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Random Comments 3

Entry 797, on 2008-06-18 at 20:40:39 (Rating 3, Comments)

I want to comment on several subjects today which are completely unrelated to each other so I introduce, for your edification, another "random comments" entry.

First on a computer and technology theme, Firefox 3 has just been released. Firefox is already popular on both the Mac and PC platform but I didn't like it that much because it was a bit slow to launch, sometimes slow at rendering, and was visually ugly as well as using the Gecko engine which I found had problems correctly laying out some pages.

But all of that seems to be fixed. Firefox 3 is actually quite impressive. I have only used the release version for a few hours but it looks really encouraging. Assuming that the PC version is also much better this is going to be a real challenge to Microsoft who must be now feeling that their once mighty empire is starting to crumble just a little bit!

Firefox is now a serious threat to Internet Explorer's dominance. OK, its got a long way to go before it approaches IE in pure numbers but it has at least created an environment on the web where creating a web site which only works in IE is no longer acceptable. And Mac OS X and Linux are very realistic alternatives to a Microsoft OS. Microsoft will not extend sales of XP, so many people will be faced with an upgrade anyway. Why not try a Mac or Linux OS instead of Vista? Office is still fairly secure but as Microsoft's OS and browser start to fall from being the preeminent options then Office will surely follow. Bring it on!

Sometimes people need to be told to just go away and to stop bugging the rest of us with their neurotic problems. I say this in introduction to a story where proposals to introduce a wireless network in Santa Fe have been held up due to a group who claim they suffer from sensitivity to electromagnetic radio frequency emissions. They want to use the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to stop the city from setting up the wireless because it contravenes their rights.

Unfortunately for the sufferers (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the whole sensitivity issue has been shown to not exist in experiments. When people are told they are being exposed to a field they get the symptoms whether they are really exposed or not! And if they are exposed but are told they are not then the symptoms don't occur! Certainly sounds more like a psychosomatic or entirely imagined problem to me!

No random comments entry would be complete without a religious rant. I'm currently involved in a discussion with a believer who loves to obfuscate the facts and shut down criticism with meaningless rhetoric. I'm also involved with discussion regarding being nice to believers instead of attacking and ridiculing them.

But I found a site today which listed some of the major massacres God carried out in the Old Testament. According to the calculations (admittedly some of them estimates) he killed about 33 million people. That's much more than the Nazis, the Communist regime, and anyone else you want to name, especially when its seen in comparison to the total population of the world at the time.

So this God that many people insist on worshipping isn't a nice entity and its every rationalists duty to discourage them from such a dangerous belief. What god of love would kill so many people for no good reason: the Flood, the Ethiopians, the Egyptians, Sodom and Gomorrah... his brutality just goes on and on. Anyone prepared to worship this monster deserves my disrespect and ridicule!

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