"The fact that England tries to have ANY claim to Ireland pisses me off. Since they're almost real members of the EU [that is the UK I mean] they should just relinquish Ireland to Ireland, and enjoy EU membership rights w.r.t. employment/travel/tourism/etc."
Ah, democracy in action: give Northern Ireland to Southern Ireland despite the fact that the majority of Northern Irish prefer to be part of the UK.
"The first question to ask is what is the cost of rebuilding the three-dimensional infrastructure of a city the size, scale, age and complexity of New York."
Because places like London, Paris, Beijing, and Athens are so new and tiny when compared to New York that putting their high-speed Infrastructure in place is a mere bagatelle by comparison.
"I've been buying Macintosh computers for ten years and every mobile phone I've ever purchased cost at least as much as the iPhone. If *I'm* not the target audience, I don't know who you think is."
They're making it for (to quote an old Mac advertising phrase) "the rest of us", i.e. those who are frustrated by the complex and unintuitive UIs on every moderately capable phone they've tried, and will therefore happy to pay for something with features that they can actually _use_. People who want traditional "smart phone" capabilities will have to look elsewhere, because Apple's current offering isn't meant for them, although this does not of course mean that there won't be such a device in the future.
"If I sound upset or angry, it's because I believe my favorite computer company has seriously dropped the ball on this one."
Perhaps they have -- Apple do after all drop the ball quite frequently, just like most other tech. companies. New products of all types often fail completely and are withdrawn, or have only marginal success for several versions until they get them "right", and there's nothing magical about Apple that predisposes them to have a greater level of success than everyone else, but this doesn't mean that they shouldn't at least try to enter new markets.
"I didn't care about writing software for the iPod, it's just a walkman. I bought three of those."
I didn't buy any iPods (although my wife has one), and I won't be buying an iPhone, but that's simply because I don't have much use for a personal music player, and actively dislike mobile phones. However, all the non-geeks I know (and I know a _lot_ of non-geeks) are pretty excited about the iPhone, and can't wait for it to reach Europe, especially the female ones, with whom Apple seems to have a wonderful reputation despite none of them having (or for that matter, wanting) Macs.
"And you don't need to spend $600 to make calls either. If phone is the killer app, well, then it was killed a long time ago. If all you want to do is make calls, do it for 30 bucks with a go phone."
You also only need to spend $10 on a pair of cheap shoes to walk around without getting your feet dirty, but lots lots of people spend _significantly_ more on them despite this, and strangely, their excellence for walking around in while keeping one's feet clean doesn't seem to be the main criterion for selecting them, hence the fact that some of the most expensive examples actively hinder effective walking while leaving most of the foot exposed.
"Yeah, just like developers messed up Macintosh dominance long ago... by not writing apps for the Mac. Oops. History repeats itself. You're right: Classic Apple."
1) Macintoshes were never dominant. The highest market share they ever had was in 1993, when they had 12%, but they were selling far fewer machines to get that 12% than they do today.
2) It's not "classic Apple", but post-iPod Apple, who dropped the "Computer" bit from their name because they think their future lies in consumer electronics and media rather than computers. Popular consumer electronics devices don't have user-hackable firmware (because that's what the iPhone's OS and integrated programs effectively are), yet they still seem to sell rather well despite this glaring omission.
"I've owned and used nothing but Macs since the dark days of Gil Amelio. I just spent $750 on a Nokia N95. Does that tell you anything?"
It tells me that you're a geek, and therefore buy things based on specifications, just like all the other geeks who bemoan the fact that the "sheeple" buy "overpriced junk" because of marketing, fashion, or some other factor that has nothing to do with specifications. Hence this:
"5 megapixel camera with a flash. It actually has two cameras, the one on the front is for video calls. GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Stereo speakers, a battery door, Infrared... did you know that there's software to turn a S60 phone with infrared into a universal TV remote?...".
This goes on at some length, liberally spiced with acronyms, features, and angry rants about Apple not bothering to add all the neat geek stuff that 99% of mobile phone users don't know about, and therefore won't miss if it's not there. It's all hauntingly reminiscent of those iPod topics on Slashdot where somebody inevitably says they bought an Archos because it does this amazing list of things that you don't get on any iPod, ergo people only buy iPods because of Apple marketing / they're stupid / both.
NB: I'm not defending the iPhone, or claiming that it will succeed (I don't know or care one way or the other). However, its success or failure will be depend on whether its target market likes what Apple is offering, and as is the case with the iPod, that market lies outside the sort of people who read Slashdot and other geek-oriented sites.
"With the original IBM PC, the real killer app was "it's a cheap enough development platform that thousands of people can buy them and develop applications for themselves and potentially millions of end-users""
The IBM 5150 (1981) cost $1265 with 16K of RAM, cassette-based storage, and a text-only monochrome display (a monitor wasn't included in the base price, and neither were serial and parallel ports). It was not therefore a cheap development platform when compared with the competition, and add-ons such as floppy-disk drives were priced in a typical IBM way, i.e. incredibly expensive, so it was reasonably successful with (mostly US) business users who tended to buy them with most of the optional extras installed, but was far too expensive for the home market, who in any case weren't particularly interested in a machine that could only display monochrome text.
It is for this reason that historical sales data show that it took several year for IBM and the clone industry together to become the dominant platform. In 1982, the year after its launch, IBM PCs and clones (there were several clones by 1982) sold a total of 240,000 units, compared with (for example) 279,000 Apple-IIs, 600,000 Atari 400/800s, 300,000 TRS-80s, and around 850,000 CP/M systems from a variety of manufacturers. IBM PCs and all the clones together took until 1985 to shift more units than the biggest single home computer (by this time, the Commodore 64), and it took until 1986 for them to get above 50% of all computers sold, which is five years after the launch of the original 5150, and four years after the clone industry started.
What the above means is that for the first five years of its life, the IBM PC and all its clones put together were used in far lower numbers than machines such as the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple-II, etc., and the majority of those PCs were being used in businesses where very few people programmed them. By contrast, just about everybody that had an Apple-II, Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, or TRS-80 ended up typing listings that appeared in the computing magazines of the time into them, and then debugging the inevitable errors, hence the fact that so many programmers who started in the late 1970s to mid 1980s had their first experiences on these machines rather than the IBM PC, and founded countless "cottage industry" companies which wrote software of all types for them.
"which allowed development of the perceived killer apps like spreadsheets and word processors."
Spreadsheets started with VisiCalc, which was written in 1978 for the Apple-II in 6502 assembly code. Computer word processors had been available since the early 1970s, and all the original ones on the IBM PC were ports of programs written for other, earlier systems: WordStar and SpellBinder originated on CP/M several years before the IBM PC was announced; WordPerfect was written for Data General mini computers; and Microsoft Word originated on Xenix systems, and was in many ways a direct descendent of Xerox Bravo, written by the same team in 1974. IBM's own DisplayWrite was the only early word-processor specifically written for the IBM PC.
"I think we would take the third option, which is to build space habitats. It's a lot cheaper than building an invasion force and traveling lightyears just to take someone else's planet."
And those space habitats will have wars over who gets the sunniest bit of orbit, the habitat with the biggest population wanting part of another that has a less people but more hydroponics capacity (because they have more space due to less of it being taken up by people), and the same old "we want what they've got" crap that's been the real motivation for every war in history.
Prediction: if we discover two apparently similar worlds on neighbouring stars, only one of which is inhabited, we will make war on the inhabited world instead of settling the uninhabited one, because the inhabited world _must_ be better, otherwise the aliens would have have decided to evolve on the other one. Damned uppity aliens, taking _our_ good world, and leaving us with the shitty planet -- we'll teach them a lesson they won't forget in a hurry.
"The patent office requires source to be submitted for software patents* -- that is, requires you to document the implmentation of the claims -- and there are no special exemptions that allow software patents to be granted with more general claims than non-software patents. That doesn't mean that the patent office does a good job enforcing those requirements, but they aren't any different for software and non-software patents."
Unfortunately, there are so many patents that (a) cover concepts rather than implementation, (b) are vague rather than merely broad, and (c) include no source code, that the requirements you cite effectively do not exist for software. A requirement that is routinely ignored might as well not be there.
"It's possible that the patent office is really bad at reviewing software patents, but I think software people just tend to ignore how many non-software patents there are that do exactly what you claim is a problem unique to software -- make overly broad claims and don't suppor those claims with specific implementation details."
Perhaps you're right in that software's simply a symptom of a much larger problem that stems from patent offices (in the plural here rather than just being the US PTO)making money from patent applications, and therefore having a vested interest in passing as many as possible. This became rather evident in some of what are now termed "biopiracy" cases, where the US PTO decided that common knowledge which is sometimes so ancient that it was first written in long-dead scripts such as sanskrit don't count as prior art because they weren't published in an academic journal, leaving them free to grant patents on things that people had been using for the same purposes since time immemorial.
Finally, I think most people object to over-broad / vague / stupid patents with software especially because 20 years is an incredibly long time in computing. If software patents had been around since the beginning, Apple's ones on GUIs and the various different types of apps that they host would have expired in 2001 (20 years since Lisa), Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc patents would have expired in 1999, and IBM's patent on SQL databases would have persisted until 1995. We'd be living in a very different, and much poorer IT world if these and other patents could have been used to smother BSD Unix, Linux, programming IDEs, virtual machines, interpreters and compilers, software optimisation techniques, RAM disks, rich media, every type of computer game we now have, everything we take for granted on the Internet, etc., etc., etc.
"as someone familiar with the hardware patent world I've never understood why software people think that conflicting, overly-broad patents on the basic process required to achieve some end result are unique to software"
The objection people have to software patents is due to the fact that they cover concepts, not specific mechanisms that embody those concepts. Your example of thousands of different and possibly overlapping compressor designs illustrates this nicely, because applying software patent principles to the hardware world would mean that somebody could hold a patent on processes that reduce the volume of compressable fluids which would (in summary) read something like this:
1) The fluid is drawn or pumped in from a higher volume source. 2) One or more mechanical processes reduces its volume by compression. 3) The resultant compressed fluid is then either used directly, or stored in a suitable compression vessel.
So all those thousands of compressor designs would have to pay royalties to whoever owned that single broad patent on "Compressing Compressable Fluids", even though the patent itself doesn't tell people how to do any of the things it covers, so it's completely useless to anyone who has to design a compressor. Then, when people were breathing a sigh of relief because it's at the point of expiring, the patent office grants an extension because the original owner added some "innovative steps":
4) If used directly, the compressed fluid can distributed via rigid pipes or flexible tubes. 5) In cases where it is stored in a pressure vessel, the vessel may form part of the device. 6) If it is not part of the device, and therefore is a separate component, this component can be placed in a storage facility. 7) Components in storage facilities from step (6) can be given or sold* to others who do not possess a device for compressing compressable fluids. *Please see separate patent number 8199477728 "A Process For Giving Away Or selling Stored Compressed Fluids"
"I thought the widely accepted definition for a "christian" was a person who followed the teachings of Jesus."
The key to "Christian" is in the word itself, i.e. one who believes that Yeshuah of Bethlehem was anointed by God. A person who following his teachings as described in the Gospels without accepting that he was "the Christ" would not therefore be a Christian, but something else (a Yeshuan?)
"Anyways, on a related note, did you notice my other post discussing the presence of quasi-evolution in their Creationism museum? I was surprised that it didn't garner even a single response as I found that tidbit to be extremely interesting."
I saw the post, but didn't look at the pictures until now. The reason I didn't respond initially was due to being notably unsurprised by yet more magical explanations in a museum which is dedicated to using magic as an explanation for things -- others of course may have had different reasons!
"National Geographic has a story on it. If you'll notice, the article says that there is evidence that they were swimming (not wading) in 3m deep water, but that evidence that they were swimming in deeper water would necessarily be absent (if the water is deep enough that they don't leave tracks, then there are no tracks, and it's really hard to study the absence of tracks)."
There is however, as I said, nothing in the article to support your claim that they did a lot of swimming, and it also supports my contention that the evidence is disputed (the bit about rheas leaving similar tracks when running in nearly dry plaster).
"Futhermore, other research I've read (I can't find it right now) mentioned that their small forearms were sometimes indicative of species that were adapting to a more aquatic lifestyle."
Unfortunately for that idea, air breathing animals adapting to an aquatic or semi-aqautic lifestyle tend to exhibit any atrophying or major modifications in their rear limbs first, not the front ones, if indeed there _is_ any form of atrophying or modification. By way of evidence, I cite plesiosaurs (rear limbs smaller than front), icthyosaurs (rear limbs disappeared), sea turtles (rear limbs smaller than front), marine iguanas (no obvious atrophying), crocodiles (rear limbs slightly smaller than front), cetaceans (rear limbs disappeared), penguins (front limbs are significantly bigger), and seals (rear limbs are significantly modified, front limbs are bigger and stronger).
Another thing that is noticeable about all aquatic and semi-aqautic air breathers is the fact that their front-limbs are positioned at the sides of their bodies, or are capable of pivoting sideways to permit steering in both the X and Y axis in a similar manner to shark fins (sharks lack the swim bladders of most other sorts of fish, so they depend entirely on their fins for steering in both axes). This is in stark contrast to T- Rex's fore-limbs, which were similar to the limbs of most modern land-dwellers without recent arboreal ancestry in having virtually no lateral movement capability whatsoever, which together with their tiny (relative) size would mean that the short-necked T.Rex would have an extremely difficult job getting its massive head above water to allow its forward-facing nostrils to breathe. This would obviously be a major disadvantage for a semi-aqautic animal.
"Additionally, with their body shape they couldn't run very fast. If they stumbled at high speeds, their arms wouldn't be able to stop the accompanying 6g deceleration rates."
Being unable to run quickly isn't a disadvantage if one's prey aren't capable of running quickly either, or (as has been suggested rather more convincingly than the ludicrous idea that their physiology made them even remotely suited to an aquatic life style) they were scavengers whose large size helped them see off smaller predators such as velociraptors.
"Also, you'll note that I did couch my original statement with the safety word "might". I'm definitely not claiming this is a settled issue, or even a widely accepted issue - just an interesting new theory"
Suggesting that small forelimbs and massive hind limbs are an adaptation to a semi-aqautic life style when no other known semi-aqautic animal (living or extinct) exhibits such an adaptation isn't a theory -- it's a hypothesis.
"There has been some recent discussion that the T. Rex might have done a lot of swimming"
The scientific evidence _may_ indicate that _a_ T. Rex. swam in around 3m of water. This hasn't surprised palaeontologists at all, because just about all animals except humans can swim if they need to, so there's nothing in the Spanish footprint discovery that indicates any unsuspected forms of behaviour, if indeed it even indicates that the animal was swimming (this has been disputed). Migrating wlldebeast and zebras for example cross quite significant rivers, and sloths and have been observed swimming in flooded regions, but this does not indicate that any of these animals are aquatic or semi-aquatic.
"The only NeXT technology that appears in Apple computers is BSD."
Well, there's Interface Builder. They got that from NeXT. But apart from Interface Builder and BSD, there are no NeXT technologies whatsoever in current Apple computers. Except of course for Cocoa, which is heavily based on NextStep/OpenStep, hence the fact that it has all those classes with names prefixed by "NS". But with the exception of BSD, Interface Builder, and Cocoa, there are no NeXT technologies in Apple computers at all. Unless of course you count Objective-C as a "technology", which NeXt licensed for programming in NeXTStep and OpenStep while Macs were being programmed in Pascal and C++. But I agree that apart from BSD, Interface Builder, Cocoa, and Objective-C, Apple computers are completely devoid of NeXT technologies. OK, I'll admit that Portable Distributed Objects also came from NeXT. I'll give way on that one. But if you discount BSD, Interface Builder, Cocoa, Objective-C, and PDO, current Apple computers are totally and completely free from NeXT technologies. Utterly without _anything_ from NeXT. Honestly. I mean, WebObjects, which is admittedly a NeXT technology, isn't even installed on most Macs, so _the majority_ of Macs are free from it. Well, they are. Really. So I can, without any pangs of conscience, categorically state that, with the exception of...
"The other problem with hollow volcanoes is that they could become active again. Look at Mt. St. Helens for example, and I hear that there's worry that Mt. Vesuvius may erupt again. However, the view on a tropical island is very good."
I hadn't thought about the view. Insides of deep-sea mountains are notably poor in the view department, and their lack of sunny beaches means that beautiful but lethal female minions who don't wear much wouldn't be present in large numbers. The problem with lairs is that they're always a case of gaining on the swings while losing on the roundabouts...
"I'm not so sure about the global empire bit. It sounds good at first, but then you have to realize that having an empire means having to govern lots of people, which is a pain in the ass."
That's the whole beauty of the pens full of captured nuclear submarines, because there won't be anything like as many people to worry about when those babies have finished emptying their silos, especially if one uses the captured Russian subs to bombard the US, and the US ones launch at Russia and China. While the surface world turns itself into a radioactive wasteland, you sit snug in your mountain under a mile of radiation-proof water, stroking your cat and waiting until the time is right for your armies of minions to sweep across the world and subjugate the small enclaves of desperate wretches who managed to survive both the nuclear conflagration and the ten years of winter that followed it.
"My preferred abode would be a hollowed-out volcano on an island, but I'm not a good enough villain the accumulate that much cash"
The problem with hollow volcanos is their vulnerability to ninjas rappelling down through the shattered remnants of their roofs from helicopters, thereby scuppering the painstakingly laid out plans of budding instituters of new world orders. My ideal lair would therefore be the undersea mountain variety, with internal pens big enough to hold an entire fleet of captured nuclear submarines whose lethal cargoes will be used to found a new global empire.
The correct geek term for such an abode is "subterranean lair". Homes are places that dull, ordinary people live in, hence the fact that astonishingly cool cool items such as werewolves, super-villains, and shaven-headed men in swivel chairs who stroke white cats while consigning Mr. Bond to The Lava Chamber invariably use the term "lair" when referring to their dwellings.
"Alternatives, like Slashdot and blogs exist for this reason. The majority of us still get most of our "news" from "mainstream" sources but we don't have to."
By far the majority of what's on Slashdot, the blogs, etc. comes from the mainstream news sources, e.g. this item, which links to a BBC article. A bunch of people posting opinions on that 99.99% of them wouldn't even know about without the mainstream outlets isn't an alternative news source.
"So what next generation user interface approach do you believe in?"
I've not seen anything that convinces me it's going to be a real breakthrough technology, although this does not of course mean that somebody somewhere isn't on the verge of one, merely that I don't know of it.
"Hmm.. so that leaves us with either "flamebait", or he's just a rather critical guy."
I said he wasn't a MS shill, not that his reviews aren't obviously biased pieces of poor journalism that judge each of the three systems by completely different sets of standards.
"I must say I personally also find all current systems disappointing on various levels; the whole industry is not where it should be. "
Agreed in full. I currently prefer OS X on my desktop, not because it's particularly wonderful in and of itself, but due to the fact that it's a marginally less dreadful than the competition at doing the things I want to do. However, the desktop-and-window metaphor that all current UIs are based around originated on systems that had a few megabytes of pretty small files, and isn't scaling well to today's computers that have sizeable fractions of a terabyte, and are permanently connected to vast international networks with far more information on them than any singe person has ever been expected to handle. We can't use real-word metaphors like desktops for this, because it's a situation that's never existed in the real world, so we need to come up with a new way of representing this immense and ever-growing n-dimensional system of increasingly rich and varied data, instead of simply tacking more and more stuff onto the same tired GUIs that sit on top of operating systems which are based on four decade-old software written for machines with 12 bit addresses and teletype terminals.
"Surely the point of reviews isn't just to trash everything though, but to then help people find the best options for them under the circumstances. I'm not sure he's achieved that."
I'd go further and say that he's definitely not achieved that. In fact, I find it hard to see why a site like HardOCP would bother looking Macs at all, because the customers Apple target are about as far away from the sort of people who are interested in overclocking PCs as it's possible to get. In obligatory Slashdot car analogy terms, this is like "What Car?" magazine reviewing an M1/A2 Main Battle Tank alongside two sedans, and concluding that the tank is an overpriced piece of crap that eats insane amounts of fuel, has no windows, is difficult for women in tight skirts and high heels to get in and out of, and will probably break down at least if driven driven from Chicago to Disneyland.
"Either the reviewer is trolling for ad-views for his website, or he is a corporate shill for MS, or he is biased and using different sets of standards to evaluate the Mac vs. (one can only presume) Windows."
I can't say anything about trolling for ads, but this particular author's "Bottom Line" part of his conclusions about 30 days with Windows Vista start with the phrase "It's a lemon.", so he definitely isn't an MS shill, or applying different standards to Windows and the Mac.
"notice the alternate term: "climate change" instead of "global warming" - Conservatives wouldn't dare agree with Liberals and call it "global warming""
That's actually unfair, because lots of countries outside the US that would be described by most Americans as "liberal" also use the term.
"why were EU rates not growing PRIOR to Kyoto, but then started growing after Kyoto, while in the US the growth has actually slowed since 2000?"
Could it perhaps be due to the fact that Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia have joined the EU since 2000, most of which are ex-Soviet satellites whose power generation systems and industries do not yet meet EC pollution standards?
That Bible seems to have been completely absent from Nazi philosophy and doctrines, which were entirely based on pseudo-scientific theories such as a twisted take on Darwinian evolution (survival of the strongest rather than the fittest), social Darwinism (which Darwin himself didn't mention), and eugenics, which itself has its foundation in genetics.
NB: I also have several Bibles with notes in them, together with a couple of Korans, Indian Vedas, Norse Eddas, and various other interesting religious texts. By your yardstick, this would mean that I'm a Christian Muslim Hindu who believes he'll stand beside Odin in the final battle before Ragnarok!
"and his many, many statements in contrast to those seem to imply that he just had his own version of Christianity, employed for his own purposes."
A man who said Christianity is "the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate, pity-ethics" can only be described as having his "own version of Christianity" by stretching the definition of "Christianity" to breaking point. Hitler was an astute politician, and very adept at saying what people wanted to hear, so those who quote passages from "Mein Kampf" or his public speeches to try and prove that he was a Christian are falling for the same propaganda that the German people did. Hitler's real beliefs are revealed in what he said to his trusted inner circle of "disciples", much of which was recorded by stenographers, and fortunately for historians, these voluminous records managed to survive WWII.
"My statements were meant to refute the original post that the Nazis should be considered separated from Christianity, when they used it quite effectively in pursuing their cause."
I agree that they used it as an effective _political tool_, but your previous post said " Who else but a Christian could come up with Hitler's ridiculous bullshit?". This is far more than simply an assertion that Nazis used Christianity for political ends.
"Even if the first site googling "Hitler Christianity" pulled up didn't give me the complete picture, and honestly I wasn't cherry-picking a damn thing"
I assume you're referring to buzzflash.com, which is so obviously biased that anything they say about Christians has the reliability level of Anne Coulter's opinions of "the left". I would respectfully suggest that the sources people use for information are a form of cherry-picking when they're obviously written by those with a political or religious agenda that's the same as their own; this is something I repeatedly lambast Christians for doing, so I'm not going to let an atheist get away with it.
"When the holy wars are over, the world will have a lot less use for religion"
We've had lots of holy wars in the past, and they all seem to have resulted in more religion rather than less of it. Our lamentable habit of repeating history leads me to conclude that this one (sadly) won't be an exception to that unfortunate rule.
"I'll go with your atheist fundamentalist thing, but evolution never led to a genocide"
The Nazis' ideas about racial hygiene that led to their acts of genocide were based on an erroneous concept of Darwinism (which was not restricted to them, but had many prominent supporters such as Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt), so once again, you are wrong.
"Religion is a mental disease."
And because fundamentalist atheism has all the hallmarks of a religion, those who follow it must be afflicted by the same condition. Stalin is a case in point, a devout atheist, and a man who wasn't sane by any reasonable definition of the word.
"I guess I'm wallowing in some kind of hog shit, but its a separate pool than Jerry Falwell's icky bloated corpse and thats as much as I ask."
Using rabidly biased sources for arguments, and claiming to know "the truth" while labelling any who think differently as deluded or mad, does I think indicate that both yourself and the late Mr. Falwell are floating hand-in-hand alongside all those who've believed that they have a right to tell others how to think.
Whereas patents on 30 year old US technologies are obviously OK, e.g. the one Microsoft was granted in 1996 for FAT, which it says it developed in 1976.
I think you left out some other important things Hitler said about Christianity, e.g.:
"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity."
"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. "
"I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would never have believed possible. For the moment I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews."
Cherry-picking quotes in a desperate attempt to push a religious agenda is the sort of tactic that fundamentalist Christians try and use against evolution, so you've just proven that there are also "atheist fundamentalists" who wallow in the same pit of hog shit. Congratulations!
Slashdot Mirror
"The fact that England tries to have ANY claim to Ireland pisses me off. Since they're almost real members of the EU [that is the UK I mean] they should just relinquish Ireland to Ireland, and enjoy EU membership rights w.r.t. employment/travel/tourism/etc."
Ah, democracy in action: give Northern Ireland to Southern Ireland despite the fact that the majority of Northern Irish prefer to be part of the UK.
"The first question to ask is what is the cost of rebuilding the three-dimensional infrastructure of a city the size, scale, age and complexity of New York."
Because places like London, Paris, Beijing, and Athens are so new and tiny when compared to New York that putting their high-speed Infrastructure in place is a mere bagatelle by comparison.
"I've been buying Macintosh computers for ten years and every mobile phone I've ever purchased cost at least as much as the iPhone. If *I'm* not the target audience, I don't know who you think is."
They're making it for (to quote an old Mac advertising phrase) "the rest of us", i.e. those who are frustrated by the complex and unintuitive UIs on every moderately capable phone they've tried, and will therefore happy to pay for something with features that they can actually _use_. People who want traditional "smart phone" capabilities will have to look elsewhere, because Apple's current offering isn't meant for them, although this does not of course mean that there won't be such a device in the future.
"If I sound upset or angry, it's because I believe my favorite computer company has seriously dropped the ball on this one."
Perhaps they have -- Apple do after all drop the ball quite frequently, just like most other tech. companies. New products of all types often fail completely and are withdrawn, or have only marginal success for several versions until they get them "right", and there's nothing magical about Apple that predisposes them to have a greater level of success than everyone else, but this doesn't mean that they shouldn't at least try to enter new markets.
"I didn't care about writing software for the iPod, it's just a walkman. I bought three of those."
I didn't buy any iPods (although my wife has one), and I won't be buying an iPhone, but that's simply because I don't have much use for a personal music player, and actively dislike mobile phones. However, all the non-geeks I know (and I know a _lot_ of non-geeks) are pretty excited about the iPhone, and can't wait for it to reach Europe, especially the female ones, with whom Apple seems to have a wonderful reputation despite none of them having (or for that matter, wanting) Macs.
"And you don't need to spend $600 to make calls either. If phone is the killer app, well, then it was killed a long time ago. If all you want to do is make calls, do it for 30 bucks with a go phone."
You also only need to spend $10 on a pair of cheap shoes to walk around without getting your feet dirty, but lots lots of people spend _significantly_ more on them despite this, and strangely, their excellence for walking around in while keeping one's feet clean doesn't seem to be the main criterion for selecting them, hence the fact that some of the most expensive examples actively hinder effective walking while leaving most of the foot exposed.
"Yeah, just like developers messed up Macintosh dominance long ago... by not writing apps for the Mac. Oops. History repeats itself. You're right: Classic Apple."
1) Macintoshes were never dominant. The highest market share they ever had was in 1993, when they had 12%, but they were selling far fewer machines to get that 12% than they do today.
2) It's not "classic Apple", but post-iPod Apple, who dropped the "Computer" bit from their name because they think their future lies in consumer electronics and media rather than computers. Popular consumer electronics devices don't have user-hackable firmware (because that's what the iPhone's OS and integrated programs effectively are), yet they still seem to sell rather well despite this glaring omission.
"I've owned and used nothing but Macs since the dark days of Gil Amelio. I just spent $750 on a Nokia N95. Does that tell you anything?"
It tells me that you're a geek, and therefore buy things based on specifications, just like all the other geeks who bemoan the fact that the "sheeple" buy "overpriced junk" because of marketing, fashion, or some other factor that has nothing to do with specifications. Hence this:
"5 megapixel camera with a flash. It actually has two cameras, the one on the front is for video calls. GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Stereo speakers, a battery door, Infrared... did you know that there's software to turn a S60 phone with infrared into a universal TV remote?...".
This goes on at some length, liberally spiced with acronyms, features, and angry rants about Apple not bothering to add all the neat geek stuff that 99% of mobile phone users don't know about, and therefore won't miss if it's not there. It's all hauntingly reminiscent of those iPod topics on Slashdot where somebody inevitably says they bought an Archos because it does this amazing list of things that you don't get on any iPod, ergo people only buy iPods because of Apple marketing / they're stupid / both.
NB: I'm not defending the iPhone, or claiming that it will succeed (I don't know or care one way or the other). However, its success or failure will be depend on whether its target market likes what Apple is offering, and as is the case with the iPod, that market lies outside the sort of people who read Slashdot and other geek-oriented sites.
"With the original IBM PC, the real killer app was "it's a cheap enough development platform that thousands of people can buy them and develop applications for themselves and potentially millions of end-users""
The IBM 5150 (1981) cost $1265 with 16K of RAM, cassette-based storage, and a text-only monochrome display (a monitor wasn't included in the base price, and neither were serial and parallel ports). It was not therefore a cheap development platform when compared with the competition, and add-ons such as floppy-disk drives were priced in a typical IBM way, i.e. incredibly expensive, so it was reasonably successful with (mostly US) business users who tended to buy them with most of the optional extras installed, but was far too expensive for the home market, who in any case weren't particularly interested in a machine that could only display monochrome text.
It is for this reason that historical sales data show that it took several year for IBM and the clone industry together to become the dominant platform. In 1982, the year after its launch, IBM PCs and clones (there were several clones by 1982) sold a total of 240,000 units, compared with (for example) 279,000 Apple-IIs, 600,000 Atari 400/800s, 300,000 TRS-80s, and around 850,000 CP/M systems from a variety of manufacturers. IBM PCs and all the clones together took until 1985 to shift more units than the biggest single home computer (by this time, the Commodore 64), and it took until 1986 for them to get above 50% of all computers sold, which is five years after the launch of the original 5150, and four years after the clone industry started.
What the above means is that for the first five years of its life, the IBM PC and all its clones put together were used in far lower numbers than machines such as the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple-II, etc., and the majority of those PCs were being used in businesses where very few people programmed them. By contrast, just about everybody that had an Apple-II, Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, or TRS-80 ended up typing listings that appeared in the computing magazines of the time into them, and then debugging the inevitable errors, hence the fact that so many programmers who started in the late 1970s to mid 1980s had their first experiences on these machines rather than the IBM PC, and founded countless "cottage industry" companies which wrote software of all types for them.
"which allowed development of the perceived killer apps like spreadsheets and word processors."
Spreadsheets started with VisiCalc, which was written in 1978 for the Apple-II in 6502 assembly code. Computer word processors had been available since the early 1970s, and all the original ones on the IBM PC were ports of programs written for other, earlier systems: WordStar and SpellBinder originated on CP/M several years before the IBM PC was announced; WordPerfect was written for Data General mini computers; and Microsoft Word originated on Xenix systems, and was in many ways a direct descendent of Xerox Bravo, written by the same team in 1974. IBM's own DisplayWrite was the only early word-processor specifically written for the IBM PC.
"I think we would take the third option, which is to build space habitats. It's a lot cheaper than building an invasion force and traveling lightyears just to take someone else's planet."
And those space habitats will have wars over who gets the sunniest bit of orbit, the habitat with the biggest population wanting part of another that has a less people but more hydroponics capacity (because they have more space due to less of it being taken up by people), and the same old "we want what they've got" crap that's been the real motivation for every war in history.
Prediction: if we discover two apparently similar worlds on neighbouring stars, only one of which is inhabited, we will make war on the inhabited world instead of settling the uninhabited one, because the inhabited world _must_ be better, otherwise the aliens would have have decided to evolve on the other one. Damned uppity aliens, taking _our_ good world, and leaving us with the shitty planet -- we'll teach them a lesson they won't forget in a hurry.
"The patent office requires source to be submitted for software patents* -- that is, requires you to document the implmentation of the claims -- and there are no special exemptions that allow software patents to be granted with more general claims than non-software patents. That doesn't mean that the patent office does a good job enforcing those requirements, but they aren't any different for software and non-software patents."
Unfortunately, there are so many patents that (a) cover concepts rather than implementation, (b) are vague rather than merely broad, and (c) include no source code, that the requirements you cite effectively do not exist for software. A requirement that is routinely ignored might as well not be there.
"It's possible that the patent office is really bad at reviewing software patents, but I think software people just tend to ignore how many non-software patents there are that do exactly what you claim is a problem unique to software -- make overly broad claims and don't suppor those claims with specific implementation details."
Perhaps you're right in that software's simply a symptom of a much larger problem that stems from patent offices (in the plural here rather than just being the US PTO)making money from patent applications, and therefore having a vested interest in passing as many as possible. This became rather evident in some of what are now termed "biopiracy" cases, where the US PTO decided that common knowledge which is sometimes so ancient that it was first written in long-dead scripts such as sanskrit don't count as prior art because they weren't published in an academic journal, leaving them free to grant patents on things that people had been using for the same purposes since time immemorial.
Finally, I think most people object to over-broad / vague / stupid patents with software especially because 20 years is an incredibly long time in computing. If software patents had been around since the beginning, Apple's ones on GUIs and the various different types of apps that they host would have expired in 2001 (20 years since Lisa), Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc patents would have expired in 1999, and IBM's patent on SQL databases would have persisted until 1995. We'd be living in a very different, and much poorer IT world if these and other patents could have been used to smother BSD Unix, Linux, programming IDEs, virtual machines, interpreters and compilers, software optimisation techniques, RAM disks, rich media, every type of computer game we now have, everything we take for granted on the Internet, etc., etc., etc.
"as someone familiar with the hardware patent world I've never understood why software people think that conflicting, overly-broad patents on the basic process required to achieve some end result are unique to software"
The objection people have to software patents is due to the fact that they cover concepts, not specific mechanisms that embody those concepts. Your example of thousands of different and possibly overlapping compressor designs illustrates this nicely, because applying software patent principles to the hardware world would mean that somebody could hold a patent on processes that reduce the volume of compressable fluids which would (in summary) read something like this:
1) The fluid is drawn or pumped in from a higher volume source.
2) One or more mechanical processes reduces its volume by compression.
3) The resultant compressed fluid is then either used directly, or stored in a suitable compression vessel.
So all those thousands of compressor designs would have to pay royalties to whoever owned that single broad patent on "Compressing Compressable Fluids", even though the patent itself doesn't tell people how to do any of the things it covers, so it's completely useless to anyone who has to design a compressor. Then, when people were breathing a sigh of relief because it's at the point of expiring, the patent office grants an extension because the original owner added some "innovative steps":
4) If used directly, the compressed fluid can distributed via rigid pipes or flexible tubes.
5) In cases where it is stored in a pressure vessel, the vessel may form part of the device.
6) If it is not part of the device, and therefore is a separate component, this component can be placed in a storage facility.
7) Components in storage facilities from step (6) can be given or sold* to others who do not possess a device for compressing compressable fluids.
*Please see separate patent number 8199477728 "A Process For Giving Away Or selling Stored Compressed Fluids"
"I thought the widely accepted definition for a "christian" was a person who followed the teachings of Jesus."
The key to "Christian" is in the word itself, i.e. one who believes that Yeshuah of Bethlehem was anointed by God. A person who following his teachings as described in the Gospels without accepting that he was "the Christ" would not therefore be a Christian, but something else (a Yeshuan?)
"Anyways, on a related note, did you notice my other post discussing the presence of quasi-evolution in their Creationism museum? I was surprised that it didn't garner even a single response as I found that tidbit to be extremely interesting."
I saw the post, but didn't look at the pictures until now. The reason I didn't respond initially was due to being notably unsurprised by yet more magical explanations in a museum which is dedicated to using magic as an explanation for things -- others of course may have had different reasons!
"National Geographic has a story on it. If you'll notice, the article says that there is evidence that they were swimming (not wading) in 3m deep water, but that evidence that they were swimming in deeper water would necessarily be absent (if the water is deep enough that they don't leave tracks, then there are no tracks, and it's really hard to study the absence of tracks)."
There is however, as I said, nothing in the article to support your claim that they did a lot of swimming, and it also supports my contention that the evidence is disputed (the bit about rheas leaving similar tracks when running in nearly dry plaster).
"Futhermore, other research I've read (I can't find it right now) mentioned that their small forearms were sometimes indicative of species that were adapting to a more aquatic lifestyle."
Unfortunately for that idea, air breathing animals adapting to an aquatic or semi-aqautic lifestyle tend to exhibit any atrophying or major modifications in their rear limbs first, not the front ones, if indeed there _is_ any form of atrophying or modification. By way of evidence, I cite plesiosaurs (rear limbs smaller than front), icthyosaurs (rear limbs disappeared), sea turtles (rear limbs smaller than front), marine iguanas (no obvious atrophying), crocodiles (rear limbs slightly smaller than front), cetaceans (rear limbs disappeared), penguins (front limbs are significantly bigger), and seals (rear limbs are significantly modified, front limbs are bigger and stronger).
Another thing that is noticeable about all aquatic and semi-aqautic air breathers is the fact that their front-limbs are positioned at the sides of their bodies, or are capable of pivoting sideways to permit steering in both the X and Y axis in a similar manner to shark fins (sharks lack the swim bladders of most other sorts of fish, so they depend entirely on their fins for steering in both axes). This is in stark contrast to T- Rex's fore-limbs, which were similar to the limbs of most modern land-dwellers without recent arboreal ancestry in having virtually no lateral movement capability whatsoever, which together with their tiny (relative) size would mean that the short-necked T.Rex would have an extremely difficult job getting its massive head above water to allow its forward-facing nostrils to breathe. This would obviously be a major disadvantage for a semi-aqautic animal.
"Additionally, with their body shape they couldn't run very fast. If they stumbled at high speeds, their arms wouldn't be able to stop the accompanying 6g deceleration rates."
Being unable to run quickly isn't a disadvantage if one's prey aren't capable of running quickly either, or (as has been suggested rather more convincingly than the ludicrous idea that their physiology made them even remotely suited to an aquatic life style) they were scavengers whose large size helped them see off smaller predators such as velociraptors.
"Also, you'll note that I did couch my original statement with the safety word "might". I'm definitely not claiming this is a settled issue, or even a widely accepted issue - just an interesting new theory"
Suggesting that small forelimbs and massive hind limbs are an adaptation to a semi-aqautic life style when no other known semi-aqautic animal (living or extinct) exhibits such an adaptation isn't a theory -- it's a hypothesis.
"There has been some recent discussion that the T. Rex might have done a lot of swimming"
The scientific evidence _may_ indicate that _a_ T. Rex. swam in around 3m of water. This hasn't surprised palaeontologists at all, because just about all animals except humans can swim if they need to, so there's nothing in the Spanish footprint discovery that indicates any unsuspected forms of behaviour, if indeed it even indicates that the animal was swimming (this has been disputed). Migrating wlldebeast and zebras for example cross quite significant rivers, and sloths and have been observed swimming in flooded regions, but this does not indicate that any of these animals are aquatic or semi-aquatic.
"The only NeXT technology that appears in Apple computers is BSD."
Well, there's Interface Builder. They got that from NeXT. But apart from Interface Builder and BSD, there are no NeXT technologies whatsoever in current Apple computers. Except of course for Cocoa, which is heavily based on NextStep/OpenStep, hence the fact that it has all those classes with names prefixed by "NS". But with the exception of BSD, Interface Builder, and Cocoa, there are no NeXT technologies in Apple computers at all. Unless of course you count Objective-C as a "technology", which NeXt licensed for programming in NeXTStep and OpenStep while Macs were being programmed in Pascal and C++. But I agree that apart from BSD, Interface Builder, Cocoa, and Objective-C, Apple computers are completely devoid of NeXT technologies. OK, I'll admit that Portable Distributed Objects also came from NeXT. I'll give way on that one. But if you discount BSD, Interface Builder, Cocoa, Objective-C, and PDO, current Apple computers are totally and completely free from NeXT technologies. Utterly without _anything_ from NeXT. Honestly. I mean, WebObjects, which is admittedly a NeXT technology, isn't even installed on most Macs, so _the majority_ of Macs are free from it. Well, they are. Really. So I can, without any pangs of conscience, categorically state that, with the exception of...
"The other problem with hollow volcanoes is that they could become active again. Look at Mt. St. Helens for example, and I hear that there's worry that Mt. Vesuvius may erupt again. However, the view on a tropical island is very good."
I hadn't thought about the view. Insides of deep-sea mountains are notably poor in the view department, and their lack of sunny beaches means that beautiful but lethal female minions who don't wear much wouldn't be present in large numbers. The problem with lairs is that they're always a case of gaining on the swings while losing on the roundabouts...
"I'm not so sure about the global empire bit. It sounds good at first, but then you have to realize that having an empire means having to govern lots of people, which is a pain in the ass."
That's the whole beauty of the pens full of captured nuclear submarines, because there won't be anything like as many people to worry about when those babies have finished emptying their silos, especially if one uses the captured Russian subs to bombard the US, and the US ones launch at Russia and China. While the surface world turns itself into a radioactive wasteland, you sit snug in your mountain under a mile of radiation-proof water, stroking your cat and waiting until the time is right for your armies of minions to sweep across the world and subjugate the small enclaves of desperate wretches who managed to survive both the nuclear conflagration and the ten years of winter that followed it.
"My preferred abode would be a hollowed-out volcano on an island, but I'm not a good enough villain the accumulate that much cash"
The problem with hollow volcanos is their vulnerability to ninjas rappelling down through the shattered remnants of their roofs from helicopters, thereby scuppering the painstakingly laid out plans of budding instituters of new world orders. My ideal lair would therefore be the undersea mountain variety, with internal pens big enough to hold an entire fleet of captured nuclear submarines whose lethal cargoes will be used to found a new global empire.
The correct geek term for such an abode is "subterranean lair". Homes are places that dull, ordinary people live in, hence the fact that astonishingly cool cool items such as werewolves, super-villains, and shaven-headed men in swivel chairs who stroke white cats while consigning Mr. Bond to The Lava Chamber invariably use the term "lair" when referring to their dwellings.
"Alternatives, like Slashdot and blogs exist for this reason. The majority of us still get most of our "news" from "mainstream" sources but we don't have to."
By far the majority of what's on Slashdot, the blogs, etc. comes from the mainstream news sources, e.g. this item, which links to a BBC article. A bunch of people posting opinions on that 99.99% of them wouldn't even know about without the mainstream outlets isn't an alternative news source.
"So what next generation user interface approach do you believe in?"
I've not seen anything that convinces me it's going to be a real breakthrough technology, although this does not of course mean that somebody somewhere isn't on the verge of one, merely that I don't know of it.
"Hmm .. so that leaves us with either "flamebait", or he's just a rather critical guy."
I said he wasn't a MS shill, not that his reviews aren't obviously biased pieces of poor journalism that judge each of the three systems by completely different sets of standards.
"I must say I personally also find all current systems disappointing on various levels; the whole industry is not where it should be. "
Agreed in full. I currently prefer OS X on my desktop, not because it's particularly wonderful in and of itself, but due to the fact that it's a marginally less dreadful than the competition at doing the things I want to do. However, the desktop-and-window metaphor that all current UIs are based around originated on systems that had a few megabytes of pretty small files, and isn't scaling well to today's computers that have sizeable fractions of a terabyte, and are permanently connected to vast international networks with far more information on them than any singe person has ever been expected to handle. We can't use real-word metaphors like desktops for this, because it's a situation that's never existed in the real world, so we need to come up with a new way of representing this immense and ever-growing n-dimensional system of increasingly rich and varied data, instead of simply tacking more and more stuff onto the same tired GUIs that sit on top of operating systems which are based on four decade-old software written for machines with 12 bit addresses and teletype terminals.
"Surely the point of reviews isn't just to trash everything though, but to then help people find the best options for them under the circumstances. I'm not sure he's achieved that."
I'd go further and say that he's definitely not achieved that. In fact, I find it hard to see why a site like HardOCP would bother looking Macs at all, because the customers Apple target are about as far away from the sort of people who are interested in overclocking PCs as it's possible to get. In obligatory Slashdot car analogy terms, this is like "What Car?" magazine reviewing an M1/A2 Main Battle Tank alongside two sedans, and concluding that the tank is an overpriced piece of crap that eats insane amounts of fuel, has no windows, is difficult for women in tight skirts and high heels to get in and out of, and will probably break down at least if driven driven from Chicago to Disneyland.
"Either the reviewer is trolling for ad-views for his website, or he is a corporate shill for MS, or he is biased and using different sets of standards to evaluate the Mac vs. (one can only presume) Windows."
I can't say anything about trolling for ads, but this particular author's "Bottom Line" part of his conclusions about 30 days with Windows Vista start with the phrase "It's a lemon.", so he definitely isn't an MS shill, or applying different standards to Windows and the Mac.
"notice the alternate term: "climate change" instead of "global warming" - Conservatives wouldn't dare agree with Liberals and call it "global warming""
That's actually unfair, because lots of countries outside the US that would be described by most Americans as "liberal" also use the term.
"why were EU rates not growing PRIOR to Kyoto, but then started growing after Kyoto, while in the US the growth has actually slowed since 2000?"
Could it perhaps be due to the fact that Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia have joined the EU since 2000, most of which are ex-Soviet satellites whose power generation systems and industries do not yet meet EC pollution standards?
"Hitler's bible, full of notes"
That Bible seems to have been completely absent from Nazi philosophy and doctrines, which were entirely based on pseudo-scientific theories such as a twisted take on Darwinian evolution (survival of the strongest rather than the fittest), social Darwinism (which Darwin himself didn't mention), and eugenics, which itself has its foundation in genetics.
NB: I also have several Bibles with notes in them, together with a couple of Korans, Indian Vedas, Norse Eddas, and various other interesting religious texts. By your yardstick, this would mean that I'm a Christian Muslim Hindu who believes he'll stand beside Odin in the final battle before Ragnarok!
"and his many, many statements in contrast to those seem to imply that he just had his own version of Christianity, employed for his own purposes."
A man who said Christianity is "the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate, pity-ethics" can only be described as having his "own version of Christianity" by stretching the definition of "Christianity" to breaking point. Hitler was an astute politician, and very adept at saying what people wanted to hear, so those who quote passages from "Mein Kampf" or his public speeches to try and prove that he was a Christian are falling for the same propaganda that the German people did. Hitler's real beliefs are revealed in what he said to his trusted inner circle of "disciples", much of which was recorded by stenographers, and fortunately for historians, these voluminous records managed to survive WWII.
"My statements were meant to refute the original post that the Nazis should be considered separated from Christianity, when they used it quite effectively in pursuing their cause."
I agree that they used it as an effective _political tool_, but your previous post said " Who else but a Christian could come up with Hitler's ridiculous bullshit?". This is far more than simply an assertion that Nazis used Christianity for political ends.
"Even if the first site googling "Hitler Christianity" pulled up didn't give me the complete picture, and honestly I wasn't cherry-picking a damn thing"
I assume you're referring to buzzflash.com, which is so obviously biased that anything they say about Christians has the reliability level of Anne Coulter's opinions of "the left". I would respectfully suggest that the sources people use for information are a form of cherry-picking when they're obviously written by those with a political or religious agenda that's the same as their own; this is something I repeatedly lambast Christians for doing, so I'm not going to let an atheist get away with it.
"When the holy wars are over, the world will have a lot less use for religion"
We've had lots of holy wars in the past, and they all seem to have resulted in more religion rather than less of it. Our lamentable habit of repeating history leads me to conclude that this one (sadly) won't be an exception to that unfortunate rule.
"I'll go with your atheist fundamentalist thing, but evolution never led to a genocide"
The Nazis' ideas about racial hygiene that led to their acts of genocide were based on an erroneous concept of Darwinism (which was not restricted to them, but had many prominent supporters such as Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt), so once again, you are wrong.
"Religion is a mental disease."
And because fundamentalist atheism has all the hallmarks of a religion, those who follow it must be afflicted by the same condition. Stalin is a case in point, a devout atheist, and a man who wasn't sane by any reasonable definition of the word.
"I guess I'm wallowing in some kind of hog shit, but its a separate pool than Jerry Falwell's icky bloated corpse and thats as much as I ask."
Using rabidly biased sources for arguments, and claiming to know "the truth" while labelling any who think differently as deluded or mad, does I think indicate that both yourself and the late Mr. Falwell are floating hand-in-hand alongside all those who've believed that they have a right to tell others how to think.
Whereas patents on 30 year old US technologies are obviously OK, e.g. the one Microsoft was granted in 1996 for FAT, which it says it developed in 1976.
I think you left out some other important things Hitler said about Christianity, e.g.:
"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity."
"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. "
"I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would never have believed possible. For the moment I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews."
Cherry-picking quotes in a desperate attempt to push a religious agenda is the sort of tactic that fundamentalist Christians try and use against evolution, so you've just proven that there are also "atheist fundamentalists" who wallow in the same pit of hog shit. Congratulations!