He means only expensive ones, like your super drive, will work.
My Superdrive cost me $97 mail-order. It took two minutes to install.
BTW, I thought the superdrive only did -R and -RW?
There's no such thing as the Superdrive. Superdrive is a name that's used to describe any device that both reads and writes both CDs and DVDs. And it's been a while (like years) since they did only DVD-R and DVD-RW.
Number of servers I've owned or operated in the past ten years: Rough estimate, 500.
Number of power supplies I've had to replace: 0.
Excluding perfectly good servers because they don't have a particular feature that's needed so seldom the odds have to be discussed using scientific notation: stupid.
Heh. Your snideness merely adds to the humor value. Because, you see, my point -- reading comprehension, man! -- was that comparing bare hardware to bare hardware is inherently stupid. The fastest hardware in the world is useless if it doesn't run the software you want to use. So your "I could buy a quad-Blobberon mother-board from Lysan that would snizzle the frabjulations" jabber-jabber was utterly high-larious.
I love it when people compare bare hardware to bare hardware. As if the machines are just going to be plugged into the wall generating heat, not actually doing anything useful.
It's all about the software, man. Software trumps everything.
New hardware is always insanely expensive. Unless you have really specific needs, it never pays to be an early adopter here.
That's not necessarily true. My habit has always been to buy the latest and greatest thing, spending as much money as I could possibly scrape up, and continue to use it for five years or more.
Over the 20 years I've used Macs (yes, I go all the way back to the original one) I've owned exactly six, counting three laptops. I'm currently using a 2002-era Power Mac G4, and it will continue to serve me well for at least another couple of years, maybe longer. Little upgrades over time (a couple hundred bucks for an additional gig of RAM, a couple hundred bucks for another big hard drive) really do a lot to extend the life of the machine.
So if you want to by frequently, buy refurbished. But if you want to buy infrequently, buy brand new.
I don't know what "a RAD environment" is, but you're mistaken. Automator has nothing to do with AppleScript. While it's true that Actions can be written in AppleScript, it's much better to write them in Objective-C using the Cocoa toolkit.
If apple provides hook into coreimage for applescript it will allow ordinary people to extraordinary things with images and video.
Um. Core Image doesn't allow anybody to do anything they can't already do with Photoshop. The Image Units are not revolutionary. They implement tried-and-true image-processing algorithms, like Gaussian blurs and color transforms. The aspects of Core Image that are neat is that it will take advantage of hardware acceleration if available, and it's very easy for developers.
MS in turn is going to go the way of avalon and xaml.
These things have nothing to do with Core Image. It's kind of like saying, "Apple computers include a mouse, while Microsoft has gone the way of using a blue logo." No relation whatsoever.
So is avalon as good as or better then coreimage?
They do not. Do. Similar. Things. How can I be more clear? They are apples and oranges. They are unrelated. They are not comparable items. Are you beginning to understand me now?
Is it easier to use xaml or applescript (or python)?
Prices will be similar, devices will have either singular-support, or very sketchy dual-support.
What do you mean, "very sketchy?" My SuperDrive, which I think is a DVR-107 or DVR-108, has perfect support for DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW. I've never had a problem writing or reading any of those types of media. And all of them plop right into my home DVD player for playback.
No, the facts indicate that life began on this planet.
Appeared on this planet, you mean. We have no evidence that it began here versus being in some way transported to here, like on a comet or something.
Precision of language is important.
All this implies that life began at some time from non-living matter.
You infer that life began, you mean. Precision of language is important.
The fact is, life is made up of certain molecules and there is no reason why the structure of these molecules can't be written down on paper by one person and then constructed at some time in the future by another person (with the ability to construct atom-by-atom).
One of those is a fact. The other is sheer fantasy. Precision of language is important.
If you'll look closely, you'll see that I was actually giving you credit. I asked how much ignorance you were going to pretend to possess. Was I mistaken? Are you really this ignorant?
What determines what something is?
What? The idea of a species is not a new and revolutionary one. It's one you should already be comfortable with. A cow is a cow and a person is a person.
Don't tell me that it will grow into a human and that thus is it human, that's circular and invalid.
It may be circular, but it's also the definition of a human being. A human being is the child of another human being. As opposed to being, you know, the child of a cow. Which is called a calf, if you're wondering.
Yes, of course they're harveested from in vitro zygotes.
Oh, god. First it was "fetus," but then people saw pictures of actual fetuses and realized that they're just very young babies. Then it became the even more jargony "embryo," but now that's starting to give way to the massively jargony "zygote."
All to avoid saying the word "baby."
A straw man argument, in contrast, it an intentionaly distorted version of your opponent's argument.
Are you suggesting that you should get a pass because you merely accidentally distorted my position? I don't buy it. First, your statement is still bullshit whether you meant for it to be or not. Second... I don't believe for a second that you weren't acting deliberately. I read your comment. I saw what it said. You didn't just trip and land funny on your keyboard. You meant exactly what you said, right up to the second when you got called on it.
By calling my argument a straw man when it clearly is not, you mischaracterize it
Oh, please. You're not fooling anyone with that "I know you are but what am I" crap.
Name one baby (your words, not mine) killed to get stem cells.
Are you an idiot? You know as well as I do that the babies killed for stem cells have not yet been given names. What does that have to do with anything? Do you think that people without names aren't technically alive? My mother didn't give me my name until eight hours after I was born. I was legally "Baby Lastname" for the first eight hours of my life. Would it have been okay to kill me?
Were we to do things your way, the zygotes would be fertilized one at a time and disguarded until a viable one is generated.
Bingo, except for the "disguarded" thing. (Invest in a Mac. It's got a built-in spell-checker.) There is zero excuse for "discarding" (i.e., killing) a baby.
Is any form of in vitro, either in the present incarnation or under your somewhat more financialy whimsical system ethical in your world view?
Of course in vitro fertilization is ethical. Create one or more babies, implant them into the mother. You know, just the way we used to do it before it became a commercial enterprise and we created a whole country of baby assembly lines to automate the process, like injecting creme filling into Twinkies.
You pretend to be ignorant of ethics. You pretend to be ignorant of rhetoric. I'm sick of your pretending. No more being difficult just for the sake of being difficult.
I followed those thoughts through to the logical conclusion.
Except, you know. Not. You started with something I said, then claimed I was saying something I did not say, in order to try to discredit what I did say.
This is the textbook definition of a cleverly implemented straw-man argument.
Or did you not take discrete mathematics?
You do realize that this is not a math problem, right?
Allright, so it's alive. So was my salad last night.
Your salad wasn't human. Do we really have to talk about the difference between human life and other life? I mean, how much ignorance are you going to pretend to possess here?
If an embryo is a human being allready, what does it grow in to?
An older, more mature human being. Duh.
this distinguishing characteristics between a human and cow embryo are pretty minimal
Um. Except the fact that one is human and one is a cow. I guess the answer to my question above is "a whole lot of ignorance."
it's not necessarily going to grow up to be a human either
What? Human babies do, in fact, grow up to be humans. You knew this already, right? You've had the birds-and-the-bees talk, I presume?
Given that the abortion has allready occured
You are ignorant of the subject under discussion. Embryonic stem cells are not recovered from aborted babies. They're harvested from babies that are created in vitro, sometimes specifically for the purpose of producing stem cells and sometimes as part of an unethical mass-production in-vitro fertilization technique.
Clearly you have moral objections to stem cell research.
Again with the straw-man argument. Have you not been paying attention, or are you just trying to discredit me? I have zero objections to stem-cell research. I have massive objections to killing babies to get to their stem cells. And you should, too.
Stem Cell research has a lot to do with in vitro fertilization. Is this procedure also objectionable?
This is not complicated. Let me make this very simple. It is wrong to create a baby only for the purpose of killing it later. If you grow a baby in a lab for the purpose of killing it and harvesting its stem cells, that's morally wrong. If you manufacture dozens of babies with the intent of only implanting a few in their mother and freezing (and eventually killing) the rest, that's morally wrong, particularly when you consider that the only reason for doing it is to save money.
Why are you pretending not to understand these incredibly simple ideas?
To help assure success IVF HAS to create far more embryo's then is actually used.
That's not correct. It's purely a cost-saving measure. Some IVF clinics -- a minority, if I remember correctly -- take many sperm and many eggs and create many babies all at once in a sort of mass-production process. Some of these are implanted in the mother; the rest are stored at low temperatures for future use.
This isn't necessary. It's something clinics do to save money. And yes, the unwanted babies are often killed. The whole process is unethical and should come to an end. We can do effective in-vitro fertilization without mass-producing babies the majority of whom are killed.
So what we are talking about here is NOT killing an embryo that someday could get itself born. We are talking about making use of tissue that is about 5 minutes from the garbage can.
Wow. If you can describe babies as "tissue that is about 5 minutes from the garbage can," then what's stopping you from describing undesirable adults the same way? Your position is, in a word, insane.
And yes, we are talking about killing babies that could someday get themselves born. All they need is a mother. It could be the mother who donated the egg, or it could be any other mother with compatible blood factors.
Your options are:
There are four options, not two. Option #3 is to donate the unwanted babies to mothers who are unable to conceive naturally, giving them the opportunity to experience pregnancy and birth despite their physical handicap. And option #4, of course, is to refrain from manufacturing babies like they were livestock in the first place, and to return to the ethical method of in-vitro fertilization where only enough babies are created for a single attempt at implantation.
Me? I choose #3 for the unwanted babies already on ice, and #4 to prevent the creation of any others.
By whom? "Baby" isn't a technical term. It means a person who's younger than a child. That's all.
The word embryo wasn't introduced at some later date to make their destruction insignificant.
The use of dehumanizing technical jargon is bad whether the jargon was already around or whether it was invented for that purpose.
Be honest, are you simplifing for us, or trying to make a stronger ethical argument?
I'm simplifying for me. I haven't got the foggiest idea where the line is between a zygote, an embryo and a fetus is. All three are words used to describe people in different stages of development, but their use implies a granularity to the process that doesn't seem to exist. There's no instant of transition where a baby goes from being technically an embryo to technically a fetus. It's a very gradual process of development. So the whole terminology issue is very confusing to me.
Let the doctors worry about the technical terms. The one thing we should all be able to agree upon is that from the instant of conception, the thing inside the mother's belly is a person, a young, undeveloped, immature person. A baby.
An hour before your first breath? The exact same thing was true an hour after your first breath. You were not aware, and you were completely dependent on another organism to stay alive.
In fact, the same things were true for most of the first year of your life.
I'm pretty sure the suggestion that it's okay to kill six-month-old babies for medical research wouldn't go over too well.
This is what I meant when I said there's no criteria that anyone can offer that can stand up to scrutiny. Whatever criteria you establish, we'll situations where those criteria are met but killing the person in question is clearly unacceptable.
That's why we need to stop trying to establish criteria for life. It's a sham. We need to stop talking about this as if there were objective, scientific truth somewhere at the bottom of it and start talking about values.
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He means only expensive ones, like your super drive, will work.
My Superdrive cost me $97 mail-order. It took two minutes to install.
BTW, I thought the superdrive only did -R and -RW?
There's no such thing as the Superdrive. Superdrive is a name that's used to describe any device that both reads and writes both CDs and DVDs. And it's been a while (like years) since they did only DVD-R and DVD-RW.
Well, let's be realistic here. The user base is tiny by any reasonable sense of proportion.
But ignoring that, the question should be, "Can they afford not to listen to their users, if they want to have any users left?"
That's only true if you spend years learning to write computer programs first.
When you look at it that way, the cost-benefit analysis just doesn't add up.
I mean, isn't that one of the selling points of OSS?
"If you don't like it, fuck off?" No, I'm gonna go ahead and say that that should not be one of the selling points of this thing you're pitching.
I'm thinking that "We listen to our customers, and while we're not perfect, we never stop trying to be" would be a good selling point.
Number of servers I've owned or operated in the past ten years: Rough estimate, 500.
Number of power supplies I've had to replace: 0.
Excluding perfectly good servers because they don't have a particular feature that's needed so seldom the odds have to be discussed using scientific notation: stupid.
You can run Linux on both. You can run NetBSD on both.
You can use both as boat anchors, too. Doesn't mean it would be a good idea.
It was a discussion of speed of the machine.
Speed is irrelevant when only one of the two computers can run the software one needs.
Heh. Your snideness merely adds to the humor value. Because, you see, my point -- reading comprehension, man! -- was that comparing bare hardware to bare hardware is inherently stupid. The fastest hardware in the world is useless if it doesn't run the software you want to use. So your "I could buy a quad-Blobberon mother-board from Lysan that would snizzle the frabjulations" jabber-jabber was utterly high-larious.
Has it ever occurred to you that your "corporate policy" might be stupid?
I love it when people compare bare hardware to bare hardware. As if the machines are just going to be plugged into the wall generating heat, not actually doing anything useful.
It's all about the software, man. Software trumps everything.
I don't think the word "promised" means what you think it means.
New hardware is always insanely expensive. Unless you have really specific needs, it never pays to be an early adopter here.
That's not necessarily true. My habit has always been to buy the latest and greatest thing, spending as much money as I could possibly scrape up, and continue to use it for five years or more.
Over the 20 years I've used Macs (yes, I go all the way back to the original one) I've owned exactly six, counting three laptops. I'm currently using a 2002-era Power Mac G4, and it will continue to serve me well for at least another couple of years, maybe longer. Little upgrades over time (a couple hundred bucks for an additional gig of RAM, a couple hundred bucks for another big hard drive) really do a lot to extend the life of the machine.
So if you want to by frequently, buy refurbished. But if you want to buy infrequently, buy brand new.
Automator is a RAD environment for applescript.
I don't know what "a RAD environment" is, but you're mistaken. Automator has nothing to do with AppleScript. While it's true that Actions can be written in AppleScript, it's much better to write them in Objective-C using the Cocoa toolkit.
If apple provides hook into coreimage for applescript it will allow ordinary people to extraordinary things with images and video.
Um. Core Image doesn't allow anybody to do anything they can't already do with Photoshop. The Image Units are not revolutionary. They implement tried-and-true image-processing algorithms, like Gaussian blurs and color transforms. The aspects of Core Image that are neat is that it will take advantage of hardware acceleration if available, and it's very easy for developers.
MS in turn is going to go the way of avalon and xaml.
These things have nothing to do with Core Image. It's kind of like saying, "Apple computers include a mouse, while Microsoft has gone the way of using a blue logo." No relation whatsoever.
So is avalon as good as or better then coreimage?
They do not. Do. Similar. Things. How can I be more clear? They are apples and oranges. They are unrelated. They are not comparable items. Are you beginning to understand me now?
Is it easier to use xaml or applescript (or python)?
Christ. They are not the same thing.
Dude, you were born 60 years too late. You would have fit right in with the crowd that ran most of Europe in 1943.
So in your view,
Sure sign of a straw-man argument. I didn't read any further.
Prices will be similar, devices will have either singular-support, or very sketchy dual-support.
What do you mean, "very sketchy?" My SuperDrive, which I think is a DVR-107 or DVR-108, has perfect support for DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW. I've never had a problem writing or reading any of those types of media. And all of them plop right into my home DVD player for playback.
Why do you say "very sketchy?"
No, the facts indicate that life began on this planet.
Appeared on this planet, you mean. We have no evidence that it began here versus being in some way transported to here, like on a comet or something.
Precision of language is important.
All this implies that life began at some time from non-living matter.
You infer that life began, you mean. Precision of language is important.
The fact is, life is made up of certain molecules and there is no reason why the structure of these molecules can't be written down on paper by one person and then constructed at some time in the future by another person (with the ability to construct atom-by-atom).
One of those is a fact. The other is sheer fantasy. Precision of language is important.
Your comment made no sense. You're talking about whose product?
Should I translate "ad hominem" for you?
... I don't believe for a second that you weren't acting deliberately. I read your comment. I saw what it said. You didn't just trip and land funny on your keyboard. You meant exactly what you said, right up to the second when you got called on it.
If you'll look closely, you'll see that I was actually giving you credit. I asked how much ignorance you were going to pretend to possess. Was I mistaken? Are you really this ignorant?
What determines what something is?
What? The idea of a species is not a new and revolutionary one. It's one you should already be comfortable with. A cow is a cow and a person is a person.
Don't tell me that it will grow into a human and that thus is it human, that's circular and invalid.
It may be circular, but it's also the definition of a human being. A human being is the child of another human being. As opposed to being, you know, the child of a cow. Which is called a calf, if you're wondering.
Yes, of course they're harveested from in vitro zygotes.
Oh, god. First it was "fetus," but then people saw pictures of actual fetuses and realized that they're just very young babies. Then it became the even more jargony "embryo," but now that's starting to give way to the massively jargony "zygote."
All to avoid saying the word "baby."
A straw man argument, in contrast, it an intentionaly distorted version of your opponent's argument.
Are you suggesting that you should get a pass because you merely accidentally distorted my position? I don't buy it. First, your statement is still bullshit whether you meant for it to be or not. Second
By calling my argument a straw man when it clearly is not, you mischaracterize it
Oh, please. You're not fooling anyone with that "I know you are but what am I" crap.
Name one baby (your words, not mine) killed to get stem cells.
Are you an idiot? You know as well as I do that the babies killed for stem cells have not yet been given names. What does that have to do with anything? Do you think that people without names aren't technically alive? My mother didn't give me my name until eight hours after I was born. I was legally "Baby Lastname" for the first eight hours of my life. Would it have been okay to kill me?
Were we to do things your way, the zygotes would be fertilized one at a time and disguarded until a viable one is generated.
Bingo, except for the "disguarded" thing. (Invest in a Mac. It's got a built-in spell-checker.) There is zero excuse for "discarding" (i.e., killing) a baby.
Is any form of in vitro, either in the present incarnation or under your somewhat more financialy whimsical system ethical in your world view?
Of course in vitro fertilization is ethical. Create one or more babies, implant them into the mother. You know, just the way we used to do it before it became a commercial enterprise and we created a whole country of baby assembly lines to automate the process, like injecting creme filling into Twinkies.
You pretend to be ignorant of ethics. You pretend to be ignorant of rhetoric. I'm sick of your pretending. No more being difficult just for the sake of being difficult.
I did not distort what you said, I quoted it verbatim.
You wrote: "So what you're saying is that an abortion is akin to having your liver, kidney, appendix, gall bladder, etc. removed."
It's a straw man. Plain and simple. Why are you trying to deny that?
I followed those thoughts through to the logical conclusion.
Except, you know. Not. You started with something I said, then claimed I was saying something I did not say, in order to try to discredit what I did say.
This is the textbook definition of a cleverly implemented straw-man argument.
Or did you not take discrete mathematics?
You do realize that this is not a math problem, right?
Allright, so it's alive. So was my salad last night.
Your salad wasn't human. Do we really have to talk about the difference between human life and other life? I mean, how much ignorance are you going to pretend to possess here?
If an embryo is a human being allready, what does it grow in to?
An older, more mature human being. Duh.
this distinguishing characteristics between a human and cow embryo are pretty minimal
Um. Except the fact that one is human and one is a cow. I guess the answer to my question above is "a whole lot of ignorance."
it's not necessarily going to grow up to be a human either
What? Human babies do, in fact, grow up to be humans. You knew this already, right? You've had the birds-and-the-bees talk, I presume?
Given that the abortion has allready occured
You are ignorant of the subject under discussion. Embryonic stem cells are not recovered from aborted babies. They're harvested from babies that are created in vitro, sometimes specifically for the purpose of producing stem cells and sometimes as part of an unethical mass-production in-vitro fertilization technique.
Clearly you have moral objections to stem cell research.
Again with the straw-man argument. Have you not been paying attention, or are you just trying to discredit me? I have zero objections to stem-cell research. I have massive objections to killing babies to get to their stem cells. And you should, too.
Stem Cell research has a lot to do with in vitro fertilization. Is this procedure also objectionable?
This is not complicated. Let me make this very simple. It is wrong to create a baby only for the purpose of killing it later. If you grow a baby in a lab for the purpose of killing it and harvesting its stem cells, that's morally wrong. If you manufacture dozens of babies with the intent of only implanting a few in their mother and freezing (and eventually killing) the rest, that's morally wrong, particularly when you consider that the only reason for doing it is to save money.
Why are you pretending not to understand these incredibly simple ideas?
You posted the same comment twice. See here.
The blastasts that we are talking about
Do you mean "blastocysts?"
To help assure success IVF HAS to create far more embryo's then is actually used.
That's not correct. It's purely a cost-saving measure. Some IVF clinics -- a minority, if I remember correctly -- take many sperm and many eggs and create many babies all at once in a sort of mass-production process. Some of these are implanted in the mother; the rest are stored at low temperatures for future use.
This isn't necessary. It's something clinics do to save money. And yes, the unwanted babies are often killed. The whole process is unethical and should come to an end. We can do effective in-vitro fertilization without mass-producing babies the majority of whom are killed.
So what we are talking about here is NOT killing an embryo that someday could get itself born. We are talking about making use of tissue that is about 5 minutes from the garbage can.
Wow. If you can describe babies as "tissue that is about 5 minutes from the garbage can," then what's stopping you from describing undesirable adults the same way? Your position is, in a word, insane.
And yes, we are talking about killing babies that could someday get themselves born. All they need is a mother. It could be the mother who donated the egg, or it could be any other mother with compatible blood factors.
Your options are:
There are four options, not two. Option #3 is to donate the unwanted babies to mothers who are unable to conceive naturally, giving them the opportunity to experience pregnancy and birth despite their physical handicap. And option #4, of course, is to refrain from manufacturing babies like they were livestock in the first place, and to return to the ethical method of in-vitro fertilization where only enough babies are created for a single attempt at implantation.
Me? I choose #3 for the unwanted babies already on ice, and #4 to prevent the creation of any others.
You aren't labeled a "baby" until after birth.
By whom? "Baby" isn't a technical term. It means a person who's younger than a child. That's all.
The word embryo wasn't introduced at some later date to make their destruction insignificant.
The use of dehumanizing technical jargon is bad whether the jargon was already around or whether it was invented for that purpose.
Be honest, are you simplifing for us, or trying to make a stronger ethical argument?
I'm simplifying for me. I haven't got the foggiest idea where the line is between a zygote, an embryo and a fetus is. All three are words used to describe people in different stages of development, but their use implies a granularity to the process that doesn't seem to exist. There's no instant of transition where a baby goes from being technically an embryo to technically a fetus. It's a very gradual process of development. So the whole terminology issue is very confusing to me.
Let the doctors worry about the technical terms. The one thing we should all be able to agree upon is that from the instant of conception, the thing inside the mother's belly is a person, a young, undeveloped, immature person. A baby.
An hour before your first breath? The exact same thing was true an hour after your first breath. You were not aware, and you were completely dependent on another organism to stay alive.
In fact, the same things were true for most of the first year of your life.
I'm pretty sure the suggestion that it's okay to kill six-month-old babies for medical research wouldn't go over too well.
This is what I meant when I said there's no criteria that anyone can offer that can stand up to scrutiny. Whatever criteria you establish, we'll situations where those criteria are met but killing the person in question is clearly unacceptable.
That's why we need to stop trying to establish criteria for life. It's a sham. We need to stop talking about this as if there were objective, scientific truth somewhere at the bottom of it and start talking about values.