Pardon me, I might be one of those godless heathens but I suffered through quite a few years of Christian teachings - what exactly has the Bible promised us apart from forgiveness from our sins and heavenly bliss in the afterlife? The old testament was as I remember it mostly punishments. Punishment for eating the apple, building Babel's tower, Sodom and Gomorrah and of course the flood to wipe out everything. We're all sinners from the original sin and if we don't repent it's hell.

The new testament was pretty much all allegories on how we should live, there were a few "one-off" miracles while Jesus lived but all those who saw him raise the dead, turn water to wine or walk on water has been dead for 2000 years. So there's good and evil in the world, but that's pretty indistinguishable from good and bad people with free will without God or Satan pulling anyone's strings.

So I'm curious, what is it you feel God has promised? And what do see that makes you feel he's delivered? Because I can't find a lick of difference, the devout believers get injured, sick and die like the rest of us and terrible sins go by without being struck down from the heavens. It's of course possible that all of this gets tallied up and justice is served in the afterlife, but here and now in this life I can't find any sign of God. Maybe I should ask this in the opposite direction, if you were to envision a world without God what exactly would be different?

Look, I understand what you're trying to say. If they're trying to hide their atrocities we should expose them, if they're using them as propaganda and to terrorize we should suppress them. But as a guideline that would be very confusing and hard to live by since it assumes you know the details of every conflict and who wants what, assuming they're all in agreement which they're probably not. Not to mention the answer is probably (d) all of the above, some are inspired to fight against the atrocities, some are frightened by them and some are cheering them on.

Every year we send busloads of teens to visit Nazi concentration camps, not because we have some morbid fascination with death camps and genocide but because at some point you have to learn how cruel human beings can be to each other. But that is quickly fading out of living memory, it's 70 years since the war ended so those who really remember the war is in their 80s and 90s by now. Very soon it'll be "museum" knowledge that you read about in a book and look at an exhibit and it's going to be filed away as ancient history. But it's not, because there's still shit like that going on but we're not sure if we want to see it or not.

I'll admit that watching cruelty will make you die a little inside. You will want to punch something or maybe cry a bit, but at the end of the day I want the truth about the world not the PG-rated version. Which is of course not to say you should lose perspective, with 7 billion people it'll seem like anything you focus on happens a lot even if it deals with 0.01% of the population or less. And I'm here in the safety of my living room looking at a screen, I'm not the one in a war zone getting shot at. I'm not the one hoping nobody will bomb the market I go to. I'm not the soldier who needs to pull the trigger risking that innocents die if I do or die if I don't. I still got it easy.

Not really. I believe there is a clean hands doctrine that says if your inaction has amplified the harm then you might not get relief for that. For example if you live in the downstairs apartment and notice water is leaking from the upstairs apartment but don't do anything to stop it or limit the damage because you'd rather get the insurance money you can get cut short. It's a lot trickier with an IP issue, is it a lump transfer or an ongoing violation but I think it has most the characteristics of the former where you take a half-finished product and hand it to someone else to finish. In that case there's no harm in delaying apart from the statute of limitations.

Let's say I'm in an accident with you, but it seems at first to not be a big deal and I don't sue for damages. However it turns out it won't heal properly and I lose a lot of money and decide to sue anyway. Am I too late? No, those costs aren't caused by the delay, they'd come no matter what and it won't count against me. Of course I'm not in the US, there you find the nearest ambulance chaser and sue for $millions, unless it was a hobo that hurt you.

Macs had cooperative multitasking since 1984. Windows 3.0 also had cooperative multitasking. It didn't need dos emulation and weird graphics hacks as it was built from the ground up rather than an add on hack for Windows. Mac II was color in 1987.

My point is Windows was a low grade hack until Windows 95 where it became a pseudo OS with more hacks upon hacks to get anything to work until XP came along and kicked the nasty model to the curb for all pcs

You know just because you all hated the leather background in the Mac address book does not mean you need to get rid of shininess, chrome, depth perception, and other features which actually helped the user distinguish which Window was active.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Give me my damn skuemorphism back. It works fine. I know NO ONE and I mean NO ONE besides hipster graphic designers afraid to have anything modern looking on their portfolio as other hipster artist look at them before hiring them. It creates a cycle of race to the bottom of less graphics, less detail, blinding white, 72x text.

SKUEMORPHISM != REALISM folks and MS appearently thinks it does.

I don't. I have endured silly ISO business standard rituals because of crazy EU protectionists. The whole EU affair has failed to make sense for the past twenty years. You achieved the free trade end game and then... kept going? WTF. Nobody really cares about most of the stuff that the EU does these days aside from the narrow interest groups that benefit from it.

European countries already have figured out how to wipe their asses. Nobody needs another, very thick layer of nannies on top of what's already there and already working well enough.

And I greatly despise the "That Hideous Strength" style of embrace and extend tyranny that the EU engages in (that is, bribing elected politicians to betray their country's interests via cushy jobs with the resulting EU bureaucracy). As a result, I'm rooting for the whole thing to end in ignominy. So far so good.

You know, it would be nice if we all had societies and systems that were worthy of respect by everyone else. I feel that we're collectively letting ourselves down though things are better than what they've been in the past. Maybe as we did before, something better will come of it eventually.

America is not just the West. After all, there's a lot of people in America who know a lot about America, but very little about the rest of the West. If you look at Atlas Shrugged, it's quite clear that everything is deliberately vague beyond the borders of the US, which might be her ignorance of Europe and South America or that she was writing for a mostly US audience (who would not be familiar with those places either).

But even granting that, she had lived in the US for over a decade before the publication of Anthem, her first libertarian-style fiction and over three decades by the time of the publication of Atlas Shrugged.

And I'm sure, if I had parachuted into Mother Russia with instructions to undermine the regime with my knowledge of orgami, that would have been super-effective too.

You might find this hard to believe, but people who think they're born to rule, don't need a book to justify their world view. Rand was a bit crazy, particularly in her later years, but it's ridiculous to assert she was undermining democracy with words (actually it would be ridiculous to assert that she was even trying to - she does have a long pro-democracy history, let us note). It is impossible to do that just as it would be impossible to overwhelmhe USSR with a few small bits of folded paper.

What I believe happened here and why Rand was so influential was because she was a voice for groups and ideas which had long been neglected and derided. I speak not just of the imaginary people who supposedly thought they were born to rule, but somehow couldn't avail themselves of the multitude of utopian, authoritarian belief systems tailored to them, but also the people who grew tired of the ever increasing dysfunctionality, demands, and hypocrisy placed on them by society and authority.

And seriously, how is Rand supposed to have undermined democracy anyway? I note that we in the US currently have a president who is the antithesis of anything Rand believed in, who is casually slipping the US into another Vietnam-style war in Iraq, created the most destructive social program (the Obamacare thing) in forty years, has a variety of 0-9 losses at the Supreme Court from breathtakingly irrational, unconstitutional actions and arguments (typical looter logic in Atlas Shrug but without the compliant judicial branch to make it work), and a variety of creeping acts of tyranny.

Meanwhile we have a senator, named after Ayn Rand herself, who just opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, which is probably the single biggest step toward US tyranny in the last half century, by filibustering it at a crucial period prior to its renewal.

I suspect you might not have a clue what undermining a democracy entails. It's not words that undermine a democracy, but the crushing of freedom to act, to speak, to think, which undermines democracy.

10-20. It's probably TMI, but I have more than that in my gut right now.

And yet it's an obvious case for cheap political rhetoric, "What do you mean that's never going to happen? You're sitting there making plans for it right now!" I don't think you should underestimate the explosive power of contingency plans. For example in a supply chain you might have a contingency plan in case your business partners, vendor or distribution network turn shit but nobody's going to like that you have a plan to stab them in the back. And there's always those who willingly or unintentionally confuse planning in case of failure with planning for failure.

TL;DR: Some things you should just keep your mouth shut about, even if makes sense.

The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.

Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?

Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.

And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.

It didn't need one. Windows and pascal were part of the toolkit. I hated Windows back in the day but was no apple fan boy. Apple was ahead as was others such as Amiga and sunos.

But corporate users needed their apps and rest was history. Windows didn't get ok until XP AND good until 7 ... then 8 sigh

Mac had that since 1984

Yep

People back then were neophytes amd corporter users.

Corporations cared for just software. Users who were neophytes used what came with work amd found these, machines intimidating and didn't like change.

The 19 80s were about us geeks. The 1990s were the suits and Joe Six packs driving the market

I see buttons, shadows, depth, higher colors, etc.

All ruined in the name of anti skuemorphism which was the most advanced progress made in gui development since win 3.0. What a shame sigh