Push the power button, it shuts down quite nicely. Or close your laptop's lid.

If you want, you can use Control-Alt-Delete, Alt-S then up and down to pick which of the 3 menu items pops up on the power button.

If you'd rather use the command line, the "shutdown" command still works just fine.

Almost the mechanisms to shut down windows over the past decade or so are still there. The only thing that's missing is the "shutdown" button on the start menu. The one that spawned all those "You have to use Start to shut down windows" jokes?

I'm typing this on a Dell XPS 17" laptop that comes with a full keyboard, including a real numeric keypad. Is it Lenovo-quality? No. Does it work just fine? Yes.

Do note that the Dell XPS 17" laptop is large enough that my colleagues nicknamed mine the "schleptop" because it's quite a lot of work to schlep it everywhere.

Neil

Wow. I'm a real person here, FYI. There are more words in your comment than in the post itself.

It was a 20 min silly little throwaway post I did at lunch. I'm sorry it offended your sensibilities, but at least it gave you a chance to vent on the internet.

- Scott

Multithreading for C/C++ and 64 bit are both available in VS Express.
Multithreading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb157784(v=vs.100).aspx
For 64 bit, you have to install the Windows SDK, but it works.

I'm pretty sure that the people doing the first post prepared in advance are just trolls stepping up their game.

So are you claiming that the accounts are fabricated? Or that someone carefully re-enacted certain of the predictions? Or some mix of the two?

You should read up on some of the prophecies Jesus is claimed to have fulfilled. Some of them involve the year and location of his birth (and indirectly, the length of his life), for instance. Obviously he didn't plan the circumstances of his birth himself (unless he's omnipotent in nature), so if you think he was a real person being talked about by essentially credible accounts, then his parents were in on the scheme also (at minimum). That seems unlikely.

If you do even a rudimentary search on "which prophecies did jesus fulfill" I think it'd be pretty difficult to intentionally fulfill all of them. The list of conspirators would be pretty long.

So in my mind, you would need to go back to assuming that the bible is largely fabricated post-facto.

Sadly, you missed my point. I'm not arguing that democracy results in truth.

First off, the early Christians were a persecuted minority. They did not "go along" with the majority, many of them were jailed or put to death because of their stubborn convictions.

Contrastingly, nobody _at all_ actually thinks FSM is a real entity. Nobody had died on behalf of their convictions that FSM is real.

I did not state that some people beleiving a thing is sufficient for its truth. However, I do imply a different question: is _anybody_ beleiving a thing _necessary_ for its truth? [a tangent we don't need to consider here]

If 100% of the people, upon considering the question of the existance of FSM, including the person who conjectured the existance of FSM -- if 100% of the populace concludes that FSM isn't real --- we don't strictly know if FSM is real or not.

However, irrespective of the truthful or delusional aspects of both entities -- FSM and the Christian God -- one of them has convinced precisely zero followers and the other has convinced billions.

Truthful or delusional, billions of people find the story of the Christian God compelling and true; nobody finds the FSM compelling or true.

They are clearly not comparable propositions.

People who use the same line of reasoning to reject God that they use to reject FSM are engaging in the ultimate strawman argument.

I'd like you to go back to my original 3 buckets in my original mail. Do you think that taxonomy is sufficient, or are there other possibilities I should include?

While it is technically true that there is as much acceptable-to-atheists "proof" of FSM's existance as there is of God's existance, there is one key difference.

Christ claimed, in all seriousness, to be the Son of God. And there are many eye witness accounts of him doing things that other people could not do. Most notably, there are multiple eye-witness acounts of him walking around and talking to people a few days _after he was murdererd_. Some of these accounts come from people who had much to lose from sounding like crazy people and nothing to gain from sharing their testimony.

Many people who were "taken in" by the claims of Christ and became his followers suffered tremendously.

What was the incentive for them to perpetuate a falsehood?

When reading the Bible and considering its truth claims, in my estimation, you must come away with one of these three broad conclusions:

1) the Bible is sufficiently fabricated to mean that most depictions of events are untrustworthy. Little in the book is relevant, from a truth perspective

2) Christ existed, and some of the depictions about what he did were accurate, but he was a magician and a tremendously good one, and was willing to commit his own life and the life of his friends to keeping his magician status secret.

3) Christ was actually exactly who he said he was: The Son of God. People begrudgingly beleive him because, despite mathematically improbable odds, he fulfilled the labyritnth of prophecies that greatly predate him, he performed many earthly miracles over the span of a few short years, and because he ultimately appeared physically to many people after he was publicly executed.

Forget for a moment whatever objections you have regarding the veracity of the claims about the claims. My point is that FSM has no such claims at all.

FSM may very well exist, but he/she/it/them/us hasn't convinced (fooled?) a bunch of people that he/she/it/them/us does.

Actually according to Inside Windows NT, NT was Intel i860 only, then x86, then MIPs.

Alpha didn't come along until significantly later.

Yes.

Everything entirely voluntary.

Anything non-voluntary is coercion. Coercion is always immoral.