Is this a joke? Have you never seen the red/blonde haired blue/green/grey eyed people in northern South Asia? Or the blonde Aborigines? Or black people with blue eyes? The iconic ancient painting of (maybe) Tocharians with red hair and blue eyes? Sure, the diversity increases in (northern) Europe, but it assuredly exists elsewhere (the Nazis had problems explaining it).
Incidentally, there's nothing mystical or religious about the crescent and star: it was adopted by the Turks from Asia Minor / Byzantium / Christians. It's relatively recent and has been used by many many groups and in (European) heraldry too. Somehow it is seen as some universal symbol of Islam on par with the cross for Christianity. It's nothing of the sort.
The simple file operations in Windows (and indeed in other OSs) still drive me insane. If I want to move/copy/delete a bunch of files (say several thousand) stored in a deep hierarchy of several folders, I've yet to see a drag-and-drop solution which will handle this (in any OS). Specifically, if a single file fails, the entire operation is aborted, leading to tons of wasted time as one figures out what was/wasn't moved/copied/deleted. I mean it's been decades... why hasn't the technology matured? The closest I've come to a solution which allows pausing/resuming/skipping/bandwidth control/etc. of copy/move operations is a handy little program for Windows called TotalCopy (http://www.ranvik.net/totalcopy/). Why this function (a few KB) isn't built into Windows by now is beyond me.
This latest news about Vista is just confirmation that the issue has been ignored again, and eye-candy that any sane user would instantly disable because of the system hit has been implemented at the expense of system usability: form above function. Here's a little ditty I wrote when Vista previews were coming out. As pertinent now as it was then:
-
-
Bud Light presents... Real Men Of Genius.
[Real Men Of Genius.]
Today, we salute you, Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.]
While others marvel at an operating system whose primary repair tradition is a complete wipe, you just can't wait for more of the same.
[I just love my Long Horn!]
Yes, it lacks security, efficiency, speed, heck, just about everything. But ever since 1985, when you first jammed your floppies into that curvaceous 186, you've been enraptured with Windows.
[It was five and a quarter inches!]
Despite the fact that it requires an array of Crays to run already invented technologies at sub-optimum speeds, you will beat the rush and see Notepad and Clock run in CPU-crippling GPU-hogging translucency.
[It turns on all my pixels!]
So crack open an ice cold Bud Lite, oh Chevalier of the Control Panel, because whilst the rest of us wonder what Vista will bring, you already know.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy!]
Bud Light beer. Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri.
I've said it before, but the people moralising about the "piracy problem" of the developing world and how "immoral" it all is over there need to look at the big picture. If I were supreme ruler of Elbonia, and I had a budget of a million dollars, I can either spend it on license fees for "legitimate" drugs, textbooks and software, or spend it all on food and other basic development costs whilst pirating all the stuff requiring licenses, I know which I'd consider the most "moral" option.
Today, we salute you, Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.]
While others marvel at an operating system whose primary repair tradition is a complete wipe, you just can't wait for more of the same.
[I just love my Long Horn!]
Yes, it lacks security, efficiency, speed, heck, just about everything. But ever since 1985, when you first jammed your floppies into that curvaceous 186, you've been enraptured with Windows.
[It was five and a quarter inches!]
Despite the fact that it requires an array of Crays to run already invented technologies at sub-optimum speeds, you will beat the rush and see Notepad and Clock run in CPU-crippling GPU-hogging translucency.
[It turns on all my pixels!]
So crack open an ice cold Bud Lite, oh Chevalier of the Control Panel, because whilst the rest of us wonder what Vista will bring, you already know.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy!]
Bud Light beer. Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri.
Yeeeeeees. Finally someone had the guts to come up with the "real" facts.
When were Jews allowed to enter the House of Commons? The 19th century, the first being Lord Rothschild. Indeed the Rothschild story is interesting because the _father_ of the Rothschild business dynasty lived in the Jewish Ghetto in Munich. Where every Jew had to pass under the arch of the ghetto entrance which had a picture on it. Of a pig. With little Jewish children suckling at its teats and a Rabbi eating its excrement. And its only one example out of many.
Gee-whizz. It seems Christian Europe didn't outright "kill" those Jews, but it sure made their lives interesting.
When were Jews allowed to hold high office in the Muslim Empire (Caliphate)? Well, blimey, for more than a thousand years, be it in academia, goverment, the Caliph's own purveyors, etc. Indeed when the Spanish threw out all their Jews, they went to the Caliphate and quite a few became involved in the goverment there (if one recalls correctly, Spanish power more or less declined not too long afterwards and they were supplanted by the Dutch and the English).
And why were those dastardly Muslims (remember those curvy swords) being so compassionate to the Jews? Well it seems that, apart from plain decency, the Quran tells them so.
"Lo! Those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee, Muhammad), and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabians -whoever believed in Allah and the Last Day and did right- surely their reward is with their Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve."
Seems to me, that if Muslims are so het up about the Quran being the Word of God, and God sort Smiles upon those mentioned above, that Muslims would do well not to go round killing them, y'know? And the historical record of more than a millenium bears that out. Even Bernard Lewis, whom Said criticised, holds this view.
Now there are verses which are used by the ignorant repeatedly, notably the one about "Slaying unbelievers where ye might find them" and "Do not take Unbelievers as friends" (or something similar), so we shall deal with those:
You will actually find that the lines: "And magnify Mohammed and his followers as thou didst magnify Abraham and his followers..." "And bless Mohammed and his followers as thou didst bless Abraham and his followers..." are recited (at least) thirteen times _per day_ in the compulsory Muslim five daily prayers. Now what use would these lines be if you didn't know whom Abraham or his followers were? The key is context, in order to find out what those lines are teaching, you have to go and do a little bit of historical homework on Abraham and why he was such a good pal of God's, to the extent that people living thousands of years after Abraham are still being taught to behave like him and his congregation.
Similarly, for the "slaying" and "friends" verses mentioned above, context is needed otherwise the lines can easily appear to be contradictory. The verse about not taking Jews and Christians as friends is very often misused by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But the actual historical reference (remember, that history homework again is needed), actually refers to when the northern Arabian tribes were becoming politically unified through their common adherence to Islam. Just as the Vatican or Israel would hardly trust its affairs to, eg, Iran or Saudi Arabia, and not necessarily because of antagonism but merely due to sensible political considerations, the same was true at the time for the fledgling Arab-Muslim state. Similarly, the slaying refers to a _state_ breaking its treaty and taking it as a call to exterminate non-Muslims is downright silly. Political Islam, or indeed Christianity or Judaism, is somewhat divorced from how you should treat your neighbour: it is how one nation should treat another. The verse about taking Christians as friends is the non-political way in which Man should deal with his brethren in the world, holding up the pious Christians of the time as an example to be followed. One can therefore easily ascertain how consistency is not lacking between the two verses, merely that people do not do their homework.
The parent is a learned genius. Mod appropriately, someone!
Nobody seems to realise that this entire issue is only an issue because most European-descended industrialised societies have run out of targets to hate. Other nations? No, we pity them, give them aid, and invade them, but we can't hate them: they're too weak to hate. Other religions? No, can't do that either: it causes civil strife within a nation and Crusades and Holy Wars without. Other races? Can't do that either. At least not publicly.
So goshdarnit, whom can we hate, unreservedly, with all our hearts? Gentlemen, the answer is paedophiles. That's right, child molesters. They are the new witches of today and we all enjoy seeing them burn at the stake: they are the one "species" we can all feel superior to and not feel guilty about it.
I remember a case here in England where two men shared a jail cell and one of them castrated the other because he had been convicted of some kind of rape. You wouldn't believe the smug self-satisfaction the public greeted this news with. No one seemed to notice that we shouldn't be resorting to criminals to mete out rough "justice" to other criminals: society itself is responsible for that, but would prefer to be hypocritical.
If the guy didn't actually forcibly rape the girl, the parent is absolutely correct: he should kill himself right now, because even if by some miracle, the courts acquit him, society has already judged him guilty. He will never recover from this debacle, careerwise or in any other sense. He is a marked man.
Surely in societies where girls as young as 9 - 12 boast of sleeping with two different boys in a single night at Catholic camp (yes, it happens, and often), a slight change in perspective is needed. There is a clear difference between such wanton and consensual promiscuity and those who genuinely do not wish to engage in sexual activity, whom the law seeks to protect. Unfortunately, below the current age of consent, it becomes difficult to legally seperate the two, the issue being topical enough as it is. It often becomes a case of "my word against yours", where the female word is often given more weight.
Until we have some progress, the fellow in TFA, if he is innocent of true forced rape, will be screwed by the mob justice the public is dying to mete out to him.
That has to be one of the silliest articles I have ever read.
The author waxes lyrical on how games personify "power" and "death" and "destruction" (and later mentions how Apple likes "control" by the way). He also states how an instrument of this "power" (the US military) is "wedded" to Windows.
It seems to me as if the author is vastly over-rating the Apple's "ethical" stance on its products. Does anyone for a moment believe that if the US military gave Apple an exclusive contract to, say, supply the servers for, to take a silly example, America's Army, that Apple wouldn't snap it up? "Sorry Mr Army Guy, we have to turn down your $50 million deal because, uh, we don't like 'power' and 'death'."?
Apple *should* concentrate on the games market: it is a given that a large percentage of Mac users like to play games. If they need to keep a Windows beige box handy (or, these days, reboot), isn't that axiomatically a detriment towards the concept of Apple providing an end-to-end solution to a user's needs?
Occam's razor suggests that the reason Apple doesn't concentrate on games has been that traditionally, with a different CPU architecture and a fraction of the market, it simply wasn't worth the effort to woo game developers to do a difficult task for which the results would be mediocre at best. Add to that the lagging speeds and specs of Apple's consumer level offerings (I refer to the G4 based systems), Apple's actually *couldn't* play fashionable games that well. And emulation was a nightmare as regards speed.
Mr Jobs announced that OS X had been running on Intel for five years previous to the unveiling of Mac OS X for x86. So if Apple *knew* it had an Intel version under the hood, why would it spend any effort at all persuading game developers to write, or port to PowerPC? Only to shaft them later by announcing OSX86?
I suggest we wait and see. Now that the biggest hardware block has been removed, there should be no reason why fashionable games do not become available on the Mac.
For knocking up a quick spreadsheet (which is what 90% of home Excel users are doing), surely this is ideal and removes the need for (buying) Excel? For such simple uses, the online and offline markets are as one.
Watch me slip towards giving Google all my information: as a personal example, I know it'd be handy for keeping a record of my yearly finances, for which full blown Excel is frankly overkill. I have to say, as a first application, they did well to pick a spreadsheet.
Specifically, this would be a boon for OS X users since Apple's current offerings in iWork (Pages and Keynote), do not extend to a spreadsheet program.
My fault: I should have made clear that the money is wasted in any case. I didn't mean to imply that the money is used for a good purpose if encryption didn't exist... merely that this invention makes it crystal clear that the money was always wasted.
I think the above post should be taken in the spirit it was written: as a good joke suitable for chuckles all round. Would that I had mod points to mod it funny. Possibly we should petition/. to create a new type of modifier: ironic, but I fear its subtlety would be lost upon the majority.
Just in case the parent was not tongue in cheek:
Is it only myself for whom liberty from large entities (like the Goverment) is worth purchasing with a risk? Didn't many brave souls die for this in the past and continue to do so? Isn't that the bargain: liberty (and eternal vigilance), or the illusion of security?
Does this mean that Government agencies cannot listen to our oh-so-important phone calls?
Typical. Millions if not billions of our tax money wasted if this technology becomes widely adopted.
The primary attribute of a disk image is not that it is (maybe) a zip file as well: its primary purpose is that it is a single file, you double-click it, it shows you what's inside. No "tar -xvzfdslfjsdhgkshg install.firefox.tar.gz" onthe command line, no unzip in WinZip, no nothing. You double click. It doesn't get simpler.
OS X may need little ore-learned expertise, but you need to at least read the few lines about installing applications. As a Windows user (using only Windows) for eight years, I don't think the OS X install process is rocket science. It comes under the category of easy to use, even for non-geeks.
You do realise that instead of "setup.exe", Mac installers tend to be a (zipped) disk image that mounts (and unzips) upon a double click. *Inside* the mounted voume is the app which, this is the important part:
*needs to be copied into your Applications folder*.
Then you can always run it without problems or slow starting times. I can see how if you never did the last step and ran it from the disk image directly, you'd be frustrated. But that is only one of your attributes, the other is being one of the few people in the world for whom OS X's legendary easy install method was too difficult to master.
"...rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film."
Er, I don't know which world divorced from reality the people who came up with this statement live in, but I've (or rather, a friend has) always found that movies downloaded from p2p tend never to contain viruses and are skillfully compressed to preserve good quality.
Why do the content distributors always conflate their offerings? I am sure this pisses a lot of their potential customers off, most of whom would have the rudiments of knowledge on bitrates, DRM, etc. If they instead stated:
"Released at the same time as the DVD (or cinema) release of the film, we offer you "Ice Age 2" as a H264/AAC file of size 1GB. We know the quality is crapper than a DVD and that it comes with DRM, is not a physical object and we are saving tons on the distribution thanks to all you altruistic BitTorrent uploaders. So have it at a tenth of the price of the DVD: $2.",
then I'm sure instead of furiously downloading Ice.Age.2.XviD.DiEtY.1.of.2.avi (or whatever) as soon as the movie comes out, the producers may actually capture a slice of the market.
You do know what will happen if anything like that were ever instituted don't you? This type of thing (i.e. instituting insulting practises or designations for those in high office or in power) has been tried before. Invariably, what starts off as an insult, degradation or shame ends up being ceremoniously revered. Let us say that here in England, we decided to rename all MPs "Lords of the lice that live under lavatories.", you can bet your bottom dollar it would work for only a little while before becoming an honorific. This is because you can label a station or position however you like, evetually that name will end up corresponding to whatever is _behind_ the name, even if it means that the meaning of the word changes. So if we did have a day when we kicked all lawyers in the balls, soon a natural heirarchy would spring up where it would become a privilege to be kicked in the balls! Lawyers could even insitute a system whereby the best lawyer received the biggest kick. Or a kick from the head of state. It could be that instead of being called to the bar, barristers were called to be kicked. Or something. Note that I do not hate lawyers and am merely illustrating the pointlessness of labelling, regardless of original good intentions, high office with derogotary terms that do not correspond to the heirarchy in society.
You will not that there is a body of opinion which describes the origin of kingship in the similar way: in matriarchal societies, kings were chosen merely as military leaders who led soldiers to battle for a year before they were sacrificed to prevent them becoming too powerful. As the natural power of the king grew, eventually, it became death after ten years rather than one. Finally, a boy was chosen as a substitute sacrifice instead of the king. Eventually, that boy was replaced with a creature or some ceremonial object.
See what I mean? Of course what this has to do with the topic, apart from rambling, is beyond me.
This is completely off-topic so will doubtless be modded as such.
You will actually find that the lines:
"And magnify Mohammed and his followers as thou didst magnify Abraham and his followers..."
"And bless Mohammed and his followers as thou didst bless Abraham and his followers..."
are recited (at least) thirteen times _per day_ in the compulsory Muslim five daily prayers. Now what use would these lines be if you didn't know whom Abraham or his followers were? The key is context, in order to find out what those lines are teaching, you have to go and do a little bit of historical homework on Abraham and why he was such a good pal of God's, to the extent that people living thousands of years after Abraham are still being taught to behave like him and his congregation.
Similarly, for the verses mentioned above, context is needed otherwise the lines can easily appear to be contradictory.
The verse about not taking Jews and Christians as friends is very often misused by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But the actual historical reference (remember, that histroy homework again is needed), actually refers to when the northern Arabian tribes were becoming politically unified through their common adherence to Islam. Just as the Vatican or Israel would hardly trust its affairs to, eg, Iran or Saudi Arabia, and not necessarily because of antagonism but merely due to sensible political considerations, the same was true at the time for the fledgling Arab-Muslim state.
Political Islam, or indeed Christianity or Judaism, is somewhat divorced from how you should treat your neighbour: it is how one nation should treat another. The verse about taking Christians as friends is the non-political way in which Man should deal with his brethren in the world, holding up the pious Christians of the time as an example to be followed. One can therefore easily ascertain how consistency is not lacking between the two verses, merely that people do not do their homework.
...which is very unfortunate. In previous times, it was accepted that any papers one did not burn or destroy, one's children would inherit, thus receiving valuable information about their antecedents. These days, on the other hand, more and more of people's lives are being lived on the net: with very little to show for it.
A while back this very issue surfaced where a US soldier was killed in Iraq. Yahoo refused his family access to his account and the clock started ticking for account deletion. I don't know what became of the problem, but it does highlight the difference between a locked safety deposit box which one receives when one's grandfather snuffs it and the current digital equivalent. I very much doubt the soldier would have minded his family reading over his final few letters if he was no longer around.
I think there should be an "opt out" scheme whereby if one dies, by default, one's relatives can send in proof of the death and be granted access to accounts (email and otherwise). If one specifically decides otherwise the account could be deleted as per normal.
Most users of the net are young and therefore haven't gotten around to this type of thinking.
I deliberately labelled the China question as a waste of time because it was a careers event where research students (who already have little neough time) came to get some *careers* advice from Google employees. SlashDot is all very well for discussing the China Google thing, but the event at the Freud Cafe was not.
Google visited Oxford yesterday and I went along to the event. It was OK. Instead of asking a question on the theme of "How do I get in?", one silly chap asked about how Google squared their "Do no evil." policy with China. Which led to a wasted ten minute PR exercise of why and how Google was operating in China. Apart from that, it was OK and I have a purple Google pen to show for it. There was a raffle in which I won nothing. The top prize being an iPod.
This is true. I've been much more complacent since I switched. While I'd never type in my Admin password due to a JPEG, I am sure the complacency of which you write might well mean that moany users would, especially as the Mac population grows and statistically includes more silly users.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a joke? Have you never seen the red/blonde haired blue/green/grey eyed people in northern South Asia? Or the blonde Aborigines? Or black people with blue eyes? The iconic ancient painting of (maybe) Tocharians with red hair and blue eyes? Sure, the diversity increases in (northern) Europe, but it assuredly exists elsewhere (the Nazis had problems explaining it).
Wish I had mod points for the parent.
Does anyone remember the BadApple plugin that allowed iTunes to sync with any mass storage? It died a death very similar to FacebookSync.
Especially amusing since the Moors had Siciliy at one point.
Incidentally, there's nothing mystical or religious about the crescent and star: it was adopted by the Turks from Asia Minor / Byzantium / Christians. It's relatively recent and has been used by many many groups and in (European) heraldry too. Somehow it is seen as some universal symbol of Islam on par with the cross for Christianity. It's nothing of the sort.
The simple file operations in Windows (and indeed in other OSs) still drive me insane. If I want to move/copy/delete a bunch of files (say several thousand) stored in a deep hierarchy of several folders, I've yet to see a drag-and-drop solution which will handle this (in any OS). Specifically, if a single file fails, the entire operation is aborted, leading to tons of wasted time as one figures out what was/wasn't moved/copied/deleted. I mean it's been decades... why hasn't the technology matured? The closest I've come to a solution which allows pausing/resuming/skipping/bandwidth control/etc. of copy/move operations is a handy little program for Windows called TotalCopy (http://www.ranvik.net/totalcopy/). Why this function (a few KB) isn't built into Windows by now is beyond me.
... Real Men Of Genius.
This latest news about Vista is just confirmation that the issue has been ignored again, and eye-candy that any sane user would instantly disable because of the system hit has been implemented at the expense of system usability: form above function. Here's a little ditty I wrote when Vista previews were coming out. As pertinent now as it was then:
-
-
Bud Light presents
[Real Men Of Genius.]
Today, we salute you, Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.]
While others marvel at an operating system whose primary repair
tradition is a complete wipe, you just can't wait for more of the
same.
[I just love my Long Horn!]
Yes, it lacks security, efficiency, speed, heck, just about
everything. But ever since 1985, when you first jammed your floppies
into that curvaceous 186, you've been enraptured with Windows.
[It was five and a quarter inches!]
Despite the fact that it requires an array of Crays to run already
invented technologies at sub-optimum speeds, you will beat the rush
and see Notepad and Clock run in CPU-crippling GPU-hogging
translucency.
[It turns on all my pixels!]
So crack open an ice cold Bud Lite, oh Chevalier of the Control Panel,
because whilst the rest of us wonder what Vista will bring, you
already know.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy!]
Bud Light beer. Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri.
The above should be modded up to the maximum.
I've said it before, but the people moralising about the "piracy problem" of the developing world and how "immoral" it all is over there need to look at the big picture. If I were supreme ruler of Elbonia, and I had a budget of a million dollars, I can either spend it on license fees for "legitimate" drugs, textbooks and software, or spend it all on food and other basic development costs whilst pirating all the stuff requiring licenses, I know which I'd consider the most "moral" option.
Bud Light presents ... Real Men Of Genius.
[Real Men Of Genius.]
Today, we salute you, Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.]
While others marvel at an operating system whose primary repair
tradition is a complete wipe, you just can't wait for more of the
same.
[I just love my Long Horn!]
Yes, it lacks security, efficiency, speed, heck, just about
everything. But ever since 1985, when you first jammed your floppies
into that curvaceous 186, you've been enraptured with Windows.
[It was five and a quarter inches!]
Despite the fact that it requires an array of Crays to run already
invented technologies at sub-optimum speeds, you will beat the rush
and see Notepad and Clock run in CPU-crippling GPU-hogging
translucency.
[It turns on all my pixels!]
So crack open an ice cold Bud Lite, oh Chevalier of the Control Panel,
because whilst the rest of us wonder what Vista will bring, you
already know.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy!]
Bud Light beer. Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri.
Yeeeeeees. Finally someone had the guts to come up with the "real" facts.
When were Jews allowed to enter the House of Commons? The 19th century, the first being Lord Rothschild. Indeed the Rothschild story is interesting because the _father_ of the Rothschild business dynasty lived in the Jewish Ghetto in Munich. Where every Jew had to pass under the arch of the ghetto entrance which had a picture on it. Of a pig. With little Jewish children suckling at its teats and a Rabbi eating its excrement. And its only one example out of many.
Gee-whizz. It seems Christian Europe didn't outright "kill" those Jews, but it sure made their lives interesting.
When were Jews allowed to hold high office in the Muslim Empire (Caliphate)? Well, blimey, for more than a thousand years, be it in academia, goverment, the Caliph's own purveyors, etc. Indeed when the Spanish threw out all their Jews, they went to the Caliphate and quite a few became involved in the goverment there (if one recalls correctly, Spanish power more or less declined not too long afterwards and they were supplanted by the Dutch and the English).
And why were those dastardly Muslims (remember those curvy swords) being so compassionate to the Jews? Well it seems that, apart from plain decency, the Quran tells them so.
"Lo! Those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee, Muhammad), and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabians -whoever believed in Allah and the Last Day and did right- surely their reward is with their Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve."
Seems to me, that if Muslims are so het up about the Quran being the Word of God, and God sort Smiles upon those mentioned above, that Muslims would do well not to go round killing them, y'know? And the historical record of more than a millenium bears that out. Even Bernard Lewis, whom Said criticised, holds this view.
Now there are verses which are used by the ignorant repeatedly, notably the one about "Slaying unbelievers where ye might find them" and "Do not take Unbelievers as friends" (or something similar), so we shall deal with those:
You will actually find that the lines: "And magnify Mohammed and his followers as thou didst magnify Abraham and his followers..." "And bless Mohammed and his followers as thou didst bless Abraham and his followers..." are recited (at least) thirteen times _per day_ in the compulsory Muslim five daily prayers. Now what use would these lines be if you didn't know whom Abraham or his followers were? The key is context, in order to find out what those lines are teaching, you have to go and do a little bit of historical homework on Abraham and why he was such a good pal of God's, to the extent that people living thousands of years after Abraham are still being taught to behave like him and his congregation.
Similarly, for the "slaying" and "friends" verses mentioned above, context is needed otherwise the lines can easily appear to be contradictory. The verse about not taking Jews and Christians as friends is very often misused by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But the actual historical reference (remember, that history homework again is needed), actually refers to when the northern Arabian tribes were becoming politically unified through their common adherence to Islam. Just as the Vatican or Israel would hardly trust its affairs to, eg, Iran or Saudi Arabia, and not necessarily because of antagonism but merely due to sensible political considerations, the same was true at the time for the fledgling Arab-Muslim state. Similarly, the slaying refers to a _state_ breaking its treaty and taking it as a call to exterminate non-Muslims is downright silly. Political Islam, or indeed Christianity or Judaism, is somewhat divorced from how you should treat your neighbour: it is how one nation should treat another. The verse about taking Christians as friends is the non-political way in which Man should deal with his brethren in the world, holding up the pious Christians of the time as an example to be followed. One can therefore easily ascertain how consistency is not lacking between the two verses, merely that people do not do their homework.
The parent is a learned genius. Mod appropriately, someone!
Would that I had mod points for the parent.
Nobody seems to realise that this entire issue is only an issue because most European-descended industrialised societies have run out of targets to hate. Other nations? No, we pity them, give them aid, and invade them, but we can't hate them: they're too weak to hate. Other religions? No, can't do that either: it causes civil strife within a nation and Crusades and Holy Wars without. Other races? Can't do that either. At least not publicly.
So goshdarnit, whom can we hate, unreservedly, with all our hearts? Gentlemen, the answer is paedophiles. That's right, child molesters. They are the new witches of today and we all enjoy seeing them burn at the stake: they are the one "species" we can all feel superior to and not feel guilty about it.
I remember a case here in England where two men shared a jail cell and one of them castrated the other because he had been convicted of some kind of rape. You wouldn't believe the smug self-satisfaction the public greeted this news with. No one seemed to notice that we shouldn't be resorting to criminals to mete out rough "justice" to other criminals: society itself is responsible for that, but would prefer to be hypocritical.
If the guy didn't actually forcibly rape the girl, the parent is absolutely correct: he should kill himself right now, because even if by some miracle, the courts acquit him, society has already judged him guilty. He will never recover from this debacle, careerwise or in any other sense. He is a marked man.
Surely in societies where girls as young as 9 - 12 boast of sleeping with two different boys in a single night at Catholic camp (yes, it happens, and often), a slight change in perspective is needed. There is a clear difference between such wanton and consensual promiscuity and those who genuinely do not wish to engage in sexual activity, whom the law seeks to protect. Unfortunately, below the current age of consent, it becomes difficult to legally seperate the two, the issue being topical enough as it is. It often becomes a case of "my word against yours", where the female word is often given more weight.
Until we have some progress, the fellow in TFA, if he is innocent of true forced rape, will be screwed by the mob justice the public is dying to mete out to him.
That has to be one of the silliest articles I have ever read.
The author waxes lyrical on how games personify "power" and "death" and "destruction" (and later mentions how Apple likes "control" by the way). He also states how an instrument of this "power" (the US military) is "wedded" to Windows.
It seems to me as if the author is vastly over-rating the Apple's "ethical" stance on its products. Does anyone for a moment believe that if the US military gave Apple an exclusive contract to, say, supply the servers for, to take a silly example, America's Army, that Apple wouldn't snap it up? "Sorry Mr Army Guy, we have to turn down your $50 million deal because, uh, we don't like 'power' and 'death'."?
Apple *should* concentrate on the games market: it is a given that a large percentage of Mac users like to play games. If they need to keep a Windows beige box handy (or, these days, reboot), isn't that axiomatically a detriment towards the concept of Apple providing an end-to-end solution to a user's needs?
Occam's razor suggests that the reason Apple doesn't concentrate on games has been that traditionally, with a different CPU architecture and a fraction of the market, it simply wasn't worth the effort to woo game developers to do a difficult task for which the results would be mediocre at best. Add to that the lagging speeds and specs of Apple's consumer level offerings (I refer to the G4 based systems), Apple's actually *couldn't* play fashionable games that well. And emulation was a nightmare as regards speed.
Mr Jobs announced that OS X had been running on Intel for five years previous to the unveiling of Mac OS X for x86. So if Apple *knew* it had an Intel version under the hood, why would it spend any effort at all persuading game developers to write, or port to PowerPC? Only to shaft them later by announcing OSX86?
I suggest we wait and see. Now that the biggest hardware block has been removed, there should be no reason why fashionable games do not become available on the Mac.
For knocking up a quick spreadsheet (which is what 90% of home Excel users are doing), surely this is ideal and removes the need for (buying) Excel? For such simple uses, the online and offline markets are as one.
Watch me slip towards giving Google all my information: as a personal example, I know it'd be handy for keeping a record of my yearly finances, for which full blown Excel is frankly overkill. I have to say, as a first application, they did well to pick a spreadsheet.
Specifically, this would be a boon for OS X users since Apple's current offerings in iWork (Pages and Keynote), do not extend to a spreadsheet program.
My fault: I should have made clear that the money is wasted in any case. I didn't mean to imply that the money is used for a good purpose if encryption didn't exist... merely that this invention makes it crystal clear that the money was always wasted.
I think the above post should be taken in the spirit it was written: as a good joke suitable for chuckles all round. Would that I had mod points to mod it funny. Possibly we should petition /. to create a new type of modifier: ironic, but I fear its subtlety would be lost upon the majority.
Just in case the parent was not tongue in cheek:
Is it only myself for whom liberty from large entities (like the Goverment) is worth purchasing with a risk? Didn't many brave souls die for this in the past and continue to do so? Isn't that the bargain: liberty (and eternal vigilance), or the illusion of security?
Does this mean that Government agencies cannot listen to our oh-so-important phone calls? Typical. Millions if not billions of our tax money wasted if this technology becomes widely adopted.
The primary attribute of a disk image is not that it is (maybe) a zip file as well: its primary purpose is that it is a single file, you double-click it, it shows you what's inside. No "tar -xvzfdslfjsdhgkshg install.firefox.tar.gz" onthe command line, no unzip in WinZip, no nothing. You double click. It doesn't get simpler.
OS X may need little ore-learned expertise, but you need to at least read the few lines about installing applications. As a Windows user (using only Windows) for eight years, I don't think the OS X install process is rocket science. It comes under the category of easy to use, even for non-geeks.
Is this some kind of joke?
You do realise that instead of "setup.exe", Mac installers tend to be a (zipped) disk image that mounts (and unzips) upon a double click. *Inside* the mounted voume is the app which, this is the important part:
*needs to be copied into your Applications folder*.
Then you can always run it without problems or slow starting times. I can see how if you never did the last step and ran it from the disk image directly, you'd be frustrated. But that is only one of your attributes, the other is being one of the few people in the world for whom OS X's legendary easy install method was too difficult to master.
"...rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film."
Er, I don't know which world divorced from reality the people who came up with this statement live in, but I've (or rather, a friend has) always found that movies downloaded from p2p tend never to contain viruses and are skillfully compressed to preserve good quality.
Why do the content distributors always conflate their offerings? I am sure this pisses a lot of their potential customers off, most of whom would have the rudiments of knowledge on bitrates, DRM, etc. If they instead stated:
"Released at the same time as the DVD (or cinema) release of the film, we offer you "Ice Age 2" as a H264/AAC file of size 1GB. We know the quality is crapper than a DVD and that it comes with DRM, is not a physical object and we are saving tons on the distribution thanks to all you altruistic BitTorrent uploaders. So have it at a tenth of the price of the DVD: $2.",
then I'm sure instead of furiously downloading Ice.Age.2.XviD.DiEtY.1.of.2.avi (or whatever) as soon as the movie comes out, the producers may actually capture a slice of the market.
This'll be off-topic.
You do know what will happen if anything like that were ever instituted don't you? This type of thing (i.e. instituting insulting practises or designations for those in high office or in power) has been tried before. Invariably, what starts off as an insult, degradation or shame ends up being ceremoniously revered. Let us say that here in England, we decided to rename all MPs "Lords of the lice that live under lavatories.", you can bet your bottom dollar it would work for only a little while before becoming an honorific. This is because you can label a station or position however you like, evetually that name will end up corresponding to whatever is _behind_ the name, even if it means that the meaning of the word changes. So if we did have a day when we kicked all lawyers in the balls, soon a natural heirarchy would spring up where it would become a privilege to be kicked in the balls! Lawyers could even insitute a system whereby the best lawyer received the biggest kick. Or a kick from the head of state. It could be that instead of being called to the bar, barristers were called to be kicked. Or something. Note that I do not hate lawyers and am merely illustrating the pointlessness of labelling, regardless of original good intentions, high office with derogotary terms that do not correspond to the heirarchy in society.
You will not that there is a body of opinion which describes the origin of kingship in the similar way: in matriarchal societies, kings were chosen merely as military leaders who led soldiers to battle for a year before they were sacrificed to prevent them becoming too powerful. As the natural power of the king grew, eventually, it became death after ten years rather than one. Finally, a boy was chosen as a substitute sacrifice instead of the king. Eventually, that boy was replaced with a creature or some ceremonial object.
See what I mean? Of course what this has to do with the topic, apart from rambling, is beyond me.
This is completely off-topic so will doubtless be modded as such. You will actually find that the lines: "And magnify Mohammed and his followers as thou didst magnify Abraham and his followers..." "And bless Mohammed and his followers as thou didst bless Abraham and his followers..." are recited (at least) thirteen times _per day_ in the compulsory Muslim five daily prayers. Now what use would these lines be if you didn't know whom Abraham or his followers were? The key is context, in order to find out what those lines are teaching, you have to go and do a little bit of historical homework on Abraham and why he was such a good pal of God's, to the extent that people living thousands of years after Abraham are still being taught to behave like him and his congregation. Similarly, for the verses mentioned above, context is needed otherwise the lines can easily appear to be contradictory. The verse about not taking Jews and Christians as friends is very often misused by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But the actual historical reference (remember, that histroy homework again is needed), actually refers to when the northern Arabian tribes were becoming politically unified through their common adherence to Islam. Just as the Vatican or Israel would hardly trust its affairs to, eg, Iran or Saudi Arabia, and not necessarily because of antagonism but merely due to sensible political considerations, the same was true at the time for the fledgling Arab-Muslim state. Political Islam, or indeed Christianity or Judaism, is somewhat divorced from how you should treat your neighbour: it is how one nation should treat another. The verse about taking Christians as friends is the non-political way in which Man should deal with his brethren in the world, holding up the pious Christians of the time as an example to be followed. One can therefore easily ascertain how consistency is not lacking between the two verses, merely that people do not do their homework.
Possibly a "next of kin" box at the time of signing up to the account?
...which is very unfortunate. In previous times, it was accepted that any papers one did not burn or destroy, one's children would inherit, thus receiving valuable information about their antecedents. These days, on the other hand, more and more of people's lives are being lived on the net: with very little to show for it.
A while back this very issue surfaced where a US soldier was killed in Iraq. Yahoo refused his family access to his account and the clock started ticking for account deletion. I don't know what became of the problem, but it does highlight the difference between a locked safety deposit box which one receives when one's grandfather snuffs it and the current digital equivalent. I very much doubt the soldier would have minded his family reading over his final few letters if he was no longer around.
I think there should be an "opt out" scheme whereby if one dies, by default, one's relatives can send in proof of the death and be granted access to accounts (email and otherwise). If one specifically decides otherwise the account could be deleted as per normal.
Most users of the net are young and therefore haven't gotten around to this type of thinking.
I deliberately labelled the China question as a waste of time because it was a careers event where research students (who already have little neough time) came to get some *careers* advice from Google employees. SlashDot is all very well for discussing the China Google thing, but the event at the Freud Cafe was not.
Google visited Oxford yesterday and I went along to the event. It was OK. Instead of asking a question on the theme of "How do I get in?", one silly chap asked about how Google squared their "Do no evil." policy with China. Which led to a wasted ten minute PR exercise of why and how Google was operating in China. Apart from that, it was OK and I have a purple Google pen to show for it. There was a raffle in which I won nothing. The top prize being an iPod.
This is true. I've been much more complacent since I switched. While I'd never type in my Admin password due to a JPEG, I am sure the complacency of which you write might well mean that moany users would, especially as the Mac population grows and statistically includes more silly users.