However it can increase libido in women, cause spontaneous orgasms in women and generally makes one feel good. We mustn't have that. DEA pressure led to its withdrawal in Europe, Britain and the US. Of course they banned it! With that stuff on the market your average citizen might develop a happy sex life!
Mac has excellent support for Unicode in its native applications. The only problem I've ever run into is a refusal to put punctuation marks on the utmost left when using a right-to-left language.
Hmm, I don't really understand. What kinds of standards would be those that supposedly hold Linux back? Insistence on doing everything through the Unix filesystem layout (since Mac's.app directories and Gobo Linux's appdirs are pretty much the best package management I've ever seen) and X11 (do you have any idea how ugly it is under the hood?) are probably the biggest offenders.
ALSA and OSS standards that require the user's desktop environment to install a sound mixer so that multiple applications can use the sound card at the same time. On my Mac sound multitasking and mixing Just Works as part of the operating system.
On a desktop system, autodetection of devices should take place automatically. I think some Linux desktop environments do this pretty well, but it should really be standard. If you don't want to automount devices, at least add them to a list of user-mountable devices that the user can access via the GUI.
All of these bugs and misfeatures are hangers-on from a time when you had a dedicated Unix mainframe/server with an administrator to handle the ugly bits like software installation, sharing of I/O devices, disk mounting and maintenance of a dedicated OS kernel. Keeping them for backwards compatibility or because some people like pretending to be old-school Unix hackers won't make a system that users will like.
My vote goes for Ubuntu, definitely. However, since it is a matter of taste anyway, I would just like to say I was able to do with Ubuntu whatever I was able to do with Mac. I used Ubuntu for work this summer. It was pretty damned nice, but I wouldn't take it over my Mac, if only because of appdirs. They really are a killer feature, because native support for appdirs allows installation or uninstallation of software to become a click-and-drag affair that any idiot user can work with and for which any idiot developer can develop.
The biggest thing holding Linux back is its insistence on maintaining backwards compatibility not merely with POSIX, but with every single other "standard" of old Unix systems.
Unix was a timesharing operating system meant for mainframes, so of course its modern-day clone makes no inroads outside of the mainframe-like server market!
Now Apple understands what users want, and Apple understands when to break backwards-compatibility for the sake of those users. Linux developers working on desktop software should stop trying to compete with Windoze and start trying to compete with Mac OS X. When Linux gives me a configurable, free-as-in-beer-and-speech POSIX system underneath with a pretty user-interface and desktop ease-of-use (like bloody.app files/directories!) I could picture myself finding on a Mac, then maybe I'll switch back to Linux.
You've just proven my point. If I understood correctly, your point was that children brought up in a secular society will be atheists, so are no better or wiser than Christians brought up in a Christian society. Yet here, you admit that even if a society starts of secular, people will invent religion. No. People in a secular society will stand a higher chance of growing up secular. People in no society at all will spontaneously invent religion.
I don't see these as being comparable things. The comparison to the former would be bringing up children to be atheists, despite clear evidence of existence of God. Which obviously we don't have an example of. Please. Are you saying that children perform a scientific examination of what their parents teach them to check it for truth? The two situations are completely comparable, because factual evidence for one opinion or another is completely irrelevant to human culture and to how children are brought up.
Atheism is not the "default" option of religious opinion. If you dropped 1000 small children on a desert island and came back in 20 years, the survivors will probably have invented some kind of religion, even if none of them had any religious upbringing previously.
Again, factual evidence for or against the existence of God is completely irrelevant to how parents raise their children and the children's willingness to believe what their parents teach them. So raising a child Christian and raising a child atheist are quite comparable. The child doesn't make a choice or a rational examination either way, as much as you might want to think that choosing atheism defines making a rational examination.
There are more atheists not because the culture is more atheistic, but because the Christians have less power to threaten nonbelievers with assault, torture, death, and so on. I'm sorry. Are you saying that in the United States Christians have the power to realistically threaten nonbelievers with assault, torture, and death? Have you ever actually been here?!
Face it, different places have distinct cultures, and those cultures vary in religiosity. You can have an atheistic culture where people are tired from centuries of fighting, and you can also have a highly religious culture in a place that guarantees freedom of religion.
Saying that me not believing in God is caused by secular society makes no more sense than saying me not believing in fairies is caused by living in a society that doesn't promote a belief in fairies. It makes perfect sense. If children can be brought up to believe in religion despite a lack of factual evidence, why can't people be brought up atheist in culture that, while officially Christian, contains far fewer believers than a purportedly secular society like America?
I come from a country (the whole continent actually) which was torn apart for nearly two hundred years by religous conflict. OK, so you're from Old Europe (now known as Atheist Europe) where for two-hundred years the royalty attempted to twist religion to their own, quite political, ends.
And now you have an extremely secular culture, far beyond most of the rest of the world.
Do you really think you're an atheist because of some great factual insight on your part, or because you grew up acculturated to an extremely atheistic society? How can you consider yourself any better or wiser than the American kid who gets sent to Jesus camp?
...you at least get the impression that you have been deprioritised, locked-in, monopolized and possibly screwed by someone with some sort of vision making an intelligent and possibly risky effort to turn out a better product rather than a committee of PHBs and marketdroids taking input from a focus group. So where Microsoft is merely an evil corporation, Apple is a cult.
And it amazes me that people who claim to care about indigenous peoples often complain when a population in someone else's country actually decides to up and go reclaim our indigenous homeland.
Funny, but I've been able to make eye contact when I use i(Sight Chat). Maybe it has something to do with the iSight camera being set at roughly eye height?
Or how about "being open isn't enough, you need to develop a finished product better than the competition"?
OSS developers need to stop expecting users to buy a phone or operating system that lacks features the user wants (ie: finished software, full multitouch support to compete with the iPhone, a sane way to install and manage software (even when your distro doesn't make a package for it)) just because -- GEEKGASM! -- it's open source.
Look: I live in a very liberal area at a very liberal university. We get hard-left and heavily environmentalist speakers here all the time.
And they're exactly like he said. They see global warming as a real, factual issue of planetary safety that they can use to topple corrupt capitalist and imperialist culture. It's a conspiracy of convenience for them.
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Except that silver and gold are valueless idols just as much as fiat money.
Why don't we back money with something that has actual use-value? I always thought fresh water would make an interesting currency.
That sounds rather cool to me (being interested in startups and things anyway). How do you do it?
On the other hand, I think an appearance or two by the G-Man would have added to the creepy mystery of the whole thing.
Goddamnit, does anyone know a way to run this game on a Mac that doesn't involve spending $300 for a Portal-only copy of Windoze?!
ALSA and OSS standards that require the user's desktop environment to install a sound mixer so that multiple applications can use the sound card at the same time. On my Mac sound multitasking and mixing Just Works as part of the operating system.
On a desktop system, autodetection of devices should take place automatically. I think some Linux desktop environments do this pretty well, but it should really be standard. If you don't want to automount devices, at least add them to a list of user-mountable devices that the user can access via the GUI.
All of these bugs and misfeatures are hangers-on from a time when you had a dedicated Unix mainframe/server with an administrator to handle the ugly bits like software installation, sharing of I/O devices, disk mounting and maintenance of a dedicated OS kernel. Keeping them for backwards compatibility or because some people like pretending to be old-school Unix hackers won't make a system that users will like. My vote goes for Ubuntu, definitely. However, since it is a matter of taste anyway, I would just like to say I was able to do with Ubuntu whatever I was able to do with Mac. I used Ubuntu for work this summer. It was pretty damned nice, but I wouldn't take it over my Mac, if only because of appdirs. They really are a killer feature, because native support for appdirs allows installation or uninstallation of software to become a click-and-drag affair that any idiot user can work with and for which any idiot developer can develop.
The biggest thing holding Linux back is its insistence on maintaining backwards compatibility not merely with POSIX, but with every single other "standard" of old Unix systems.
.app files/directories!) I could picture myself finding on a Mac, then maybe I'll switch back to Linux.
Unix was a timesharing operating system meant for mainframes, so of course its modern-day clone makes no inroads outside of the mainframe-like server market!
Now Apple understands what users want, and Apple understands when to break backwards-compatibility for the sake of those users. Linux developers working on desktop software should stop trying to compete with Windoze and start trying to compete with Mac OS X. When Linux gives me a configurable, free-as-in-beer-and-speech POSIX system underneath with a pretty user-interface and desktop ease-of-use (like bloody
Well they could just port from Delphi to Lazarus, which would enable their games to compile and run natively under Windoze, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Atheism is not the "default" option of religious opinion. If you dropped 1000 small children on a desert island and came back in 20 years, the survivors will probably have invented some kind of religion, even if none of them had any religious upbringing previously.
Again, factual evidence for or against the existence of God is completely irrelevant to how parents raise their children and the children's willingness to believe what their parents teach them. So raising a child Christian and raising a child atheist are quite comparable. The child doesn't make a choice or a rational examination either way, as much as you might want to think that choosing atheism defines making a rational examination.
Face it, different places have distinct cultures, and those cultures vary in religiosity. You can have an atheistic culture where people are tired from centuries of fighting, and you can also have a highly religious culture in a place that guarantees freedom of religion.
I was calling the society extremely atheistic, not you. Please fix your English parser and recompile.
Now, an extremely atheistic society has extreme levels of atheism and tolerance for atheism, versus most societies, in which atheism is frowned upon.
Woop-de-do, but that correct interpretation doesn't give you any opportunity to criticize a theist, does it?
Not everyone who makes a comment about your atheism is persecuting you, so leave the Persecuted Minority Syndrome to Apple users.
For example, were your parents religious?
And now you have an extremely secular culture, far beyond most of the rest of the world.
Do you really think you're an atheist because of some great factual insight on your part, or because you grew up acculturated to an extremely atheistic society? How can you consider yourself any better or wiser than the American kid who gets sent to Jesus camp?
Could you please not compare Nintendo to Microsoft?
You ever seen Apple's nonsensical templates in Pages from iWork? It looks like someone forgot to edit the template.
...you at least get the impression that you have been deprioritised, locked-in, monopolized and possibly screwed by someone with some sort of vision making an intelligent and possibly risky effort to turn out a better product rather than a committee of PHBs and marketdroids taking input from a focus group. So where Microsoft is merely an evil corporation, Apple is a cult.And it amazes me that people who claim to care about indigenous peoples often complain when a population in someone else's country actually decides to up and go reclaim our indigenous homeland.
But there may be cake!
Funny, but I've been able to make eye contact when I use i(Sight Chat). Maybe it has something to do with the iSight camera being set at roughly eye height?
Or how about "being open isn't enough, you need to develop a finished product better than the competition"?
OSS developers need to stop expecting users to buy a phone or operating system that lacks features the user wants (ie: finished software, full multitouch support to compete with the iPhone, a sane way to install and manage software (even when your distro doesn't make a package for it)) just because -- GEEKGASM! -- it's open source.
I'm sorry, but even Ofra Hazah is hotter than Natalie Portman!
Look: I live in a very liberal area at a very liberal university. We get hard-left and heavily environmentalist speakers here all the time.
And they're exactly like he said. They see global warming as a real, factual issue of planetary safety that they can use to topple corrupt capitalist and imperialist culture. It's a conspiracy of convenience for them.
The cake is a lie!