Posts by sisk 2456 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2010
Actually the Antichrist is more heavily discussed in Daniel than in Revelation. Not by that name, granted, but every Bible scholar I've seen equates Daniel's little horn with the Antichrist of Revelation. In fact any serious study of Biblical prophecy concerning the end times will spend just as much, if not more, time in Daniel as in Revelation.
And no, I'm not a fundie. In my opinion you can't think your yourself (which I do, much to the annoyance of several pastors over the years) and still be a fundie.
1) It's possible that inventing artificial light is a rare phenominon. After all the natural human sleep cycle would have us going to bed at dusk and getting up at dawn, leaving little or no need for widespread artificial lighting.
2) Who says aliens can't be nocturnal, therefore having no need for artificial lighting.
3) There are plenty of critters here on Earth, even discounting the nocturnal ones, that see perfectly fine in the dark, such as housecats.
4) Perhaps they don't 'see' as we think of it. I can think of lots of sensory devices that could replace sight. Echolocation is just the start. Magnetic fields, other forms of radiation, heck, even a gravity sense (yeah, yeah, very science fictiony, but then we are talking about aliens here). Or maybe they're even blind, relying on olfactory, tactical, and auditory senses. And that doesn't even count things that they could sense that would be beyond my imagination (of which I'm sure there are plenty).
5) If you start with the assumption that an alien civilization developed as we did, you stand a very good chance of being wrong. For instance, our own path would have been far different had the oxygen crisis never happened.
Alien civilizations may not have a Nikolai Tesla to promote AC before a DC based infrastructure could be build. Once the DC infrastructure is in place it would be highly unlikely that they would switch to an AC based one. Kinda like how one of the biggest obstacles in moving past gasoline powered cars is the lack of high speed charging/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever-else-you-want-to-burn stations to replace our gasoline stations, only on a much more costly scale.
Android is like the slightly nerdy kid who can't get a date to the prom but shows up to the 10 year reunion with a supermodel wife who gushes about what a great husband he is. iOS is more like the slightly retarded but widely loved jock who really can only do one thing well, but it's the one thing everyone cares about. WinPho is the kid whose older siblings were all troublemakers and who hasn't yet had a chance, which we all hope he will take, to distiguish himself from them. Blackberry is the class president of the class that graduated two years ago but still hangs around the high school.
Or those who believe that the appearance of a piece of personal electronics kit has nothing to do with how well it functions. That'd be me, by the way. I'll take an ugly but useful and reliable piece of kit over a shiny turd any day (and there are plenty of shiny turds in the consumer electronics market to choose from.)
I have no plans to pick one up, in case you're wondering. Maybe a used Xoom if I can get one for a song, but really any tablet would end up being just an expensive toy to me. I have more important things to do with my money, like buying expensive toys my kids. Given that they've managed to destroy a 'laptop' made for little kids by LeapFrog I don't want to see what they'd do to a tablet.
One of the Rain City Defenders, or whatever they're calling themselves, had to get charged with assault sooner or later, but is being misguided enough to think the comic book approach to fighting crime is a good idea really a good reason to fire a man who works with autistic children? That's a job you have to care about and people who care are in short supply.
Ah well. Here's hoping that the rest of the costumed 'super heros' running around Seattle take this as a reality check and find a better way to improve the world before one of them pokes their nose into something more serious than a bar fight and gets killed. I have my doubts, but it could happen.
Seriously, if you're going to call these offensive you need to put pants on the zoo animals. Besides, these folks have a right to their bad taste. Personally I don't get the point behind the things (or any of the other various crap people put on their cars for that matter) but they certainly shouldn't be illegal.
They marketted the thing from the get go as a casual platform, they licensed mostly casual titles (with the notable exceptions of their own lines like Zelda and Metroid), they specced far below what most non-Nintendo hardcore games require... and now they say they weren't targetting casual gamers? Who do they think they're fooling?
"Not any kind of visions of the afterlife or ghosts or any of that mythical nonsense."
People seeing visions as they near death is pretty well documented and can't realistically be called nonsense. If you want to call them hallucinations I'll go with that, but to say people don't see things that look like God or angels or (more likely in Jobs' case) Nirvana is to ignore tons of documented research on the subject.
"Google just copied iOS"
BS. Android was in development long before the iPhone was released.
"they are now trying to copy Apple's business model too"
No, Apple's business model is to make sure you can't go anywhere but Apple for all your needs. Google is merely starting to charge for a service that costs them a fortune to run. Which, by the way, is NOT a feeble argument. I've been in the boat of having to start charging for something I had been giving away myself.
"any company with common sense would basically copy Apple"
And no company with a shred of business ethics would ever copy Apple's exploitive business model. Ever.
But hey, have your little fantasy world where it's perfectly ok to take 30% out of the pockets of developers after telling them what language they have to use and what kinds of apps they're allowed to write. Along with it, keep your phone with it's one-size-fits-all-because-Apple-says-so interface and the inability to access a huge chunk of the web. You're welcome to it and that's your choice. It's the only one you get with them.
I'll keep mine, with the interface that I, not Apple, choose to use and the apps that I, not some micromanaging entity, choose from whatever source I, not some company 2000 miles away, choose to trust, including the ones I wrote and put on my own phone without having to fork over $90 to the company that made my phone for a developer's license.
Geez, now I feel old.
Great game though. Playing a character from BG all the way through both games and their expansions was a good way to spend a few months worth of free time. I went to fire it up again a few months ago, but alas, the original 4 disc + Sword Coast version doesn't run on modern systems apparently. I'll have to go dig up a copy of the 3 disc version eventually.
Something else to keep in mind: guns are legal in the US because our founding fathers felt that an armed populace was vital for a just society. Basically the idea is that if we need to we can overthrow our own government by force. In practice any such attempt would get smacked down, hard, but that's why guns are legal here. To paraphrase one of the founding fathers, the second amendment will be completely useless until they try to take it away.
"Guns are legal in the US of A, yes? Enjoying the murder rate, are you?"
Depending on the studies you look at the legality of guns may not have any impact on the murder rate (yes, I know that's a big MAY). At any rate our murder rate isn't as high as a lot of the rest of the world seems to think. Here, for instance, there have been a grand total of two murders in the last five years, and that's if you count the guy who shot a burgler in self defense (which, by the way, is the only killing in this area since I've been old enough to care about the news that actually involved a gun. The rest have all been stabbings or blunt insturments).
I'd go so far as to say that this is neccessary if you want UEFI to serve it's intended purpose. If Linux geeks have to break UEFI to install Linux then they will. If that happens then malware writers will come along behind them, pick up thier work, and use it to install malware.
What you've got here is the same situation that game consoles face: the crackers may not have the skill to break it, but the Linux hackers do. Let the Linux guys do what they want and they'll never make the tools for crackers to use down the line. Case in point: the PS3, thought to be unhackable until the people who wanted to run Linux on it had to hack it to do so.
"They are facts. The question is whether they are important?"
Yes. Absolutely. They are and always will be.
". The majority of users now are consumers of web content. To them the important thing is does it work reliably? Can I access the content I want? Is it easy to use?"
That may be what the average consumer cares about, but it doesn't change the fact that being able to use their device as they choose is important. Just because the majority wants something shiny and isn't ever going to tinker with it doesn't mean that the ability to tinker is unimportant.
Let's look at some other things that are true by your argument. Most people wouldn't be affected if the use of a five button mouse were suddenly removed from Windows, so that woludn't be important. Most people wouldn't be affected if Windows were the only OS available, so let's just do away with all the others. Most people wouldn't be affected if international calls were suddenly impossible, so lets do away with that capability (maybe to help curb terrorism). Most people don't have any secrets that would be harmful to them if the government knew about them, so we don't really need laws restricting the government's ability to listen in on our phone calls.
See where that kind of thinking leads?
"Only the true pistonheads think so."
So very, very wrong. No one who knows me would EVER classify me as a piston head. A couple of them actually cringe when they see me in an auto parts store by myself. Even so I sorely resent being forced to pay a mechanic to fix a problem that I should be able to fix by myself just because some idiot decided that my car needs to be computer controlled. Very few people I know would disagree with that sentiment.
The computer in cars added little of value. They just make for more complexity and more things that can go wrong. It's the same thing with the lockdown on mobile devices: little or no real added value for the consumer, but lots of things are taken out of the user's hands for no good reason.
"Why should it not be patentable? It fulfils the non-obvious part of the patent requirement that most of the patents out there currently for trolling seem to lack."
No, it's pretty freaking obvious. The only reason it wasn't widespread before the iPhone (and I'm certain it was around earlier than that) is because there weren't many touchscreen-only devices around that fit in your pocket before then. USPTO is just being stupid in granting this patent, but then that's par for the course.
RIP McCarthy. We built a chunk of an industry on your back, so I'd say you earned the rest.
They say things happen in threes. If you count Jobs (I wouldn't, but the case could be made) that makes three men who helped build the pillars of the modern IT world to leave us in the last month. Can we stop now? My toasts are going to start getting repetitious if too many more of these oldschool geniuses die.
"Gaddafi offered to set up a peaceful transfer of power and the NTC refused."
Really? When did this happen? Not saying it didn't, but I was following the situation and never saw that. That and if he'd really wanted a peaceful resolution all he had to do is leave the country never to return. Banishment would have been better than anything he could have realistically expected from the NTC (starting with imprisonment, of course).
"When they caught him, he was executed without trial."
You forgot that they beat him to a bloody pulp while parading him around while he begged for mercy before they executed him. Yeah, they dang sure shouldn't be in line for any human rights awards. Hopefully that's the last of that kind of behavior we'll see from them, but I'm not optimistic. How a group treats a defeated enemy is usually a good indicator of how they'll treat their subjects.
I've always had a certain amount of respect for Anonymous, but it's always been tempered by distaste for their methods. So as you can imagine, this will be the first time I've ever said this:
Well done Anonymous. Well done indeed. The quicker that kind of filth vanishes from the net the better.
In a simulated attack (run by the US government), hackers were able to shut down the entire US power grid and huge chunk of the rest of the utilities in three days. Doubtless in that situation some people will die. And it would be even easier to induce a panic which leads to rioting and mob violence. I agree it's unlikely that it will ever actually happen, but it very well could.
Wait, are you actually saying the iPad is perfect? You can't be that deluded, could you? There's no product in any sector of the IT market (or, really, any other market for that matter) that can realistically be called perfect.
A better wheel? That's been done several times over the centuries. The most recent improvement involved inflatable vulcanized rubber. I'm sure that someone will eventually improve upon that.
Here, hold this anchor. It'll keep you in the real world.
"Nice fail from Oracle (again)"
I disagree. The only fail I see here on Oracle's part is waiting as long as they did to let go of OpenOffice. Hold those downvotes a minute and hear me out.
Oracle deals in enterprise level databases and other such beasts rarely seen outside of a server room. Their customers are either part of or make decisions for corporate IT departments. They have a history of being somewhat hostile towards FOSS.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, is an office suite. It's target audience are mostly non-technical minded users (yes geeks use it, but geeks are the minority of users with any office suite). And it is FOSS.
In short, OpenOffice and Oracle were never a good match. I honestly expected Oracle to lock it up and try to charge for it or dump it into the community's hands within a couple months of their aquisition of Sun.
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