it, not _whether_ you can do so.
"and even then, only if you choose to continue using Windows."
But you have to pay for Windows even if you won't be using it. This isn't the case with motor vehicles because driving licenses, insurance, road use taxes etc. are sold by third parties separately from the vehicles themselves, so you don't pay for them if you aren't intending to drive on public roads.
"However, he's trying to return PART of what he purchased. It's kinda like buying a dvd and then going "Oh, I don't like all these interviews / commentaries, but I don't want to return the $20 dvd, just give me $8 and take back the interviews and commentaries""
It's actually more like somebody being forced to pay for a bunch of DVDs from Universal with 90% of the DVD players out there (and pretty much every one of them that's sold in stores), but having a refund coupon in the box that the manufacturers do everything in their power to avoid honouring.
"In order to use that car you bought, you have to agree to a separate legal agreement (road rules) with a third party (the government) who was not involved in the legal and financial transaction of buying the car."
That's only true if you want to drive it on public roads. There's no need for a driving license, insurance, or for a vehicle to be road-legal (e.g. some types of racing cars and bikes, many agricultural and construction vehicles, main battle tanks) if it's only going to be used off-road.
"Mimes suck and France should never had invented them."
France didn't invent mime: that "honour" goes to the ancient Greeks. And much of what we currently call "French Mime" was actually the fault of Italians, who introduced it to France in 1576.
Note that the accordion isn't a French invention either (Austria and Germany were responsible for that one), so neither of the notable crimes against humanity that they're frequently accused of are actually French.
I didn't say it was. However, there are a large number of things that are mathematically possible but not physically practical, e.g. building a tesseract or an infinitely connected network.
"Maybe it's only impossible because we don't have the physical resources"
Why bother repeating what I've already said?
"And you are wrong, you could genetically engineer humans to have wings if you really set your mind to it."
I suggest you do some checking up on the physiology of flying animals, especially large ones such as the Canada goose before making ludicrous statements like this one.
" Or you can build an airplane. The matter is not what got you off the ground, the design did."
Another ludicrous statement, because the design is wholly dependant on the properties of matter. If this wasn't the case, then working man-carrying aircraft could be carved from solid stone or lead poured into moulds, and be able to fly into space because they wouldn't rely on air to generate lift.
Because anyone who doesn't agree with you must be a troll by definition.
"Sure, some things comes over very long distances, but you completely bypass that the stuff those animals eat could be used in other things as well than feeding animals:)"
"For a well-off professional with above average disposable income, no amount of vegetarian or vegan eating, recycling, organic local produce or packaging avoidance will make any shrinkage of our shadow. Flying time, petrol spend and energy bills will predominate."
"The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan..."
Japanese meat production is, and always has been extremely inefficient because they don't have much land that's suitable for natural animal grazing and fodder production.
"You also bypass completely the fact that vegans do not eat exotic foods only, yes they are part as some things are simply not grown locally even if the climate would suit."
1. Not mentioning something isn't "bypassing" it. I'm not writing a book, but refuting a brief post with another brief post.
2. They don't have to eat exotic foods to incur transport costs -- a truck with 20 tons of carrots in it uses the same amount of fuel as a truck with 20 tons of meat to cover the same distance. Anything not grown locally (and I don't mean in the same country, but within a few miles of where the consumer lives) incurs a significant transport overhead, irrespective of what it is.
"You also completely bypass that vegans are not the only ones who eat stuff which comes over long distances, like bananas, rice, quite often soy"
While you bypass the fact than non-vegans don't need to eat as much of them, so they incur less transport overhead.
"Furthermore, freighters quite often, or rarely are high-speed, more like tuned for fuel economy"
"alcohol is good for what else than drinking and disinfectant? Yes, that's right, as a fuel. Atleast where i live was it 5% of all gas sold has to be alcohol, mixed into your normal DIN 95 octane or DIN 98 octane."
While you, who accuse me of bypassing things, neatly bypass the fact that producing bioethanol from corn has a slightly worse carbon footprint than fossil fuels:
"Which of these are more environmentally friendly:
- Meat produced locally
- Vegetary foods produced locally
- Regular vegan diet which combines local & foreign foods "
It depends where you live. In my part of the world for example;
- Meat, dairy products, leather, wool, and poultry come from local free range animals that graze land which isn't well suited to other types of agriculture. They produce natural fertiliser that's collected and used by farmers and gardeners, thus reducing dependance on industrial fertilisers.
- Locally produced crops include (but aren't restricted to) rice, citrus fruits, some tropical fruits, tomatoes, melons of several types, lettuce, spinach, and artichokes. A balanced diet is not possible with local crops alone, none of which contains enough protein, and rice is the only one with a significant level of carbohydrate
"They don't need to stop eating as often but enjoy eating better quality food in sensible amounts."
That's easy for people who can afford quality food to say. In the Western world, there's a notable inverse correlation between obesity and income because junk's a lot cheaper than good stuff, so poorer people are the ones who tend to eat it.
"They don't need to stop eating as often but enjoy eating better quality food in sensible amounts."
Perhaps you'd like to donate half you income to a couple of poor families so they have the financial means to buy better quality food.
"We don't need to stop consuming energy - but we need to enjoy obtaining energy from quality sources"
All of which happen to be far more expensive per watt produced than fossil fuels even at today's prices, so we end up with a situation where the already massively over-consuming wealthy can afford to continue massively over-consuming while everyone else uses is forced to use a lot less.
"Quality lights the room without giving us climate problems."
Coming up with more efficient ways of using our current energy producing systems has a similar effect, but it reduces the amount most people will need to spend instead of increasing it.
"Vegans have way smaller carbon footprint because they don't eat meat, nor any animal based foods."
Where food comes from has a far greater effect on its carbon footprint than the type of food. A vegan who eats fruit, nuts, and vegetables that are have to be transported over long distances will for example have a much higher carbon footprint than somebody who eats meat, eggs, etc, that are produced locally by animals that eat locally grown animal fodder.
"Animals consume way way way more food during their lifespan than what you get to eat"
Much of that food is however things we cannot eat, e.g. grass, hay (a by-product of wheat production), and various other things that they're equipped to handle, but we aren't. Some (e.g. pigs, chickens) are primarily fed on stuff that's not fit for human consumption, and would therefore be thrown away, to become food for colonies of bacteria that produce heat, methane, and CO2 without benefiting us in any way.
"What are they really good producing, constantly?"
The same stuff that the rotting plant matter would be producing if it wasn't consumed by animals whose stomachs contain bacteria which are similar to those that produce methane when breaking down dead plants outside the stomachs of animals. This is why swamps (which by their nature have few if any large grazing animals living in them) produce extremely large amounts of methane, and also the reason that pockets of it have always been a hazard in coal mines, as well as becoming a source of natural gas in the 20th century (clue: natural gas reserves were produced at a time when there were no animals more complex than insects on land).
"The point is, that it's eating meat whats the true biggest cause of global warming"
But shipping bananas over long distances in high-speed refrigerated ships is environmentally friendly because vegans eat them.
"I'm not suggesting that they should have simply adopted X11 and modified it, just that they should have taken some inspiration from the feature set."
Perhaps they would have done so if certain aspects of that feature hadn't made X into a less than ideal system for handling graphics on stand-alone computers.
"the situation they have now - running X11 on top of Aqua - is not exactly ideal for X11 users."
The alternative from Apple's viewpoint (i.e. building Aqua on top of X11) would have involved changing so many aspects of X11 itself that they'd still have been faced with writing yet another compatibility layer on top of it to run X11 applications, so we'd have ended up with a situation that's pretty much the same as the one we have now.
"Mainly network transparency"
Apple, Microsoft, and a variety of third parties have managed to produce graphical remote desktop software that works extremely well over networks without incurring X's overhead when handling graphics on stand-alone machines.
"user configurability"
I fail to see where X itself (as opposed to some of the software that runs on top of it) is more configurable than Quartz or the Windows device layer.
"Choice between multiple window managers"
This is not an attribute of X itself. There's nothing to stop people from writing different Window managers that run on top of the base Quartz Compositor layer or the Windows GDI apart from the fact that very few of Microsoft's or Apple's customers would want to use it. Note also that there are many FOSS supporters who regard the plethora of window managers, desktops, and toolkits on Linux as being one of the primary reasons for its failure to compete as a desktop OS, so it's debatable whether X gains or loses from not having a standard window manager and desktop.
"The ability of a single machine to have multiple GUI users simultaneously logged in"
Both Apple and MS support a variety of mechanisms for doing this, e.g. VNC and RDP. They also have their own software for remotely managing clients (in the standard client / server sense rather than the way X uses client and server), i.e. Apple Remote Desktop and Microsoft Terminal Services, both of which have capabilities that go far beyond those of X (e.g. shared clipboards, remote drag-and-drop, file and printer redirection, and a bunch of other stuff).
"If there is something you can't do then you merely need to empower yourself and the impossible becomes possible."
We cannot change the fundamental physical attributes of the universe we inhabit, so many of the impossible things that occur in dreams will continue to be impossible, yet they seem very real indeed to those who are dreaming them, despite the fact that the dreaming person wouldn't consider such things as being plausible (let alone possible) when they're awake.
"And no, the matter isn't what took man into space, it was mans mind which designed the spacecraft and worked out the math."
The history of our forays into both the air and space are notable for the fact that they were made possible by trial and error rather than mathematics (which turned out to be spectacularly wrong more often that it was right). Note also that without suitable matter, no amount of mathematics and imagination would have been able to move us off the ground.
Man cannot do either of these things. We have built machines that can fly and reach space, some of which can carry humans, but people can't do either on their own, despite the fact that dreams of unaided flight are extremely common.
"can have sex with lots of women"
How do you know that I can do this (they have to be really hot)? Remember that I was talking about _my_ dream worlds where _I_ have and can do amazing things. Whether others can do them is no more relevant to my situation than the fact that others can move their legs is to a paraplegic who isn't a paraplegic in his or her dreams.
"they threw away is the lessons of two decades of X development in favor of proceeding with their own proprietary architectures"
Perhaps they, like many in the UNIX community during the mid 1990s when X was a horribly slow, resource-hogging POS, simply believed that it was poorly suited to personal computers, and therefore not worth considering. There have after all been alternative UNIX-based projects that were intended to overcome what many saw as inadequacies in X, e.g. NEWS, Berlin / Fresco, and Y Windows. Others have attempted to overcome its performance problems by providing direct interfaces to hardware within the X framework (FBUI, DRI, etc.)
"Apple especially had an opportunity to do something about it when they built Quartz and Aqua from scratch - when they were retiring QuickDraw and Display Postscript."
Mike Paquet, who was one of Quartz's authors, said that the reason Apple chose not to use X (after spending some time considering it as a possibility) was due to the fact that their version would end up being so different to any other version time they'd added all the features they wanted that it wouldn't have been compatible.
"but it's not open and it's not capable of the neat things X is capable of"
What "neat things" can X do that Quartz isn't capable of?
"The fact is that solipsists, while they profess to believe one thing, *act* as though they really believed in the outside world and the existence of others."
This is because said solipsists discovered that behaving in any other way could have unpleasant consequences long before they were mentally capable of thinking about things like solipsism.
The general refutation of solipsism (and its variants) is dreaming, where our minds create temporary environments that aren't bound by the same laws as those we perceive (or solipsists would say imagine). If my brain can conceive of so many dream worlds where I can fly, have sex with lots of really hot women, own expensive things that are far more wonderful than their equivalents here, etc., etc., then why did that same mind decide to lock into one where I can do / have none of these things? After all, if I'm imagining it all, then surely one imaginary world is as good as any of the others, so I should be able to use the fact that dreams seem real at the time to stay in one that's better than the rather annoying place I'm typing this in.
"Oh well sure, I guess some people are actually agnostic."
Unfortunately, there are lots of people who describe themselves as agnostic who think it's a catch-all phrase for anyone who can't be bothered to think about the subject. I blame this on Huxley for coining the phrase "agnostic" to describe himself instead of something like "apistevo" (without belief), which IMO would have been less ambiguous.
"Or perhaps you don't care enough either way."
The intellectually lazy aren't agnostics, despite the fact that they often describe themselves as being such.
"My point was that you can never be completely certain about anything - so once you're sufficiently certain of something, you might as well just stop mentioning that you're not 100% certain of it."
Agnosticism attempts to draw the boundary between belief and knowledge, i.e. it states that having an opinion about topics that we do not (and in some cases cannot) know is a belief system, not an explanation of the way things are.
"In my case, I realised that I considered the existence of god so unlikely that I was actually an atheist for all intents and purposes."
Unlikely in what way? Remember that agnostics aren't concerned with restrictive Christian definitions of gods (or for that matter to religious topics!), but address the larger question of whether there were / are supernatural entities that played a role in the formation of our current universe and perhaps the nature of life on Earth (these are not necessarily the same topic).
There have been many religions in both time and space, so we must frame our questions in ways that apply to all of them rather than addressing a restricted subset, including for example Aristotle's Prime Mover, a being who set things in motion, but has no interest whatsoever in what happened afterwards, and is therefore utterly oblivious of humans and our attempts at worship.
"The question of knowledge, as unequivocally established above, is entirely disjoint from belief."
"You can legitimately answer:
Yes (you're a theist) No (you're an atheist) I don't know [if I have such a belief] (cowardice or capacity problem - jackass or clueless inability for introspection) [_____] (failure to respond, but you know it's one of the 3 above)"
5. I am an agnostic, and do not therefore believe anything. I may _accept_ the likelihood that certain things are more likely than others based on firm evidence, but this does not mean I believe them.
"The question of knowledge, as unequivocally established above, is entirely disjoint from belief. "
it is indeed, hence the fact that agnosticism can be summed up as being the rejection of beliefs about things which are not known.
"Now, you may use knowledge to justify your lack of belief â" you know there's no evidence for a god or gods whatsoever â" or you may use knowledge to justify your belief â" you know that the universe is orderly, complex and well beyond your ability to comprehend, and this knowledge has caused you to lean towards the view that there must have been a creator"
You could also take the position that because both are demonstrably true, those who claim one is more correct than the other are doing so for superstitious rather than logical reasons (atheist superstition is based on a fallacious claim that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, while theists in your example are basing theirs on the equally fallacious superstition that order, complexity, or an inability for us to comprehend things can only be adequately explained by supernatural entities willing things to be so (animism)).
"So agnosticism isn't a valid answer in response to do you believe, or not. Because agnosticism is about knowledge. Not belief."
Which means that your question is, by trying to frame things in terms you admit aren't relevant to agnosticism, an irrelevance in itself that neither validates or invalidates the position that agnostics take.
Slashdot Mirror
"Apparently "being obscene" is a crime in India"
Being obscene is a crime in most places. The only differences are (1) what counts as obscenity, and (2) the penalties.
"India has many laws that are rooted in the prude thinking that is pretty much common there"
The same can be said for many countries when seen from the viewpoint of more liberal ones. Inhabitants of much of Europe for example regard the fact that women in the US can be arrested for going topless on public beaches as laws that are rooted in prudishness that appears to be extremely common there.
"That is just as awkward and amateurish. It identifies the almost irrelevant sex of the 'suspect' while omitting detail germane to the issues of jurisdiction and ethics."
The term "Indian" always has referred to things from India, e.g. Indian elephant. It's an accident of history that natives of the Americas also became called Indians, because Columbus was seeking alternative routes to India, China, the Spice Islands and other sources of expensive stuff, and although he knew the Earth was round, he thought it was much smaller than it is, so he initially believed the Caribbean islands were parts of India (hence the name "West Indies").
"The word "desktop" connotes work, and while PCs are certainly used to help people perform "work""
Personal Computers were all about work when the term was coined. Home computers were called "home computers", and tended to be sold without what were then expensive peripherals such as disk drives and dedicated monitors (although these could sometimes be added). It was actually quite unusual for the first personal computers to have any graphics capabilities at all: CP/M machines were usually connected to serial text terminals, and IBM's later offering initially came with a Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) that was also only capable of displaying text. Sound was likewise limited to a device that was intended for emitting beeps (although programmers became adept at coaxing a lot more out of the IBM PC's less than spectacular sound hardware).
"Multimedia and the idea of convergence really started to chip away at the idea that a PC is a virtual desktop"
The term "ready for the desktop" is used to denote a machine that's fit to be used _on_ a desktop by the sort of people who usually sit at desks in offices instead of being put in a server room, factory floor, pocket, sound or movie studio, or the inside of another machine (embedded system). It has nothing whatsoever to do with the increasingly old desktop GUI metaphor, especially nowadays when it's rare for any of the so-called "desktops" to bear even a remote resemblance to the top of a desk with some stuff on it.
"Keep the Desktop at work"
That's the environment Xerox originally intended to use it in, and Apple's Lisa (and later Mac) that were inspired by them were also primarily intended to be business machines.
Red Hat and IBM make money off enterprise customers who buy support contracts (and pricey hardware in IBM's case) for servers; RH gave up on any hopes of earning money from desktop Linux several years ago, and IBM no longer make personal computers, so they have no interest in it either.
Novell started making money this year after a long period of losing it. Again, the vast bulk comes from enterprise customers running servers -- their income from desktop users is negligible.
As Loki and others have shown, it's extremely difficult to make enough money selling commercial software to desktop Linux users to support even a small company, let alone cover the porting, marketing, and support costs of larger ones.
"check the Ubuntu forums: there's no real consistency in comments about the readniess of Ubuntu for the mainstream: some computer illiterates say it's ready, some don't. Some geeks say it's ready, some don't."
People post inconsistent opinions on MS and Apple forums too, though. OS X 10.5 is the bee's knees, OS X 10.5 is a buggy piece of crap and I hate the transparent UI bits; Windows Vista is so great that I'd gladly sell my own liver and give the money to Microsoft, Windows Vista is a slow resource-hogging POS. And as with Ubuntu, both positive and negative comments come from newbies, geeks, and everyone in between.
"Each Linux distro sale or download can result in dozens of installations"
It can also result in zero installations that actually end up being used as a day-to-day OS.
"I don't think [Apple] realize the importance of gaining support from users in the Linux-sphere compared to the ease with which they could do it."
Alternatively, Apple may have done a cost / benefit analysis, and concluded that people who use Linux are unlikely to buy iPods or music from the iTunes store, so there's no real point in porting iTunes to it.
"Much like you only have to agree to the Windows EULA if you choose to turn the PC on"
You don't need a third party agreement to start and drive the motor vehicle itself. The EULA governs _where_ you can drive it, not _whether_ you can do so.
"and even then, only if you choose to continue using Windows."
But you have to pay for Windows even if you won't be using it. This isn't the case with motor vehicles because driving licenses, insurance, road use taxes etc. are sold by third parties separately from the vehicles themselves, so you don't pay for them if you aren't intending to drive on public roads.
"However, he's trying to return PART of what he purchased. It's kinda like buying a dvd and then going "Oh, I don't like all these interviews / commentaries, but I don't want to return the $20 dvd, just give me $8 and take back the interviews and commentaries""
It's actually more like somebody being forced to pay for a bunch of DVDs from Universal with 90% of the DVD players out there (and pretty much every one of them that's sold in stores), but having a refund coupon in the box that the manufacturers do everything in their power to avoid honouring.
"In order to use that car you bought, you have to agree to a separate legal agreement (road rules) with a third party (the government) who was not involved in the legal and financial transaction of buying the car."
That's only true if you want to drive it on public roads. There's no need for a driving license, insurance, or for a vehicle to be road-legal (e.g. some types of racing cars and bikes, many agricultural and construction vehicles, main battle tanks) if it's only going to be used off-road.
"the point is that a French customer should be able to buy a hardware without any software"
The point is actually about buying hardware without being forced to _pay for_ software from a third party.
"Mimes suck and France should never had invented them."
France didn't invent mime: that "honour" goes to the ancient Greeks. And much of what we currently call "French Mime" was actually the fault of Italians, who introduced it to France in 1576.
Note that the accordion isn't a French invention either (Austria and Germany were responsible for that one), so neither of the notable crimes against humanity that they're frequently accused of are actually French.
"It's not mathematically impossible"
I didn't say it was. However, there are a large number of things that are mathematically possible but not physically practical, e.g. building a tesseract or an infinitely connected network.
"Maybe it's only impossible because we don't have the physical resources"
Why bother repeating what I've already said?
"And you are wrong, you could genetically engineer humans to have wings if you really set your mind to it."
I suggest you do some checking up on the physiology of flying animals, especially large ones such as the Canada goose before making ludicrous statements like this one.
" Or you can build an airplane. The matter is not what got you off the ground, the design did."
Another ludicrous statement, because the design is wholly dependant on the properties of matter. If this wasn't the case, then working man-carrying aircraft could be carved from solid stone or lead poured into moulds, and be able to fly into space because they wouldn't rely on air to generate lift.
"You should be rated Troll :)"
:)"
Because anyone who doesn't agree with you must be a troll by definition.
"Sure, some things comes over very long distances, but you completely bypass that the stuff those animals eat could be used in other things as well than feeding animals
Such as?
"http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/11/food.climatechange"
The last paragraph says:
"For a well-off professional with above average disposable income, no amount of vegetarian or vegan eating, recycling, organic local produce or packaging avoidance will make any shrinkage of our shadow. Flying time, petrol spend and energy bills will predominate."
"http://vegetarian.about.com/od/vegetarianvegan101/f/fossilfuels.htm"
There is a world outside the US which doesn't use 25% of global energy production for 3% of the planet's population.
"http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19526134.500"
"The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan..."
Japanese meat production is, and always has been extremely inefficient because they don't have much land that's suitable for natural animal grazing and fodder production.
"You also bypass completely the fact that vegans do not eat exotic foods only, yes they are part as some things are simply not grown locally even if the climate would suit."
1. Not mentioning something isn't "bypassing" it. I'm not writing a book, but refuting a brief post with another brief post.
2. They don't have to eat exotic foods to incur transport costs -- a truck with 20 tons of carrots in it uses the same amount of fuel as a truck with 20 tons of meat to cover the same distance. Anything not grown locally (and I don't mean in the same country, but within a few miles of where the consumer lives) incurs a significant transport overhead, irrespective of what it is.
"You also completely bypass that vegans are not the only ones who eat stuff which comes over long distances, like bananas, rice, quite often soy"
While you bypass the fact than non-vegans don't need to eat as much of them, so they incur less transport overhead.
"Furthermore, freighters quite often, or rarely are high-speed, more like tuned for fuel economy"
Balderdash:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/break-bulk-reefer.htm
"alcohol is good for what else than drinking and disinfectant? Yes, that's right, as a fuel. Atleast where i live was it 5% of all gas sold has to be alcohol, mixed into your normal DIN 95 octane or DIN 98 octane."
While you, who accuse me of bypassing things, neatly bypass the fact that producing bioethanol from corn has a slightly worse carbon footprint than fossil fuels:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/01/complete-carbon-footprint-of-biofuel.html
"Which of these are more environmentally friendly:
- Meat produced locally
- Vegetary foods produced locally
- Regular vegan diet which combines local & foreign foods
"
It depends where you live. In my part of the world for example;
- Meat, dairy products, leather, wool, and poultry come from local free range animals that graze land which isn't well suited to other types of agriculture. They produce natural fertiliser that's collected and used by farmers and gardeners, thus reducing dependance on industrial fertilisers.
- Locally produced crops include (but aren't restricted to) rice, citrus fruits, some tropical fruits, tomatoes, melons of several types, lettuce, spinach, and artichokes. A balanced diet is not possible with local crops alone, none of which contains enough protein, and rice is the only one with a significant level of carbohydrate
"They don't need to stop eating as often but enjoy eating better quality food in sensible amounts."
That's easy for people who can afford quality food to say. In the Western world, there's a notable inverse correlation between obesity and income because junk's a lot cheaper than good stuff, so poorer people are the ones who tend to eat it.
"They don't need to stop eating as often but enjoy eating better quality food in sensible amounts."
Perhaps you'd like to donate half you income to a couple of poor families so they have the financial means to buy better quality food.
"We don't need to stop consuming energy - but we need to enjoy obtaining energy from quality sources"
All of which happen to be far more expensive per watt produced than fossil fuels even at today's prices, so we end up with a situation where the already massively over-consuming wealthy can afford to continue massively over-consuming while everyone else uses is forced to use a lot less.
"Quality lights the room without giving us climate problems."
Coming up with more efficient ways of using our current energy producing systems has a similar effect, but it reduces the amount most people will need to spend instead of increasing it.
"Vegans have way smaller carbon footprint because they don't eat meat, nor any animal based foods."
Where food comes from has a far greater effect on its carbon footprint than the type of food. A vegan who eats fruit, nuts, and vegetables that are have to be transported over long distances will for example have a much higher carbon footprint than somebody who eats meat, eggs, etc, that are produced locally by animals that eat locally grown animal fodder.
"Animals consume way way way more food during their lifespan than what you get to eat"
Much of that food is however things we cannot eat, e.g. grass, hay (a by-product of wheat production), and various other things that they're equipped to handle, but we aren't. Some (e.g. pigs, chickens) are primarily fed on stuff that's not fit for human consumption, and would therefore be thrown away, to become food for colonies of bacteria that produce heat, methane, and CO2 without benefiting us in any way.
"What are they really good producing, constantly?"
The same stuff that the rotting plant matter would be producing if it wasn't consumed by animals whose stomachs contain bacteria which are similar to those that produce methane when breaking down dead plants outside the stomachs of animals. This is why swamps (which by their nature have few if any large grazing animals living in them) produce extremely large amounts of methane, and also the reason that pockets of it have always been a hazard in coal mines, as well as becoming a source of natural gas in the 20th century (clue: natural gas reserves were produced at a time when there were no animals more complex than insects on land).
"The point is, that it's eating meat whats the true biggest cause of global warming"
But shipping bananas over long distances in high-speed refrigerated ships is environmentally friendly because vegans eat them.
"I'm not suggesting that they should have simply adopted X11 and modified it, just that they should have taken some inspiration from the feature set."
Perhaps they would have done so if certain aspects of that feature hadn't made X into a less than ideal system for handling graphics on stand-alone computers.
"the situation they have now - running X11 on top of Aqua - is not exactly ideal for X11 users."
The alternative from Apple's viewpoint (i.e. building Aqua on top of X11) would have involved changing so many aspects of X11 itself that they'd still have been faced with writing yet another compatibility layer on top of it to run X11 applications, so we'd have ended up with a situation that's pretty much the same as the one we have now.
"Mainly network transparency"
Apple, Microsoft, and a variety of third parties have managed to produce graphical remote desktop software that works extremely well over networks without incurring X's overhead when handling graphics on stand-alone machines.
"user configurability"
I fail to see where X itself (as opposed to some of the software that runs on top of it) is more configurable than Quartz or the Windows device layer.
"Choice between multiple window managers"
This is not an attribute of X itself. There's nothing to stop people from writing different Window managers that run on top of the base Quartz Compositor layer or the Windows GDI apart from the fact that very few of Microsoft's or Apple's customers would want to use it. Note also that there are many FOSS supporters who regard the plethora of window managers, desktops, and toolkits on Linux as being one of the primary reasons for its failure to compete as a desktop OS, so it's debatable whether X gains or loses from not having a standard window manager and desktop.
"The ability of a single machine to have multiple GUI users simultaneously logged in"
Both Apple and MS support a variety of mechanisms for doing this, e.g. VNC and RDP. They also have their own software for remotely managing clients (in the standard client / server sense rather than the way X uses client and server), i.e. Apple Remote Desktop and Microsoft Terminal Services, both of which have capabilities that go far beyond those of X (e.g. shared clipboards, remote drag-and-drop, file and printer redirection, and a bunch of other stuff).
"If there is something you can't do then you merely need to empower yourself and the impossible becomes possible."
We cannot change the fundamental physical attributes of the universe we inhabit, so many of the impossible things that occur in dreams will continue to be impossible, yet they seem very real indeed to those who are dreaming them, despite the fact that the dreaming person wouldn't consider such things as being plausible (let alone possible) when they're awake.
"And no, the matter isn't what took man into space, it was mans mind which designed the spacecraft and worked out the math."
The history of our forays into both the air and space are notable for the fact that they were made possible by trial and error rather than mathematics (which turned out to be spectacularly wrong more often that it was right). Note also that without suitable matter, no amount of mathematics and imagination would have been able to move us off the ground.
"If you can dream it you can do it."
Really?
"Man can fly, can go into space"
Man cannot do either of these things. We have built machines that can fly and reach space, some of which can carry humans, but people can't do either on their own, despite the fact that dreams of unaided flight are extremely common.
"can have sex with lots of women"
How do you know that I can do this (they have to be really hot)? Remember that I was talking about _my_ dream worlds where _I_ have and can do amazing things. Whether others can do them is no more relevant to my situation than the fact that others can move their legs is to a paraplegic who isn't a paraplegic in his or her dreams.
"they threw away is the lessons of two decades of X development in favor of proceeding with their own proprietary architectures"
Perhaps they, like many in the UNIX community during the mid 1990s when X was a horribly slow, resource-hogging POS, simply believed that it was poorly suited to personal computers, and therefore not worth considering. There have after all been alternative UNIX-based projects that were intended to overcome what many saw as inadequacies in X, e.g. NEWS, Berlin / Fresco, and Y Windows. Others have attempted to overcome its performance problems by providing direct interfaces to hardware within the X framework (FBUI, DRI, etc.)
"Apple especially had an opportunity to do something about it when they built Quartz and Aqua from scratch - when they were retiring QuickDraw and Display Postscript."
Mike Paquet, who was one of Quartz's authors, said that the reason Apple chose not to use X (after spending some time considering it as a possibility) was due to the fact that their version would end up being so different to any other version time they'd added all the features they wanted that it wouldn't have been compatible.
"but it's not open and it's not capable of the neat things X is capable of"
What "neat things" can X do that Quartz isn't capable of?
"You're atheist. A person without belief in a god or gods."
An atheist is a person who believes gods do not exist. I am without belief, irrespective of whether it's in gods or anything else.
"See how easy that was?"
It's easy if you arbitrarily redefine existing terms to fit your own personal definitions.
"The fact is that solipsists, while they profess to believe one thing, *act* as though they really believed in the outside world and the existence of others."
This is because said solipsists discovered that behaving in any other way could have unpleasant consequences long before they were mentally capable of thinking about things like solipsism.
The general refutation of solipsism (and its variants) is dreaming, where our minds create temporary environments that aren't bound by the same laws as those we perceive (or solipsists would say imagine). If my brain can conceive of so many dream worlds where I can fly, have sex with lots of really hot women, own expensive things that are far more wonderful than their equivalents here, etc., etc., then why did that same mind decide to lock into one where I can do / have none of these things? After all, if I'm imagining it all, then surely one imaginary world is as good as any of the others, so I should be able to use the fact that dreams seem real at the time to stay in one that's better than the rather annoying place I'm typing this in.
"Oh well sure, I guess some people are actually agnostic."
Unfortunately, there are lots of people who describe themselves as agnostic who think it's a catch-all phrase for anyone who can't be bothered to think about the subject. I blame this on Huxley for coining the phrase "agnostic" to describe himself instead of something like "apistevo" (without belief), which IMO would have been less ambiguous.
"Or perhaps you don't care enough either way."
The intellectually lazy aren't agnostics, despite the fact that they often describe themselves as being such.
"My point was that you can never be completely certain about anything - so once you're sufficiently certain of something, you might as well just stop mentioning that you're not 100% certain of it."
Agnosticism attempts to draw the boundary between belief and knowledge, i.e. it states that having an opinion about topics that we do not (and in some cases cannot) know is a belief system, not an explanation of the way things are.
"In my case, I realised that I considered the existence of god so unlikely that I was actually an atheist for all intents and purposes."
Unlikely in what way? Remember that agnostics aren't concerned with restrictive Christian definitions of gods (or for that matter to religious topics!), but address the larger question of whether there were / are supernatural entities that played a role in the formation of our current universe and perhaps the nature of life on Earth (these are not necessarily the same topic).
There have been many religions in both time and space, so we must frame our questions in ways that apply to all of them rather than addressing a restricted subset, including for example Aristotle's Prime Mover, a being who set things in motion, but has no interest whatsoever in what happened afterwards, and is therefore utterly oblivious of humans and our attempts at worship.
"The question of knowledge, as unequivocally established above, is entirely disjoint from belief."
"You can legitimately answer:
Yes (you're a theist)
No (you're an atheist)
I don't know [if I have such a belief] (cowardice or capacity problem - jackass or clueless inability for introspection)
[_____] (failure to respond, but you know it's one of the 3 above)"
5. I am an agnostic, and do not therefore believe anything. I may _accept_ the likelihood that certain things are more likely than others based on firm evidence, but this does not mean I believe them.
"The question of knowledge, as unequivocally established above, is entirely disjoint from belief. "
it is indeed, hence the fact that agnosticism can be summed up as being the rejection of beliefs about things which are not known.
"Now, you may use knowledge to justify your lack of belief â" you know there's no evidence for a god or gods whatsoever â" or you may use knowledge to justify your belief â" you know that the universe is orderly, complex and well beyond your ability to comprehend, and this knowledge has caused you to lean towards the view that there must have been a creator"
You could also take the position that because both are demonstrably true, those who claim one is more correct than the other are doing so for superstitious rather than logical reasons (atheist superstition is based on a fallacious claim that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, while theists in your example are basing theirs on the equally fallacious superstition that order, complexity, or an inability for us to comprehend things can only be adequately explained by supernatural entities willing things to be so (animism)).
"So agnosticism isn't a valid answer in response to do you believe, or not. Because agnosticism is about knowledge. Not belief."
Which means that your question is, by trying to frame things in terms you admit aren't relevant to agnosticism, an irrelevance in itself that neither validates or invalidates the position that agnostics take.
"later I realized, there always comes a point where you have to draw a line, and pick a side."
Why should those who don't agree with either side have to pick one?