If you think it's weird... well, ok; with like, a rock band? Yeah, I don't know how much difference there is (I've never been to a rock concert). But as a classical musician myself, I can say that the live performance is so, so, so much better than a recording. My ears pick up even more depth in the sound of the instrument itself, let alone the actual music and harmonics that go on... not harmony, but the harmonics, harmonic series, all that stuff. I don't know if the recording or the speakers are the typical culprit, but a live performance sounds amazingly better; especially when you take into account the natural acoustics of the room that you're in and everything. I'm not an audiophile in the recording-listening sense, but dude... when it comes to hearing a symphony live or recorded, live is so much better.
Interestingly, soundtracks and the like have kinda dumbed down the typical listener of classical music, those are digitally remastered to a high degree to be made to sound really full... fuller than you could get live; but the fullness takes away the clarity and the nuance in the music that I love. And the difference between a recording and a live performance is, I think, even more detectable when it's a small group... say, a string quartet. When you hear the sound of one instrument live vs. that instrument recorded, you can hear the difference. It's like looking at a picture of a sunset and actually being there; yeah, you can photoshop it all you want, there's just something not alive about a picture (a "recording") of something vs. the actual thing.
Again, I'm really not sure about contemporary music that uses electronic instruments anyways... this is strictly about classical, acoustic instruments.
It is interesting that you would claim, essentially, to know more about Christianity than a Christian. Christians accept scientific and natural answers, but do not rule out supernatural events. I do look at a flower and say that it's amazing... why? Because there's no way that I could have made that flower. But I also know that a lot of natural processes (also things that I could not have made) are at work.
For something to be "amazing" does NOT mean that it has to be unnatural.
Christians should, at least, only deny science that is contradictory to something Biblical. If you have met Christians that deny all science or decide that we shouldn't look into natural things because, obviously, it's all of God and nothing else... well first of all, that's more like the Greek religious mindset before the 5th century BC, and secondly, they misrepresent Christianity.
Hm. You do realize, of course, that everything you know about historical science is pretty much based on humans? That is to say, did Einstein himself show you something, or do you... may I use the word, only believe the reports of other humans and the reports of physical writings by him?
While I know this is not going to go terribly far on slashdot, since this is somewhat about the Christian religion at this point, I figured I would mention something commonly held to by Christians (interesting that "anti-evolution" is almost automatically read as "Christian," even though there are non-Christian non-evolutionists). Romans 1 describes perhaps why God doesn't drop a Bible next to you and tell you to read it. Because, according to Romans 1, everyone knows of God's existence, especially through the natural world.
And there is potentially why anti-evolution sentiment usually gets automatically translated as Christian - because most Christians believe that the natural world points to the Creator, not points to naturalistic forces that happened to end up this way.
The point of all this is simply this... the dark ages were not dark because of the Christian; as a Christian, I very much regret that the dominant "Christian" church was so horridly unchristian. The dark ages were dark for many reasons, but one of the big ones is that the "church," which is a very different type of Christianity than evangelical Christianity, decided it wanted to dictate with temporal authority; that is, governmental authority. Believe or die.
Does that actually mean that Christianity is the physical incarnation of evil when it comes to science? I really, really don't think so. I know many Christian scientists, scientists, computer geeks, etc. I even know Christian philosophers. In fact, if really looked at, some Christian worldviews are pretty well worked out, a lot better than the typical worldview held to by most average people... which tends to simply be what the media feeds them.
Again, all this to say one simple point: religion wasn't really the problem, Christianity wasn't the problem, the problem was a lack of freedom and a lack of social and governmental independence. On the other hand, if atheistic evolutionists got to the point that they decided the world would be vastly better without religion and decided to burn everyone that believed in any sort of religion... well, would I be wrong in saying that atheistic evolution was the problem? Do all atheistic evolutionists want to burn all people who believe in religion? No! The problem there was there was no tolerance of a difference of thought.
And, lastly, I would like to make this point. In the Christian Bible, in Romans 12:8, Christians are told this: As much as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.
That definitely sounds like the dark ages to me. *rolls eyes* If you think Christianity naturally leads to the dark ages (and I'm not sure the person I am replying to right now does, in fact I'm pretty sure his post was one of the more thought out ones...) and intolerance, then I'd suggest you read some of what real, Biblical, Christianity (which refers to Christ, who definitely was NOT militant, by any account, nor were the Christians, by even ancient, secular historians that believed in the Roman pantheon!) teaches before you are... ahem... intolerant of it. After all, one would expect people supportive of science to have reasonable answers to philosophical questions, as well.
I'm still in college, and there are still students in college that literally go to class, get food to-go from the cafeteria, and sit and play video games until 2am. Some of them are still "good students," others definitely let their grades slide because of computer games.
Do computer games help obesity/health? No, they don't, I hope we can ALL agree on that. Do they hinder it? I think they do hinder it a little bit. How many people spend hours upon hours, each day, often late into the night (loss of sleep? not healthy!) playing WoW? Of course, you could argue that this is because they weren't taught that they need to go to bed, or perhaps that their parents told them to and they don't, or whatever... but, at the very least, WoW is the way they choose to lose their sleep. And it's not out of boredom all the time. I don't have TIME to play games while I'm in school... there's plenty more to do, but some people HAVE decided that WoW is the single most important thing in their life.
Back to being skinny, by the way, I know a lot of gamers that look very unhealthy, look like they don't sleep, are always eating fast food, and are very skinny, hehe. Actually, I know some gamers, too, that are quite healthy, drink tons of water, don't eat fast food, work out, etc... but they still spend a ton of time playing games, and a ton of money buying 8800GTS video cards for their computers to play a virtual reality.
Maybe part of the problem is we have taught our kids to ignore reality and to try to seek a virtual reality, instead of trying to make the REAL reality better? Hm.
Put very simply though, that still means basically nothing. I have not, and I'd venture to guess the average Joe, has not benefited directly from Hubble. It has made precious little impact on my life. Maybe one or two pictures.
I have nothing against science, but I think it's a valid question to ask. People seemed to ask the same question about, say, the Star Wars missile defense thing, or even the current missile defense thing... even the slashdot-storified commercial jetliner defense system. Apparently, there's more opposition to spending money on practical things to defend from missiles (with, of course, the typical question, "has it ever happened before?") than to spending money in hopes that taking cool pictures of very distant things with an admittedly wicked cool telescope will somehow profit mankind eventually in some way.
Dunno. Personally, if I had to pay for something, I'd rather pay for the commercial jet thing. I'll probably fly on a commercial jet within the next year. Probably won't need anything involved with hubble anytime soon. Isn't NASA government funded, which means, tax funded?
The Ubuntu installation went pretty well. The Fedora ones had a lot of issues. These were all being installed on a variety of different laptops, or as virtual machines.
If I was a shill, wanted to troll, or felt like lying, I could probably do a lot better job... *shrugs*
I love linux... but it seems every time someone unashamedly mentions that Windows might be "easier to use" for someone, they are jumped upon. And I think to myself, "This guy is right..." when someone posts something like the post I'm replying to, commenting that linux wasn't really "meant" to have a GUI. "Doesn't crash," "more stable," "more secure," are not very pleasant answers when someone says "But why can't I open a Word 2007 file?" or "Why can't I see my son's powerpoint presentation that he just sent me?"
I actually did what the article mentioned and installed Ubuntu on an old resurrected computer... only thing I bought was a hard drive. It works pretty well, all in all. I run SuSE on my laptop (dualboot w/ XP), and have two other desktops, one with XP and one with XPx32/XPx64.
With all this, I'd have to agree with thsi basic statement: Linux is not easier to use. I took a class in linux (easy A..), and the first few weeks of the class was just getting the thing installed (most were installing Fedora, one Ubuntu, and one SuSE... me). And these were mostly computer science majors, they weren't entirely computer illiterate..
Anyways, this is all just meant to say that from my perspective, Linux is cool, Linux seems to generally be superior in security and stability, but Linux is not as compatible and as easy to use as members of the Linux Cult would have me think:)
On the other hand, let's say there are 4.5 billion people in the world (I'm not sure how many there were back then). That's a lot of people; is it really so strange that two people with have the same idea, given that they have the same technology, the same lack in technology, etc...?
Motherboards will catch up to the processor. Same reason computer games have graphics "abilities" that pretty much no one can see because it's too taxing on the system... eventually, you'll be able to run it.
Sounds absolutely great. I wish every business person was as smart, since open source is obviously better in every way than closed source.
End of sarcasm. Yeah, open source is pretty cool, I like it, etc. Does open source guarantee everything wonderful, does open source guarantee a business with a profit? No, it doesn't. Open source is not the answer to everything.
And even open source organizations will stop support for decrepit applications. If you insist on using a 10 year old Linux kernel and demanding that some quirky bug in it be fixed, I'm not sure how much support you'd get:)
Is that an exact analogy, no... but, as a previous poster said, businesses run on profit, not open source feel-good-ness...:)
It's not all that bad. If I remember correctly, most flash memory can take 100,000-300,000.. according to wikipedia:
"while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1-5 million write cycles"
I did a small research project (informational) on flash stuff recently for school, I believe solid state hard drives back in June or so were said to have about 2 million writes.
2 million writes per sector. You can always move the information around, and algorithms are being written to do that.
But, with all that, seems like hybrid drives would be the way to go right now.. after all, there's no limit on READING from solid state drives, just writing.
The classical music bit is a big deal, too, because live classical music is typically best heard with no electronic amplification... the difference between a recording or even an amplified concert and a live performance is astounding; yet, because people have been listening to recordings for so long, live music is on its way out, and people have forgotten what music can really sound like. Even amateur music is sometimes nicer to listen to live than professional recordings.
As far as contemporary music, pop music, etc., I have never been to a live concert, so I wouldn't know... but I do know that at live concerts, it's very loud, which is probably why record companies want the album to be loud... today's culture, IMO, simply doesn't know what good music really sounds like. They would probably be bored with it. Loudness = exciting, just liked whipped-cream = fun. So, let's have a huge bowl of whipped cream and forget all about the cake, as opposed to having a beautiful and delicate cake with a bit of whipped cream on top...
It's like "family" restaurants vs. gourmet food whether cooked at home by someone who knows how, or by a chef in a nice restaurant), I suppose.. but that's another topic.
Only extremist groups? Hm. Was Germany an extermist group? I know, they weren't Islamic. But that wasn't really just an extremist group... admittedly, an "extremist group" ended up in control of the country, but there didn't appear to be a huge outcry by the general populace, either. Maybe there was and I'm not aware of it, of course.
According to Wikipedia, immediately after Israel was independent, the following nations declared war on Israel: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq. After Israel won, ceasefires were signed.
Regarding the Suez canal and the Sinai Peninsula... Israel didn't allow UN people to be on their side. Egypt did. But, not very soon after, wikipedia says.. "On May 19, 1967, Egypt expelled UNEF observers,[17] and deployed 100,000 soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula.[18] It then closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping,[19][20] catapulting the region back to the pre-1956 status quo. On May 30, 1967, Jordan entered into the mutual defense pact between Egypt and Syria. President Nasser declared: "Our basic objective is the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight."[21]"
So, basically, Egypt kicks the UN observers out, deploys soldiers, cancels Israeli shipping, basically starting a war. Jordan and Syria and Egypt combine with this. Nasser says that his nation wants the destruction of Israel. President Nasser, not the president of Jamas or some extremist group.. the president of the nation of Egypt. Israel responded with a preemptive strike, the Six Days' War, and totally beat the Egyptian air force; then they attacked Jordanian, Syrian... AND Iraqi air forces. So, Iraq again. Air force... not extremist groups. This is the air force.
Furthermore, regarding Iraq: "In June, 1981, Israel successfully attacked and destroyed newly built Iraqi nuclear facilities in Operation Opera.
During the Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 missiles into Israel, in the hopes of uniting the Arab world against the coalition which sought to liberate Kuwait. At the behest of the United States, Israel did not respond to this attack in order to prevent a greater outbreak of war.[27]"
Now, technically, it seems mostly terrorist groups. The question is... how condoning and sympathetic the nations of Syria, Lebanon, Iran, etc, are of groups like Al Quaeda and Hezbollah. Just as people tend to argue that if an American company is openly doing some form of "evil" somewhere in the world and the American government does nothing about it... well, imagine if America had a large terrorist group dedicated to destroying Mexico, and the government didn't seem to care.
But if the jewish people have the god given right to take the land now owned by someone else because they was there first. A lot of people will have to move out of there own country.
I believe I entirely left God out of the picture. Partially because you would likely complain that my religion was getting in the way of my politics, or something like that... so I left my religion entirely out of it, and never mentioned God.
why ain't we giving them back the land? 2 of the 3 mentioned was within the last 300 to 100 years and even in the last century.
Indeed.. rise and fall of nations apparently is entirely... well, mostly based on force. Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Persians, Medes, Turks, English, American...
To say they have the right to destroy the government that was in place is insane. They should of done what _any_ civilized society would of done with the situation, immigrated and merged with the current society that was in place.
If I remember correctly, they were given the land of Israel by, in fact, the United Nations in 1948... or, well, they approved at least. I guess Britain technically "owned" it.
So, now that Israel IS in place, can we justify Palestine for continuing to attack them, claiming Israel is on their land?
Basically, both Jews and Muslims claim the "holy land" as their own. So, who do we support, then, or do we just let them blow themselves to bits?
Seems to me that, if the issue IS a religious one, if the issue IS whose holy land it is, we should go with the historically accurate one... and I would argue that, to be historically accurate, we would have to say it belongs to the Jews. They took the land quite a long time ago from races that no longer exist, really.
Human rights, the right to life... such things are why an American company can exist to make money for itself. Freedom to do stuff usually means you have the freedom to do stuff that isn't necessarily good for everyone else...
Besides that, one [insert country here] company doesn't mean that all [insert same country here] companies are evil and inhumane, nor does it mean that's a [insert same country here] moral... unless, of course, we want to make sure the government keeps total track of all the companies to make sure that everything they do is humane and lawful and... hm, that sounds like what China is doing with this city's citizens.
Seems there's a catch 22 with these sorts of things. I don't exactly like China's government and whatever, but I think every government faces something similar to this: which is worse, crime or total surveillance?
Obviously, surveillance should increase capture of criminals, if not prevent some. On the other hand... most people like being allowed to be private, for whatever reason - you don't have to be doing something WRONG to want privacy.
So, at the very least, it will be interesting to see what happens with this system.
Well, I have to agree with you there, real sugar is far better. Even table sugar, though, is processed.. corn syrup is even worse than table sugar. Far worse. High fructose corn syrup is awful.
To the "quit blaming it on Americans" person, I AM American, so I blame Americans for their own health. Instead of blaming the European Union, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, or some other random company or government for Americans' bad health. I don't expect the government to make me eat right, nor make companies feed me right. If I can't think enough to look at the ingredients of something before eating it, I apparently am rather stupid. Furthermore, if I expect to be healthy AND eat at MacDonald's all day... well, I may as well believe that Windows ME is by far the best operating system ever produced. It'd be just as logical...:)
How familiar are you with middle eastern history? The land that Israel is in now is smaller than the land they had 3500 years ago. They took the land from races that no longer exist. Saying that Israel is "stealing" Palestinian land... well, they aren't; the Palestinians are trying to take Israel's land.
To the point, I might add, that at the moment, Muslims have control of the temple mount... the Hebrew/Jewish temple mount. And they put a mosque on it. They have done numerous things specifically to insult the Jews... for religious reasons. Now, are you going to argue that the Islamic religion is older than the Jewish religion? He lived in the 6th century, AD; Moses lived quite a bit earlier than that. Even secular skeptics will agree that the Old Testament was written before the 6th century AD... I mean, the Jews were persecuted by the Romans, attacked by the Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians... this is ancient history, not 5th century history.
With that in mind, then, and knowing that the Jewish temple was in place long, long before the Islamic religion existed, how is it that Israel is stealing Palestinian lands... when an Islamic mosque sits on top of the Jews' temple mount itself?
To argue that Israel is "stealing" Palestinian land... well, if I squatted on your land and kicked you off, I'm not sure you'd think you were stealing it if you decided to try to take it back.
And again, with that in mind, the way the Islamic countries are fighting Israel is far from humane. Bombings, random missles... well, a previous post summed it up nicely.
But, strangely enough, as previously mentioned... paper from the UN doesn't really seem to affect the Islamic religious militaries. They don't seem to care. I wonder why? Perhaps it's like a mother who just tells his child over and over that "you're gonna get it if you do that again!"... but the child very quickly learns that he never DOES get it.
I've tried using OpenOffice. I use it for school. But when someone sends me a Word 2007 document, what do I do? Last I had checked (a few months ago, I admit), there was no way for OO to open a Word 2007 file.
Or, try powerpoint. OO's presenter or whatever isn't bad, but PowerPoint... well, easily looks far more professional.
And frankly, I think a lot of businesses would rather pay for Office because it allows them to have professional looking documents much quicker (i.e., templates and such).
Whether or not "we" need it is irrelevant; Microsoft has succeeded in producing and marketing software that is somewhat easy and efficient to use for.. well, offices. Until Linux/OSS productivity packs like OpenOffice can achieve the same, and well, many people will still prefer Microsoft Office.
And it's not just because it's what they are used to. People are also used to their old cars, but a lot of them want new ones:) Especially if their old one had random problems all the time... but if the new one was really hard to figure out, they might just rather have the old one with random problems. Shoot, I just used a car analogy.
Interesting, though, regarding the "happy" sort of excited - we rarely get excited about much at all. How many people really get excited about their high school or general ed undergraduate classes? Does that mean they are necessarily bad, no good, etc.? No, I don't think so. Windows isn't something poeple typically get "excited" (in a happy way) about because... well it's not really new. XP compared to Windows 98 or Windows 2000 wasn't THAT much different. Whether or not it was better or worse... well, it was significantly more stable than my version of Windows 98. I luckily avoided Windows ME entirely. But, frankly, unless you're kind of an OS geek, I don't know many people that get excited about Linux, either... any more than they'd get excited about having an Atari. It's new, different, but eventually... well, I've known people to try Linux, but it's too difficult and doesn't support their hardware well enough for them to use; they went back to using Windows because it worked easily.
Regarding the Novell-MS stuff though... if MS wants to somehow support an open source operating system, for whatever reason; well, is that a problem? As long as Novell is careful and whatnot. Nobody seemed upset about Dell offering Linux boxes, even though Dell hasn't appeared to care all that much until it was somewhat financially profitable for them to care.
So, I agree with Linus that these sorts of situations DO show biases.
There ARE some things about Microsoft that they do well. Besides marketing, I think we'd all have to agree that Microsoft supports the majority of PC software out there better than Linux. Whether or not that is from anti-competititve processes or what, who knows.
Is Apple better than Microsoft in this way? Seems to me that Apple has been very closed to... competition. Especially with something like hardware and whatever. Is the actual OS better? I don't think that's really the argument at hand. Is Apple actually more friendly to OSS though?
Lastly, Microsoft certainly has software that, at the very least, seems to have functional use. Many people use Office 2003 quite happily, Windows Server 2003.
Is it BETTER than other software? Maybe, maybe not. It does appear to be easier to use.
And, for the record, I've used openoffice, apache, tinkered with various servers and whatever, and Windows Server 2003 and Office 2003 are easier for the user to use.
He had mountains of data about life from, basically, an explorer's viewpoint. He thought, in his mountain of data, that a "cell" was basically a glob of plasma, did he not? He had NO idea regarding the complexity of each individual cell. And even he recognized, for example (to use a beaten-to death example, at that!), that the eye was very complex and his theory did not account for it at that time.
Sure, he had lots of data. As much data as he could at the time. The Greeks had a whole lot of data, too, you know, and look at some of the theories they came up with. Arguing about the amount of data really does nothing. Darwin didn't even know about DNA and the complexity of it... I'm sure you've read somewhat recently about the first entire human genome... it took, what, 2 DVDs to contain it all? THAT is a lot of data... complex data, at that. And I'm sure you know all about how DNA works in the cell, how it is produced, moved, used to create proteins and other necessary components of cells, and how this goes on all the time in every single one of your trillions of cells (of which there are about 210 distinct types, Google tells me). Darwin had NO idea about the complexity of each cell and the complexity of the DNA that governs the reproduction of them. He thought the eye was too complex for his theory at the time, I wonder what he would have thought about DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's weird... well, ok; with like, a rock band? Yeah, I don't know how much difference there is (I've never been to a rock concert). But as a classical musician myself, I can say that the live performance is so, so, so much better than a recording. My ears pick up even more depth in the sound of the instrument itself, let alone the actual music and harmonics that go on ... not harmony, but the harmonics, harmonic series, all that stuff. I don't know if the recording or the speakers are the typical culprit, but a live performance sounds amazingly better; especially when you take into account the natural acoustics of the room that you're in and everything. I'm not an audiophile in the recording-listening sense, but dude... when it comes to hearing a symphony live or recorded, live is so much better.
Interestingly, soundtracks and the like have kinda dumbed down the typical listener of classical music, those are digitally remastered to a high degree to be made to sound really full... fuller than you could get live; but the fullness takes away the clarity and the nuance in the music that I love. And the difference between a recording and a live performance is, I think, even more detectable when it's a small group... say, a string quartet. When you hear the sound of one instrument live vs. that instrument recorded, you can hear the difference. It's like looking at a picture of a sunset and actually being there; yeah, you can photoshop it all you want, there's just something not alive about a picture (a "recording") of something vs. the actual thing.
Again, I'm really not sure about contemporary music that uses electronic instruments anyways... this is strictly about classical, acoustic instruments.
It is interesting that you would claim, essentially, to know more about Christianity than a Christian. Christians accept scientific and natural answers, but do not rule out supernatural events. I do look at a flower and say that it's amazing... why? Because there's no way that I could have made that flower. But I also know that a lot of natural processes (also things that I could not have made) are at work.
For something to be "amazing" does NOT mean that it has to be unnatural.
Christians should, at least, only deny science that is contradictory to something Biblical. If you have met Christians that deny all science or decide that we shouldn't look into natural things because, obviously, it's all of God and nothing else... well first of all, that's more like the Greek religious mindset before the 5th century BC, and secondly, they misrepresent Christianity.
Hm. You do realize, of course, that everything you know about historical science is pretty much based on humans? That is to say, did Einstein himself show you something, or do you ... may I use the word, only believe the reports of other humans and the reports of physical writings by him?
While I know this is not going to go terribly far on slashdot, since this is somewhat about the Christian religion at this point, I figured I would mention something commonly held to by Christians (interesting that "anti-evolution" is almost automatically read as "Christian," even though there are non-Christian non-evolutionists). Romans 1 describes perhaps why God doesn't drop a Bible next to you and tell you to read it. Because, according to Romans 1, everyone knows of God's existence, especially through the natural world.
And there is potentially why anti-evolution sentiment usually gets automatically translated as Christian - because most Christians believe that the natural world points to the Creator, not points to naturalistic forces that happened to end up this way.
The point of all this is simply this... the dark ages were not dark because of the Christian; as a Christian, I very much regret that the dominant "Christian" church was so horridly unchristian. The dark ages were dark for many reasons, but one of the big ones is that the "church," which is a very different type of Christianity than evangelical Christianity, decided it wanted to dictate with temporal authority; that is, governmental authority. Believe or die.
Does that actually mean that Christianity is the physical incarnation of evil when it comes to science? I really, really don't think so. I know many Christian scientists, scientists, computer geeks, etc. I even know Christian philosophers. In fact, if really looked at, some Christian worldviews are pretty well worked out, a lot better than the typical worldview held to by most average people... which tends to simply be what the media feeds them.
Again, all this to say one simple point: religion wasn't really the problem, Christianity wasn't the problem, the problem was a lack of freedom and a lack of social and governmental independence. On the other hand, if atheistic evolutionists got to the point that they decided the world would be vastly better without religion and decided to burn everyone that believed in any sort of religion... well, would I be wrong in saying that atheistic evolution was the problem? Do all atheistic evolutionists want to burn all people who believe in religion? No! The problem there was there was no tolerance of a difference of thought.
And, lastly, I would like to make this point. In the Christian Bible, in Romans 12:8, Christians are told this: As much as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.
That definitely sounds like the dark ages to me. *rolls eyes* If you think Christianity naturally leads to the dark ages (and I'm not sure the person I am replying to right now does, in fact I'm pretty sure his post was one of the more thought out ones...) and intolerance, then I'd suggest you read some of what real, Biblical, Christianity (which refers to Christ, who definitely was NOT militant, by any account, nor were the Christians, by even ancient, secular historians that believed in the Roman pantheon!) teaches before you are... ahem... intolerant of it. After all, one would expect people supportive of science to have reasonable answers to philosophical questions, as well.
Skinny doesn't necessarily mean healthy, though.
I'm still in college, and there are still students in college that literally go to class, get food to-go from the cafeteria, and sit and play video games until 2am. Some of them are still "good students," others definitely let their grades slide because of computer games.
Do computer games help obesity/health? No, they don't, I hope we can ALL agree on that. Do they hinder it? I think they do hinder it a little bit. How many people spend hours upon hours, each day, often late into the night (loss of sleep? not healthy!) playing WoW? Of course, you could argue that this is because they weren't taught that they need to go to bed, or perhaps that their parents told them to and they don't, or whatever... but, at the very least, WoW is the way they choose to lose their sleep. And it's not out of boredom all the time. I don't have TIME to play games while I'm in school... there's plenty more to do, but some people HAVE decided that WoW is the single most important thing in their life.
Back to being skinny, by the way, I know a lot of gamers that look very unhealthy, look like they don't sleep, are always eating fast food, and are very skinny, hehe. Actually, I know some gamers, too, that are quite healthy, drink tons of water, don't eat fast food, work out, etc... but they still spend a ton of time playing games, and a ton of money buying 8800GTS video cards for their computers to play a virtual reality.
Maybe part of the problem is we have taught our kids to ignore reality and to try to seek a virtual reality, instead of trying to make the REAL reality better? Hm.
Put very simply though, that still means basically nothing. I have not, and I'd venture to guess the average Joe, has not benefited directly from Hubble. It has made precious little impact on my life. Maybe one or two pictures.
I have nothing against science, but I think it's a valid question to ask. People seemed to ask the same question about, say, the Star Wars missile defense thing, or even the current missile defense thing... even the slashdot-storified commercial jetliner defense system. Apparently, there's more opposition to spending money on practical things to defend from missiles (with, of course, the typical question, "has it ever happened before?") than to spending money in hopes that taking cool pictures of very distant things with an admittedly wicked cool telescope will somehow profit mankind eventually in some way.
Dunno. Personally, if I had to pay for something, I'd rather pay for the commercial jet thing. I'll probably fly on a commercial jet within the next year. Probably won't need anything involved with hubble anytime soon. Isn't NASA government funded, which means, tax funded?
The Ubuntu installation went pretty well. The Fedora ones had a lot of issues. These were all being installed on a variety of different laptops, or as virtual machines.
If I was a shill, wanted to troll, or felt like lying, I could probably do a lot better job... *shrugs*
I love linux... but it seems every time someone unashamedly mentions that Windows might be "easier to use" for someone, they are jumped upon. And I think to myself, "This guy is right..." when someone posts something like the post I'm replying to, commenting that linux wasn't really "meant" to have a GUI. "Doesn't crash," "more stable," "more secure," are not very pleasant answers when someone says "But why can't I open a Word 2007 file?" or "Why can't I see my son's powerpoint presentation that he just sent me?"
I actually did what the article mentioned and installed Ubuntu on an old resurrected computer... only thing I bought was a hard drive. It works pretty well, all in all. I run SuSE on my laptop (dualboot w/ XP), and have two other desktops, one with XP and one with XPx32/XPx64.
With all this, I'd have to agree with thsi basic statement: Linux is not easier to use. I took a class in linux (easy A..), and the first few weeks of the class was just getting the thing installed (most were installing Fedora, one Ubuntu, and one SuSE ... me). And these were mostly computer science majors, they weren't entirely computer illiterate..
Anyways, this is all just meant to say that from my perspective, Linux is cool, Linux seems to generally be superior in security and stability, but Linux is not as compatible and as easy to use as members of the Linux Cult would have me think :)
On the other hand, let's say there are 4.5 billion people in the world (I'm not sure how many there were back then). That's a lot of people; is it really so strange that two people with have the same idea, given that they have the same technology, the same lack in technology, etc...?
Motherboards will catch up to the processor. Same reason computer games have graphics "abilities" that pretty much no one can see because it's too taxing on the system... eventually, you'll be able to run it.
Sounds absolutely great. I wish every business person was as smart, since open source is obviously better in every way than closed source.
End of sarcasm. Yeah, open source is pretty cool, I like it, etc. Does open source guarantee everything wonderful, does open source guarantee a business with a profit? No, it doesn't. Open source is not the answer to everything.
And even open source organizations will stop support for decrepit applications. If you insist on using a 10 year old Linux kernel and demanding that some quirky bug in it be fixed, I'm not sure how much support you'd get :)
Is that an exact analogy, no... but, as a previous poster said, businesses run on profit, not open source feel-good-ness... :)
It's not all that bad. If I remember correctly, most flash memory can take 100,000-300,000.. according to wikipedia:
"while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1-5 million write cycles"
I did a small research project (informational) on flash stuff recently for school, I believe solid state hard drives back in June or so were said to have about 2 million writes.
2 million writes per sector. You can always move the information around, and algorithms are being written to do that.
But, with all that, seems like hybrid drives would be the way to go right now.. after all, there's no limit on READING from solid state drives, just writing.
The classical music bit is a big deal, too, because live classical music is typically best heard with no electronic amplification... the difference between a recording or even an amplified concert and a live performance is astounding; yet, because people have been listening to recordings for so long, live music is on its way out, and people have forgotten what music can really sound like. Even amateur music is sometimes nicer to listen to live than professional recordings.
As far as contemporary music, pop music, etc., I have never been to a live concert, so I wouldn't know... but I do know that at live concerts, it's very loud, which is probably why record companies want the album to be loud... today's culture, IMO, simply doesn't know what good music really sounds like. They would probably be bored with it. Loudness = exciting, just liked whipped-cream = fun. So, let's have a huge bowl of whipped cream and forget all about the cake, as opposed to having a beautiful and delicate cake with a bit of whipped cream on top...
It's like "family" restaurants vs. gourmet food whether cooked at home by someone who knows how, or by a chef in a nice restaurant), I suppose.. but that's another topic.
Only extremist groups? Hm. Was Germany an extermist group? I know, they weren't Islamic. But that wasn't really just an extremist group... admittedly, an "extremist group" ended up in control of the country, but there didn't appear to be a huge outcry by the general populace, either. Maybe there was and I'm not aware of it, of course.
According to Wikipedia, immediately after Israel was independent, the following nations declared war on Israel: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq. After Israel won, ceasefires were signed.
Regarding the Suez canal and the Sinai Peninsula... Israel didn't allow UN people to be on their side. Egypt did. But, not very soon after, wikipedia says.. "On May 19, 1967, Egypt expelled UNEF observers,[17] and deployed 100,000 soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula.[18] It then closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping,[19][20] catapulting the region back to the pre-1956 status quo. On May 30, 1967, Jordan entered into the mutual defense pact between Egypt and Syria. President Nasser declared: "Our basic objective is the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight."[21]"
So, basically, Egypt kicks the UN observers out, deploys soldiers, cancels Israeli shipping, basically starting a war. Jordan and Syria and Egypt combine with this. Nasser says that his nation wants the destruction of Israel. President Nasser, not the president of Jamas or some extremist group.. the president of the nation of Egypt. Israel responded with a preemptive strike, the Six Days' War, and totally beat the Egyptian air force; then they attacked Jordanian, Syrian... AND Iraqi air forces. So, Iraq again. Air force... not extremist groups. This is the air force.
Furthermore, regarding Iraq: "In June, 1981, Israel successfully attacked and destroyed newly built Iraqi nuclear facilities in Operation Opera.
During the Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 missiles into Israel, in the hopes of uniting the Arab world against the coalition which sought to liberate Kuwait. At the behest of the United States, Israel did not respond to this attack in order to prevent a greater outbreak of war.[27]"
Now, technically, it seems mostly terrorist groups. The question is ... how condoning and sympathetic the nations of Syria, Lebanon, Iran, etc, are of groups like Al Quaeda and Hezbollah. Just as people tend to argue that if an American company is openly doing some form of "evil" somewhere in the world and the American government does nothing about it... well, imagine if America had a large terrorist group dedicated to destroying Mexico, and the government didn't seem to care.
But if the jewish people have the god given right to take the land now owned by someone else because they was there first. A lot of people will have to move out of there own country. I believe I entirely left God out of the picture. Partially because you would likely complain that my religion was getting in the way of my politics, or something like that... so I left my religion entirely out of it, and never mentioned God.
why ain't we giving them back the land? 2 of the 3 mentioned was within the last 300 to 100 years and even in the last century. Indeed.. rise and fall of nations apparently is entirely ... well, mostly based on force. Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Persians, Medes, Turks, English, American...
To say they have the right to destroy the government that was in place is insane. They should of done what _any_ civilized society would of done with the situation, immigrated and merged with the current society that was in place. If I remember correctly, they were given the land of Israel by, in fact, the United Nations in 1948... or, well, they approved at least. I guess Britain technically "owned" it.
So, now that Israel IS in place, can we justify Palestine for continuing to attack them, claiming Israel is on their land?
Basically, both Jews and Muslims claim the "holy land" as their own. So, who do we support, then, or do we just let them blow themselves to bits?
Seems to me that, if the issue IS a religious one, if the issue IS whose holy land it is, we should go with the historically accurate one... and I would argue that, to be historically accurate, we would have to say it belongs to the Jews. They took the land quite a long time ago from races that no longer exist, really.
Human rights, the right to life... such things are why an American company can exist to make money for itself. Freedom to do stuff usually means you have the freedom to do stuff that isn't necessarily good for everyone else...
Besides that, one [insert country here] company doesn't mean that all [insert same country here] companies are evil and inhumane, nor does it mean that's a [insert same country here] moral... unless, of course, we want to make sure the government keeps total track of all the companies to make sure that everything they do is humane and lawful and ... hm, that sounds like what China is doing with this city's citizens.
Obviously, surveillance should increase capture of criminals, if not prevent some. On the other hand... most people like being allowed to be private, for whatever reason - you don't have to be doing something WRONG to want privacy.
So, at the very least, it will be interesting to see what happens with this system.
But, I think in modern slang, "chemical" refers to an unnatural or synthetic (whether synthetically produced/processed or manufactured) substance...
*shrugs*
In fact, looksie at these links. http://www.mercola.com/2004/may/26/corn_syrup_diab etes.htm
- Corn syrup linked to diabetes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8003-200 3Mar10?language=printer
- Average American consumes, in 2001! ... about 62 pounds of corn syrup per year... no wonder we don't have that much real sugar, we replaced it with a chemical :)
To the "quit blaming it on Americans" person, I AM American, so I blame Americans for their own health. Instead of blaming the European Union, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, or some other random company or government for Americans' bad health. I don't expect the government to make me eat right, nor make companies feed me right. If I can't think enough to look at the ingredients of something before eating it, I apparently am rather stupid. Furthermore, if I expect to be healthy AND eat at MacDonald's all day... well, I may as well believe that Windows ME is by far the best operating system ever produced. It'd be just as logical... :)
To the point, I might add, that at the moment, Muslims have control of the temple mount... the Hebrew/Jewish temple mount. And they put a mosque on it. They have done numerous things specifically to insult the Jews... for religious reasons. Now, are you going to argue that the Islamic religion is older than the Jewish religion? He lived in the 6th century, AD; Moses lived quite a bit earlier than that. Even secular skeptics will agree that the Old Testament was written before the 6th century AD... I mean, the Jews were persecuted by the Romans, attacked by the Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians... this is ancient history, not 5th century history.
With that in mind, then, and knowing that the Jewish temple was in place long, long before the Islamic religion existed, how is it that Israel is stealing Palestinian lands... when an Islamic mosque sits on top of the Jews' temple mount itself?
To argue that Israel is "stealing" Palestinian land... well, if I squatted on your land and kicked you off, I'm not sure you'd think you were stealing it if you decided to try to take it back.
And again, with that in mind, the way the Islamic countries are fighting Israel is far from humane. Bombings, random missles... well, a previous post summed it up nicely.
But, strangely enough, as previously mentioned... paper from the UN doesn't really seem to affect the Islamic religious militaries. They don't seem to care. I wonder why? Perhaps it's like a mother who just tells his child over and over that "you're gonna get it if you do that again!" ... but the child very quickly learns that he never DOES get it.
Or, try powerpoint. OO's presenter or whatever isn't bad, but PowerPoint ... well, easily looks far more professional.
And frankly, I think a lot of businesses would rather pay for Office because it allows them to have professional looking documents much quicker (i.e., templates and such).
Whether or not "we" need it is irrelevant; Microsoft has succeeded in producing and marketing software that is somewhat easy and efficient to use for.. well, offices. Until Linux/OSS productivity packs like OpenOffice can achieve the same, and well, many people will still prefer Microsoft Office.
And it's not just because it's what they are used to. People are also used to their old cars, but a lot of them want new ones :) Especially if their old one had random problems all the time... but if the new one was really hard to figure out, they might just rather have the old one with random problems. Shoot, I just used a car analogy.
It still seems that not eating massive amounts of sugar (as most Americans do) might help prevent diabetes, too.
Regarding the Novell-MS stuff though... if MS wants to somehow support an open source operating system, for whatever reason; well, is that a problem? As long as Novell is careful and whatnot. Nobody seemed upset about Dell offering Linux boxes, even though Dell hasn't appeared to care all that much until it was somewhat financially profitable for them to care.
So, I agree with Linus that these sorts of situations DO show biases.
There ARE some things about Microsoft that they do well. Besides marketing, I think we'd all have to agree that Microsoft supports the majority of PC software out there better than Linux. Whether or not that is from anti-competititve processes or what, who knows.
Is Apple better than Microsoft in this way? Seems to me that Apple has been very closed to ... competition. Especially with something like hardware and whatever. Is the actual OS better? I don't think that's really the argument at hand. Is Apple actually more friendly to OSS though?
Lastly, Microsoft certainly has software that, at the very least, seems to have functional use. Many people use Office 2003 quite happily, Windows Server 2003.
Is it BETTER than other software? Maybe, maybe not. It does appear to be easier to use.
And, for the record, I've used openoffice, apache, tinkered with various servers and whatever, and Windows Server 2003 and Office 2003 are easier for the user to use.
Sure, he had lots of data. As much data as he could at the time. The Greeks had a whole lot of data, too, you know, and look at some of the theories they came up with. Arguing about the amount of data really does nothing. Darwin didn't even know about DNA and the complexity of it... I'm sure you've read somewhat recently about the first entire human genome... it took, what, 2 DVDs to contain it all? THAT is a lot of data... complex data, at that. And I'm sure you know all about how DNA works in the cell, how it is produced, moved, used to create proteins and other necessary components of cells, and how this goes on all the time in every single one of your trillions of cells (of which there are about 210 distinct types, Google tells me). Darwin had NO idea about the complexity of each cell and the complexity of the DNA that governs the reproduction of them. He thought the eye was too complex for his theory at the time, I wonder what he would have thought about DNA.