That is not entirely true. Yes, Blu-Ray is a disk format, and as such it doesn't care about resolution, however, it must be able to deliver a 4K data stream through a HDMI 2.0 interface at bit rates significantly higher than for HD. The format must also be able to store a 4K movie on the disk, which means the drive probably has to be able to support BD-XL3 or XL4. This means that the player (drive) must be able to support BD-XL, it must support HDMI 2.0 and it must support 6x speeds. I doubt most Blu-Ray players of today supports this.
Whaling ended because the big whales were pretty much wiped out
No. It ended because there were better alternatives. Norway and Japan do commercial whaling today and these operations are not even close to profitable. Never will be. The product isn't attractive enough to fetch a price making it profitable.
He made a lot of that money by forcing people to buy stuff they didn't want or need, remember the "Windows tax"
Nonsense. The number of people who didn't want DOS/Windows with their computer when they bought it is numbered in the single digits or below percent. He didn't increase his fortune in any measurable way by "forcing" the unwilling to buy his OS.
They've engaged in anticompetitive behavior for a long time
Who was harmed. Please use some examples.
did a lot to break standards
The most quoted example of this seems to be a specific version of IE. It killed off Netscape, not because it was evil but because Microsoft tried to innovate just a little. I'll agree that it wasn't a particularly good way to innovate, but it was that particular version of IE, today slammed and hated, was a huge improvement over Netscape. It also, through the XmlHttpRequest object, launched what we now all do, namely Web 2.0, DOM manipulation (not much of a point unless you had the XmlHttpRequest object) and what we now "love" about Single Page Apps.
ActiveX and many, many other things, the fact that IE6 was neglected for so long for example, were bad behaviors, and we (and Microsoft by the way) still suffer the consequences. Don't see how it killed anyone or anything though. Netscape was an abhorrent monster long before IE6 came along. Thank goodness for the likes of Opera and (later) Google though.
The most serious of these actions was in the agreements they made OEMs sign in order to sell machines with Windows
Was that evil? Why?The alternative was Linux (in reality) and Linux on the desktop back then was a joke, a cruel, bad, pathetic joke. Today it is just a bad, pathetic joke, and it doesn't have to deal with this "evil" by Microsoft. The OEM agreements may have harmed Digital Research a tiny bit, but not by much.
The main pieces of software where Microsoft have made money were (besides the OS), Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Word has a formidable competitor in Word Perfect, but Microsoft didn't kill WP in a sneaky, under-handed way. Microsoft killed WP when the morons at the Word Perfect team refused to release a functional product for Windows. Microsoft Word 2.0 was a product that was heads and shoulders above Word Perfect in usability. Sure, if you wanted to write a book with annotations etc, WP was still more functional, but most people do not want to do that. Most people write a page or five and they do not even care about styles (which they should). WP "died" because the people developing WP were morons. Excel - same thing. It was a huge success on the Mac, and when Microsoft released it properly for Windows, the competition committed suicide.
The way he got all that money in the first place is evil.
Were you born retarded or did your father hit you over the head with a hammer throughout your youth to achieve this? There is nothing dumber than MS haters on Slashdot.
However, "I believe x does not exist" and "I do not believe x exists" are logically identical
Sigh. There is nothing wrong with me, and I'll try to show you again. I understand meta-discussions are difficult, and you are obviously not particularly well educated as it comes to logic and language. So, let's break this down a little. Let's start with the belief in a tea pot. There are three main elements to the statement "I believe in a tea pot". They are the subject, "I", the action "believe" and the object "a tea pot". Then there is the negation, NOT. This gives us:
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(believe) OBJECT(NOT tea pot) => no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind"
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(NOT believe) OBJECT(tea pot) => no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind"
So, in your mind, the fact that both situations end up with the non-existence of a tea pot in "the believing area of my mind", the two actions must be the same. This is where you fail. Remember, we are specifically talking about the action of belief, and though the two ACTIONS above, namely believing and not believing are diametrically opposite, we end up with the same result, no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind". Your fallacious assumption is that because we end up with the same result, the ACTIONS are the same, they are not. Now, after these exchanges, I do realize that you will not understand this, so therefore let's create another sentence with exactly the same logical content but a different action and object. This time, let's use "look through a microscope" as action and "bacteria" as an object. We then get:
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(look through a microscope) OBJECT(NOT bacteria) => no presence of bacteria in "the visualization area of my mind"
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(NOT look through microscope) OBJECT(bacteria) => no presence of bacteria in "the visualization area of my mind"
Is it really your contention that looking through a microscope to see no bacteria is the same as not looking through the microscope and therefore ending up with no bacteria visualization are the same? Is the action of not looking through a microscope the same as the action of looking through a microscope and not seeing anything the same?
I don't believe. In anything at all. I have zero beliefs. In total. When I converse with someone about reality and stuff, I have to make an assumption that could be tantamount to a belief. I will have to assume that the world (universe if you wish) is observable by all within it, and that the experience of observing aspects of it are very similar for all of us. In other words, I have to assume that if we watch an apple "fall down" from a tree, you and I both will agree that there was an apple falling down. If that is not so, all discussions about the nature of the universe become pointless.
This is the only trace of "belief" you will find in my entire being. I believe in nothing else.
The statements "I don't believe the green teapot exists" and "I believe the green teapot does not exist" are logically equivalent
No, they are not. Not even close. The first goes to the existence of my belief, it doesn't exist. The second states I have a belief, a belief there is no teapot. You should get a refund from your English teacher.
As in math - simplify. Statement 1:I have no belief. Statement 2: I have a belief. They are not equivalent, they are opposites.
So, not collecting stamps is a hobby. Not running 50 miles is exercise. Not earning $100 000 is income. Not slapping you in the face is violence.
Were you born retarded or was it inflicted upon you by other retards?
I believe no such tea pot exists.
I see that your retardation has made it difficult for you to read. if you don't understand the difference between: "I believe there is no tea pot" and "I do not have a belief in such a tea pot" you should not participate in public discourse without adult supervision. There is an infinite number of things in which I do not have a belief, I do not believe there is a tea pot out there. In other words, that belief does not exist within me. I have no opinion whatsoever on whether there is a tea pot or not. That doesn't mean I am agnostic about the tea pot, agnosticism would mean that I am open to the possibility of there being a tea pot, I am not. The "idea of there being a tea pot out there" is silly to me, but that doesn't mean I have an opinion on the tea pot, I don't. I have an opinion about entertaining the idea that there may be a tea pot out there.
Again, the number of things in which I do not have a belief is infinite, exactly infinite. Someone can come up with any kind of thing they them selves believe exists, but I do not entertain these ideas. I have never heard of these ideas, and I relate to them accordingly (not at all). I relate to notions about deities in the same way. I have heard some of the notions of people who believe in deities, but I do not have any kind of notions about the deities I have an opinion about the notions of deities
. Google "not even wrong".
My version of not even wrong would be something like: When a religious person says "there is a God", he is not correct, he's not even wrong. In science, a statement isn't either right or wrong, it can be right, wrong and "not even wrong". Statements about the existence of magical creatures like God are not wrong, they are not right, they are neither, the statement it self is nonsense. These two statements have equivalent truth levels: "There is a God" and "bleeeeehhhpfhhhth eeeeef ooook". When religious people talk about their gods, to a scientific mind the sounds coming out of their mouths contain less information than the sounds coming out of a male chimpanzee in heat. The very statements, disregarding the meaning they are trying to convey, are meaningless stringing together of sounds that only appears to be some form of communication.
How do you know it was not God's plan to rescind the order at the last minute?
I don't know (well, actually I do since the whole story is fiction) and I do not care. Anyone asking this from anyone else, no matter what other motives they might have, is evil beyond comprehension. If a (real) deity with ultimate powers asks the question the evil is bigger and worse. The story of God testing Abraham is a description of the worst evil known to man: God. Later, when God makes a bet with Satan and gives Satan the permission to torture Job in unspeakable ways, killing his family etc, God ups the ante a bit and shows him self for the insane evil he actually is. Well, if he existed that is. The fact that Christians do not deem these acts of their God as evil just means they are morally far below any person who ever lived who did not subscribe to this evil ideas.
Is killing your only solution to a problem?
It's called self defense, and in this case, defense against evil incarnate. If someone tries very hard to have my child killed and I can not call upon an authority to remove the evil bastard, then yes I will kill him my self. That is not a right I have, it is an obligation. You protect your family above anything else. Even against evil gods.
Abraham's God is the same God as the ISIS God.
Yes, that is why I said "Abraham's God is worse than ISIS", not "Abraham's God is worse than the God of ISIS". Abraham's God is worse than the worst members of the ISIS. By many orders of magnitude. Compared to God the members of ISIS are positively Mother Theresas.
No, he doesn't. He treats God in the same way as he treats invisible pink unicorns in the forest. He treats it in the same way that he treats tea pots somewhere around Alpha Centauri.
Ponder this - the statement "There is a God" is not correct, it isn't even wrong. Scientifically. Google "not even wrong".
the atheist clubs support its members and try to spread that belief
Which clubs? I know a fair amount of atheists, and none of them are in any clubs. The most militant of all atheists I know of is probably Richard Dawkins, and to my knowledge he is not a member of any "atheist club". What are these clubs you speak of?
The problem you face is that extremism has a long and fairly well known history among atheist regimes
No, it doesn't. Seriously. The USSR, for example, was a bloody regime, not because it was atheist, but because it was socialist. You need motivation to become extremist, and the absence of something is not motivation. Christians have been lying about this for years, but it doesn't get more true. People can become extreme for a lot of reasons, but there has to be a motivating factor, and the absence of something can not be a motivating factor. So, yes, an atheist can surely become an extremist, but not motivated by his lack of belief, there has to be another factor that drives his motivation. For Stalin and Mao, for example, that motivation came from their belief in socialism/communism as the be-all end-all solution to perceived problems in the world.
As I said elsewhere, you can probably become a fanatical coin collector, but you can not become a fanatical "non-stamp-collector", there is nothing in the absence of a stamp collecting hobby that could motivate you to extremism.
The motivation that drives you to extremism would also typically be some sort of motivation where you could derive an absolute, non-debatable truth. A coin collector could feel that all mistreatment of coins was evil in any and all circumstance, a communist would consider anyone with an opposing world view as wrong by definition etc. There must be an "absolute truth" and an aspect of totalitarianism in the "belief" of the extremist. Religions (most) have such views, as does totalitarian political ideologies. The lack of a belief system has no such things.
The common thread there is atheism, not "defending science."
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as a "4k Blu-ray drive".
That is not entirely true. Yes, Blu-Ray is a disk format, and as such it doesn't care about resolution, however, it must be able to deliver a 4K data stream through a HDMI 2.0 interface at bit rates significantly higher than for HD. The format must also be able to store a 4K movie on the disk, which means the drive probably has to be able to support BD-XL3 or XL4. This means that the player (drive) must be able to support BD-XL, it must support HDMI 2.0 and it must support 6x speeds. I doubt most Blu-Ray players of today supports this.
H.265 alledgely achieves same quality in half the size.
Not even close. Not yet. Probably never.
I haven't inserted a disc into a device to watch or listen to something in many many years.
Your loss. Streaming "HD" is barely SD in quality.
let's focus on improving 3D technology
You can't. 3D doesn't work and it never will
Whaling ended because the big whales were pretty much wiped out
No. It ended because there were better alternatives. Norway and Japan do commercial whaling today and these operations are not even close to profitable. Never will be. The product isn't attractive enough to fetch a price making it profitable.
why would I still take you seriously if you can't even follow the simple rules of logic?
That is actually not ad hominem since you include a property that is probably a real factor in your evaluation of his level of seriousness.
Ad hominem would be: why would I still take you seriously if you have red hair?
Yes we are, none. It's not his project.
It isn't "his", it is a project run by other people that he likes. The project has no Bill Gates stuff in it, only his money.
He made a lot of that money by forcing people to buy stuff they didn't want or need, remember the "Windows tax"
Nonsense. The number of people who didn't want DOS/Windows with their computer when they bought it is numbered in the single digits or below percent. He didn't increase his fortune in any measurable way by "forcing" the unwilling to buy his OS.
he should fund scholarships
Like this one?
If only the fanatics with guns could be replaced with developers somehow
On /., aren't fanatics with guns and developers mostly synonymous? Feels like it if you have the audacity to claim Microsoft is not All Evil (TM).
company whose success is first and foremost based on marketing and manipulation of perception
We are talking about Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs.
a business man who stole from and took advantage of people much more creative than he
Such as? This is actually a serious question. From whom did he steal? What people did he take advantage of? Who were these creative people?
How did those second rate products come to dominate the computing landscape?
By not having first-rate competition. Which first-rate products did their shady practices out-compete through shady business practices?
They stamped out competition in the consumer OS space via shady OEM contracts
They did? Who was stamped out? Digital Research? Hardly. Linux? Don't make me laugh.
They've engaged in anticompetitive behavior for a long time
Who was harmed. Please use some examples.
did a lot to break standards
The most quoted example of this seems to be a specific version of IE. It killed off Netscape, not because it was evil but because Microsoft tried to innovate just a little. I'll agree that it wasn't a particularly good way to innovate, but it was that particular version of IE, today slammed and hated, was a huge improvement over Netscape. It also, through the XmlHttpRequest object, launched what we now all do, namely Web 2.0, DOM manipulation (not much of a point unless you had the XmlHttpRequest object) and what we now "love" about Single Page Apps.
ActiveX and many, many other things, the fact that IE6 was neglected for so long for example, were bad behaviors, and we (and Microsoft by the way) still suffer the consequences. Don't see how it killed anyone or anything though. Netscape was an abhorrent monster long before IE6 came along. Thank goodness for the likes of Opera and (later) Google though.
The most serious of these actions was in the agreements they made OEMs sign in order to sell machines with Windows
Was that evil? Why?The alternative was Linux (in reality) and Linux on the desktop back then was a joke, a cruel, bad, pathetic joke. Today it is just a bad, pathetic joke, and it doesn't have to deal with this "evil" by Microsoft. The OEM agreements may have harmed Digital Research a tiny bit, but not by much.
The main pieces of software where Microsoft have made money were (besides the OS), Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Word has a formidable competitor in Word Perfect, but Microsoft didn't kill WP in a sneaky, under-handed way. Microsoft killed WP when the morons at the Word Perfect team refused to release a functional product for Windows. Microsoft Word 2.0 was a product that was heads and shoulders above Word Perfect in usability. Sure, if you wanted to write a book with annotations etc, WP was still more functional, but most people do not want to do that. Most people write a page or five and they do not even care about styles (which they should). WP "died" because the people developing WP were morons. Excel - same thing. It was a huge success on the Mac, and when Microsoft released it properly for Windows, the competition committed suicide.
The way he got all that money in the first place is evil.
Were you born retarded or did your father hit you over the head with a hammer throughout your youth to achieve this? There is nothing dumber than MS haters on Slashdot.
However, "I believe x does not exist" and "I do not believe x exists" are logically identical
Sigh. There is nothing wrong with me, and I'll try to show you again. I understand meta-discussions are difficult, and you are obviously not particularly well educated as it comes to logic and language. So, let's break this down a little. Let's start with the belief in a tea pot. There are three main elements to the statement "I believe in a tea pot". They are the subject, "I", the action "believe" and the object "a tea pot". Then there is the negation, NOT. This gives us:
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(believe) OBJECT(NOT tea pot) => no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind"
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(NOT believe) OBJECT(tea pot) => no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind"
So, in your mind, the fact that both situations end up with the non-existence of a tea pot in "the believing area of my mind", the two actions must be the same. This is where you fail. Remember, we are specifically talking about the action of belief, and though the two ACTIONS above, namely believing and not believing are diametrically opposite, we end up with the same result, no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind". Your fallacious assumption is that because we end up with the same result, the ACTIONS are the same, they are not. Now, after these exchanges, I do realize that you will not understand this, so therefore let's create another sentence with exactly the same logical content but a different action and object. This time, let's use "look through a microscope" as action and "bacteria" as an object. We then get:
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(look through a microscope) OBJECT(NOT bacteria) => no presence of bacteria in "the visualization area of my mind"
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(NOT look through microscope) OBJECT(bacteria) => no presence of bacteria in "the visualization area of my mind"
Is it really your contention that looking through a microscope to see no bacteria is the same as not looking through the microscope and therefore ending up with no bacteria visualization are the same? Is the action of not looking through a microscope the same as the action of looking through a microscope and not seeing anything the same?
I don't believe. In anything at all. I have zero beliefs. In total. When I converse with someone about reality and stuff, I have to make an assumption that could be tantamount to a belief. I will have to assume that the world (universe if you wish) is observable by all within it, and that the experience of observing aspects of it are very similar for all of us. In other words, I have to assume that if we watch an apple "fall down" from a tree, you and I both will agree that there was an apple falling down. If that is not so, all discussions about the nature of the universe become pointless.
This is the only trace of "belief" you will find in my entire being. I believe in nothing else.
To the question "Is there a green teapot" answering "I don't believe in the green teapot" is the same as answering "I believe no green teapot exists"
Not in English, and not using logic. "I believe" and "I do not believe" are the exact opposite. Try running it by an adult.
The statements "I don't believe the green teapot exists" and "I believe the green teapot does not exist" are logically equivalent
No, they are not. Not even close. The first goes to the existence of my belief, it doesn't exist. The second states I have a belief, a belief there is no teapot. You should get a refund from your English teacher.
As in math - simplify. Statement 1:I have no belief. Statement 2: I have a belief. They are not equivalent, they are opposites.
Why does this simple fact bother you so much?
Morons with big mouths always bother me.
Yes. Obviously
So, not collecting stamps is a hobby. Not running 50 miles is exercise. Not earning $100 000 is income. Not slapping you in the face is violence.
Were you born retarded or was it inflicted upon you by other retards?
I believe no such tea pot exists.
I see that your retardation has made it difficult for you to read. if you don't understand the difference between: "I believe there is no tea pot" and "I do not have a belief in such a tea pot" you should not participate in public discourse without adult supervision. There is an infinite number of things in which I do not have a belief, I do not believe there is a tea pot out there. In other words, that belief does not exist within me. I have no opinion whatsoever on whether there is a tea pot or not. That doesn't mean I am agnostic about the tea pot, agnosticism would mean that I am open to the possibility of there being a tea pot, I am not. The "idea of there being a tea pot out there" is silly to me, but that doesn't mean I have an opinion on the tea pot, I don't. I have an opinion about entertaining the idea that there may be a tea pot out there.
Again, the number of things in which I do not have a belief is infinite, exactly infinite. Someone can come up with any kind of thing they them selves believe exists, but I do not entertain these ideas. I have never heard of these ideas, and I relate to them accordingly (not at all). I relate to notions about deities in the same way. I have heard some of the notions of people who believe in deities, but I do not have any kind of notions about the deities I have an opinion about the notions of deities
. Google "not even wrong".
My version of not even wrong would be something like: When a religious person says "there is a God", he is not correct, he's not even wrong. In science, a statement isn't either right or wrong, it can be right, wrong and "not even wrong". Statements about the existence of magical creatures like God are not wrong, they are not right, they are neither, the statement it self is nonsense. These two statements have equivalent truth levels: "There is a God" and "bleeeeehhhpfhhhth eeeeef ooook". When religious people talk about their gods, to a scientific mind the sounds coming out of their mouths contain less information than the sounds coming out of a male chimpanzee in heat. The very statements, disregarding the meaning they are trying to convey, are meaningless stringing together of sounds that only appears to be some form of communication.
How do you know it was not God's plan to rescind the order at the last minute?
I don't know (well, actually I do since the whole story is fiction) and I do not care. Anyone asking this from anyone else, no matter what other motives they might have, is evil beyond comprehension. If a (real) deity with ultimate powers asks the question the evil is bigger and worse. The story of God testing Abraham is a description of the worst evil known to man: God. Later, when God makes a bet with Satan and gives Satan the permission to torture Job in unspeakable ways, killing his family etc, God ups the ante a bit and shows him self for the insane evil he actually is. Well, if he existed that is. The fact that Christians do not deem these acts of their God as evil just means they are morally far below any person who ever lived who did not subscribe to this evil ideas.
Is killing your only solution to a problem?
It's called self defense, and in this case, defense against evil incarnate. If someone tries very hard to have my child killed and I can not call upon an authority to remove the evil bastard, then yes I will kill him my self. That is not a right I have, it is an obligation. You protect your family above anything else. Even against evil gods.
Abraham's God is the same God as the ISIS God.
Yes, that is why I said "Abraham's God is worse than ISIS", not "Abraham's God is worse than the God of ISIS". Abraham's God is worse than the worst members of the ISIS. By many orders of magnitude. Compared to God the members of ISIS are positively Mother Theresas.
The atheist believes there is no god.
No, he doesn't. He treats God in the same way as he treats invisible pink unicorns in the forest. He treats it in the same way that he treats tea pots somewhere around Alpha Centauri.
Ponder this - the statement "There is a God" is not correct, it isn't even wrong. Scientifically. Google "not even wrong".
the atheist clubs support its members and try to spread that belief
Which clubs? I know a fair amount of atheists, and none of them are in any clubs. The most militant of all atheists I know of is probably Richard Dawkins, and to my knowledge he is not a member of any "atheist club". What are these clubs you speak of?
The problem you face is that extremism has a long and fairly well known history among atheist regimes
No, it doesn't. Seriously. The USSR, for example, was a bloody regime, not because it was atheist, but because it was socialist. You need motivation to become extremist, and the absence of something is not motivation. Christians have been lying about this for years, but it doesn't get more true. People can become extreme for a lot of reasons, but there has to be a motivating factor, and the absence of something can not be a motivating factor. So, yes, an atheist can surely become an extremist, but not motivated by his lack of belief, there has to be another factor that drives his motivation. For Stalin and Mao, for example, that motivation came from their belief in socialism/communism as the be-all end-all solution to perceived problems in the world.
As I said elsewhere, you can probably become a fanatical coin collector, but you can not become a fanatical "non-stamp-collector", there is nothing in the absence of a stamp collecting hobby that could motivate you to extremism.
The motivation that drives you to extremism would also typically be some sort of motivation where you could derive an absolute, non-debatable truth. A coin collector could feel that all mistreatment of coins was evil in any and all circumstance, a communist would consider anyone with an opposing world view as wrong by definition etc. There must be an "absolute truth" and an aspect of totalitarianism in the "belief" of the extremist. Religions (most) have such views, as does totalitarian political ideologies. The lack of a belief system has no such things.
The common thread there is atheism, not "defending science."
Where? I would love to see an example.