Wednesday, May 11, 2011

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  • Swampthing
    May 9, 09:33 AM
    Been using my iPhone 3GS since July 2009 in the Washington DC metro area with almost ZERO dropped calls. It always seems that most of the AT&T dropped calls jokes and issues come from the West Coast...





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  • Bill McEnaney
    Apr 25, 09:31 PM
    I certainly feel that most atheists are what I would call agnostic atheists. They lack belief in a god but leave the question of such a being existing either open and yet to be proved or unknowable and, therefore, pointless to contemplate. Only a so-called gnostic atheist would say they have seen sufficient evidence to convince them there is no god and I have not seen to many of them in my travels. It's more likely that they have yet to see sufficient evidence so, while they do not specifically believe in his existence, they cannot categorically deny it either. The blurry line between atheism and agnosticism is fairly crowded, I think.
    I probably have met too few atheists. Each of my philosophy professors at the State University of New York was an atheist. But only one seemed hostile to theism. Other atheists, J.L. Mackie and Roger Scruton, say, were made some excellent points in their books. Mackie even discovered a way to go through the horns of the Euthypro dilemma, a philosophical dilemma that you can sum up with a question: Is murder morally wrong because God says so, or does he say so because it's morally wrong? Unfortunately, I forget Mackie's reply. But I'm sue that had someone proved that God existed, Mackie would have become a theist just as Antony Flew did. I've spent years studying theism and too little time to studying atheism.





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  • Naimfan
    Apr 24, 11:25 AM
    Well in that case anything could be classed as Christianity. Frankly I find that absurd. What's the point of identifying as a Christian if any interpretation of Christianity is considered OK? You may as well just call yourself a spiritualist as it would be closer to the truth.

    I mean that kind of logic just annoys me no end. Either God exists or he does not. If he does exist one must assume that he intends the Bible to be read literally. If he didn't then why did he go through the whole bother of having it written by the disciples in the first place if people were just going to change and reinterpret it willy nilly based on whatever the current political or social ideals of the time are?

    Based on what you've written, you have a very narrow view of what you consider to be "Christianity." You should perhaps spell that out--what I would infer from what you've written is that to "Christian" one must interpret the Bible (by which I assume you mean the Old and New Testaments) fairly literally and that any denomination which does not do so cannot be "Christian." Which would be news to many of the major Christian denominations.

    Perhaps you should substitute "fundamental Christian" for Christian, since that term seems to be more in line with what you've written.





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  • sinsin07
    Apr 9, 01:19 AM
    Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8G4)




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  • edifyingGerbil
    Apr 22, 08:26 PM
    There is no reason to imagine that god does exist, one doesn't need to provide a reason for not believing in god.

    Can you provide me an argument for why you don't believe in witches or Santa?

    Yes, because witches and santa exist in space and time, God does not so rules which apply to people who live in space and time do not apply to God. It's physically impossible for santa to exist. Witches do exist, the Romanian parliament recently passed a law which said witches must pay taxes.

    That's why God knows what's going to happen in the future but we still have free-will, because if you exist outside of time you can see everything that's going to happen or has happened because it's already happened.





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  • marco114
    May 17, 08:31 AM
    I get dropped calls constantly. I'd say it's approaching 50% of the time. I am not even in a rural area at all. My phone will say 3-4 bars and then when I go to make a call, it dropps down to 0-1 bars. I just turned in on, just now and it showed 4 bars, and then it dropped to 2 bars immediately. I think their software is trying to be optimistic or something. It's like magic!

    I just did it again, 5 bars! then drops to 2. and now 3..., go make a call, sometimes it goes through and other times not.

    It's so screwy. I'll find a good place in the house and it will work for 5 minutes and then just drop, so I'll move to another part of the house and finish the call. Sometimes I go outside, and it still drops.

    I had Verizon for about 4 years before this and never experienced a dropped call, ever! and I travelled a lot more in the car back then.





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  • NathanMuir
    Mar 25, 01:37 PM
    It is entirely relevant. The leadership of the Catholic Church, as one very significant representative of a multitude of peer sects that engage in similar behavior, uses its political and rhetorical power to promote the attitudes that spread their own prejudice and enable prejudiced people, including a subset of extremists, to excuse themselves from the obligation to treat those people with fundamental dignity and respect.

    All Christians are not Catholics. ;)

    That's the only item I was trying to 'underscore' so to speak.

    Christians cannot be used interchangeably with Catholics. By using the term 'Christians' one includes a multitude of other peoples with varying religious beliefs.

    First, I explicitly did not stretch the topic of the thread. I stretched an analogy about the topic of the thread. You are attacking as illegitimate something that didn't happen, and ignoring the legitimacy of what did.

    Second, it was a conservative, and now that I look you in fact, who introduced the word "mainstream" as a "no true Scotsman" weasel word to disclaim the association between "strongly held beliefs" that certain other people are not to be tolerated and extremists who take strong actions consistent with those beliefs. When you are as influential as a major religion, you cannot just go around saying such-and-such group is intentionally undermining and destroying everything decent in the world and not expect some impressionable half-wit with poor impulse control to take you seriously and act accordingly.

    Let me boil it down:

    (1a) Catholics (or anyone else) may believe what they like about gay people, so long as (1b) they don't try to force gay people to live consistent with those beliefs.

    In a like spirit of mutual respect, (2a) I'll think what I like about Catholics, particularly in regard to their attitudes about gay people, but (2b) I will not attempt to force them to believe otherwise or to behave inconsistently with their beliefs.

    Stipulating (1b) does not constitute denying (1a). However, Tomasi's whine in the first post asserts exactly the opposite, that to demand (1b) is itself a violation of (2b). If this is the case, if (1b) is held to be an unreasonable expectation, then mutual respect is likewise off the table, and Catholics are welcome to roll up (2b) and cram it in a spirit of defense of essential human rights against an aggressive assault.

    Take your pick. You get the respect you give.

    And if one goes back and reads the entire exchange, one would see that I used that term so that Appleguy123 could not go find some obscure article on some obscure Catholic sect that murders Homosexuals for fun, a sect that the mainstream governing body of the Catholic church does not endorse nor have control over.

    As I understand it, the Vatican is the mainstream hierarchy of the Catholic church. Is there another hierarchy that governs the Catholic church?


    This is a thread on the Vatican's position regarding homosexuality and homosexual marriage, not violence, correct? Please correct me if that's not right.

    And...?

    IIRC, you're the one that introduced a timeline and then could not prove what link(s) at all it had with the topic of violence and Catholicism. IIRC, you're also the one that made up a statistic about how many of the offenses on the list were by 'Christians', not even Catholics. IIRC, you're also the one that attempted to introduce the umbrella term of 'Christians' as a synonym for Catholics (which it is not).





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  • Multimedia
    Oct 30, 02:26 AM
    In theory you're correct, Multimedia.

    In practice, it is possible that a multi-threaded program might have synchronization or logic bugs that don't show up with 4 CPUs, but do show up with 8 CPUs. For example:

    Thread_ID tid[4];

    for (i=0; i<System.CPU_count(); i++)
    {




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  • Sydde
    Mar 11, 11:50 PM
    Radiation leaks? In Japan? I hope they have someone keeping an eye out for really, really large reptiles





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  • .Andy
    Apr 26, 05:41 PM
    I could murder some toast.
    http://jesustoasters.com/





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  • CalBoy
    Mar 25, 11:09 AM
    As marriage is licensed by the state, it is in fact a privilege. The fact that it is near-universally granted doesn't make it any more a right.

    On the contrary, our own Supreme Court has held it to be a fundamental right, and the United States through its treaty making power has also held it as a right through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 16).





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  • r1ch4rd
    Apr 22, 09:48 PM
    I don't believe in God. To me, I haven't seen anything to convince me of his existence and it just seems way too convenient of a way to explain away difficult questions. I also don't think that religion would add anything to my life - it's just not an issue for me, I don't even think about it until asked.

    I am interested in this thread, just because I am not used to people questioning my viewpoint, or even really caring about how big the atheist population is. In the UK, it just doesn't seem that the issue is that important.

    Is this a bigger issue in the US, and do atheists abroad feel pressure to at least consider the idea of a God?





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  • Apple OC
    Apr 24, 06:15 PM
    just what we need in the world ... a McPeace treaty:cool:





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  • Huntn
    Mar 14, 02:16 PM
    You need to separate capacity from demand. Capacity is just the maximum power a station can theoretically produce. In practice, most of these renewable stations never reach that max. I've checked the stats at my utility's wind farm and that thing is usually around 9% of capacity. Considering a wind farm costs 4 times as much money as a natural gas generator to build for the same capacity, efficiency-wise, the station is a joke.

    What's more important is demand - being able to produce enough energy when we need it. This is where solar and wind fall short. They don't generate when we want them to, they only generate when mother nature wants them to. It would be fine if grid energy storage (IE batteries) technology was developed enough to be able to store enough energy to power a service area through an entire winter (in the case of solar). But last I checked, current grid energy storage batteries can only store a charge for 8-12 hours before they start losing charge on their own. They're also the size of buildings, fail after 10 years, and cost a ton of money.

    This is why a lot of utilities have gone to nuclear to replace coal and why here in the US, we still rely on coal to provide roughly 50% of our electricity and most of our base load. There are few options.

    It would require a multi-tiered approach. We have abundant coal which I believe can be made to burn cleanly although I'm not necessarily advocating that. And none of these sources if they break down (except nuclear) threaten huge geographical areas with basically permanent radioactivity. In case of worst case accidents, it could be plowed under but we'd still have substantial problems. The thing about nuclear power if it was perfect it would be a great power source, but it is far from perfect and the most dangerous.





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  • weitzner
    Sep 20, 01:42 PM
    I think it's pretty obvious that iTV will NOT have DVR functionality- The iTunes store is a competitor to DVR. This thing is a means of connecting your computer (iTunes) to your TV- not about connecting your TV to your computer. It's a completely different take on watch-your-show-whenever-you-feel-like-it mentality.





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  • cgc
    Sep 26, 08:35 AM
    My 2.66GHz MacPro doesn't use all four cores except on rare occassions (e.g. benchmarks, quicktime, handbrake, etc.) and even then it doesn't peg them all. What I'm most interested in is offloading OpenGL to a core, the GUI to another core, etc.





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  • springscansing
    Oct 13, 04:46 AM
    This is actually my first post. Yay! Been a machead forever (using a IIgs when I was 4).

    ANYWAY, regarding various posts about PCs encoding mp3s faster than macs. I am an audio engineer, and I must say the encoding algorithm is MUCH better sounding in iTunes than in Winamp, and I assume most of you are using iTunes in your comparisons. Different programs encode at vastly different rates. For example, I don't know if you recall an application called Soundjam and another called Audiocatalyst. Soundjam encoded 2.4x faster, but sounded like total junk.

    Now.. I'm not part of the "MACS IS FASTR" group, because sadly, they aren't... I just wanted to point out the mp3 encoding tests weren't fair.

    - Springs





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  • Big-TDI-Guy
    Mar 14, 08:32 PM
    Should they have a full-on meltdown, yes there will be fallout detected around the globe - but I doubt the levels will be high enough to cause concern after thousands of miles to disperse.

    As for the divine wind bit... To be fair, we did irradiate them first...





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  • dante@sisna.com
    Oct 26, 03:37 AM
    Bulletin. Many thousands of us knew it would be this soon. :)

    Yep we did. I expected Octo way back in July/August.





    tigress666
    Apr 9, 01:38 AM
    You summed it up beautifully. You're not a gamer. You're what is called a time passer, which are what 99 percent of IOS games are, mind numbing time killers. That's fine. As long as Apple does not come in to the gaming market and starts trying to strong arm third party big names all is good.

    Wait, why is FFII and FFIII more a mind numbing time killer over any other game (I am getting FFIII either when it goes on a good sale or I finally finish up my other games, whichever comes first)? Or Myst or Riven for that matter (both on my phone, I've beaten Myst but haven't started Riven).

    Or Prince of Persia for that matter? Not saying I am a real hard core gamer but not completely casual either (granted not into it as much as I used to be, my last console was my PS2 but honestly, my favorite console was the Playstation). And I will admit I prefer the old style RPGs to new style (I usually don't like reflex games, prefer the more tactics focus of old style RPGs vs how quick can you react of the new style. If I wanted a more live action game I'd buy one. Honestly, the iphone is hte first time I've gotten into the more "live action" games like Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed. Don't ask me why as I will admit those are the type of games that suffer the most from the lack of physical buttons. But it's still fun regardless).

    What I am saying is I'm confused on what you consider not just some petty mind numbing game if you consider everything I listed as one.

    Yeah, some of those are good for short burst of time killing (the little puzzle games like Boxed In and Sudoku). And I'll agree a lot of those games more unique to the iphone are ones you usually download, play a bit, and then never touch again (though some are still pretty good that you do keep going back to them too). And after a while they get so old you won't even download them for free (on a bunch of free app lists which end up having a lot of those games and these days I look, go, Oh one of those, and pass them up. Though you do find some true gems amongst those games that do last more than just a short bit).

    Honestly, I haven't gotten back into gaming until recently when I've been finding a lot of actual good games and not just good for time killing for the iphone (mostly discovering Gameloft games and when Squaresoft started porting some games over on the iphone. I really want FFVII on my phone and I'd love to see some more jrpgs, if you can't tell, those are my favorites. I like a good story with them though).

    (What I'm really hoping is that Square finds the iphone lucrative and we get a lot of stuff from them *grin*. Though I'm finding I really like Gameloft's offerings a lot too and GL really seems to understand how to get things to work best on the iphone despite the lack of buttons and the fact that many of their games they port over would do better with buttons).





    Diavilo1
    Sep 12, 03:21 PM
    Definately has piqued my interest. I may have missed this but does it have a TV Tuner?





    MacCoaster
    Oct 10, 04:06 AM
    Originally posted by ryme4reson
    <EDIT> I am gonna try to run this on my brothers 333 celeron on a 66MHZ bus with 320 RAM, I know my 933 is not the fastest, but maybe it just found its competition. :) </EDIT>
    I had a friend run my C# implementation on his 333MHz Celeron o/c'ed to 375MHz. His result was 108085. *GASP!* 375 MHz Celeron BEATS 933MHz PowerPC G4 (no L2/L3). This is interesting.





    UnixMac
    Oct 7, 07:27 PM
    No....you did no such thing, and no offense was taken. I didn't join this thread till the last post. I only used Hitler as an example becasue it rang true of the same kind of "head in the sand" attitude we in the Mac community take at times.





    AidenShaw
    Oct 8, 02:06 PM
    I thought so. This is the first time I have seen the term "Multi-Threaded Workflow" and I thank you for that.
    Yes, I was thinking of your workflow when I said that. :D


    I'm glad to see you confirm my suspicion that the 2.33GHz Dual Clovertown Mac Pro will in fact be faster than the 2.66 or 3GHz Dual Woodie when someone knows how they work simultaneously with a set of applications that can use all those cores a lot of the time.
    IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene) is fundamentally based on the fact that for parallel tasks you can essentially add all of the "MHz" together, and that lots and lots of slower CPUs will beat a much smaller number of much faster CPUs.

    In the case of the current dual and quad core chips, you double the number of cores - but the cores aren't that much slower than the earlier chips. It's a win for lots of workloads, and not much of a loss for a completely single-threaded task.