Read the line you're answering to again. Gallileo was perfectly free to teach, publish, shout in public squares, and otherwise extoll his ideas as long as he presented them as theories. Note also that secularists in particular tend to be very selective in presenting this as a case of Gallileo being persecuted only for the things that he was right about, while conveniently forgetting that the things he was wrong about (which he also insisted were facts) also played a significant role in his trial, including his theory about tides, which even his most ardent followers were embarrassed by due to the fact that it completely failed to explain observed phenomena such as there being two tides a day instead of only one. It's also quite possible that they'd have ignored him but for the fact that his published "Dialogues" had a character called "Simplicio" who was obviously based on the Pope, and played the idiot to another character that was an equally obvious stand-in for Galileo himself. Those who seek lots of trouble in a society where certain people have near absolute power over them will find that publishing a work which presents one of those people as a blithering idiot is an excellent way of finding it.
Because religious persecution is completely justifiable when it promotes your set of beliefs over those of others, especially when your beliefs are right, while theirs are so obviously wrong. The fact that this was (and in some parts of the world still is) precisely the same line of reasoning used by the followers of various religions to justify persecuting people who think differently does not of course apply, because they persecute for all the the wrong reasons, while you would of course be persecuting for all the _right_ reasons.
"Being so unpopular, that even malware writers didn't bother used to be the key to Mac security for so long."
If popularity is the key, then please explain why several pieces of malware (primarily viruses) for older non-Unix versions of Mac OS appeared during periods when its popularity was at a notable low ebb. Popularity gives people a reason for attacking a system, but whether they succeed or not is governed by how good a system's defences are, and with general purpose desktop computers in particular, users are a part of those defences because they ultimately control what does or does not get installed and run. To use Slashdot's much-beloved car analogy, a designer can reduce the probability of accidents by giving a vehicle superb brakes and steering, sensors that adjust to varying road conditions, lights than turn themselves on during rain, fog, and encroaching darkness, audible warnings of being too close to other vehicles, etc., but the fact that there's ultimately a human behind the wheel means that people can and will do stupid things, so our designer also puts seat belts and air bags in to increase the probability of the occupants surviving the consequences of both their own silly acts and those of others.
"Maybe one System is more secure than the other, maybe one company manages to get patches out the door faster than the other (though I do like the fact that I don't have to rely on one single company for the delivery of patches), but nobody is immune to zero day attacks."
Agreed in full. It's impossible for even the most talented group of people to build something as complex as a complete modern OS without making (a probably quite large number of) bad design decisions and programming errors, and this situation is compounded by the fact that the OS authors have no control over the thousands of third party applications, widgets, and other stuff that people want to put on their computers, the vast majority of which will also have their own share of bad design decisions and programming errors. What's surprising therefore is not that all there are, and will inevitably be security holes that can be exploited, but the fact that such complex combinations of elements from so many different sources work reliably enough for people like me to experience significant periods of up-time in Linux, OS X, and Windows XP.
So as you say, the best we can hope for is that vulnerabilities get found and patched before they're exploited, or failing that, are closed very shortly after an exploit appears, at least until somebody finds a way of preventing social engineering attacks like this one without frustrating and annoying users with Vista-style items such as "Your computer is about to do something that you may or may not have wanted it to do. Are you really, really, really, totally, and utterly sure that this is a good idea? [Yes] [No] [Duh...]".
"But almost always overlooked is the average lifespan of a dinosaur"
I don't think the figures given are a particularly good guide, because fossilisation events on land in particular tend to be much more frequent when some sort of disaster occurs such as a flood drought, volcano blowing up, etc., and we rarely have very many examples of a particular dinosaur type anyway, so the age that these adult animals died at doesn't necessarily say a huge amount about either their average or maximum life spans under normal circumstances.
"That's how long one -could- live, while 40 years was a statistical average across the population."
An excellent point. 90% of people born during the Middle ages died by the age of 12, but those who reached 13 had good probability of living the Biblical three score and ten years (70).
"The point you were making that they may have had children earlier in the Middle Ages as a consequence of the death rate is valid."
But it was the the childhood death rate they were trying to overcome, not that among adults. As is the case in some of the poorer countries today, the only real hope that people had of being looked after in their old age was by ensuring that their children would take care of them, and the best way to do that was by having lots of kids in the hope that at least one or two of them would survive to adult-hood. Lethal childhood diseases were still prevalent even in the first world well into the 20th century -- my mother for example was born in London in 1928, and caught throat diphtheria as a small child. She obviously survived, but some of her friends didn't, and most people knew families who'd lost kids to whooping cough, polio (which frequently permanently crippled those who survived it), and various other "fevers" of an undefined nature. This was a time when medical knowledge was significantly more advanced than during the Middle Ages, so children afflicted with such ailments stood a much better chance of surviving, but diphtheria alone still killed around 10% to 15% of children who were infected by it in both the US and UK during the 1920s (it's estimated to have killed around 15,000 in the US during that decade, of which the vast majority were children).
The fact that our main children's health worries in the 1st world are things like obesity, low self esteem, and Attention Deficit Disorder serves to indicate how far we've come in a period short enough for there to people still living who remember a time when the children of even wealthy families could easily become infected with one of several potentially lethal diseases.
"For the people that went Mac for security reasons. Welcome to Ubuntu, comes preinstalled here:"
Because unlike dumb old OS X, Ubuntu Linux on Dell hardware has a secret magical AI capability that knows you didn't really want to _manually install a Trojan_ despite the fact that you typed in the administrator's password when the OS asked for it.
DMG files are disk images, so opening them only results them being mounted as a volume -- nothing inside them will be automatically executed. This program is therefore a simple Trojan that has to be deliberately installed by its victims, and therefore presents no more danger to Mac users who know about it than EMAIl phishing scams.
"The difference was visible on high-end monitors like those seen in studios and editing rooms, however, and so it was used in professional editing solutions and remained in use in pro workshops for editing and archival for many years."
The professional U-Matic system was launched four years before Betamax, and was accepted as a standard by several manufacturers, including JVC, who would later go on to develop VHS for domestic use. It originally used 3/4" tape instead of 1/2", but was otherwise very similar to Betamax in both its electronic specifications (i.e. resolution, chroma / luminance crosstalk, and S/N ratio) and its use of the "U" shaped tape path from which U-Matic got its name. Betamax was thus a domestically-oriented version of U-Matic rather than U-Matic being a professional version of Betamax, although later versions of U-Matic used identical 1/2" tape cartridges to Betamax. Note though that they weren't compatible in other ways, so neither system could play tapes recorded on the other despite their physical similarities.
"we still needed 30K loud cricket fans to create the SOUND of a pitched battle."
The fact that they chose to do it that way doesn't mean that it was either the only, or for that matter even the best way of achieving that particular result. It could for example simply have provided them with an excuse to spend time outside watching cricket and drinking beer, which would be far more appealing to most Kiwis than recording five mates from the pub shouting things in Orcish, and then spending several days using pitch and time shifters to build hundreds of variations which would then have to be mixed into a coherent whole.
A 3% drop in market share is far from being invisible to either a company or its shareholders. There's a hell of a lot of agonising when growth isn't as high as people expected -- lack of growth is considered to be pretty dire, and sustained negative growth can result in things such as Ballmer going out the window on a chair thrown by someone else.
It's fairly easy to measure _market share_, because markets are by their nature commercial entities that measure success by the number of items sold. The problem Linux presents is that market share doesn't provide a good guide to actual usage numbers when dealing with something that can be both legally and very easily obtained without having to pay for it. Another factor to consider is that unlike for example Windows, server and desktop versions of Linux only really differ in terms of what the people using them choose to install (and of course, what not to install), so it's quite difficult to pigeon-hole Linux usage by category, although the Linux _market_ (i.e. commercial distros and machines sold with Linux pre-installed) can be categorised quite easily.
It was actually ten years ago for most people. The last consumer version of Windows that didn't come with a bundled version of IE was the initial Windows-95 release; OSR2 (an OEM version of Win95 launched in 1997) bundled IE 2, and although this wasn't tied into the internal APIs and subsystems like later OS releases, there was no option to remove it, so most people were stuck with it (that early version could be removed by people who knew what they were doing, but that was a very small percentage of computer buyers).
So anybody who bought a new computer with Windows on it from 1997 onwards got IE with it, and for most, the lack of an option to remove it meant that they were stuck with it on their systems whether they wanted it or not.
They'd still get to keep her on the coins if the UK switched to Euros. Belgian, Dutch and Spanish Euros (and multiples and fractions thereof) for example have their crowned heads on one side, so this particular argument against them (which I know you're not making) is very much a case of FUD spreading.
IMO the most important point against the Euro is the fact that its interest rate is controlled from a central bank that's trying to do the impossible, i.e. balance the needs of lots of countries s whose economies differ considerably. It is therefore very easy to end up with a situation like the current one, where interest rates get progressively hiked to control inflation in Northern Europe, thus causing both inflation and impending recession in Southern Europe, where wages are a lot lower but (thanks to the Euro) most things cost the same, so people don't have much of a margin between income and their expenditure for necessities such as a place to live and food, and cannot therefore easily absorb higher credit costs (especially mortgages), which obviously also result in extra costs for businesses, who pass these on to consumers in the form of higher prices. At some point, something's got to give: the ECB has to drop interest rates; wages have to go up considerably in Southern Europe (thereby further increasing inflationary pressure); or a recession occurs in some parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, further accentuating the already considerable differences between various European economies, and making the ECB's job even harder.
Good point. The popular press have taken terms such as "cyborg" and "robot", and applied them to anything that has some form of machinery operated by a human via some form of computer. If a human is required to operate it in real-time, either directly or via some form of remote control system, and the link between man and machine isn't permanent, then it's a waldo, not a cyborg or robot.
"Changing just that one word and your sentence still makes just as much sense."
It only makes sense if there is some evidence for external design at the genetic level. There isn't any, so that single change results in the entire sentence becoming nonsense from a scientific viewpoint.
"There is this thing called the second law of thermodynamics."
Indeed.
"It also applies to the DNA as a storage medium for genetic information."
Balderdash. The 2nd. law of thermodynamics says that _in an isolated system_, a process can only occur if it increases the total entropy of that system. The Earth is not however an isolated system, because it receives energy from the sun, so the 2nd law of thermodynamics has no relevance whatsoever to its processes. Note also that the 2nd. law is in any case only applicable to macroscopic systems at equilibrium; microscopic systems can and do exhibit positive energy transfers from a lower energy system to one with more energy.
NB: this sort of rubbish helps to explain why the scientific community discount the ID lobby as a bunch of charlatans.
"Since we do not have access to the original code, we cannot know how or what parts have deteriorated."
Define "deteriorate", because I doubt that you're using the term in the same way that a geneticist would.
"In all cases, these are still ragworts, mosquitos, mice etc. None of them became some other different kind of life form."
They're still speciation events, which should be impossible if you IDers are correct. Moving the goal posts whenever people produce evidence that refutes your claims is yet another sign of charlatanism.
"Ragworts don't become daisies or some other sort of plant, mosquitoes don't evolve into flies or some other type of insect and mice don't become rats, gophers or some other kind of rodent."
Making blanket statement like this is again a sign of a charlatan, because (a) we haven't yet discovered every form of life that exists, and (b) nobody has observed every living example of the ones we do know about continuously over a period of a human life time, so nobody with an iota of integrity would be bold enough to claim that such things don't happen, especially when our notably sporadic and short-term observations of only a few examples of a tiny number of species have already provided evidence of the sort of speciation events that the theory of evolution predicted.
"No matter how many weird variations of fruit flies scientists come up with in their labs, the FACT is that fruit flies are and always will be only that."
I presume your certainty in this "FACT" is at the same level as your certainty that genetic information must obey the 2nd. law of thermodynamics.
"All changes in biology we have seen or been able to artificially make so far are ALWAYS confined within rather narrow groupings of life forms. Nobody has ever turned a reptile into a bird or a bird into a mammal."
This is very true. However, the fact that there are living transitionary forms between reptiles and mammals (e.g. echidnas and platypuses, which lay eggs but suckle their young) indicates that nature had no problems turning one into the other.
"Evolutionists try to extend this WAY beyond what we observe today by the hypothesis of vast amounts of time."
That's because both geological and astronomical evidence indicate that the Earth is extremely ancient.
"That may or may be valid. It is however an assumption (belief) that cannot be verified. "
The approximate age of the Earth has been verified satisfactorily enough for it to be regarded as a scientific fact, not a hypothesis or other form of conjecture. Whether you choose to accept this is irrelevant.
"Therefore THIS aspect of evolution is NOT science, but philosophy and should be treated as such, equally. with other philospohies."
I respectfully suggest that a person who chooses to spout ID doctrine about the 2nd law of thermodynamics on the Internet instead of using the resources of said Internet to see whether what he's been told is true should not presume to to tell others what is or is not science.
The original Betamax (Beta-1) was slightly better than the original VHS, not vastly better. Beta had a mild edge on horizontal resolution (250 lines as opposed to 240 lines), slightly better S/N, and marginally lower luminance / chrominance cross-talk, but these differences were in the region of 5%.
"Those links prove that piracy is killing consoles as much as links to RIAA press releases prove that piracy is killing the music industry."
Then provide some counter examples that support your assertion instead of simply blowing hot air.
"The biggest reason that consoles have DRM is to prevent "unlicensed" software."
They prevent unlicensed software by exercising strict control over who gets the development kits. These contain special emulation hardware, without which the accompanying software is useless, and each kit has a distribution key that's embedded in software produced with it, so any "leaked" kits can easily be traced back to the development shop that they came from, whose keys will be revoked, and their name removed from the list of "approved" developers.
"Nintendo is making a killing on "licensing fees""
More hot air. Nintendo's primary source of income is the consoles themselves (unlike MS and Sony, they don't sell their hardware as a loss leader), and the games they write for their own platforms, which always sell extremely well, and earn them far more money per box than they get from royalties on a third party title. This is why Nintendo used to have a reputation for making third party development shops' lives much more difficult than for example Sony, who depend on others for the bulk of their income during at least the first year of their consoles being on the market.
"After all, how many companies pay MS a fee to release PC software?"
The ones who want to put Microsoft's Windows logos on their packaging, documentation, splash screens, etc.
"Why? Because there is no fee to be paid to MS to bypass DRM."
Which is precisely what I said several posts ago, i.e. that the software market for locked down products from a single manufacturer is entirely different from the one for commodity PCs running commodity operating systems. Why bother arguing in the first place if you're going to end up saying the same things I did?
"The word 'Evolution' is being applied in various ways today."
It is applied in one, and only one way in biology: the process whereby a change in the traits of a population is passed from one generation to the next.
"When a bacterium becomes resistant or even immune to an antibiotic, that process is often called evolution."
It is called evolution when a population of bacteria of the same species (i.e. not a single bacterium) pass a new trait (resistance to something deadly) on to the next generation. Evolution is only concerned with populations, not individuals.
"I prefer to call that adaptation."
A single organism can adapt to a change in circumstances without that adaptation being passed on as genetic information. Evolution requires an adaptation to be passed on to the next generation, and this can only occur if there is a change at the genetic level.
"As long as the concept of evolution is ONLY applied in the sense of present change, it is verifiable science."
The speciation events that are at the core of evolutionary theory have been observed in organisms far more complex than bacteria, e.g. goatsbeard and Welsh ragwort plants, the London Underground mosquito, and the Faeroa Island mouse (many others have been seen both in the wild and laboratories).
"What happened in the distant past is not verifiable science but is based on belief.
Balderdash. Every time somebody looks at a star, they're seeing something that happened in the past, because the light that reaches our eyes started its journey several years (and in the case of some visible objects such as galaxies or supernovas, several thousand years) ago. This does not mean that seeing a star is a matter of belief.
"Science cannot test what happened in the distant past."
It can't test what stars are made of, or how they form, but this doesn't prevent astronomy from being regarded as a science. You either have a very poor grasp of what science is, or are deliberately trying to present your own personal very narrow definition of it as a way of setting up one of those straw men that the ID / Creationist lobby are so fond of building.
"All humans are totally confined to the present"
Then how is it that I can remember what I had for lunch yesterday, have recordings of conversations with my parents who are now dead, and books containing my school work from the early 1960s? None of these things happened in the present, but know they did happen, so no belief on my part is necessary.
"Even if we have a written historical record, we have to BELIEVE that record, or not."
That's because people exaggerate, and even tell lies when it suits them, so historical records in and of themselves cannot be taken at face value. This isn't the case with physical evidence, which neither lies nor has an agenda of it's own.
"We can believe that the fossil record tells us certain things, but we cannot know and prove this in the same way we can repeatedly test and know Ohm's law of electricity any time we want."
Unfortunately for you and the ID / Creationist lobby, the days when we had to rely on fossil records and morphological similarities are long past thanks to new breakthroughs in molecular biology and genetics. The evolutionary record of all living things is written in their genes, and we've been learning how to read that record more and more accurately with every passing year. This does not of course fit in very well with the agenda of the ID / Creationist lobby, so they tend to ignore it, together with the fact that it (a) reflects what the fossil record already told us very well indeed, and (b) validates predictions made by the theory of evolution long before these particular scientific methods were available.
NB: ohm's law is an approximation of what happens under a narrow range of circumstances, so it's just as easy to disprove as it is to prove if one selects the conditions, hence phenomena such as superconductivity and hyperconductivity.
Consoles are actually an excellent example of the fact that people who buy cheap systems will avoid paying for software unless they absolutely have to. If this wasn't the case, then they wouldn't have increasingly complex internal DRM systems, there wouldn't have been enough of a market for "mod chips" that bypass said DRM systems for them to exist, and the console manufacturers wouldn't have regarded those "mod chips" as enough of a threat to their licensing revenue to bother doing everything in their power to prevent them being manufactured, sold, or installed.
Here are some links which show (a) piracy flourishes when people can bypass a system's internal DRM, and (b) all three major console manufacturers take this threat very seriously indeed:
There are countless other similar links that prove how reluctant people are to pay for software on any low-cost platform if they can find a way of not doing so.
There are a number of notable differences between a locked-down proprietary device made by only one company that cannot run any software which hasn't been licensed by them, and a commodity PC assembled from readily available off-the-shelf components running a free commodity OS that can use thousands of free programs, some of which are primarily used to pirate copies of other programs whose authors didn't intend to make them available for free.
There's little commercial software for Linux because (1) supporting several different distros and at least two major GUI toolkits adds complexity and therefore expense when both writing and supporting software, and (2) those who've tried found that a large sector of the Linux community refuse to use anything that isn't (a) open source, and (b) free as in beer. Emerging Linux hardware options that specifically target cheapskates won't change this one whit or iota, because it doesn't take a marketing genius to realise that those who buy the cheapest computers aren't going to shell out for commercial software if they can find a way to avoid it.
You can write Java with nothing more than a text editor. It has a full set of command-line tools, and operates on standard text files, so as with most other languages, the use of an IDE is optional, not mandatory.
"Like managing files and linking object files and libraries; using certain flags to enable compiler options."
You mean things like (for example) "javac -O -g -d/progs/java/output/myproject -target 1.1 -bootclasspath jdk1.1.7/lib/classes.zip -extdirs "" MyClass.java
Note that although linking isn't necessary with Java (it links at run-time), non-trivial projects are usually divided into a series of archives, which are conceptually similar to libraries using the "jar" tool, which is invoked from the command line, and has a number of flags and options. Other notable command-line tools are the javadoc documentation generator, the jdb debugger, javah, which is a tool for generating C headers and stubs from Java, and the javap class file dis-assembler (class files are compiled Java byte codes, and carry a.class suffix).
I would have thought that the fact Java was designed by Sun, a company that's been intimately involved with Unix for decades, would have meant that it was obvious they'd ensure it could be edited, managed, and run via standard Unix text-based remote admin tools such as SSH. Sadly, I seem to have severely underestimated the amount of ant-Java FUD floating around on the Internet.
"Why the industry tried to kill singles is anyone's guess. It really defies explanation."
Since the advent of CDs, albums and singles cost the same amount to manufacture, but albums sell for a lot more money, so they're much more profitable. Studio and post production time is a one-off cost that artists have to pay for out of their advances, whereas manufacturing, distribution, etc. are recurring costs that the labels themselves pay, so they're obviously going to favour the option that gives them the highest possible return for each unit they produce.
"I guess from a logical perspective, it's also true that more than one of these factors could have been important -- one triggered in some way by another, or even just coincidentally."
Or it could well have been due to some factor or combination of factors that we don't know about because they don't leave any physical records that we've been able to detect (and we may never be able to detect them without some form of time travel). The way that various new fossil discoveries have caused radical reviews of many scientific viewpoints about dinosaurs shows that we actually know very, very little about the way they lived, so _any_ theories that try to explain their demise are little more than speculation.
Consider for example that we're currently in the middle of a notable mass extinction event that is also the result of a combination of factors, at least some of which are probably due to human activity. Imagine for a moment that a race of intelligent beings comes along 60 million years in the future, a time so remote from our own that the only human artefacts which survived various ice ages, tectonic plate movements, bouts of vulcanism, oceans and seas rising and falling, and general weathering would be a few stone tools made by our remote ancestors. They'd find a "boundary layer" where a rich and extremely diverse ecosystem declined drastically in a period that's so short when seen in the context of 60 million years that it might as well have happened in a day. Human activity wouldn't be considered as a factor because the few stone tools and rare fossil examples of humans (fossilisation only happens under specific sets of conditions) would indicate that these fragile creatures with a primitive technology wouldn't have been a significant threat to powerful predators like bears, lions, tigers, etc., and their presence wouldn't explain the fact that marine ecosystems all over the planet also began to collapse within a few tens of years. Yet the only evidence they have to go on are a few fossils of skeletons that provide only tenuous clues to how any of their original owners lived, moved, or behaved, and none whatsoever that help explain why so many of them died in such a short period of time.
It's likely that these future palaeontologists would also come up with all sorts of theories to explain how it happened, most if not all of which would be incorrect because all the evidence that points to the real causes has been erased by the planet itself over a period of time that's far too long for any intelligent creature with less than a near infinite life span to grasp. Consider for example how little we really know about Neanderthals in general, and their extinction in particular, and then consider that they were far more like us than 99.9999999% of all the other life that's existed (and indeed still exists) on this planet, and only died out 30,000 years ago, one 20,000th of the time between now and the K-T extinction event.
"But as for the fascination with the Cretaceous mass extinction -- I think it comes directly from our fascination with dinosaurs... the enormous and toothy types scare the bejesus out of us, to put it one way, and it's perhaps even more awe-inspiring to think of them all being wiped out than it is to imagine them alive."
It could also possibly be due to the fact that some palaeontologists (and the popular press) are of the opinion that the K-T extinction vacated various ecological niches which allowed mammals to proliferate and evolve into a wide variety of forms, some of which rivalled even the big sauropod dinosaurs in size and weight, while others would eventually lead to us. I'm not personally convinced that significant mammalian evolution wouldn't have occurred even if the dinosaurs hadn't died out, just as crocodilians, snakes, birds, lizards, turtles, amphibians, and many other forms of life also co-existed with and continued to evolve alongside them. Recent fossil discoveries of cretaceous mammals have overturned the old view of them all being tiny shrew-like nocturn
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Read the line you're answering to again. Gallileo was perfectly free to teach, publish, shout in public squares, and otherwise extoll his ideas as long as he presented them as theories. Note also that secularists in particular tend to be very selective in presenting this as a case of Gallileo being persecuted only for the things that he was right about, while conveniently forgetting that the things he was wrong about (which he also insisted were facts) also played a significant role in his trial, including his theory about tides, which even his most ardent followers were embarrassed by due to the fact that it completely failed to explain observed phenomena such as there being two tides a day instead of only one. It's also quite possible that they'd have ignored him but for the fact that his published "Dialogues" had a character called "Simplicio" who was obviously based on the Pope, and played the idiot to another character that was an equally obvious stand-in for Galileo himself. Those who seek lots of trouble in a society where certain people have near absolute power over them will find that publishing a work which presents one of those people as a blithering idiot is an excellent way of finding it.
Because religious persecution is completely justifiable when it promotes your set of beliefs over those of others, especially when your beliefs are right, while theirs are so obviously wrong. The fact that this was (and in some parts of the world still is) precisely the same line of reasoning used by the followers of various religions to justify persecuting people who think differently does not of course apply, because they persecute for all the the wrong reasons, while you would of course be persecuting for all the _right_ reasons.
"Being so unpopular, that even malware writers didn't bother used to be the key to Mac security for so long."
If popularity is the key, then please explain why several pieces of malware (primarily viruses) for older non-Unix versions of Mac OS appeared during periods when its popularity was at a notable low ebb. Popularity gives people a reason for attacking a system, but whether they succeed or not is governed by how good a system's defences are, and with general purpose desktop computers in particular, users are a part of those defences because they ultimately control what does or does not get installed and run. To use Slashdot's much-beloved car analogy, a designer can reduce the probability of accidents by giving a vehicle superb brakes and steering, sensors that adjust to varying road conditions, lights than turn themselves on during rain, fog, and encroaching darkness, audible warnings of being too close to other vehicles, etc., but the fact that there's ultimately a human behind the wheel means that people can and will do stupid things, so our designer also puts seat belts and air bags in to increase the probability of the occupants surviving the consequences of both their own silly acts and those of others.
"Maybe one System is more secure than the other, maybe one company manages to get patches out the door faster than the other (though I do like the fact that I don't have to rely on one single company for the delivery of patches), but nobody is immune to zero day attacks."
Agreed in full. It's impossible for even the most talented group of people to build something as complex as a complete modern OS without making (a probably quite large number of) bad design decisions and programming errors, and this situation is compounded by the fact that the OS authors have no control over the thousands of third party applications, widgets, and other stuff that people want to put on their computers, the vast majority of which will also have their own share of bad design decisions and programming errors. What's surprising therefore is not that all there are, and will inevitably be security holes that can be exploited, but the fact that such complex combinations of elements from so many different sources work reliably enough for people like me to experience significant periods of up-time in Linux, OS X, and Windows XP.
So as you say, the best we can hope for is that vulnerabilities get found and patched before they're exploited, or failing that, are closed very shortly after an exploit appears, at least until somebody finds a way of preventing social engineering attacks like this one without frustrating and annoying users with Vista-style items such as "Your computer is about to do something that you may or may not have wanted it to do. Are you really, really, really, totally, and utterly sure that this is a good idea? [Yes] [No] [Duh...]".
"But almost always overlooked is the average lifespan of a dinosaur"
I don't think the figures given are a particularly good guide, because fossilisation events on land in particular tend to be much more frequent when some sort of disaster occurs such as a flood drought, volcano blowing up, etc., and we rarely have very many examples of a particular dinosaur type anyway, so the age that these adult animals died at doesn't necessarily say a huge amount about either their average or maximum life spans under normal circumstances.
"That's how long one -could- live, while 40 years was a statistical average across the population."
An excellent point. 90% of people born during the Middle ages died by the age of 12, but those who reached 13 had good probability of living the Biblical three score and ten years (70).
"The point you were making that they may have had children earlier in the Middle Ages as a consequence of the death rate is valid."
But it was the the childhood death rate they were trying to overcome, not that among adults. As is the case in some of the poorer countries today, the only real hope that people had of being looked after in their old age was by ensuring that their children would take care of them, and the best way to do that was by having lots of kids in the hope that at least one or two of them would survive to adult-hood. Lethal childhood diseases were still prevalent even in the first world well into the 20th century -- my mother for example was born in London in 1928, and caught throat diphtheria as a small child. She obviously survived, but some of her friends didn't, and most people knew families who'd lost kids to whooping cough, polio (which frequently permanently crippled those who survived it), and various other "fevers" of an undefined nature. This was a time when medical knowledge was significantly more advanced than during the Middle Ages, so children afflicted with such ailments stood a much better chance of surviving, but diphtheria alone still killed around 10% to 15% of children who were infected by it in both the US and UK during the 1920s (it's estimated to have killed around 15,000 in the US during that decade, of which the vast majority were children).
The fact that our main children's health worries in the 1st world are things like obesity, low self esteem, and Attention Deficit Disorder serves to indicate how far we've come in a period short enough for there to people still living who remember a time when the children of even wealthy families could easily become infected with one of several potentially lethal diseases.
"For the people that went Mac for security reasons. Welcome to Ubuntu, comes preinstalled here:"
Because unlike dumb old OS X, Ubuntu Linux on Dell hardware has a secret magical AI capability that knows you didn't really want to _manually install a Trojan_ despite the fact that you typed in the administrator's password when the OS asked for it.
DMG files are disk images, so opening them only results them being mounted as a volume -- nothing inside them will be automatically executed. This program is therefore a simple Trojan that has to be deliberately installed by its victims, and therefore presents no more danger to Mac users who know about it than EMAIl phishing scams.
"The difference was visible on high-end monitors like those seen in studios and editing rooms, however, and so it was used in professional editing solutions and remained in use in pro workshops for editing and archival for many years."
The professional U-Matic system was launched four years before Betamax, and was accepted as a standard by several manufacturers, including JVC, who would later go on to develop VHS for domestic use. It originally used 3/4" tape instead of 1/2", but was otherwise very similar to Betamax in both its electronic specifications (i.e. resolution, chroma / luminance crosstalk, and S/N ratio) and its use of the "U" shaped tape path from which U-Matic got its name. Betamax was thus a domestically-oriented version of U-Matic rather than U-Matic being a professional version of Betamax, although later versions of U-Matic used identical 1/2" tape cartridges to Betamax. Note though that they weren't compatible in other ways, so neither system could play tapes recorded on the other despite their physical similarities.
"we still needed 30K loud cricket fans to create the SOUND of a pitched battle."
The fact that they chose to do it that way doesn't mean that it was either the only, or for that matter even the best way of achieving that particular result. It could for example simply have provided them with an excuse to spend time outside watching cricket and drinking beer, which would be far more appealing to most Kiwis than recording five mates from the pub shouting things in Orcish, and then spending several days using pitch and time shifters to build hundreds of variations which would then have to be mixed into a coherent whole.
A 3% drop in market share is far from being invisible to either a company or its shareholders. There's a hell of a lot of agonising when growth isn't as high as people expected -- lack of growth is considered to be pretty dire, and sustained negative growth can result in things such as Ballmer going out the window on a chair thrown by someone else.
"How do you measure Linux desktop market share?"
It's fairly easy to measure _market share_, because markets are by their nature commercial entities that measure success by the number of items sold. The problem Linux presents is that market share doesn't provide a good guide to actual usage numbers when dealing with something that can be both legally and very easily obtained without having to pay for it. Another factor to consider is that unlike for example Windows, server and desktop versions of Linux only really differ in terms of what the people using them choose to install (and of course, what not to install), so it's quite difficult to pigeon-hole Linux usage by category, although the Linux _market_ (i.e. commercial distros and machines sold with Linux pre-installed) can be categorised quite easily.
It was actually ten years ago for most people. The last consumer version of Windows that didn't come with a bundled version of IE was the initial Windows-95 release; OSR2 (an OEM version of Win95 launched in 1997) bundled IE 2, and although this wasn't tied into the internal APIs and subsystems like later OS releases, there was no option to remove it, so most people were stuck with it (that early version could be removed by people who knew what they were doing, but that was a very small percentage of computer buyers).
So anybody who bought a new computer with Windows on it from 1997 onwards got IE with it, and for most, the lack of an option to remove it meant that they were stuck with it on their systems whether they wanted it or not.
"But hey, we get to keep Brenda on the coins"
They'd still get to keep her on the coins if the UK switched to Euros. Belgian, Dutch and Spanish Euros (and multiples and fractions thereof) for example have their crowned heads on one side, so this particular argument against them (which I know you're not making) is very much a case of FUD spreading.
IMO the most important point against the Euro is the fact that its interest rate is controlled from a central bank that's trying to do the impossible, i.e. balance the needs of lots of countries s whose economies differ considerably. It is therefore very easy to end up with a situation like the current one, where interest rates get progressively hiked to control inflation in Northern Europe, thus causing both inflation and impending recession in Southern Europe, where wages are a lot lower but (thanks to the Euro) most things cost the same, so people don't have much of a margin between income and their expenditure for necessities such as a place to live and food, and cannot therefore easily absorb higher credit costs (especially mortgages), which obviously also result in extra costs for businesses, who pass these on to consumers in the form of higher prices. At some point, something's got to give: the ECB has to drop interest rates; wages have to go up considerably in Southern Europe (thereby further increasing inflationary pressure); or a recession occurs in some parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, further accentuating the already considerable differences between various European economies, and making the ECB's job even harder.
Good point. The popular press have taken terms such as "cyborg" and "robot", and applied them to anything that has some form of machinery operated by a human via some form of computer. If a human is required to operate it in real-time, either directly or via some form of remote control system, and the link between man and machine isn't permanent, then it's a waldo, not a cyborg or robot.
"Changing just that one word and your sentence still makes just as much sense."
It only makes sense if there is some evidence for external design at the genetic level. There isn't any, so that single change results in the entire sentence becoming nonsense from a scientific viewpoint.
"There is this thing called the second law of thermodynamics."
Indeed.
"It also applies to the DNA as a storage medium for genetic information."
Balderdash. The 2nd. law of thermodynamics says that _in an isolated system_, a process can only occur if it increases the total entropy of that system. The Earth is not however an isolated system, because it receives energy from the sun, so the 2nd law of thermodynamics has no relevance whatsoever to its processes. Note also that the 2nd. law is in any case only applicable to macroscopic systems at equilibrium; microscopic systems can and do exhibit positive energy transfers from a lower energy system to one with more energy.
NB: this sort of rubbish helps to explain why the scientific community discount the ID lobby as a bunch of charlatans.
"Since we do not have access to the original code, we cannot know how or what parts have deteriorated."
Define "deteriorate", because I doubt that you're using the term in the same way that a geneticist would.
"In all cases, these are still ragworts, mosquitos, mice etc. None of them became some other different kind of life form."
They're still speciation events, which should be impossible if you IDers are correct. Moving the goal posts whenever people produce evidence that refutes your claims is yet another sign of charlatanism.
"Ragworts don't become daisies or some other sort of plant, mosquitoes don't evolve into flies or some other type of insect and mice don't become rats, gophers or some other kind of rodent."
Making blanket statement like this is again a sign of a charlatan, because (a) we haven't yet discovered every form of life that exists, and (b) nobody has observed every living example of the ones we do know about continuously over a period of a human life time, so nobody with an iota of integrity would be bold enough to claim that such things don't happen, especially when our notably sporadic and short-term observations of only a few examples of a tiny number of species have already provided evidence of the sort of speciation events that the theory of evolution predicted.
"No matter how many weird variations of fruit flies scientists come up with in their labs, the FACT is that fruit flies are and always will be only that."
I presume your certainty in this "FACT" is at the same level as your certainty that genetic information must obey the 2nd. law of thermodynamics.
"All changes in biology we have seen or been able to artificially make so far are ALWAYS confined within rather narrow groupings of life forms. Nobody has ever turned a reptile into a bird or a bird into a mammal."
This is very true. However, the fact that there are living transitionary forms between reptiles and mammals (e.g. echidnas and platypuses, which lay eggs but suckle their young) indicates that nature had no problems turning one into the other.
"Evolutionists try to extend this WAY beyond what we observe today by the hypothesis of vast amounts of time."
That's because both geological and astronomical evidence indicate that the Earth is extremely ancient.
"That may or may be valid. It is however an assumption (belief) that cannot be verified. "
The approximate age of the Earth has been verified satisfactorily enough for it to be regarded as a scientific fact, not a hypothesis or other form of conjecture. Whether you choose to accept this is irrelevant.
"Therefore THIS aspect of evolution is NOT science, but philosophy and should be treated as such, equally. with other philospohies."
I respectfully suggest that a person who chooses to spout ID doctrine about the 2nd law of thermodynamics on the Internet instead of using the resources of said Internet to see whether what he's been told is true should not presume to to tell others what is or is not science.
The original Betamax (Beta-1) was slightly better than the original VHS, not vastly better. Beta had a mild edge on horizontal resolution (250 lines as opposed to 240 lines), slightly better S/N, and marginally lower luminance / chrominance cross-talk, but these differences were in the region of 5%.
"There's only 1cm between my components (just measured)."
Which obviously proves that 1cm is enough for everyone, so Sony were being generous.
"Why is 3cm too much for connecting stereo components?"
Because, despite what you seem to think, not everyone sets things up the way you do.
"Those links prove that piracy is killing consoles as much as links to RIAA press releases prove that piracy is killing the music industry."
Then provide some counter examples that support your assertion instead of simply blowing hot air.
"The biggest reason that consoles have DRM is to prevent "unlicensed" software."
They prevent unlicensed software by exercising strict control over who gets the development kits. These contain special emulation hardware, without which the accompanying software is useless, and each kit has a distribution key that's embedded in software produced with it, so any "leaked" kits can easily be traced back to the development shop that they came from, whose keys will be revoked, and their name removed from the list of "approved" developers.
"Nintendo is making a killing on "licensing fees""
More hot air. Nintendo's primary source of income is the consoles themselves (unlike MS and Sony, they don't sell their hardware as a loss leader), and the games they write for their own platforms, which always sell extremely well, and earn them far more money per box than they get from royalties on a third party title. This is why Nintendo used to have a reputation for making third party development shops' lives much more difficult than for example Sony, who depend on others for the bulk of their income during at least the first year of their consoles being on the market.
"After all, how many companies pay MS a fee to release PC software?"
The ones who want to put Microsoft's Windows logos on their packaging, documentation, splash screens, etc.
"Why? Because there is no fee to be paid to MS to bypass DRM."
Which is precisely what I said several posts ago, i.e. that the software market for locked down products from a single manufacturer is entirely different from the one for commodity PCs running commodity operating systems. Why bother arguing in the first place if you're going to end up saying the same things I did?
"The word 'Evolution' is being applied in various ways today."
It is applied in one, and only one way in biology: the process whereby a change in the traits of a population is passed from one generation to the next.
"When a bacterium becomes resistant or even immune to an antibiotic, that process is often called evolution."
It is called evolution when a population of bacteria of the same species (i.e. not a single bacterium) pass a new trait (resistance to something deadly) on to the next generation. Evolution is only concerned with populations, not individuals.
"I prefer to call that adaptation."
A single organism can adapt to a change in circumstances without that adaptation being passed on as genetic information. Evolution requires an adaptation to be passed on to the next generation, and this can only occur if there is a change at the genetic level.
"As long as the concept of evolution is ONLY applied in the sense of present change, it is verifiable science."
The speciation events that are at the core of evolutionary theory have been observed in organisms far more complex than bacteria, e.g. goatsbeard and Welsh ragwort plants, the London Underground mosquito, and the Faeroa Island mouse (many others have been seen both in the wild and laboratories).
"What happened in the distant past is not verifiable science but is based on belief.
Balderdash. Every time somebody looks at a star, they're seeing something that happened in the past, because the light that reaches our eyes started its journey several years (and in the case of some visible objects such as galaxies or supernovas, several thousand years) ago. This does not mean that seeing a star is a matter of belief.
"Science cannot test what happened in the distant past."
It can't test what stars are made of, or how they form, but this doesn't prevent astronomy from being regarded as a science. You either have a very poor grasp of what science is, or are deliberately trying to present your own personal very narrow definition of it as a way of setting up one of those straw men that the ID / Creationist lobby are so fond of building.
"All humans are totally confined to the present"
Then how is it that I can remember what I had for lunch yesterday, have recordings of conversations with my parents who are now dead, and books containing my school work from the early 1960s? None of these things happened in the present, but know they did happen, so no belief on my part is necessary.
"Even if we have a written historical record, we have to BELIEVE that record, or not."
That's because people exaggerate, and even tell lies when it suits them, so historical records in and of themselves cannot be taken at face value. This isn't the case with physical evidence, which neither lies nor has an agenda of it's own.
"We can believe that the fossil record tells us certain things, but we cannot know and prove this in the same way we can repeatedly test and know Ohm's law of electricity any time we want."
Unfortunately for you and the ID / Creationist lobby, the days when we had to rely on fossil records and morphological similarities are long past thanks to new breakthroughs in molecular biology and genetics. The evolutionary record of all living things is written in their genes, and we've been learning how to read that record more and more accurately with every passing year. This does not of course fit in very well with the agenda of the ID / Creationist lobby, so they tend to ignore it, together with the fact that it (a) reflects what the fossil record already told us very well indeed, and (b) validates predictions made by the theory of evolution long before these particular scientific methods were available.
NB: ohm's law is an approximation of what happens under a narrow range of circumstances, so it's just as easy to disprove as it is to prove if one selects the conditions, hence phenomena such as superconductivity and hyperconductivity.
Consoles are actually an excellent example of the fact that people who buy cheap systems will avoid paying for software unless they absolutely have to. If this wasn't the case, then they wouldn't have increasingly complex internal DRM systems, there wouldn't have been enough of a market for "mod chips" that bypass said DRM systems for them to exist, and the console manufacturers wouldn't have regarded those "mod chips" as enough of a threat to their licensing revenue to bother doing everything in their power to prevent them being manufactured, sold, or installed.
Here are some links which show (a) piracy flourishes when people can bypass a system's internal DRM, and (b) all three major console manufacturers take this threat very seriously indeed:
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/28984/Piracy-drive-threatens-Nintendo-DS
http://www.thetanooki.com/2007/11/26/r4-chip-costing-nintendo-millions-in-ds-software-sales/
http://www.playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1355-Nintendos-success-is-breeding-Piracy-Problems.html
http://www.gamersevolved.com/nintendo-ds-tries-to-put-stop-to-piracy.html
http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/2884/2/
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39161307,00.htm
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/05/sony-busts-down-mod-chip-retailer-with-9-mil-lawsuit/
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/07/31/sony-wins-australian-mod-chip-case
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/4407.cfm
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/13847/532/
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/3401.cfm
http://www.news.com/2100-1040-962797.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=6042
http://www.geek.com/three-people-facing-charges-for-xbox-piracy/
There are countless other similar links that prove how reluctant people are to pay for software on any low-cost platform if they can find a way of not doing so.
There are a number of notable differences between a locked-down proprietary device made by only one company that cannot run any software which hasn't been licensed by them, and a commodity PC assembled from readily available off-the-shelf components running a free commodity OS that can use thousands of free programs, some of which are primarily used to pirate copies of other programs whose authors didn't intend to make them available for free.
There's little commercial software for Linux because (1) supporting several different distros and at least two major GUI toolkits adds complexity and therefore expense when both writing and supporting software, and (2) those who've tried found that a large sector of the Linux community refuse to use anything that isn't (a) open source, and (b) free as in beer. Emerging Linux hardware options that specifically target cheapskates won't change this one whit or iota, because it doesn't take a marketing genius to realise that those who buy the cheapest computers aren't going to shell out for commercial software if they can find a way to avoid it.
"I wrote all my code in C/C++ in vim."
/progs/java/output/myproject -target 1.1 -bootclasspath jdk1.1.7/lib/classes.zip -extdirs "" MyClass.java
.class suffix).
You can write Java with nothing more than a text editor. It has a full set of command-line tools, and operates on standard text files, so as with most other languages, the use of an IDE is optional, not mandatory.
"Like managing files and linking object files and libraries; using certain flags to enable compiler options."
You mean things like (for example) "javac -O -g -d
Note that although linking isn't necessary with Java (it links at run-time), non-trivial projects are usually divided into a series of archives, which are conceptually similar to libraries using the "jar" tool, which is invoked from the command line, and has a number of flags and options. Other notable command-line tools are the javadoc documentation generator, the jdb debugger, javah, which is a tool for generating C headers and stubs from Java, and the javap class file dis-assembler (class files are compiled Java byte codes, and carry a
I would have thought that the fact Java was designed by Sun, a company that's been intimately involved with Unix for decades, would have meant that it was obvious they'd ensure it could be edited, managed, and run via standard Unix text-based remote admin tools such as SSH. Sadly, I seem to have severely underestimated the amount of ant-Java FUD floating around on the Internet.
"Why the industry tried to kill singles is anyone's guess. It really defies explanation."
Since the advent of CDs, albums and singles cost the same amount to manufacture, but albums sell for a lot more money, so they're much more profitable. Studio and post production time is a one-off cost that artists have to pay for out of their advances, whereas manufacturing, distribution, etc. are recurring costs that the labels themselves pay, so they're obviously going to favour the option that gives them the highest possible return for each unit they produce.
"I guess from a logical perspective, it's also true that more than one of these factors could have been important -- one triggered in some way by another, or even just coincidentally."
Or it could well have been due to some factor or combination of factors that we don't know about because they don't leave any physical records that we've been able to detect (and we may never be able to detect them without some form of time travel). The way that various new fossil discoveries have caused radical reviews of many scientific viewpoints about dinosaurs shows that we actually know very, very little about the way they lived, so _any_ theories that try to explain their demise are little more than speculation.
Consider for example that we're currently in the middle of a notable mass extinction event that is also the result of a combination of factors, at least some of which are probably due to human activity. Imagine for a moment that a race of intelligent beings comes along 60 million years in the future, a time so remote from our own that the only human artefacts which survived various ice ages, tectonic plate movements, bouts of vulcanism, oceans and seas rising and falling, and general weathering would be a few stone tools made by our remote ancestors. They'd find a "boundary layer" where a rich and extremely diverse ecosystem declined drastically in a period that's so short when seen in the context of 60 million years that it might as well have happened in a day. Human activity wouldn't be considered as a factor because the few stone tools and rare fossil examples of humans (fossilisation only happens under specific sets of conditions) would indicate that these fragile creatures with a primitive technology wouldn't have been a significant threat to powerful predators like bears, lions, tigers, etc., and their presence wouldn't explain the fact that marine ecosystems all over the planet also began to collapse within a few tens of years. Yet the only evidence they have to go on are a few fossils of skeletons that provide only tenuous clues to how any of their original owners lived, moved, or behaved, and none whatsoever that help explain why so many of them died in such a short period of time.
It's likely that these future palaeontologists would also come up with all sorts of theories to explain how it happened, most if not all of which would be incorrect because all the evidence that points to the real causes has been erased by the planet itself over a period of time that's far too long for any intelligent creature with less than a near infinite life span to grasp. Consider for example how little we really know about Neanderthals in general, and their extinction in particular, and then consider that they were far more like us than 99.9999999% of all the other life that's existed (and indeed still exists) on this planet, and only died out 30,000 years ago, one 20,000th of the time between now and the K-T extinction event.
"But as for the fascination with the Cretaceous mass extinction -- I think it comes directly from our fascination with dinosaurs... the enormous and toothy types scare the bejesus out of us, to put it one way, and it's perhaps even more awe-inspiring to think of them all being wiped out than it is to imagine them alive."
It could also possibly be due to the fact that some palaeontologists (and the popular press) are of the opinion that the K-T extinction vacated various ecological niches which allowed mammals to proliferate and evolve into a wide variety of forms, some of which rivalled even the big sauropod dinosaurs in size and weight, while others would eventually lead to us. I'm not personally convinced that significant mammalian evolution wouldn't have occurred even if the dinosaurs hadn't died out, just as crocodilians, snakes, birds, lizards, turtles, amphibians, and many other forms of life also co-existed with and continued to evolve alongside them. Recent fossil discoveries of cretaceous mammals have overturned the old view of them all being tiny shrew-like nocturn