PLEASE tell me you're joking. Such Micky Mouse amateur hour coding might cut it for the individual tinkerer, but it's certainly not gonna cut it for commercial grade software that you seem to be envisioning. CLI is just another GUI that humans use to interact with computers, so you're going to be using a GUI to interact with another GUI that then actually does the work........why is this seen as a good idea? This reminds me of the episode of Mr. Bean where he rigs his car so he can drive it from the chair strapped to the roof of his car.

No, it's a way that people can kludge together code into something kinda-sorta functional to make up for the fact that commercial software developers won't touch linux with a 10 foot pole.

Which is approximately 0% of the general computer-using population. (+/- 1% margin of error)

No, it's because there is no money to be made in making GUIs for Linux/unix. More-or-less all the major Linux development is funded by server companies who don't care about GUIs. The only reason many of them put up with Linux in the first place is because Microsoft continues to be pants-on-head retarded when it comes to server licencing.

I never understood the infatuation with the idea that a world government would be anything but a horrible idea. Is it from people watching too much Star Trek or something? The history of the world is one long lesson AGAINST large centralized government power.

Exactly. Modern science has absolutely no idea how live arose from non-life except for a few just-so stories that can't be shown to even be theoretically possible, let alone shown to work in a lab. If live arose from naturalistic causes, there is no guarantee that it is a common occurrence or even a guarantee that it has happened more than once.

Now, lets say for the sake of the argument that theism is true, could god have created life on other planets, certainly. Could he have have created an entire universe billions of light years across just so he could create one planet of sentient life? He has unlimited time and resources so why not?

Either way, the evidence seems to point to there not being a lot of life out there.

If you think capital punishment is wrong because killing humans is wrong then you should be against abortion for the same reason. Lets go through the reasoning and see in what way you can "demolish" it without resorting to logical fallacies.

Once an egg has been fertilized into a zygote the only thing that separates that zygote from a fully grown human is food, water, oxygen, and time.

No matter how much food, water, oxygen, and time you throw at an egg or sperm, neither one will form a human on their own, thus fertilization is clearly the point at which a human individual is biologically created.

Biologically, the only difference between you and a zygote is the stage of the human life cycle that each is currently at.

Biologically, a zygote/fetus is a distinct organism from the mother, that is why there is a placenta, without it the mothers immune system would destroy the fetus.

If it is wrong for a mother to kill her child outside her womb, then it must be wrong for a mother to kill her child inside her womb. If it is OK for a mother to kill her child inside her womb, then it must be OK for a mother to kill her child outside her womb. If it is OK for a mother to kill her child inside her womb, then why should it be wrong if someone else should kill that child inside or outside her womb?

Note that at no point in my argument did I appeal to religion of any kind. Someone could be an Atheist and agree with what I have said.

The Pro-abortion crown always deflect the question into an issue about "Women's rights" because they can't answer the questions I, and many others, have raised. Those of us against abortion would agree that a women has the right to do what she wants with her body, the problem is that a fetus is not part of her body. As I said before, that is why there is a placenta. If a fetus was part of her body than a placenta would be unnecessary.

http://albosauce.com/images/NotYourBody.gif

I wonder how you will respond.

Exactly. The more data you have, the more potential connections there are between those points of data.

Here is a link that will explain it in better detail.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-people/

Watson will suffer the exact same problem, false positives increase exponentially when your data set increases at a linear rate.

Just because a computer can compete on Jeopardy and do a decent job of recommending cancer treatments, which are all double checked by humans BTW, does not mean it won't spew garbage when given terabytes of new data every day. Real intelligence is non-algorithmic, a computer will never be be to match it, only perform a crude simulation of it.

Anyone who knows anything won't be scared by this. The problem the NSA has is the EXACT same problem as the STAZI or whatever secret police anywhere has had, mass surveillance doesn't work.

The fundamental problem is that as the size of your data set increases linearly, the number of false positives increases exponentially. More computers will not fix this because humans can't be reduced to a series of if/then statements, the computer will either miss gobs of important info or spit so many false positives at you to be worthless. It takes annalists to sift through data making connections and with this data deluge their scarce time and effort is wasted chasing dead ends.

How ineffective is mass surveillance? The Soviet Union and Warsaw pact nations back in the day could not stop the illegal drug trade operating within their borders despite trying as hard as they could to do so. Think about that, nations where you need to apply for a frigin passport to go to the town 10 miles over for a weekend could not interdict and stop the illegal drug trade even while monitoring a massive portion of the population.

What kept the population under control at this time was the government controlling the information the population received. Do you think the North Korean government would last 10 minutes if everyone there was suddenly made aware of living standards outside their country? Likewise in the Soviet Block, people there only had vague rumors of the living standards of the west that could easily be disregarded as exaggeration or propaganda.

Intelligence needs to be focused. Casting a bigger net doesn't do you any good when doing so gets you more bycatch than fish. Sure the intelligence agencies love it because it gets them big budgets, but it doesn't make them more effective. If anything, it makes them LESS effective.

Here is the "dense" argument in a nutshell.

I can carry enough gold in my pocket to walk into a dealership and drive out of there in a car. I can carry enough silver in my pocket to go and buy a 40" TV

Now, try to do the same thing with oil, wheat, or corn.

That is what they mean by "density". Significant purchasing power in a small volume makes it easily portable to use in transactions.

Not to mention one other important factor. Ease of detecting counterfeits.

Touchstones made ascertaining the quality of gold one was trying to use relatively straightforward in the old days. Cutting your gold with copper would get discovered right quick. Today, with Krugerands and 90% junk silver coins it is even simpler to detect a counterfeit. Drop a gold or silver coin from a few inches onto a table. Notice the sound? You don't get that with a copper, zinc, or steel coin. Coins made of those metals also don't have the density of gold or silver. Counterfeits made of plated lead have a "dead" sound to them and are also easy to spot.

I still have not seen convincing evidence that it was the Assad government that did this. The "attack" was in an area of no importance and Syrian military was not in a position to exploit the attack. I find the claims that it was the rebel fighters mishandling chemical weapons or artillery hit a store of industrial chemicals to be quite convincing given the limited information available. I don't know either way.

The thing is though, tanks only work when there is infantry supporting them. The old saying of "The job of the tank is to protect the infantry and the job of the infantry is to protect the tank" is very much true. Just watch some of the videos from Syria. Tanks that are used properly with infantry support tear the rebels a new rectum while tanks that are deployed stupidly, without infantry support, get attacked and damaged/destroyed. What happens when one of those robo tanks gets disabled? Merc recovery team is gonna have to go recover it. How many are going to want to do that and at what price when every high place is gonna have someone with a 30-06 hunting rifle looking for a shot. That's assuming the robo tank hasn't had all it's ammunition and other goodies looted.

As for F-16 drones. Absent nuclear power, air power never has and never will win a war. There are always too few aircraft carrying too little ordinance to be anything other than an inconvenience. The Serbs in Kosovo played NATO like a cheap violin with stupidly low-tech countermeasures.

That may be true, but to offer a counterpoint, the STASI couldn't stop the illegal drug trade within its borders any better than we could. The problem then is the same as now. You can gather all the data you want, but faster computers can't tell you what's important. You need analysts to process the possible matches and the more noise you add to the system the less effective they are as they chase down dead ends.

What REALLY kept the population in line was keeping their citizens by and large ignorant of what things were like in the west. Glasnost sped up the demise of the Soviet Union as knowledge of Western living standards made the population increasingly intolerant of the shortages the Soviet system produced.

People in the US today don't really care much because the welfare state is still more-or-less functioning. Once the government is forced to default on Social Security and the rest of the welfare state once the world stops propping up the US economy people will again become intolerant of the governments actions.

Tell me you're trolling Hairy and not that stupid to believe the troofer nonsense. You're better than that

If the Gov was gonna stage 9/11 they would have put a van of explosives in the basement like they did in 93. All they would have to do is pay a structural firm to run an analysis, under the guise of preventing another such attack, and then have two or three guys build and plant the bomb.

You're gonna tell me that the gov that can't keep the NSA wiretapping thing under wraps and can't stop wikileaks has managed to keep this stuff quiet? Go to any number of the troofer debunking websites and you'll find more than enough answers to their claims. All the claims you make were answered by people who know what they are talking about, and not some dimwit playing with chicken wire, a few concrete blocks, and video camera, more than a decade ago.

Oh SURE they exploited what happened and did their best to cover the incompetence of the FBI etc from catching them, but actually pulling it off? Please.

Hairyfeet, seriously.step away from the keyboard because you're doing nothing but making yourself look stupid. You have your areas of expertize, but you know effectively nothing about economics and even less about history.

The "age of the robber barons" saw the standard of living of the average worker rise faster than at any point before or since. Sure conditions were poor for the workers in the factories, but that was because society itself was too technologically primitive to produce the goods we have today.

How about I sit you in front of a PC from 1988 and have you do your job from that computer? Would you lament about the poor condition of the PC world from that era as the result of "the age of unfettered capitalism" and attribute to today's PC world to the result of government regulation? Or would you recognize that things were that dismal and primitive because that was the best that-they could do at that time given the technology available to them?

Were things "primitive" on Gilligan's Island because Thurston had all the money? Or was it because the capital equipment to produce the goods that they were accustomed to did not exist on the island? If they took all of Thurston's money and distributed it to everyone else would they be better off in any way? Standards of living rise because productivity per worker wises, which is the result of capital investment and accumulation, not by redistributing money.

The "collusion and market rigging" are myths. The price of steel, kerosene, and other goods that the "robber barons" ruled during the latter part of the 19th century saw production skyrocket and prices FALL. Rockefeller brought the price of Kerosene down around 90%. Sure he drove a great many of his competitors out of business, but the average person benefited by now having a cheap fuel for illumination. Any attempts at collusion quickly fell apart because in a voluntary cartel, someone will soon start cheating and the whole system falls apart. Only TWO cartels have had any lasting impact or power without government support, the DeBeers diamond monopoly and the New York Stock exchange. Even OPEC can't permanently affect prices because all the member states have cheated on their quotas at one point or another. (BTW, the 1970's oil crisis was caused by US government price controls on oil, not OPEC. Had prices been allowed to rise slightly there would have been no shortages.) It is only by an overarching central government that cartels can last for any length of time.

As for violence against the workers, when you take stuff that isn't yours, I would hope that someone comes to crack your skull. Frequently, as in the Homestead strike, the workers had taken property that wasn't theirs and were the ones who first opened fire on the Pinkerton agents, whose assigned task was to simply secure the factory for the owners.

You also neglect the violence brought upon workers by the labor unions. Workers whose only crime was accepting terms of employment that the Union workers had rejected. If you won't fix PCs for less than $35 an hour and I will do it for $30, what right do you, or a Union, have to prevent me from freely agreeing to a contract that you, or the Union, had rejected?

Problems like company housing and the company store were temporary problems, partially resolved by the invention of the safety bicycle and completely solved by the mass produced automobile, which gave workers the ability to chose from dozens of employers instead of just the one within walking distance.

Nobody bothers responding to you on these issues anymore because these facts have been pointed out to you repeatedly and yet you continue blathering on as if nothing has happened. I really need to set up a "copy/paste" to use because your arguments NEVER change no matter what evidence is provided. (and I HAVE given far more detailed responses to you.) You blame religious folk for being closed minded. How about taking a little look in the mirror?

Diesels don't sell in the US because EPA emissions regulations discriminate against them heavily. Too expensive to bring them to market vs gasoline engines, thus only a few diesel vehicles on the market.