I normally wouldn’t rip a headline (or even a story) straight from the Micro$haft Network, but this one was such a doozie that I thought it would be fun to share anyway:
A Bosnian man insists he is being targeted by extra-terrestrials after his house was hit by meteorites six times in three years.
Radivoje Lajic, 50, who lives in the northern village of Gornji Lajici, believes aliens are responsible for the meteor strikes.
“I am obviously being targeted by extra-terrestrials,” he insists. “I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.”
I’m not entirely sure why he’s so pissed about this considering that the selling price of ONE of the meteorites was enough to steel-reinforce his roof!
Hey, the odds of life having appeared are so small that life has to be designed. See? It still looks stupid.
This man is giving us an explanation of how did god appeared in ancient societies.
Clearly, it’s for teh lulz.
I’d be surprised if meteorites are even hitting his home. Regardless, why would an advanced alien species be interested enough tot choose to annoy some poor bloke from Bosnia rather than someone important like a president or a king?
You mean that he is carving rocks and then selling them as meteorytes? I can’t believe you. What kind of person would do that?
Oh, wait, I just remembered christian’s relics
For the lulz?
No, I think the explanation is very simple. Everybody knows aliens have time-travel technology. That guy is probably going to father the next interstellar Hitler, so they sent the meteorites back in time to kill him.
Belgrade University confirmed they’re all meteorites.
I would be mildly curious to see a follow up on this one. Does anyone here know a contact at Belgrade U ? I don’t speak Serbian or Russian, if I did, I might give them a ring. At the very least, we need a confirmation from the university to take this even slightly seriously. Or perhaps a confirmation of purchase by this mysterious university in the Netherlands. Just a single article on the web has my skepticism bells ringing.
The Telegraph has it – it must be true….
So if they’re just meteorites…why are they worth so much? I’s assume they’re made out of material we already know exists?
We already know that the material that diamonds are made of exist; that doesn’t stop people from paying up the wazoo for the same stuff we use in pencils. Francesc nailed it with the analogy to christian relics.
I guess my mistake was thinking meteorites were made from common materials.
DDM, every pristine meteorite we find is a boon to the study of the solar system. While we do know what the basic elements are (the periodic table) we don’t know all the possible ways those elements can interact with each other. We also don’t fully understand the formation of the solar system. Many of these rocks have been orbiting the sun relatively undisturbed since the earth was just a tiny gravity well starting to collect matter.
Meteorites are like little windows into the past. Every new one discovered adds to our knowledge of our solar system, and even of the stars that went nova to make the elements that our system is made of.
It’s not him it’s the house. They want him to move because that’s the location they’ve chosen for their new landing strip.
Aliens eh? At least he didn’t blame God.
Anyone form these universities here that can confirm this meteor?
Micro$haft? really? come on.
“I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense.”
What? There are no crazy neighbors with catapults in Bosnia?
No, they “ethnically cleansed” them all.
Ooooooh! Too soon?
The odds of a catapult being that accurate probably about the same as being hit six times by meteorites.
Neat!
What I don’t get however, is the remark on the “Micro$haft” network. Huh? Fox News I get – but that?
Because (in my personal opinion which in no way represents the views of Daniel Florien or any of the other contributors at Unreasonable Faith), Micro$haft make crappy, inferior products for which they charge absurdly inflated prices because they’ve effectively created a monopoly. Steve Jobs and Appfail are even worse, but it’s a close run thing.
Which is an opinion you are entitled to, and not without a certain amount of evidence. However, when you start saying “Micro$haft” or “Appfail”, well…. here’s a test. Go to http://linsux.org/ and look around a little. There you will find not only “Linsux” for Linux but also “Oopoopoo” for Ubuntu and any number of other “creative” spellings.
Now: notice how it makes even the less idiotic of the posts seem stupider? (Which is quite a feat on that site, by the way.) The way it screams “my arguments are so weak I’m falling back on name-calling”? Well, you’re doing the same thing to yourself. You’re not sticking to the man with Micro$haft and Appfail, you’re making yourself look like a 15-year-old zealot who thinks Richard Stallman is the second coming and takes every bug report against Linux as a personal insult.
Interesting. You started that post by pointing out that I am entitled to my opinion and that there is evidence to back my opinion. You then went on to talk about how some people think Linux sucks (not sure how that’s relevant since Micro$haft and Appfail both make more than just operating systems – I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about Linux), and then you spend the next ‘graph saying that I shouldn’t be allowed to express my opinion how I choose after all.
Note how you read way more into my statement than it actually said and it made you look like an utter tool who thinks you can debug PHP with a can of Raid?
You missed my point. My point is that using made-up derogatory names like that — which does not automatically follow from your opinion, to which you have a right — makes us (your readers) dismiss your ideas because of the way it makes you sound.
Sure, you can express your opinion the way you want. But if you want people to actually care about it, or to take you seriously as a person, it’s best not to mimic raving zealots.
“You missed my point. My point is …(concern troll, Derp) ”
OMG WTF STFU BBQ? Maybe the internets isn’t for you Gramps.
“But if you want people to actually …(concern troll x2 Derp Derp Derp)”
KTHXBI NOOB.
Microsoft software actually tends to be quite reasonably priced compared to most equivalent proprietary software. The fact that they are also a de facto standard in a wide variety of applications leads me to question the “crappy products” claim.
But I will admit they have basically created a majority.
I think that MS (will The Vicar be upset if I call it M$ instead?) gets a much worse press than they deserve. This is probably in two respects a) security and b) reliability. The first is much improved since the bad old days but MS still suffers from the, if you going to target an OS then Windows is the one to go for as it used so much. For b) much of the Windows has crashed can be attributed to poor applications and drivers not the OS itself (not that helps much in terms of user experience). The second part of the problem is that PC users seem to have a habit of downloading any old shite to run on their computers – try asking a Mac user and the general case is it’s used for e-mail and surfing … well you could have saved a shed load of cash by buying a cheap laptop and putting a Linux distro on it. Of course you wouldn’t have looked so trendy sitting in the pub vacantly jabbing at the keyboard but you can always just sellotape a real apple to the case …
There’s my 2p’s worth
Isn’t that the entire point of a Mac? To prove that you can afford to own one?
No, not for me, as I could just barely. I “cut my teeth” on PCs and Windows, and bought a Mac laptop in 2002 because that’s what was in my university bookstore. I took a liking to it. So I prefer it.
I think the fights over computers in which everyone tries to out-snob and out-insult each other are immature and silly.
I confess I bought mine because it looked awesome (iMac, 20”) and I had the available $$. I’m a shallow little bitch like that. I don’t have a laptop, so there.
That said, I enjoy it, I intend to dual boot eventually, whenever I can scrounge the pennies for W7. The more the merrier.
I ran dual boot for a while between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7 RC. Ultimately, though, you don’t need Linux if you have Windows but you still need Windows if you have Linux. I’ll go back to it when games are shipped with Linux compatibility :D
:D
I dual-booted with Fedora core while in college, but then my computer went to hell. Must try Ubuntu some day… mm.
I used the Hardy Heron build. I imagine there’s probably been another build since then, but I haven’t really kept up. It’s very intuitive, really. One nice feature is that you can have multiple desktops open and ping between them as you like. It’s a very windows style interface, I must say.
I have to say I have been consistently unimpressed with the Mac OS, and I can’t imagine any other reason to buy a Mac. To be honest I think the Windows NT kernel is just fine (although ME was massive fail), and Windows 7 is particularly stable and versatile (I still personally like the look of Vista better, but the memory cost is not worth it).
I guess Macs have some advantages, but if I really wanted a Mac, I would be much more likely to dual boot OSX/Win7 on my PC then shell out the forty thousand dollars for a new MacPro.
Agreed with Michael and Jabster.
But on the price thing, over here at least Windows licenses run about R$300 – whereas I can upgrade my Mac OS X from Leopard to Snow Leopard for R$70, it’s not possible for those with Windows Vista to upgrade to Windows 7 without paying R$300. Applications are about the same price, but of course Windows has a lot of variety.
I di like Windowsnthough. Especially W7.
Ick, misspellings. I’m typing from an iphone, btw :p
My upgrade from Windows Vista to 7 (it was the same price even if it wasn’t an upgarde) was just £45 by pre-ordering it which doesn’t seem like a lot of money to me …
Mine was effectively free – I Beta tested Windows 7 and ran the release version until March this year – then I bought a new PC with it pre-installed after my motherboard died.
£45 = roughly R$121. I suppose I could get it from Amazon or whatever – but here in Brazil they don’t directly sell upgrades, that I know of, only full licenses.
Note, it is the same price for a full Snow Leopard license rather than an upgrade – SL is only slightly cheaper. Also most PCs will have it preinstalled, but it’ll be a Starter edition unless you pay more for a better edition. We also have a culture of gray boxes rather than makers such as Dell and HP; except for laptops, most people have someone assemble a box for them.
APPFAIL! I love it. Media snobs.
It’s a sign, Xenu has returned.
Can you get Fix Noise in Bosnia? Because that’s where he may have got the idea that everything is the fault of those aliens.
Well, to be fair, he didn’t say “everything” is the fault of aliens. Just meteors hitting his house on a frequent basis. If anybody has the right to freak out its this guy.
If I got hit by meteorites six times, I’d get paranoid and superstitious too. But then, maybe he didn’t get hit by meteorites and is still paranoid and superstitious. Or a hog for his 15 minutes of fame and all the money he can milk out of it.
I”ll guess at least some were Leonids.
List of meteor showers in 2009: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteor_showers
My point was – that that sort of stuff has no place in a mature blog like this. The remark had no merit in regards to the topic – so why inject your personal opinion (that you have any right to have) entirely out of context? And @ Sunnyboy. Yeah. Fanboy-ism’s is what we need. Come back if you have something relevant to contribute.
If you’re also “The Vicar”, can you please be explicit about that? Not doing so could be seen as sock-puppetry.
To answer your point: I’m an invited contributor on this blog and have every right to express my own opinions in articles which I write in any way that I choose unless Daniel tells me otherwise. If you don’t like it, don’t read what I write. KTHXBAI!
Daniel you changed your picture, and your writing style, and completely changed your opinion about what has its place on your blog!
Either that or its some presumptuous sockpuppet trying to tell us what is the “correct” way to use the internet from whatever Bizzarro world they’re from.
You have got to love people telling other people what belongs on someone’s blog.
I feel I have to apologize for some of the kids on my home planet. You know how it is.They take the family spaceship out for a joy ride, get a little bored, and start messing with people on other planets.
Kids these days!