Care to define the overwhelmingly convincing evidence? All I have seen is diatribes about how Christianity is frequently hyporcitical or uses logical fallicies to describe God. This of course relies on Christians to have the "Correct" definition of God, which in a weird way only serves to validate them. But, by all means, show your evidence of the nonexistance of something that cannot be described. Science and Religion have squat to do with each other.
Also, that you have never seen any atheist claim to "prove" God didn't exist is pretty willfull blindness. A few quick google searches will bring tons of results and a quick stroll through the bookstore will bring more.
Roam through the science section of a book store. There are quite a few out there. Multiple books on the subject. Which amuses me that they would waste so much of their lives dedicated to proving a negative that, according to them, has absolutely no impact on their lives anyways. The most amusing piece for me is that aside from that whole proving a negative problem, they fail their own logic. The very definition of an omnipotent force existing outside of the rules of science pretty much kills science ever being able to prove or disprove its existence. So, they "disprove" the existence of their own concocted definition of God.
Similar to this concept. I can prove right at this moment that I do not have a wizbanglefrat in my hand. Since I get to define what a wizbanglefrat is and it doesn't have to match anyone elses definition of a wizbanglefrat I can indeed state that there is not one in my hand. Then I can proceed to make outlandish statements about anyone who has a differing definition of wizbanglefrat and write numerous books on the subject rather than doing anything actually productive.:)
Splitting hairs. The courts don't write the laws that determine what a criminal is. The courts only decide when a person meets the criteria. You let the government define what a criminal is and give them unlimited power to find those criminals you will soon have a very loose definition of what a criminal really is.
I guess what I mean is that it is far easier to find meaningful discussion online than with the average joe off the street. This is a growing byproduct of our us vs them mentality these days. The current political climate has made it pretty much impossible to think for yourself. You are either group A or group B and neither group tolerates the other.
Prejudice is indeed a human problem, however, some societies have had much fewer issues with welcoming the newcomers. The fact that so many have been able to come here and do well over the years has more to do with our economic views than our social views. The power of the dollar trumps social norms in a capitalist society like ours. A stunningly good example of this is our wonderful puritan origins being washed away almost compeltely by sex sells. This of course has left us in a very bizarre state where a nipple flash on TV is nearly treason but you can have people murdered by the hundreds on TV and hardly anyone takes issue.
The zealots...oh the zealots... They are harder to find in reality, but they are not any less common. When everyone walks around assuming that everyone else thinks like them there is less chance for sparks to show where the powder kegs really are. Go ask those "controversial" questions about evolution, origin of man, creation of the earth, and you will find a stunning amount of ignorance and often enough outright hostility towards anyone (regardless of their faith) who accepts the science. I recently decided to go back and finish up my degree and I am taking a few gen ed classes I missed. Two weeks into Geology almost a full 1/3 of the class goes into the "I had no idea how much scientists didn't know and that this was all just a theory and I don't believe it because of my religion" type crap. It has gotten to the point that every time I hear "just a theory" used as a backhanded attack on evolution even when that wasn't what was being discussed I about snap. The militant atheists annoy me to, but at least they are less likely to get in peoples faces that don't want to listen to them. Trust me, toss a few matches out and you will see just how prevalent it really is. Remember now, at the Creationist Museum Jesus rode a dinosaur and that Godless secular world is trying to lie to our children about the origin of man.
What? You expect a group of militant atheists to be any better behaved than a bunch of religious fundamentalists? They are basically the same thing, and rely on unbelievably literalist or warped interpretations of various religious texts to attempt to maintain their relevance.
I am just as disgusted by the militant atheist blathering on about Science proves there is no God as I am the religious fundy trying to pass of creationism as Science. The only way the militant atheist can even begin to pretend to "disprove God" is to rely on bizarre interpretations of God in the most literal sense from the most wackaloon fundy.
I suspect that if somehow we could destroy one of these polar forces the other would follow and we would finally wind up with a balanced world wehre Science can do Science and Religion can do Religion and neither one will have penis envy over the other and we can all move on.
Don't drink their kool-aid. Sure, tracking down and prosecuting criminals is always a noble goal right? I mean thats why they keep tearing up our rights. To track down terrorists, or child pornographers, or whatever else.
When speaking badly about your government becomes a crime will it still be a worthwhile goal to track down criminals?
We have given government the ability to declare who is and isn't a criminal, and now you propose we allow them to do whatever they want in order to find criminals?
Well, look at how we handle immigrants and I think that is a pretty good example of how socially inept we are. It is hard to be both a nation of immigrants and a nation of xenophobes at the same time without severe problems. This is hardly new behavior, which is one of the reasons I get so pissed of about the modern incarnation of racism like it is only about the blacks, mexicans, arabs, etc. It wasn't all that long ago that it was the jews, the irish, the italians, the japanese, etc. We are unbelievably socially inept for being a first world country made up entirely of immigrants. (Well, except for the handful of natives that we fenced into little reservations to keep them away from the rest of us).
The fact that you have to come online to have a deeper conversation is also evidence of how backwards we are. That speaking to the average person on anythign more complex than the weather is likely to lead to problems. The tendancy for religious fundamentalism in our society has made it even more fun, because now its not just "hey, you are different", its "hey, you are different, and your eternal soul will be damned for all time you Godless heathen sinner".
I agree with the not talking to people while running, but lets be honest here. I imagine most of the people here on slashdot wouldn't ever talk to anyone while running anyways. Not because of any social issue, but I imagine most of the crowd here isn't athletic enough to be running at a good pace and hold a conversation without struggling to breathe.:)
Actually you are entitled to harrass people just as you described. You just don't have the funding to procede with it. The only difference here is the RIAA has the funding to push this kind of crap. When you can purchase a few congress critters you can get them to declare whatever you want to do legal, and if you buy enough of them you might even get the government to pick up the tab for you.
WM5 is not WM6 is not Smartphone WMX is not PocketPC WMX. Without fail every time I needed some app it boiled down to "oh, sucks to be you, your variant of WMX + Hardware does not work". Or you want SSH for free?! HAHA $30 for you!
WM email copy/paste is most certainly not universal as not all WM devices have the ability.
Then we also have the wonderful fun dance of trying to get anything installed on the stupid device without the joy of ActiveSync. At least iTunes is free and runs on Windows and OSX. Sure, easy enough to get ActiveSync for Windows, but have you ever tried syncing a WM device with a Mac? (Unfortunately linux is left ass out on most of this requiring all manner of bizarreness to make anything work)
Then there was always the fun of charging the stupid device, because without ActiveSync on Windows you are screwed. (At least in linux/osx I was able to charge it without all of that headache). The iPhone...USB = Charging without iTunes or headache. And oh yes...some WM devices most certainly do have WiFi. I can't even begin to count the number of times the damned ones I have had the joy of dealing with either freak out because they have added too many wireless networks to their connect list, magically decided that their regulatory domain has moved and that they can no longer connect, or switched from "my work network" to "the internet".
As far as email, I know that at least some of the WM devices cannot leave mail on the server when using POP. Of course it works great with Exchange, its an MS product, and its a damned shame that they decided to make it impossible for other devices to work smoothly with it by supporting real standards.
Hell the iThings (touch and phone) even allow you to go from the v1 software to v2. To get from WM5 to WM6 you get to buy a whole new device.
Honestly I ditched my WM device for an iPhone too.
Exchange support, IMAP support, POP support (with the ability to leave messages on the server!) pretty much murder WM email
Cisco IPSec, PPTP, L2TP rapes, murders, and pillages WM device VPN support.
Multiple windows, big screen, easy pan/zoom destroys WM device web surfing.
AppStore/Cydia/Installer is a MUCH wider selection of software. The prices for iPhone software vs WM software are also considerably lower from what I have encountered.
Wifi, GPS, multiple calendar support, a very nice camera, a bigger screen, WAY better music/video support than that half assed windows media player for WM
I have dealt with enough WM devices phones and non phones and their networking support is such a load of convoluted shit. "Work" or "Internet" or whatever goofball user stupid crap they come up with to describe how the device connects with no real power. I have not been even remotely impressed with WM.
I had a specific incident as a PC tech (or two really) that lead me to quit forever. One day while the boss was out on his frequent extended lunches I was left alone to man the shop. Elderly man comes in with one of those E-PCs or whatever the hell they were. "Mouse doesn't work". So I hook it all up, and while it boots I am moving the mouse around (You know, that thing that makes a computer boot faster. You know you all do it, don't act stupid now!) and it felt kinda odd. The guy left the little plastic packing thing taped on the bottom (You youngins with your fancy lazer mices wouldn't know what I am talking about, this is back when a mouse had balls!). I ripped that off, verified it worked, and helped him carry everything out to his car just to get him out the door fast enough so that noone would know he was there and he didn't get charged the minimum 1hr bench work price. Well...he came back a few days later... "My task bar keeps jumping around". I boot it up...let it sit for a minute wondering what the hell he is talking about. And then the lighbulb went off... I clicked on the task bar and moved it around to the sides and top and he exclaimed "Yes! That!". I explained that he had to let go of the mouse button... That lesson cost him $65 in the minimum bench charge because my asshat boss was there when it happened. I have never felt so sick in my life in dealing with a customer/client.
I was never really a mechanic, but I did work on my own Mach 1. One winter, changing the fuel pump was all it took to decide that mechanic was NEVER anything I wanted to really do. First, fucking freezing out, but must fix car so car runs, unpleasant at best. Then we have the fact that with socket wrench attached the bolt was just a hair to long to be removed, by the time it was mostly out the wrench was stuck and nothing was going anywhere. This of course meant that the last 1/4 inch or so of bolt had to be done by hand. This in itself wasn't much of a problem, its not like there was any significant resistance at this point. HOWEVER!!! When you are working on a fuel pump, you will get at least a little fuel on your hands. Fuel on hands, snow on ground, and cold ass metal are not a fun combination. I had to keep going inside to run my hands under warm water because it would get so cold that bumping the metal wrong would send pain all the way up to my elbow. Moving a heavy beast of a car like that uphill into a garage, with snow on the ground, by myself was just not a real option.
Just to play devils advocate a bit. "Cheaper should not have more weight than secure" is not true. Think about space travel. "Secure" would involve thicker shells to protect better from debris and more lead to protect against radiation and so on and so forth. The "Cheaper" in this case allows it to happen at all because all of that extra layering would make the whole thing pretty cost prohibitive.
I can think of tons of reasons these things should be networked. I am having a hard time with why they should not be part of a closed network. But being networked most certainly does not simply boil down to simply being "cheaper". With industrial systems like this, being able to NOT be in the room where it is operating is a tremendous boost to safety in many cases.
The ONLY thing I can really come up with for having these accessible outside of a closed network is faster emergency access. And lets face the music here, the probability that you would need to access something like this quickly to avert/recover from a normal possible failure is FAR higher than the risk posed by evil haxors. So, still not simply a case of cheaper.
And actually...to be fair in the case of space travel secure most certainly does carry more weight than cheaper, but not exactly in the way you were describing.:)
That isn't always the case with mechanics thankfully. We have a local repair shop here in town that our vehicles go to unless there is something absolutely preventing it. They have had the vehicle up on a lift and have said "hey, we see these other issues, if you want to have us replace them while we have it your labor costs will be the same since we already have it up, tools out, and its a minimal fuss part." (I can attest to the fact that the parts WERE indeed failing as I have a fair idea what I am doing, but being lazy, not enjoying working on cars, and being on crutches at the time makes it easier to just pay them.)
On one occassion they even drove the few blocks to our house to take a look at it (since it would be going to them if they couldn't fix it on the spot). Turns out the problem was a freak glitch. no charge.
I have run into many many sheisty mechanics over the years, and I have faced the exact same type of behavior in my early days as a PC tech. I had to get out of the PC tech business for exactly the same reason. While all of this is pretty tangent to the original point, just wanted to give you the warm fuzzy that there are indeed some really good mechanics out there.
Typically it is the reverse for me. I sit around doing unproductive things until an email interrupts giving me something productive to do. Most of my emails initiate work for me, system monitoring emails, project starter emails, etc.
Honestly, it is this style of cosmic horror that scares me more than most of what goes on here on earth. Not that I think this instance specifically is going to be a problem for us (we will either have moved or killed ourselves off long before). But there is a WIDE array of cosmic badness that could happen to us that we can do absolutely nothing about. Hell, there is an extremely large number of things that we wouldn't even see coming.
My personal favorite is when people learn of the whole magnetic field of earth flipping problem, they immediately key in on "oh my god, how could we live without all of our electronics working" which is something we did for a very long time before electronics. They tend to ignore "oh my god, how could we live without the giant shield stopping the sun from bombarding us with cosmic radiation" which is something we don't exactly have much experience with.
Actually, basic astronomy says that our sun is nowhere near massive enough to collapse into a black hole. Even then, in a couple billion years the sun will have expanded and engulfed earth long before the whole collapse thing would happen.
In fact, with the exception of a few (H, and He most notably) the normal life cycle of the sun can create all of the elements up to and including iron!
Actually I can sum this up for you. You mention halfway competent campaigning of Senators, I make a joke about how incompetently the groups of Senators running for President have campaigned so there is no reason to believe any of it will be done half competently. I say bad things about your trophy Republicans and you go into a weird rant about Obama worship while insisting McCain isn't a total sellout. The funny thing is that when I dared insult the precious Republicans it somehow turned my insults of the Democrats into praise and worship. When I explain why they were insults you somehow construe that to be an attack on Obama's race rather than the indication that the party should have supported members less likely to draw fire for race/sex when they should have a sure win of the office being campaigned for because the incumbant is a total failure.
This is why I find the modern Republican so funny. Your complete and total lack of thought being replaced by rabid responses is pretty classic responses for the modern Republican. The rhetoric from the left tends to just be whiney nonsense. The rhetoric from the right is comically ignorant or offensive. Enjoy your mouthfrothing.
The other amusing thing is the posturing about being so tough when they are the biggest bunch of pussies in office. "Oh but we need the government to control every aspect of our lives to protect us from terrorism!" Fuck off already, please! Either grow a pair or get the fuck out. I hear China doesn't have much of a terrorist problem and the government has total control and does plenty of monitoring, you all should be right at home.
You really are entertaining. Let me break it down for you in simple concepts, because apparently anything complex is terribly difficult to register for you. You said campaign half competently. As evidence of their inability to campaign competently I offered Democrats running a black man and a woman in an election that should have been a sure win by any less "radical" choice of candidate. Republicans facing a tough election chose to put up McCain who supports most of the same failed foreign and domestic policy (Iraq, Wiretaps, FBI powers, Eminent domain, the list goes on), and while he has managed to say some pretty out of line for Republican things about wanting to teach evolution and sex education, he picks Palin, a fundie nut hell bent on killing sex ed programs and teaching creationism. So to me, that is clear evidence of completely and totally incompetent campaigning on BOTH SIDES. The fact that you somehow warp that into a bizarre defense of Obama just because I mentioned his name pretty much shows the mindless automaton the McCain crowd tends to be when they hear the word Obama.
I still don't understand how you get the idea that I support Obama at all, specifically when I said he was a dumb choice for the Dems to make. That slimeball voted for Telcom immunity after constantly talking about how bad it was. So...here you are accusing me of "finding a messiah" and listening to what his "preachers" have said. So even beyond your complete and total lack of reading comprehension that I actually said I thought Obama was a bad pick and you somehow warped that into I believe he is a messiah in your simple and twisted little Republican mind is stunning. Further, the fact that you insist on using rhetoric like messiah, and preacher, and offer NO differences on Bush and McCain policy other than to claim how stupid I am for not realizing they don't support the same moronic policy. I have given specific examples of McCain, Palin, and Obama policy in this discussion.
The most amusing thing to me here is that for all of your use of "messiah" and "preacher" you are the one going with the weird blind faith nonsense on the party of the religious right. Maybe you are right...maybe McCain is not Bush 2.0...maybe he is worse.
I generally agree with your sentiment here. The biggest problem I have is the antiwarmers tend to grab anything they can and wave it around "See see, you are all crazy alarmists and we are perfectly ok pumping shit into the air because it would hurt our precious economy to stop.". Prowarmer activists are easy to ignore, and while their attentions may or may not be misguided, as you said, lowering pollution and the like is hardly a bad thing. Antiwarmer activists on the other hand are more difficult to deal with, because now they use their antiwarming soapbox to mock antipollution measures.
One of the most stunning denials I have seen is how they go on about climate change instead of global warming is the new word and shows how fake it all is. As far as I can remember the major global warming threat wasn't that the entire planet would get warmer. It was that it would screw up things like the transatlantic current leaving the planet less able to circulate the heat so some areas would get hotter and other areas would get colder. All a perfectly normal cycle of change and recovery until you factor in that it would make life for humans terribly difficult. So they cling to "global warming" and misinterpret the term intentionally to deny the true ideas behind it.
In the end...my view on the whole thing is pretty simple. 1. We don't fully understand the science and anyone who claims we do is little more than pushing a religious crusade in either direction. 2. It is better to err on the side of caution and work on cleaning things up without taking drastic measures is probably the best course of action. 3. If the sky really is falling I fail to see the real problem. In our current state I don't think mankind is terribly worthy of a gauronteed future given that we would use that future to find other ways and reasons to kill eachother. I would be more upset by the doom of mankind if we were a little closer to peacefully coexisting, but as it stands now it doesn't bother me much. Life on earth will more than likely survive, it may just not be much of human life. If anything, human life being squashed by mass climate problems is more likely to allow other life a continued future than some of the other methods we could use to erradicate ourselves.
What the hell are you talking about? Copyright, is the right to print copy of said copyrighted material. This isn't trade secret law (nor would it matter, because a company may have to reveal a trade secret to a judge to show that someone else stole their trade secret, this would not invalidate their trade secret). I don't need copyright to read a book, I need copyright to PRINT a book. He is breaking the law by reproducing their copyrighted material and hoping they will sue him for it so he can have the copyright on laws thrown out. They do not lose any rights by "revealing the copyright". That would mean an author would lose his copyright on a work the moment he printed it. Methinks you need another look at what copyright actually means before you go making jokes about others getting hit in the head.
Kneejerking defense of a messiah? You certainly are an interesting one. I have no love for Obama either, nor did I imply that I did. I simply mentioned his name and you went flying off the handle. I only pointed that insane mess as an example of why "campaign half compentently" is a damned joke.
What is really telling here is that at the mention of Obama you leap into a explitive laden tyraid about how stupid I am and so on. And I have looked at McCain. He espouses the same failed policies of Bush. Even when he says something else, his voting record shows otherwise. It is ironic that you mention the whole blind faith Christian crap, because his running mate is exactly that. Pro creationist, anti-sex ed. Genious.
Halfway competent meaning what? The Dems got lucky with Obama catching on. When faced with the trainwreck Bush administration, with almost a sure victory for a Dem candidate... When they could have run a pet rock against the Republican and won... They picked a woman and a black guy, two presidential firsts that will be difficult to deal with for many people. It is almost like they are trying to lose. In the meantime the Republicans run Bush 2.0.
I can't believe you would even dare to mention even halfway competent and campaigning in the same line. I will be really surprised if incumbents don't come out ahead again. Not that it matters much, I rarely see anyone voting based on issues rather than party membership.
You realize you just made the argument for why ISO doesn't matter right? CEOs need to be able to trust these things, compatability, interoperability, etc. When the standards can be outright purchased as they were here, then that whole process breaks down, and nobody should be trusting anything with an ISO stamp.
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Care to define the overwhelmingly convincing evidence? All I have seen is diatribes about how Christianity is frequently hyporcitical or uses logical fallicies to describe God. This of course relies on Christians to have the "Correct" definition of God, which in a weird way only serves to validate them. But, by all means, show your evidence of the nonexistance of something that cannot be described. Science and Religion have squat to do with each other.
Also, that you have never seen any atheist claim to "prove" God didn't exist is pretty willfull blindness. A few quick google searches will bring tons of results and a quick stroll through the bookstore will bring more.
Roam through the science section of a book store. There are quite a few out there. Multiple books on the subject. Which amuses me that they would waste so much of their lives dedicated to proving a negative that, according to them, has absolutely no impact on their lives anyways. The most amusing piece for me is that aside from that whole proving a negative problem, they fail their own logic. The very definition of an omnipotent force existing outside of the rules of science pretty much kills science ever being able to prove or disprove its existence. So, they "disprove" the existence of their own concocted definition of God.
:)
Similar to this concept. I can prove right at this moment that I do not have a wizbanglefrat in my hand. Since I get to define what a wizbanglefrat is and it doesn't have to match anyone elses definition of a wizbanglefrat I can indeed state that there is not one in my hand. Then I can proceed to make outlandish statements about anyone who has a differing definition of wizbanglefrat and write numerous books on the subject rather than doing anything actually productive.
Splitting hairs. The courts don't write the laws that determine what a criminal is. The courts only decide when a person meets the criteria. You let the government define what a criminal is and give them unlimited power to find those criminals you will soon have a very loose definition of what a criminal really is.
I guess what I mean is that it is far easier to find meaningful discussion online than with the average joe off the street. This is a growing byproduct of our us vs them mentality these days. The current political climate has made it pretty much impossible to think for yourself. You are either group A or group B and neither group tolerates the other.
Prejudice is indeed a human problem, however, some societies have had much fewer issues with welcoming the newcomers. The fact that so many have been able to come here and do well over the years has more to do with our economic views than our social views. The power of the dollar trumps social norms in a capitalist society like ours. A stunningly good example of this is our wonderful puritan origins being washed away almost compeltely by sex sells. This of course has left us in a very bizarre state where a nipple flash on TV is nearly treason but you can have people murdered by the hundreds on TV and hardly anyone takes issue.
The zealots...oh the zealots... They are harder to find in reality, but they are not any less common. When everyone walks around assuming that everyone else thinks like them there is less chance for sparks to show where the powder kegs really are. Go ask those "controversial" questions about evolution, origin of man, creation of the earth, and you will find a stunning amount of ignorance and often enough outright hostility towards anyone (regardless of their faith) who accepts the science. I recently decided to go back and finish up my degree and I am taking a few gen ed classes I missed. Two weeks into Geology almost a full 1/3 of the class goes into the "I had no idea how much scientists didn't know and that this was all just a theory and I don't believe it because of my religion" type crap. It has gotten to the point that every time I hear "just a theory" used as a backhanded attack on evolution even when that wasn't what was being discussed I about snap. The militant atheists annoy me to, but at least they are less likely to get in peoples faces that don't want to listen to them. Trust me, toss a few matches out and you will see just how prevalent it really is. Remember now, at the Creationist Museum Jesus rode a dinosaur and that Godless secular world is trying to lie to our children about the origin of man.
What? You expect a group of militant atheists to be any better behaved than a bunch of religious fundamentalists? They are basically the same thing, and rely on unbelievably literalist or warped interpretations of various religious texts to attempt to maintain their relevance.
I am just as disgusted by the militant atheist blathering on about Science proves there is no God as I am the religious fundy trying to pass of creationism as Science. The only way the militant atheist can even begin to pretend to "disprove God" is to rely on bizarre interpretations of God in the most literal sense from the most wackaloon fundy.
I suspect that if somehow we could destroy one of these polar forces the other would follow and we would finally wind up with a balanced world wehre Science can do Science and Religion can do Religion and neither one will have penis envy over the other and we can all move on.
Don't drink their kool-aid. Sure, tracking down and prosecuting criminals is always a noble goal right? I mean thats why they keep tearing up our rights. To track down terrorists, or child pornographers, or whatever else.
When speaking badly about your government becomes a crime will it still be a worthwhile goal to track down criminals?
We have given government the ability to declare who is and isn't a criminal, and now you propose we allow them to do whatever they want in order to find criminals?
Well, look at how we handle immigrants and I think that is a pretty good example of how socially inept we are. It is hard to be both a nation of immigrants and a nation of xenophobes at the same time without severe problems. This is hardly new behavior, which is one of the reasons I get so pissed of about the modern incarnation of racism like it is only about the blacks, mexicans, arabs, etc. It wasn't all that long ago that it was the jews, the irish, the italians, the japanese, etc. We are unbelievably socially inept for being a first world country made up entirely of immigrants. (Well, except for the handful of natives that we fenced into little reservations to keep them away from the rest of us).
:)
The fact that you have to come online to have a deeper conversation is also evidence of how backwards we are. That speaking to the average person on anythign more complex than the weather is likely to lead to problems. The tendancy for religious fundamentalism in our society has made it even more fun, because now its not just "hey, you are different", its "hey, you are different, and your eternal soul will be damned for all time you Godless heathen sinner".
I agree with the not talking to people while running, but lets be honest here. I imagine most of the people here on slashdot wouldn't ever talk to anyone while running anyways. Not because of any social issue, but I imagine most of the crowd here isn't athletic enough to be running at a good pace and hold a conversation without struggling to breathe.
Actually you are entitled to harrass people just as you described. You just don't have the funding to procede with it. The only difference here is the RIAA has the funding to push this kind of crap. When you can purchase a few congress critters you can get them to declare whatever you want to do legal, and if you buy enough of them you might even get the government to pick up the tab for you.
WM5 is not WM6 is not Smartphone WMX is not PocketPC WMX. Without fail every time I needed some app it boiled down to "oh, sucks to be you, your variant of WMX + Hardware does not work". Or you want SSH for free?! HAHA $30 for you!
WM email copy/paste is most certainly not universal as not all WM devices have the ability.
Then we also have the wonderful fun dance of trying to get anything installed on the stupid device without the joy of ActiveSync. At least iTunes is free and runs on Windows and OSX. Sure, easy enough to get ActiveSync for Windows, but have you ever tried syncing a WM device with a Mac? (Unfortunately linux is left ass out on most of this requiring all manner of bizarreness to make anything work)
Then there was always the fun of charging the stupid device, because without ActiveSync on Windows you are screwed. (At least in linux/osx I was able to charge it without all of that headache). The iPhone...USB = Charging without iTunes or headache. And oh yes...some WM devices most certainly do have WiFi. I can't even begin to count the number of times the damned ones I have had the joy of dealing with either freak out because they have added too many wireless networks to their connect list, magically decided that their regulatory domain has moved and that they can no longer connect, or switched from "my work network" to "the internet".
As far as email, I know that at least some of the WM devices cannot leave mail on the server when using POP. Of course it works great with Exchange, its an MS product, and its a damned shame that they decided to make it impossible for other devices to work smoothly with it by supporting real standards.
Hell the iThings (touch and phone) even allow you to go from the v1 software to v2. To get from WM5 to WM6 you get to buy a whole new device.
Honestly I ditched my WM device for an iPhone too.
Exchange support, IMAP support, POP support (with the ability to leave messages on the server!) pretty much murder WM email
Cisco IPSec, PPTP, L2TP rapes, murders, and pillages WM device VPN support.
Multiple windows, big screen, easy pan/zoom destroys WM device web surfing.
AppStore/Cydia/Installer is a MUCH wider selection of software. The prices for iPhone software vs WM software are also considerably lower from what I have encountered.
Wifi, GPS, multiple calendar support, a very nice camera, a bigger screen, WAY better music/video support than that half assed windows media player for WM
I have dealt with enough WM devices phones and non phones and their networking support is such a load of convoluted shit. "Work" or "Internet" or whatever goofball user stupid crap they come up with to describe how the device connects with no real power. I have not been even remotely impressed with WM.
I had a specific incident as a PC tech (or two really) that lead me to quit forever. One day while the boss was out on his frequent extended lunches I was left alone to man the shop. Elderly man comes in with one of those E-PCs or whatever the hell they were. "Mouse doesn't work". So I hook it all up, and while it boots I am moving the mouse around (You know, that thing that makes a computer boot faster. You know you all do it, don't act stupid now!) and it felt kinda odd. The guy left the little plastic packing thing taped on the bottom (You youngins with your fancy lazer mices wouldn't know what I am talking about, this is back when a mouse had balls!). I ripped that off, verified it worked, and helped him carry everything out to his car just to get him out the door fast enough so that noone would know he was there and he didn't get charged the minimum 1hr bench work price. Well...he came back a few days later... "My task bar keeps jumping around". I boot it up...let it sit for a minute wondering what the hell he is talking about. And then the lighbulb went off... I clicked on the task bar and moved it around to the sides and top and he exclaimed "Yes! That!". I explained that he had to let go of the mouse button... That lesson cost him $65 in the minimum bench charge because my asshat boss was there when it happened. I have never felt so sick in my life in dealing with a customer/client.
I was never really a mechanic, but I did work on my own Mach 1. One winter, changing the fuel pump was all it took to decide that mechanic was NEVER anything I wanted to really do. First, fucking freezing out, but must fix car so car runs, unpleasant at best. Then we have the fact that with socket wrench attached the bolt was just a hair to long to be removed, by the time it was mostly out the wrench was stuck and nothing was going anywhere. This of course meant that the last 1/4 inch or so of bolt had to be done by hand. This in itself wasn't much of a problem, its not like there was any significant resistance at this point. HOWEVER!!! When you are working on a fuel pump, you will get at least a little fuel on your hands. Fuel on hands, snow on ground, and cold ass metal are not a fun combination. I had to keep going inside to run my hands under warm water because it would get so cold that bumping the metal wrong would send pain all the way up to my elbow. Moving a heavy beast of a car like that uphill into a garage, with snow on the ground, by myself was just not a real option.
Just to play devils advocate a bit. "Cheaper should not have more weight than secure" is not true. Think about space travel. "Secure" would involve thicker shells to protect better from debris and more lead to protect against radiation and so on and so forth. The "Cheaper" in this case allows it to happen at all because all of that extra layering would make the whole thing pretty cost prohibitive.
I can think of tons of reasons these things should be networked. I am having a hard time with why they should not be part of a closed network. But being networked most certainly does not simply boil down to simply being "cheaper". With industrial systems like this, being able to NOT be in the room where it is operating is a tremendous boost to safety in many cases.
The ONLY thing I can really come up with for having these accessible outside of a closed network is faster emergency access. And lets face the music here, the probability that you would need to access something like this quickly to avert/recover from a normal possible failure is FAR higher than the risk posed by evil haxors. So, still not simply a case of cheaper.
And actually...to be fair in the case of space travel secure most certainly does carry more weight than cheaper, but not exactly in the way you were describing. :)
That isn't always the case with mechanics thankfully. We have a local repair shop here in town that our vehicles go to unless there is something absolutely preventing it. They have had the vehicle up on a lift and have said "hey, we see these other issues, if you want to have us replace them while we have it your labor costs will be the same since we already have it up, tools out, and its a minimal fuss part." (I can attest to the fact that the parts WERE indeed failing as I have a fair idea what I am doing, but being lazy, not enjoying working on cars, and being on crutches at the time makes it easier to just pay them.)
On one occassion they even drove the few blocks to our house to take a look at it (since it would be going to them if they couldn't fix it on the spot). Turns out the problem was a freak glitch. no charge.
I have run into many many sheisty mechanics over the years, and I have faced the exact same type of behavior in my early days as a PC tech. I had to get out of the PC tech business for exactly the same reason. While all of this is pretty tangent to the original point, just wanted to give you the warm fuzzy that there are indeed some really good mechanics out there.
Typically it is the reverse for me. I sit around doing unproductive things until an email interrupts giving me something productive to do. Most of my emails initiate work for me, system monitoring emails, project starter emails, etc.
Given the current state of affairs how is anyone surprised that the piece that separates humans is considered "junk"? Seems perfectly logical to me.
Honestly, it is this style of cosmic horror that scares me more than most of what goes on here on earth. Not that I think this instance specifically is going to be a problem for us (we will either have moved or killed ourselves off long before). But there is a WIDE array of cosmic badness that could happen to us that we can do absolutely nothing about. Hell, there is an extremely large number of things that we wouldn't even see coming.
My personal favorite is when people learn of the whole magnetic field of earth flipping problem, they immediately key in on "oh my god, how could we live without all of our electronics working" which is something we did for a very long time before electronics. They tend to ignore "oh my god, how could we live without the giant shield stopping the sun from bombarding us with cosmic radiation" which is something we don't exactly have much experience with.
Actually, basic astronomy says that our sun is nowhere near massive enough to collapse into a black hole. Even then, in a couple billion years the sun will have expanded and engulfed earth long before the whole collapse thing would happen.
In fact, with the exception of a few (H, and He most notably) the normal life cycle of the sun can create all of the elements up to and including iron!
Actually I can sum this up for you. You mention halfway competent campaigning of Senators, I make a joke about how incompetently the groups of Senators running for President have campaigned so there is no reason to believe any of it will be done half competently. I say bad things about your trophy Republicans and you go into a weird rant about Obama worship while insisting McCain isn't a total sellout. The funny thing is that when I dared insult the precious Republicans it somehow turned my insults of the Democrats into praise and worship. When I explain why they were insults you somehow construe that to be an attack on Obama's race rather than the indication that the party should have supported members less likely to draw fire for race/sex when they should have a sure win of the office being campaigned for because the incumbant is a total failure.
This is why I find the modern Republican so funny. Your complete and total lack of thought being replaced by rabid responses is pretty classic responses for the modern Republican. The rhetoric from the left tends to just be whiney nonsense. The rhetoric from the right is comically ignorant or offensive. Enjoy your mouthfrothing.
The other amusing thing is the posturing about being so tough when they are the biggest bunch of pussies in office. "Oh but we need the government to control every aspect of our lives to protect us from terrorism!" Fuck off already, please! Either grow a pair or get the fuck out. I hear China doesn't have much of a terrorist problem and the government has total control and does plenty of monitoring, you all should be right at home.
You really are entertaining. Let me break it down for you in simple concepts, because apparently anything complex is terribly difficult to register for you. You said campaign half competently. As evidence of their inability to campaign competently I offered Democrats running a black man and a woman in an election that should have been a sure win by any less "radical" choice of candidate. Republicans facing a tough election chose to put up McCain who supports most of the same failed foreign and domestic policy (Iraq, Wiretaps, FBI powers, Eminent domain, the list goes on), and while he has managed to say some pretty out of line for Republican things about wanting to teach evolution and sex education, he picks Palin, a fundie nut hell bent on killing sex ed programs and teaching creationism. So to me, that is clear evidence of completely and totally incompetent campaigning on BOTH SIDES. The fact that you somehow warp that into a bizarre defense of Obama just because I mentioned his name pretty much shows the mindless automaton the McCain crowd tends to be when they hear the word Obama.
I still don't understand how you get the idea that I support Obama at all, specifically when I said he was a dumb choice for the Dems to make. That slimeball voted for Telcom immunity after constantly talking about how bad it was. So...here you are accusing me of "finding a messiah" and listening to what his "preachers" have said. So even beyond your complete and total lack of reading comprehension that I actually said I thought Obama was a bad pick and you somehow warped that into I believe he is a messiah in your simple and twisted little Republican mind is stunning. Further, the fact that you insist on using rhetoric like messiah, and preacher, and offer NO differences on Bush and McCain policy other than to claim how stupid I am for not realizing they don't support the same moronic policy. I have given specific examples of McCain, Palin, and Obama policy in this discussion.
The most amusing thing to me here is that for all of your use of "messiah" and "preacher" you are the one going with the weird blind faith nonsense on the party of the religious right. Maybe you are right...maybe McCain is not Bush 2.0...maybe he is worse.
I generally agree with your sentiment here. The biggest problem I have is the antiwarmers tend to grab anything they can and wave it around "See see, you are all crazy alarmists and we are perfectly ok pumping shit into the air because it would hurt our precious economy to stop.". Prowarmer activists are easy to ignore, and while their attentions may or may not be misguided, as you said, lowering pollution and the like is hardly a bad thing. Antiwarmer activists on the other hand are more difficult to deal with, because now they use their antiwarming soapbox to mock antipollution measures.
One of the most stunning denials I have seen is how they go on about climate change instead of global warming is the new word and shows how fake it all is. As far as I can remember the major global warming threat wasn't that the entire planet would get warmer. It was that it would screw up things like the transatlantic current leaving the planet less able to circulate the heat so some areas would get hotter and other areas would get colder. All a perfectly normal cycle of change and recovery until you factor in that it would make life for humans terribly difficult. So they cling to "global warming" and misinterpret the term intentionally to deny the true ideas behind it.
In the end...my view on the whole thing is pretty simple. 1. We don't fully understand the science and anyone who claims we do is little more than pushing a religious crusade in either direction. 2. It is better to err on the side of caution and work on cleaning things up without taking drastic measures is probably the best course of action. 3. If the sky really is falling I fail to see the real problem. In our current state I don't think mankind is terribly worthy of a gauronteed future given that we would use that future to find other ways and reasons to kill eachother. I would be more upset by the doom of mankind if we were a little closer to peacefully coexisting, but as it stands now it doesn't bother me much. Life on earth will more than likely survive, it may just not be much of human life. If anything, human life being squashed by mass climate problems is more likely to allow other life a continued future than some of the other methods we could use to erradicate ourselves.
What the hell are you talking about? Copyright, is the right to print copy of said copyrighted material. This isn't trade secret law (nor would it matter, because a company may have to reveal a trade secret to a judge to show that someone else stole their trade secret, this would not invalidate their trade secret). I don't need copyright to read a book, I need copyright to PRINT a book. He is breaking the law by reproducing their copyrighted material and hoping they will sue him for it so he can have the copyright on laws thrown out. They do not lose any rights by "revealing the copyright". That would mean an author would lose his copyright on a work the moment he printed it. Methinks you need another look at what copyright actually means before you go making jokes about others getting hit in the head.
Kneejerking defense of a messiah? You certainly are an interesting one. I have no love for Obama either, nor did I imply that I did. I simply mentioned his name and you went flying off the handle. I only pointed that insane mess as an example of why "campaign half compentently" is a damned joke.
What is really telling here is that at the mention of Obama you leap into a explitive laden tyraid about how stupid I am and so on. And I have looked at McCain. He espouses the same failed policies of Bush. Even when he says something else, his voting record shows otherwise. It is ironic that you mention the whole blind faith Christian crap, because his running mate is exactly that. Pro creationist, anti-sex ed. Genious.
Halfway competent meaning what? The Dems got lucky with Obama catching on. When faced with the trainwreck Bush administration, with almost a sure victory for a Dem candidate... When they could have run a pet rock against the Republican and won... They picked a woman and a black guy, two presidential firsts that will be difficult to deal with for many people. It is almost like they are trying to lose. In the meantime the Republicans run Bush 2.0.
I can't believe you would even dare to mention even halfway competent and campaigning in the same line. I will be really surprised if incumbents don't come out ahead again. Not that it matters much, I rarely see anyone voting based on issues rather than party membership.
You realize you just made the argument for why ISO doesn't matter right? CEOs need to be able to trust these things, compatability, interoperability, etc. When the standards can be outright purchased as they were here, then that whole process breaks down, and nobody should be trusting anything with an ISO stamp.