Steve Jobs is indeed the largest single Disney shareholder, but that means he has about 7%, which is far from being enough to let him unilaterally make decisions about any company policies.
"However, I still have to ask for clarification when sitting through finance presentations given in English by German or French people, and I sometimes still see the term "milliard" in their slides."
Add Spanish people to that list, because they also use billion as 10E12, and milliard for 10E9.
"first-courses or first-course-oriented books I've seen that start with "Hello, World!" examples in any language dissect the pieces of the example, rather than leaving everything as "magic"."
The point though is that programming as a concept is completely alien to somebody who hasn't done it before, so the fact that some bits about a very simple Java program can't be explained without knowledge that students don't yet have is not something peculiar to Java, but is inherent in the nature of programming itself.
"And those that use languages with an immediate environment that shows evaluation results tend not to cover I/O much at all until they've covered a lot of other material."
Then they should, because the first thing any student needs to learn is what a program is, i.e. something that processes input, and outputs the result.
"I actually recommend classic assembly as early as possible. If you use a virtual machine that displays the state of the memory and CPU, it will give students a chance to get a grip on what the computer is really doing."
A simplified virtual computer with a very basic CPU, small blocks of virtual ROM and RAM, and some simple virtual I/O devices would indeed be an excellent teaching mechanism. Students could run their code in slow motion, and see graphical displays of registers, stack(s), stuff getting read from and written to memory and I/O, etc. It wouldn't crash when they did something wrong, but stop on the offending instruction with all register and memory values intact and ready for inspection and discussion.
"THEN they can move on to C. (And/Or LISP, depending on what you want to teach them.)"
i think it'd be better for them to implement a simple high-level language for the virtual computer to give them a reasonable idea of how they work before moving on to something more abstract. There were some integer-only but otherwise pretty complete BASIC and FORTH interpreters for some of the old 8-bit microcomputers that "lived" in as little as 2K of ROM, including an (albeit not wonderful) editor, so a simpler language could probably be expressed in a few hundred lines of assembly code.
"Of course, we don't quite live in a world where Virtual Machines of antique computers are accepted by teachers as a valid teaching method. (Yet.)"
That's because there aren't many of them nowadays who would be comfortable enough with even heavily simplified virtual hardware of this sort to use it as an effective teaching aid.
"Classic BASIC provides a set of I/O routines that allow a student to become comfortable with working out the logical flow of a program without worrying about the details of printing to the screen or reading a line of input. Just don't dwell on BASIC for too long or you may make the student too comfortable for their own good."
There are three other advantages to "old style" BASIC from a teaching POV: (1) it has line numbers, so the execution order of instructions is easy to see from the source; (2) everything's built in, so students don't have to worry about specifying external code modules or headers; and (3) it's an interpreter, so they can run their code without having to save and compile it. The major disadvantage of course is implicit variable declarations, which are quite honestly a complete pain for both teaching and writing working code, although BASIC is of course far from being alone in having them.
"Just don't dwell on BASIC for too long or you may make the student too comfortable for their own good."
The fact that old-style BASIC only has global variables and cannot therefore be used to illustrate recursive algorithms, and has no data structures beyond arrays places an effective limit on its usefulness as a teaching tool. An excellent time to introduce a different language is therefore at the point where one is also introducing topics that are outside BASIC's capabilities. However, I'd tend to favour Python over LISP or C as the next step for the following reasons: (1) it's an empirical language like assembler and BASIC that makes good use of their existing knowledge, but has various functional bits (e.g. lambda functions) that can act as a spring-board to working with true functional languages later in the course; (2) the environment is still interpreted, so students spend their time learning to write code instead of messing around with files and compiler command lines; (3) it can be used to illustrate structured programming, modularity, and when the course calls for it, OO techniques; (4) despite the fact that it's controversial, enforced indenting makes students think in terms of indenting their code, while Python's system of using comments as documentation also helps instil good commenting practices; and finally, there are a variety of ways of interfacing with C that can also be used to introduce that language.
"Criminals are not necessarily intelligent enough to think of consequences."
In this sort of case, it's very probable that they're well aware of the potential consequences, but don't give a shit because they're sure that said consequences will end up being Somebody Else's Problem.
"And there's no reason touch screens or other electronic voting machines can't have a paper record either. Diebold, one of the companies making these machines, makes ATMs as well and ATMs print out receipts. Just require the machines to print out a record of the vote on a roll of paper, the voter can check to make sure the name of the person he or she voted for is on the paper."
How will an after-the-fact printed audit trail help if the system "accidentally" either ignores votes for the "wrong candidates" when they're input, or "mistakenly" credits them to the "right candidates"?
"After 10 years in academia there is one sad fact that I've learned the hard way: no matter how good someone's reputation is, and how massive their ego - if they cannot properly communicate what they are doing, they very often are not brilliant scientists who are "just" unable to communicate."
As Einstein said, a person who cannot explain something in simple terms doesn't understand it well enough.
"PASCAL was a great language for teaching but it never really penetrated into the science world as C did."
Perhaps the fact that Pascal was specifically designed for teaching structured programming concepts rather than as a general-purpose programming language might have had something to do with it not being very good for things other than teaching structured programming concepts.
"In the old DOS days, people on PCs used to know what a file was, and what a directory was for."
They did indeed, hence the fact that 95% (I'm being generous here, because it was probably more like 99%) of DOS PCs had all those "file" thingies in the root directory. This was after all what it must be for, otherwise they wouldn't have required learning extra, complicated commands and parameters to put stuff elsewhere and then find it again if you forgot where it was after a week or two.
"All kinds of horrible stuff that you'd learn not to do if you ever had to allocate your own memory and design your own data structures and figure out how the actual hardware works in conjunction with the software."
Because as we all know, malloc() and calloc() are part of every processor's instruction set, so those using them are talking to the hardware directly rather than merely calling an OS routine like those "quiche eater" languages that go around abstracting stuff such arithmetic and complementing, stacks, program counters, registers, and all the other things that every C programmer deals with on a daily basis.
""Yeah, don't worry about that 'public class HelloWorld' bit. We'll get to that later."
"Trust me. You need to have that import in your code. Otherwise it won't work."
"We'll get to that main() method later."
Whereas the standard C "hello world" example will of course be perfectly obvious to any rank programming beginner due to the fact that people are born knowing all about functions, header files, and libraries, whereas objects and classes are something they have to be taught.
"Written in Ada, RT Secure is a real-time, pre-emptive multitasking microkernel optimized for mission-critical applications that require true hard real-time response."
The VG Chartz page doesn't give XBox 360 sales for "other" (i.e. places that aren't Japan and the US), whereas these are included for ever other console and handheld. I somehow doubt that this means nobody outside Japan and the US buys XBox 360s.
I found the software sales chart interesting, because the top 5 in Japan, the US, and "Other" were all Nintendo DS and Wii titles, so it's obvious that the commonly voiced Slashdot opinion about casual gamers who are the Wii's primary market not being likely to buy much if any games for it is turning out to be another case of "less space than a Nomad".
"Americans get slammed all the time on forums like/. for what our government does, after all."
It's mostly other Americans doing the slamming though, because the people who live in a country experience _everything_ their government does, while the rest of us are only on the receiving end of its foreign policy.
"There's a reason bundling like this is mostly illegal in the EU"
if you're using "bundling like this is mostly illegal in the EU" to mean "bundling like this is common practice in the vast majority of EU member countries", then I'd agree with you.
"Referring to scientific facts in terms of 'faith' and 'belief' is rather an unfortunate choice of terminology. There's no need to believe in facts. There's no need to 'have faith' in random mutations--you can prove to yourself that such things happen, and thus have no need for 'faith'.
Have you, or for that matter the majority of people who claim that science deals with "facts" actually tested anything beyond the most basic ones (i.e. the sort of experiments that Galileo and Newton could do)? If you haven't done so, then you're basing much of your world view on what you've told rather than what you really _know_ to be true, which is a pretty good definition of belief.
"I don't know of any religion that accepts "that's the way things are", they all try to say "no it's not! This is the result of our doing something!!""
Most of them have something that boils down to the pretty much the same thing, e.g. "God moves in mysterious ways" (translation: shit happens).
"Imagine the world, where anyone, talking about God, is treated just as if talking about their imaginary, bright, blue, fuzzy friend, that's invisible, to those who don't believe.
Happy sunny future."
People who believe one thing have been treating those who believe something different like that for millennia.
"You've certainly managed to pick some negative examples of what can happen"
My examples were of things that _have_ happened, not what might happen.
"Yes some laws are bad laws but there are also an awful lot of laws which aren't."
This does not alter the fact that there have been (and still are in many countries) large numbers of laws which we would describe as instruments of oppression, while those who made and enforced them regarded them as being necessary for (to use your term) "the smooth running" of their society. Spartacus (who was a real historical person) for example is always a hero in modern Western versions of the story, but Romans saw things very differently indeed, so they regarded crucifying him and thousands of followers along the Appian Way as a perfectly reasonable punishment for people who had committed the worst possible crime, i.e. a form of treason that threatened to completely destroy the economic and social model that not only Rome, but just about every ancient civilisation was based on.
"What you haven't done is presented any argument as to what is wrong with beginning to phase out religous institutions."
That's because I'd be extremely happy indeed to see them and other superstitions (e.g. astrology) disappear entirely. I'm not arguing in favour of religion, but against totalitarians like yourself who think that their definition of "the truth" should be forced on everyone because it's "obviously" the correct one. This is exactly the same line of thought that led to things like the Spanish Inquisition (which of course nobody ever expects...), regular pogroms against Jews (who everyone in mediaeval Europe knew were baby-eating Jesus-killing diabolists who'd caused the Black Death by deliberately poisoning wells), witches, Cathars, Protestants, Catholics, anyone who wasn't a Calvanist, communists, socialists, homosexuals, pagans, Sikhs, and a vast list of others whose "crime" was having "the wrong" ideas (or in many cases, simply being accused of it, or knowing somebody who'd been accused of it).
"I've said they serve no purpose and on balance get in the way of rational society and nothing you've said has convinced me otherwise."
Because you're a dogmatist who automatically assumes that everyone with a contrary position to one or more of your ideas must by definition be a representative of "the other side", because all your ideas are so obviously correct that only a complete infidel could possibly find anything wrong with any of them. One excellent example of this dogmatism in action is your definition of "rational society", which is one that somehow manages to have laws against not agreeing with official definitions of the truth, but is supposedly different from various repressive theocracies, who also have the notable characteristic of making it illegal to disagree with their official definition of "the truth".
"Yeah. We (atheists) are right. And they (religions) are wrong."
I hope you realise that this is exactly the same thing members of one religion have said about other religions for millennia. All religions claim that their world view is the one and only real truth, so everyone else must by definition be wrong.
"If they had to respond to the sword with their prayers, who'd have the survival advantage? Religion is a bad tool."
I suggest you read about the religions of the Norse, Incas and Aztecs, Greco-Romans, Celts, ancient Jews in the Old Testament, Shintoists, Sikhs, and the life of Mohammed before claiming that followers of "religion" meet swords with prayers.
"I'm NOT advocating a religious war. I don't want anyone killed over that AGAIN."
How could there be such a thing if followers of "religion" are a bunch of pacifists whose response to being attacked is prayer?
"I want religions to disappear, displaced by science."
Most religions want theirs to be the only one, because they know all the others are wrong. What this says about some atheists is left as an exercise for any who haven't become too bored by this thread to have stopped reading long ago.
"Teach all children the self-evident scientific method, the origins of the world, give them answers to the Eternal Questions, and all religions will disappear in under a century."
Because as any fool knows, everybody always thinks and acts in exactly the way their teachers tell them to while at school, and thereafter.
"visit any police station late at night and hear the cries of prisoners decrying the foul persecution they are suffering because they did not do it guv' and it wos my mate wot hit him."
This comment is obviously written by somebody who lives in a country where they can think, say, and write pretty much anything. A Chinese or Iranian on the other hand (i.e. people living in precisely the sort of "saying the wrong thing is a crime" society you are advocating) might have a very different opinion of how justified some of those in police cells are of claiming they're being persecuted.
"Society has always stepped in to discourage activies which it deems antisocial"
I completely agree, because history has countless examples of just this sort of thing: Rome and the 18th century American South (to name but two of many) discouraged the antisocial act of not wanting to be a slave; mediaeval and renaissance Europe discouraged the antisocial act of not being a Catholic; Stalin's Russia discouraged the antisocial act of being someone Stalin had taken a dislike to, was suspicious of, or said the wrong thing where one of spies heard it; Pohl Pot discouraged the antisocial act of being able to read and write; etc., etc., etc.
"in many countries society even goes so far as to kill people who break its laws"
And this is OK, because we all know that every law in every country at every time must by definition be just (otherwise it wouldn't be a law), so anyone who breaks one deserves whatever punishment they get.
"As I said I'm not advocating putting anyone to death"
You're a really nice guy who only wants to imprison people for not agreeing with your definition of "the truth".
"I realise this will involve intervention in peoples lives and this is a regrettable but not by any means an unusual activity for a society to engage in to ensure it can run smoothly."
A sentiment that has been expressed in uncannily similar terms by Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and many other influential historical figures.
"Many DMG images are set up to automatically mount, copy their contents to the current directory, then unmount the image and move it to the Trash."
Copying isn't automatically executing.
"Other DMG images are set up to automatically run the OS X installer on an installer package embedded in the DMG after it auto-mounts."
This still isn't a case of automatically executing something on the disk image itself, which versions of MacOS prior to X could do in much the same way as Windows (and as with Windows, the capability could easily be disabled). OS X's package installer is an application already present on the host machine that displays a GUI which the user must interact with for the installation to take place (the DMG containing the package will also be opened in the normal OS X way, so the fact that a DMG has been mounted can be clearly seen), so it should be pretty obvious that (a) something is trying to install itself, and (b) there is an option to cancel it.
NB: the above capability is nothing more or less than OS X' default behaviour of using the application associated with a data file type to automatically open such a file if it is the only thing present on an auto-mounted disk image. I'm not saying this isn't a potential security risk, because there have been many cases of data files (or their names) being specially crafted to take advantage of things like buffer overflows in either the default application that displays them, the OS launch handler, etc., and vulnerabilities of this sort have been found in both in OS X itself and various applications that run on it, although the known ones seem to be patched pretty quickly (as yet unknown ones are obviously still there).
"You can avoid the worst of this crap by turning off the preference in Safari which opens "safe" files after download"
This sort of option should be turned off in _any_ browser on any platform, not just Safari.
"Of course, there's also usually a disclosure sheet attached to the Safari downloads window which asks if you really want to open this image/archive if it looks like it contains an executable."
It looks for other types of potential threat as well, but this doesn't change the fact that it should have been turned off by default. The lesson _all_ software authors should learn from Microsoft's experiences is that automatic behaviour which is intended to make life easier and more convenient for non-technical people often ends up being a major source of misery for them and everyone else, including those who thought that putting it in was a really great idea.
I hope realise that each of those numbered entries represents a different definition of the same term, so your post actually support the parent's statement. it's also a fact that the ability to reason and rational behaviour aren't necessarily the same thing: psychopaths for example are often of well above average intelligence, and therefore obviously have the ability to reason, but that doesn't mean that regularly kidnapping and dissecting living people because one has uncontrollable urge to do is rational behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs is indeed the largest single Disney shareholder, but that means he has about 7%, which is far from being enough to let him unilaterally make decisions about any company policies.
"However, I still have to ask for clarification when sitting through finance presentations given in English by German or French people, and I sometimes still see the term "milliard" in their slides."
Add Spanish people to that list, because they also use billion as 10E12, and milliard for 10E9.
"first-courses or first-course-oriented books I've seen that start with "Hello, World!" examples in any language dissect the pieces of the example, rather than leaving everything as "magic"."
The point though is that programming as a concept is completely alien to somebody who hasn't done it before, so the fact that some bits about a very simple Java program can't be explained without knowledge that students don't yet have is not something peculiar to Java, but is inherent in the nature of programming itself.
"And those that use languages with an immediate environment that shows evaluation results tend not to cover I/O much at all until they've covered a lot of other material."
Then they should, because the first thing any student needs to learn is what a program is, i.e. something that processes input, and outputs the result.
"I actually recommend classic assembly as early as possible. If you use a virtual machine that displays the state of the memory and CPU, it will give students a chance to get a grip on what the computer is really doing."
A simplified virtual computer with a very basic CPU, small blocks of virtual ROM and RAM, and some simple virtual I/O devices would indeed be an excellent teaching mechanism. Students could run their code in slow motion, and see graphical displays of registers, stack(s), stuff getting read from and written to memory and I/O, etc. It wouldn't crash when they did something wrong, but stop on the offending instruction with all register and memory values intact and ready for inspection and discussion.
"THEN they can move on to C. (And/Or LISP, depending on what you want to teach them.)"
i think it'd be better for them to implement a simple high-level language for the virtual computer to give them a reasonable idea of how they work before moving on to something more abstract. There were some integer-only but otherwise pretty complete BASIC and FORTH interpreters for some of the old 8-bit microcomputers that "lived" in as little as 2K of ROM, including an (albeit not wonderful) editor, so a simpler language could probably be expressed in a few hundred lines of assembly code.
"Of course, we don't quite live in a world where Virtual Machines of antique computers are accepted by teachers as a valid teaching method. (Yet.)"
That's because there aren't many of them nowadays who would be comfortable enough with even heavily simplified virtual hardware of this sort to use it as an effective teaching aid.
"Classic BASIC provides a set of I/O routines that allow a student to become comfortable with working out the logical flow of a program without worrying about the details of printing to the screen or reading a line of input. Just don't dwell on BASIC for too long or you may make the student too comfortable for their own good."
There are three other advantages to "old style" BASIC from a teaching POV: (1) it has line numbers, so the execution order of instructions is easy to see from the source; (2) everything's built in, so students don't have to worry about specifying external code modules or headers; and (3) it's an interpreter, so they can run their code without having to save and compile it. The major disadvantage of course is implicit variable declarations, which are quite honestly a complete pain for both teaching and writing working code, although BASIC is of course far from being alone in having them.
"Just don't dwell on BASIC for too long or you may make the student too comfortable for their own good."
The fact that old-style BASIC only has global variables and cannot therefore be used to illustrate recursive algorithms, and has no data structures beyond arrays places an effective limit on its usefulness as a teaching tool. An excellent time to introduce a different language is therefore at the point where one is also introducing topics that are outside BASIC's capabilities. However, I'd tend to favour Python over LISP or C as the next step for the following reasons: (1) it's an empirical language like assembler and BASIC that makes good use of their existing knowledge, but has various functional bits (e.g. lambda functions) that can act as a spring-board to working with true functional languages later in the course; (2) the environment is still interpreted, so students spend their time learning to write code instead of messing around with files and compiler command lines; (3) it can be used to illustrate structured programming, modularity, and when the course calls for it, OO techniques; (4) despite the fact that it's controversial, enforced indenting makes students think in terms of indenting their code, while Python's system of using comments as documentation also helps instil good commenting practices; and finally, there are a variety of ways of interfacing with C that can also be used to introduce that language.
"Criminals are not necessarily intelligent enough to think of consequences."
In this sort of case, it's very probable that they're well aware of the potential consequences, but don't give a shit because they're sure that said consequences will end up being Somebody Else's Problem.
"And there's no reason touch screens or other electronic voting machines can't have a paper record either. Diebold, one of the companies making these machines, makes ATMs as well and ATMs print out receipts. Just require the machines to print out a record of the vote on a roll of paper, the voter can check to make sure the name of the person he or she voted for is on the paper."
How will an after-the-fact printed audit trail help if the system "accidentally" either ignores votes for the "wrong candidates" when they're input, or "mistakenly" credits them to the "right candidates"?
"After 10 years in academia there is one sad fact that I've learned the hard way: no matter how good someone's reputation is, and how massive their ego - if they cannot properly communicate what they are doing, they very often are not brilliant scientists who are "just" unable to communicate."
As Einstein said, a person who cannot explain something in simple terms doesn't understand it well enough.
"PASCAL was a great language for teaching but it never really penetrated into the science world as C did."
Perhaps the fact that Pascal was specifically designed for teaching structured programming concepts rather than as a general-purpose programming language might have had something to do with it not being very good for things other than teaching structured programming concepts.
"In the old DOS days, people on PCs used to know what a file was, and what a directory was for."
They did indeed, hence the fact that 95% (I'm being generous here, because it was probably more like 99%) of DOS PCs had all those "file" thingies in the root directory. This was after all what it must be for, otherwise they wouldn't have required learning extra, complicated commands and parameters to put stuff elsewhere and then find it again if you forgot where it was after a week or two.
"All kinds of horrible stuff that you'd learn not to do if you ever had to allocate your own memory and design your own data structures and figure out how the actual hardware works in conjunction with the software."
Because as we all know, malloc() and calloc() are part of every processor's instruction set, so those using them are talking to the hardware directly rather than merely calling an OS routine like those "quiche eater" languages that go around abstracting stuff such arithmetic and complementing, stacks, program counters, registers, and all the other things that every C programmer deals with on a daily basis.
""Yeah, don't worry about that 'public class HelloWorld' bit. We'll get to that later."
"Trust me. You need to have that import in your code. Otherwise it won't work."
"We'll get to that main() method later."
Whereas the standard C "hello world" example will of course be perfectly obvious to any rank programming beginner due to the fact that people are born knowing all about functions, header files, and libraries, whereas objects and classes are something they have to be taught.
"Good luck implementing an OS with Ada."
http://www.adahome.com/articles/1998-07/nw_ghs.html
"Written in Ada, RT Secure is a real-time, pre-emptive multitasking microkernel optimized for mission-critical applications that require true hard real-time response."
The VG Chartz page doesn't give XBox 360 sales for "other" (i.e. places that aren't Japan and the US), whereas these are included for ever other console and handheld. I somehow doubt that this means nobody outside Japan and the US buys XBox 360s.
I found the software sales chart interesting, because the top 5 in Japan, the US, and "Other" were all Nintendo DS and Wii titles, so it's obvious that the commonly voiced Slashdot opinion about casual gamers who are the Wii's primary market not being likely to buy much if any games for it is turning out to be another case of "less space than a Nomad".
"Americans get slammed all the time on forums like /. for what our government does, after all."
It's mostly other Americans doing the slamming though, because the people who live in a country experience _everything_ their government does, while the rest of us are only on the receiving end of its foreign policy.
"they're the Sony of European countries"
This is such a wonderful phrase that it deserves to become a meme.
Rebellious people like you deserve to have your hands smacked quite hard.
"There's a reason bundling like this is mostly illegal in the EU"
if you're using "bundling like this is mostly illegal in the EU" to mean "bundling like this is common practice in the vast majority of EU member countries", then I'd agree with you.
"Referring to scientific facts in terms of 'faith' and 'belief' is rather an unfortunate choice of terminology. There's no need to believe in facts. There's no need to 'have faith' in random mutations--you can prove to yourself that such things happen, and thus have no need for 'faith'.
Have you, or for that matter the majority of people who claim that science deals with "facts" actually tested anything beyond the most basic ones (i.e. the sort of experiments that Galileo and Newton could do)? If you haven't done so, then you're basing much of your world view on what you've told rather than what you really _know_ to be true, which is a pretty good definition of belief.
"I don't know of any religion that accepts "that's the way things are", they all try to say "no it's not! This is the result of our doing something!!""
Most of them have something that boils down to the pretty much the same thing, e.g. "God moves in mysterious ways" (translation: shit happens).
"Imagine the world, where anyone, talking about God, is treated just as if talking about their imaginary, bright, blue, fuzzy friend, that's invisible, to those who don't believe.
Happy sunny future."
People who believe one thing have been treating those who believe something different like that for millennia.
"You've certainly managed to pick some negative examples of what can happen"
My examples were of things that _have_ happened, not what might happen.
"Yes some laws are bad laws but there are also an awful lot of laws which aren't."
This does not alter the fact that there have been (and still are in many countries) large numbers of laws which we would describe as instruments of oppression, while those who made and enforced them regarded them as being necessary for (to use your term) "the smooth running" of their society. Spartacus (who was a real historical person) for example is always a hero in modern Western versions of the story, but Romans saw things very differently indeed, so they regarded crucifying him and thousands of followers along the Appian Way as a perfectly reasonable punishment for people who had committed the worst possible crime, i.e. a form of treason that threatened to completely destroy the economic and social model that not only Rome, but just about every ancient civilisation was based on.
"What you haven't done is presented any argument as to what is wrong with beginning to phase out religous institutions."
That's because I'd be extremely happy indeed to see them and other superstitions (e.g. astrology) disappear entirely. I'm not arguing in favour of religion, but against totalitarians like yourself who think that their definition of "the truth" should be forced on everyone because it's "obviously" the correct one. This is exactly the same line of thought that led to things like the Spanish Inquisition (which of course nobody ever expects...), regular pogroms against Jews (who everyone in mediaeval Europe knew were baby-eating Jesus-killing diabolists who'd caused the Black Death by deliberately poisoning wells), witches, Cathars, Protestants, Catholics, anyone who wasn't a Calvanist, communists, socialists, homosexuals, pagans, Sikhs, and a vast list of others whose "crime" was having "the wrong" ideas (or in many cases, simply being accused of it, or knowing somebody who'd been accused of it).
"I've said they serve no purpose and on balance get in the way of rational society and nothing you've said has convinced me otherwise."
Because you're a dogmatist who automatically assumes that everyone with a contrary position to one or more of your ideas must by definition be a representative of "the other side", because all your ideas are so obviously correct that only a complete infidel could possibly find anything wrong with any of them. One excellent example of this dogmatism in action is your definition of "rational society", which is one that somehow manages to have laws against not agreeing with official definitions of the truth, but is supposedly different from various repressive theocracies, who also have the notable characteristic of making it illegal to disagree with their official definition of "the truth".
"Yeah. We (atheists) are right. And they (religions) are wrong."
I hope you realise that this is exactly the same thing members of one religion have said about other religions for millennia. All religions claim that their world view is the one and only real truth, so everyone else must by definition be wrong.
"If they had to respond to the sword with their prayers, who'd have the survival advantage? Religion is a bad tool."
I suggest you read about the religions of the Norse, Incas and Aztecs, Greco-Romans, Celts, ancient Jews in the Old Testament, Shintoists, Sikhs, and the life of Mohammed before claiming that followers of "religion" meet swords with prayers.
"I'm NOT advocating a religious war. I don't want anyone killed over that AGAIN."
How could there be such a thing if followers of "religion" are a bunch of pacifists whose response to being attacked is prayer?
"I want religions to disappear, displaced by science."
Most religions want theirs to be the only one, because they know all the others are wrong. What this says about some atheists is left as an exercise for any who haven't become too bored by this thread to have stopped reading long ago.
"Teach all children the self-evident scientific method, the origins of the world, give them answers to the Eternal Questions, and all religions will disappear in under a century."
Because as any fool knows, everybody always thinks and acts in exactly the way their teachers tell them to while at school, and thereafter.
"visit any police station late at night and hear the cries of prisoners decrying the foul persecution they are suffering because they did not do it guv' and it wos my mate wot hit him."
This comment is obviously written by somebody who lives in a country where they can think, say, and write pretty much anything. A Chinese or Iranian on the other hand (i.e. people living in precisely the sort of "saying the wrong thing is a crime" society you are advocating) might have a very different opinion of how justified some of those in police cells are of claiming they're being persecuted.
"Society has always stepped in to discourage activies which it deems antisocial"
I completely agree, because history has countless examples of just this sort of thing: Rome and the 18th century American South (to name but two of many) discouraged the antisocial act of not wanting to be a slave; mediaeval and renaissance Europe discouraged the antisocial act of not being a Catholic; Stalin's Russia discouraged the antisocial act of being someone Stalin had taken a dislike to, was suspicious of, or said the wrong thing where one of spies heard it; Pohl Pot discouraged the antisocial act of being able to read and write; etc., etc., etc.
"in many countries society even goes so far as to kill people who break its laws"
And this is OK, because we all know that every law in every country at every time must by definition be just (otherwise it wouldn't be a law), so anyone who breaks one deserves whatever punishment they get.
"As I said I'm not advocating putting anyone to death"
You're a really nice guy who only wants to imprison people for not agreeing with your definition of "the truth".
"I realise this will involve intervention in peoples lives and this is a regrettable but not by any means an unusual activity for a society to engage in to ensure it can run smoothly."
A sentiment that has been expressed in uncannily similar terms by Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and many other influential historical figures.
"Factually untrue."
Really?
"Many DMG images are set up to automatically mount, copy their contents to the current directory, then unmount the image and move it to the Trash."
Copying isn't automatically executing.
"Other DMG images are set up to automatically run the OS X installer on an installer package embedded in the DMG after it auto-mounts."
This still isn't a case of automatically executing something on the disk image itself, which versions of MacOS prior to X could do in much the same way as Windows (and as with Windows, the capability could easily be disabled). OS X's package installer is an application already present on the host machine that displays a GUI which the user must interact with for the installation to take place (the DMG containing the package will also be opened in the normal OS X way, so the fact that a DMG has been mounted can be clearly seen), so it should be pretty obvious that (a) something is trying to install itself, and (b) there is an option to cancel it.
NB: the above capability is nothing more or less than OS X' default behaviour of using the application associated with a data file type to automatically open such a file if it is the only thing present on an auto-mounted disk image. I'm not saying this isn't a potential security risk, because there have been many cases of data files (or their names) being specially crafted to take advantage of things like buffer overflows in either the default application that displays them, the OS launch handler, etc., and vulnerabilities of this sort have been found in both in OS X itself and various applications that run on it, although the known ones seem to be patched pretty quickly (as yet unknown ones are obviously still there).
"You can avoid the worst of this crap by turning off the preference in Safari which opens "safe" files after download"
This sort of option should be turned off in _any_ browser on any platform, not just Safari.
"Of course, there's also usually a disclosure sheet attached to the Safari downloads window which asks if you really want to open this image/archive if it looks like it contains an executable."
It looks for other types of potential threat as well, but this doesn't change the fact that it should have been turned off by default. The lesson _all_ software authors should learn from Microsoft's experiences is that automatic behaviour which is intended to make life easier and more convenient for non-technical people often ends up being a major source of misery for them and everyone else, including those who thought that putting it in was a really great idea.
I hope realise that each of those numbered entries represents a different definition of the same term, so your post actually support the parent's statement. it's also a fact that the ability to reason and rational behaviour aren't necessarily the same thing: psychopaths for example are often of well above average intelligence, and therefore obviously have the ability to reason, but that doesn't mean that regularly kidnapping and dissecting living people because one has uncontrollable urge to do is rational behaviour.