Sayonara

first in with the "old"

You now have ten warning points. Well done.

Only one of which evolutionary biologists give a shit about. If you don't at least start taking in the reasons why your arguments are palpably and demonstrably bad I am going to assume deliberate obstinancy, and give you a Persistent Strawman warning.

The vast majority of "cops" in the UK will find it difficult and time consuming to kill suspects using the plastic wrist ties and notebooks they are armed with. You are being somewhat alarmist today.

Hmmmm. See pm.

In the context of "Death to Creationism", when we say creationism we mean the mode of argument rather than the specifics of whichever belief system is being used as a vehicle.

What you decide to like best doesn't magically become more real.

And any reasonable scientist would likely agree with that principle. However, the issue of "concrete proof" is not really a quest for any such thing (fundamentally, this is because we can debate whether or not what we are observing is real, and the whole discussion becomes a bit pointless). What it really is is a quest to find the point on the sliding scale where "really quite likely" turns into "absolutely certain". When you're dealing with event probabilties that are in the order of being millions of times more likely than the alternative explanation, that point is lower on the scale and occupies a much greater range. When I said a desperate measure, I was referring to the argumentative strategy of trying to "bump up" creation so that it seems more likely than it really is. In this particular instance, an inverse strategy has been chosen which involves trying to make abiogenesis seem less likely - and this is done by likening the evidence proposed for each side to the same independent entity, despite the fact that they are clearly in different classes of credibility and interpretative potential. Also, you must bear in mind that while the evidence for abiogenesis at the start of life on Earth is - as you say - as circumstantial as the evidence for divine origins, the evidence for abiogenesis occurring at all is highly compelling, repeatable, and testable. Since we're going with legal metaphors, I believe that qualifies as a precedent. Or perhaps a character witness - I'm not sure who's who in this game.

Bio Mind Super Powers!

It's because space is getting stickier.

Not to mention the fact that we know the basic elements of the abiogenesis argument are things that exist and behave in specific and predictable ways, whereas the divine intervention argument relies on stories of mythical beings and magical events. Pretty ****ing big advantage, any reasonable person would conclude. Trying to bring everyone down to the same level of credibility by likening the reasoning to circumstantial evidence and calling it "legally low" is a desperate measure.

Rubbish. If we waited until everyone understood everything nothing would ever get done. Bollocks to that - you need to go right back to the beginning and learn how scientific method works.

Luckily Windows XP has lots of accessibility tools for the visually impaired. They aren't perfect, but it's better than nothing.

Given that we established ages ago there's no scientific method being used here, I really don't see why anyone cares any more.

"Cheers" is a UK English expression. It is an informal toast, another word for thank-you, and more recently seems to be used in place of "goodbye". Mystery solved?

Flying in the face of the evidence, I see.

He appears to have been giving an example of what led him to that opinion. Stop stirring up the animosity. You made your feelings on this type of discussion clear on the first page, and if you don't like it you are free to not read it. Or - to put it another way - it's okay to discuss reasons why Linux may or may not be preferable to WinXP in a thread that was posted for that purpose. If you have exhausted your constructive comments - which, by the way, were very interesting - you should probably avoid the childish dismissals. "Stop earning money" is clearly ridiculous on its own. I'm beginning to think someone else is logged in as you.

If the thread starter decides not to take part in the debate, they can nominate an "I agree" person to do it for them.

Why is this mad PC rather than just normal PC?

And yet they still do. How mysterious.

See other threads in this forum category for many good answers.

You just said something that was true, so I am going to hold back a bit. That may be your opinion, but it is demonstrably true that IE lacks many significant features that the other market leaders have in common. It is also a fact that IE neglects to adhere to any one of the most important web standards. I think you'll find that this is because IE is badly written. It needs to be constantly updated because developers are constantly finding holes that nobody noticed in the last (major or minor) release. By contrast, other browsers like Opera and Firefox release a mere few updates each quarter because that's all they need to release. Actually, Netscape is THE original web browser, and is based on the Gecko engine, which is considered to be excellent. The reason you don't get "updates" is because security holes and flaws are fixed before version-incrementing releases are made. Most web sites that "work" with IE and not other browsers do so because they are poorly coded, which is a practice that IE's lack of standards support actively encouraged. A shrewd business move on Microsoft's part that is literally destroying the interoperability of the web. Berners-Lee is probably furious. The browsers are not "poorly designed", the sites are. This is common knowledge and easily demonstrated. AOL actually is an example of a shit browser. Guess what? It's based on the same engine as IE5, the worst version>4 browser ever made. Then you aren't adhering to standards. That's an issue with you, not "the other browsers". Try visiting the W3C some time. Web site owners who know what they are doing don't have that concern. Business people. It's called a high level view. Seriously, how does that not tell you everything you need to know about how stable IE is? You don't seem to understand that any software that so frequently requires high priority fixes and patches is quite obviously a bag of shit. To whom? Without knowing what the system is intended to be used for, any recommendation is premature. Presumably you mean "home use by a PC novice", in which case I'd tend to agree. But that's an issue of market share and educational saturation, not technical superiority. I think you ought to search for the last Linux vs Windows thread. You seem to think that Linux is the poor man's crappy OS, which is just laughable. That's an argument from ignorance I'm afraid. Try researching how the hardware manufacture / Microsoft relationship came about. Even if the first part was correct, the rest would not make sense. The resentment of Microsoft has to do with the anti-trust practices and their aversion to industry standards, not licenses. And I think you'll find that running XP on a different machine does not magically change how it was designed. The bottom line is that it's not relevant. Pointing out another browser is crap does not show that IE is not crap - that's a red herring. Incidentally this is the relevance of yourdad's remark about you being a creationist. Many creationists love to use red herring fallacies in arguments, and he quite rightly highlighted the fact that we can expect such reasoning from you in this thread. Perhaps not completely fair dragging that up, but you have to admit he turned out to be right. Too little, too late. When they support alpha channels, full CSS2, XML, and XHTML in the correct fashion, web designers will take notice again. Presumably you did not read down the page then. The page gives a security and vulnerability overview of all of 6.x, including a report for every vulnerability that has been found which includes the patched/unpatched status (and the ever amusing "partial fix"). It is a high-to-low level document. All true, but not the best argument to use when the "Windows is easier than Linux" gloves are coming off. The same applies to many of the recent Linux distro releases. I don't think we even need to consider X-Box, so that doesn't really count for anything. Perhaps what we could do with here is a list of criteria that "the best operating system" would need to meet, before we start going around handing out prizes. Oh dear. Pretty yes, but it really is the spawn of satan. Google for "WMP DRM outrage". That's not how it works. Linux users generally just download what they need for free, after a cursory search to find the best tool for the job. Emulate or dual-boot. For each one you see, you can bet your ass there are seven free versions for Linux. They were not so much an afterthought as a final hard-won concession to the tens of thousands of web developers who screamed and screamed and screamed at MS when they said tabs would not be in IE7. That's either intellectually dishonest, or really stupid... ...sorry, but I'm going with stupid. "Linux" don't "make computers". Win32 software has a foreign architecture to Linux software, just like it is foreign to Macs. Requiring non-Windows platforms to support software that is designed for Windows platforms is retarded. If you absolutely have to insist on using that fallacious argument, then I would like to know why Windows doesn't support any Linux or Mac software. How crap is that? Given that IE (and by extension AOL) is the only browser that deliberately breaks its own implementation of W3C standards, I'd love it if you could please justify that statement. Bear in mind that only an idiot is going to try and use non-native software with any given OS, and someone who specifically seeks out a new PC with a Linux distro is unlikely to be an idiot. That isn't like it at all. Windows is no more "designed for" the generic PC than you are designed to fit into your clothes. Again, do some research on the history of the home computer market. Not true. System processes are protected, and hangers won't die. The browser a person uses is determined by their requirements from such software, not by which one is installed first. Don't bother replying to this point - all the judges in all the anti-trust cases of the past five years agree with me, not you. Your logic is - to be blunt - a joke. All that proves is that there is a high migration rate from Windows to Linux and a large population of new users. If they are leaving Windows and don't immediately turn back the moment they find a minor problem (i.e. they haven't replaced their packages yet), we can reasonably assume that they find Linux meets their needs more closely than Windows did. Correlation is not causation. IE has become a de facto standard (which is a weak position in terms of directing actual standards, unless you are downright nasty) because of Microsoft's naughty business practices, not because it is superior software. You aren't the first person to use web logs as "proof", and by god you won't be the last, and I tire of explaining why it's a crock. By the way, the IE browser share has dropped nearly 20% since the first beta version of Firefox was released. What does that say? Because inclusion, accessibility, and interoperability are the founding and primary principles of the World Wide Web. Seriously, you need to take a look at the WWW Consortium's web site. You are the one who doesn't get it. The way IE displays those pages is wrong because it disobeys the CSS2 specifications, which are laid out by the W3C and accepted by industry working groups. Your analogy is kind of correct, but you have it the wrong way around. To borrow from another thread, imagine that English is the standard language for the entire planet. IE's interpretation of those pages is like a country sending a diplomat to a global meeting when he speaks Martian every fifth word. Wrong. Read "Accidental Empires", ISBN 0-14-025826-4. It will explain why Windows is so widespread. He was being sarcastic. The reason you get so few non-IE visitors is because you don't accommodate them. Anyway, this is largely off-topic so I hope you feel good and properly crushed by now