Phi for All

The oldest known papyrus copy of Revelation 13, currently at Oxford in the Ashmolean Museum, shows that this number is 616. There are also several other documents that confirm this as a significant number.

Of course it's a red herring. And you're using it as a strawman, since you're arguing against it when no one else brought it up. So doubly fallacious reasoning. Look, atheism isn't the opposite of theism. It represents NOT being a part of any religion or god. You can't tell me my hobby is not-collecting stamps just because you claim everyone has hobbies.

I moved the thread from Computer Science (which this really isn't) to Computer Help. The Lounge would have been another choice of sub-forums. No big deal. We're still on topic, pros and cons about desktops vs laptops.

Planned obsolescence is when you plan for a product to need replacement after a certain period. This is accomplished naturally in the market based on the materials you use. PO is part of virtually every manufacturer's business plan. Not everyone can afford products built to last for decades. Built-in obsolescence is different. It's internally dishonest, because it's usually done purposely to cause problems and hopefully get your customer to re-purchase more often. I bought a pasta-making machine that had a metal auger for mixing, it's why I trusted that model. But the bushing the auger socked into was made of plastic, and it was the first thing to break due to heavy torque. Three times. Three replacements. Built to fail, imo. Solid-state electronics have a low failure rate, but they do fail, and it's not cost-effective to test every PCB in every unit for glitches. It's unfortunate, but this is why manufacturers seem to use us to test their products for free. As long as someone responsible is willing to replace electronics failures, there isn't usually a big problem. But it does mean a lot more customer service calls, and I agree wholeheartedly that these companies need to do more in the way of great customer service. That's one part of the marketplace today I really miss, the relationship between a trusted vendor and a good customer. All you can do is tell these companies they need to step up service a few notches, and let you know when they think they have it right, because you won't be doing business with them until then.

Planned obsolescence is different than built-in obsolescence. In this case, it's the technology that is doing the "planning". It tends to make huge leaps about every three years or so. I'm not sure how you'd reorganize for the better and still maintain market share. Built-in obsolescence is what you really want to watch out for. Products that are mostly metal, except for the part that moves most, which is made of plastic, are good examples of this. I don't see this much with computers, unless it's with connections. Sensei mentioned how fragile some of the port and power connectors can be. Computers and the technology that drives them are balancing on a fine edge here. Manufacturers have a small window in which to introduce new products before they are "old" products, with an even newer technology to replace them. All the costs for research, development, and implementation have to be balanced with the fact that as soon as you go to market, 10 other companies will copy your designs and change them just enough so you can't sue them. I would recommend that you find a young geek near you who makes desktop computers to sell. Explain what you do with a computer, and let the geek make you a desktop that has just what you need. He/she will be able to upgrade the machine for you every few years with the latest and greatest if it makes sense for you to have it, and ignore upgrades that don't have a lot of benefit for the way you compute.

I think it's ignorance. We have questions without answers, and religion often provides a very short, non-intellectually challenging explanation that satisfies us until we observe differently. When we know why something works the way it does, when we remove our ignorance, religious explanations are no longer needed. But if nobody ever teaches you how to think critically, the short answers like, "God works in mysterious ways" can provide a big old blanket of comfort you can hide from your fears under.

I suspect as much, too. We've also had people claim that anything one believes in or spends an inordinate amount of time on can be called a "religion". Through such a tortured definition, hobbies, careers, and watching sports become equivalent to Catholicism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.

I'd like to know how long they've had it, and if it's edging out competition from the big boys. I'm normally free market supportive, but some things have become so basic to city life that it makes sense to fund them publicly.

The old operating systems have no functionality with a lot of newer software and hardware. I loved Windows XP when compared to the alternatives at the time, but Windows 7 is even better, imo. Windows 8 seems to support more touchscreen features that I'm not using atm. If we kept the old and just kept adding to it to make it work with the new, we'd end up with some pretty unmanageable systems. If you had told me when I was running Windows 95 that soon I'd be able to have my phone and my laptop working together in a cloud environment, I'm not sure I could have waited. Remember, back in the old Win95 days, your hard drive had 4 gigabytes of space if you were lucky. Now we have that much available in RAM!

Desktops have a much more open architecture for hardware. Once you get the panel off, most of the parts are pop-out/plug-in. If one piece needs to be replaced, you don't have to remove four other parts just to get to it. Of course, desktops are usually cheaper, so you run into the same problem of repair vs upgrade. If I had a two-year-old desktop and a repair was going to cost me 20% of what a new one might cost, I'd have to consider getting an upgrade. It is hard to find support for anything more than a few years old. But I think this is more a question of the technology leaping ahead every couple of years and leaving the old stuff in the dirt, rather than it being strictly a laptop size issue. I could be wrong, though, especially with high-end graphics cards and major components like the cpu.

Inescapable individual religions that atheism does not deny? Citation, please. I can't imagine a religion that would be necessary once you've removed its god. Or are you torturing the definition of "religion" to make it fit your purpose?

Software rarely cares if it's on a PC or a laptop. Mobile applications for your phone are usually different, but an operating system like Windows and programs for email will function equally well on desktop or laptop.

! Moderator Note Moved from The Lounge to Mathematics. Can you describe what you've been working on? Theories rely on mathematical models, but usually start out as hypotheses until a lot of review, tests, modeling, more review, and more tests result in NOT refuting the hypothesis. Then we start calling it a theory, when it's as strong and foundationally sound as we can make it.

I've heard it's 1000 Mps fiber optic service, for about the same or less than other providers with less speed. I hope this trend catches on. I'd like to see some of the corporations like Comcast and Time-Warner get challenged by The People.

For the record, I don't think repair problems with laptops are due to lack of spare hardware, at least not in my experience. What usually makes laptops harder to fix is that it costs more in labor because you have to pull so much out to get to anything. If you bought your laptop for under $500, you may be reluctant to spend more than $100 to fix it, especially if it's a year or two old already.

Not enough support for an assertion like, "Preety much the entirity of christianity and older religions and muslims" find biochips religiously unacceptable, at least in my opinion.

! Moderator Note HoneyRazwell/MikeSanchez, sockpuppets are against the rules here. MikeSanchez has been banned as well. Please "educate yourself" on the topic of intellectual dishonesty.

Citation needed.

! Moderator Note When someone starts a conversation with you about their idea on an online forum, it's considered VERY rude to interrupt with your own idea, rather than commenting on theirs. Especially when it's just as easy for YOU to start a conversation about YOUR idea in another thread, rather than trying to hijack this one. You've been warned about this a few times before. Please take the time to read through some other threads for guidance if this concept continues to prove difficult.

If you're considering a laptop for its portability, know that it's not a good idea to move around with a laptop while it's running. Hard drives like stability. Battery power is usually a big consideration, so you should think about how you want to use a laptop. Are you using it in places where you have no plug-in, so battery is more important? A bigger battery may be necessary, it may change how the laptop sits, it will definitely change the weight. I have a standard battery, gives me 3-4 hours, but I don't need that part so much. I tend to haul my laptop in a backpack around the city, find a wi-fi hotspot, plug in my laptop, plug my phone and bluetooth headset into my laptop, and can now office from any decent coffee shop. I know that I give up a lot of computing power, longevity, and monitor benefits with a laptop, but I really have no choice. Desktop hasn't been practical for me for years.

Corporations should NOT be considered as people because people set them up to limit "people" liability. Corporate personhood gives corporations all the limits on liability PLUS all the power granted to an individual citizen. Pay low taxes as a corp, donate to politicians as a person, gain subsidies as a corp, fight regulation as a person, skim the cream, avoid the dregs. Best of all worlds. Technically, if a corporation is a person, that corporation can expect to have its religious beliefs protected under the Constitution. I think this is where they're all moving to, so they can also become religions and stop paying taxes altogether.

! Moderator Note You realize it's all here for anyone to read, and see this isn't true, right?

! Moderator Note HoneyRazwell, you are violating the rules you agreed to when you joined. Civility is not an option at SFN. We don't attack people here, only ideas and behavior. Further, you're ignoring the actual replies to your ranting, in favor of your very narrow interpretation of the methodology of science. This is most definitely a strawman argument. Your claim of 7 billion people all thinking the same thing is equally irrational and fallacious. Don't persist in these lines of attack. Don't respond to this modnote in thread; just report it if you disagree with it, so we don't derail the thread further.

! Moderator Note HoneyRazwell, this is a discussion forum, but your posts seem like all you want to do is tell people things in a hostile drive-by format. Can you drop the hostility, pull up a chair and sit down to have a conversation? Don't respond to this modtip in thread, report it if you don't like it.

This is a discussion forum. Are you here to discuss this, or did you just want the links to your website?