OS X has never been worth the upgrade in single increments. Nor have most other software packages (Adobe in particular) but there are plenty of people who only upgrade every-other release. Going from 10.3 to 10.5 makes sense.
With the exception of 10.0 --> 10.1, which meant going from a godawful beta to a usable OS, I think you're right. Historically (back to the System 7 days, if not before) even-numbered point releases of the Mac OS have been when Apple introduced new features, and odd-numbered point releases have been when those features actually worked right.
Leaders have always tried to simulatenously exploit and control the power of whatever media was current at the time. Does anyone doubt that the skald who came up with the original version of Beowulf was paid off to chant about the virtues of the king -- and knew exactly what would happen if he didn't? Through the age of pamphlet, newspaper, radio, and TV, nothing changed; I don't see why we should be terribly surprised now that it's ON THE INTERNET (tm).
How bad can a game about a kid countering a bully possibly be?
Oh, very, very bad.
You see, kids who fight back against bullies are just like Harris and Klebold! They wear black and listen to scary music and have guns, lots of guns! And they kill people with them! Lots and lots of people!
In fact, any kid who fights back against a bully might just be...
A TERRORIST! LOOK! LOOK, OVER THERE! SCARY, SCARY TERRORISTS!
TERRORISTS! 9/11! ROCKSTAR GAMES! 9/11! AL-QAEDA! 9/11! COLUMBINE! 9/11! TERRORISTS! RED LAKE! 9/11! THEY'RE ALL IN IT TOGETHER! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHIIIIIIIIIILDREN!
To be honest, any behavior where people go "I am willing to fuck up my own body because I know if it comes to the crunch I'll be seen by a doctor" is highly questionable and probably should be illegal. Yes that goes for smoking too.
Two responses to this:
1) Where do you stop? Okay, smoking is an obvious one. What about drinking? (You may recall that there was a little experiment called Prohibition a few decades back.) Eating crappy fast food? Not exercising enough (whatever the government decides "enough" is)? Exercising too much, to the point of injury? Living in a particularly polluted place, or in a place prone to natural disasters? All of these things can fuck your body up just as much as heroin, and all of them are personal choices. There is no clear cutoff line between "too dangerous" and "dangerous, but just safe enough that we'll tolerate it."
2) Total cost. Yes, all of the behaviors mentioned above, as well as illegal drug use, have costs to society, which we all have to pay. But against this, you have to measure the cost to society of illegalization. We spend an insane amount of money on the War on Drugs: the salaries of the law enforcement personnel, the maintenance of the prisoners, and the high-tech equipment are only the most obvious ones. How about the cost of productive working lives wasted in prison? How about the general rise in the power of organized crime, and all the ills it brings with it, which have a ripple effect far beyond the drug money which provides the initial funding? (The venture capital, if you will.) How about the medical costs incurred by the violence inherent in any illegal trade? (Liquor store owners may tend toward alcoholism, sure -- but since 1933, their rate of death by Tommy gun has gone down to almost nothing.) Add these up, and I suspect they dwarf the direct costs of drug use. Ban smoking, or drinking, or McDonald's, and you'd see a cost to our government and society that would make the current budget for the WoD look like chicken feed.
Once it's legalised it's really hard to go back if it turns out to have been a mistake.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that Moses came down from the mountain with a stone tablet reading "Thou shalt not smoke up," and since then, thus hath it ever been -- in other words, that illegality is the natural state of drugs. But cannabis, coca, poppies, and for that matter tobacco have all been growing for a long time before the law ever even came into existence. Drugs, of any kind, haven't always been illegal. People made those laws, and did so fairly recently in historical terms. We can unmake or remake them as we choose.
I guess the problem lies with the fact that no one I know, republican or otherwise, supports "setting up torture and murder camps." We just realize that, for example, touching someone's koran isn't "torture." Or maybe, for example, we know that the incidents at Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents conducted by a few morons who deserved to be punished, and that doesn't make Abu Ghraib some hell-hole of a detention facility.
How do you feel about practices such as waterboarding, which is not an "isolated incident" but is in fact official policy? Do you think you would consider it "torture" after having it applied to you, or would you consider to say it was equivalent to "touching someone's koran"?
As one of the other replies pointed out, people like you are cowards. You support the policy, but you don't have the guts to face up to the consequences.
"I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
The point is that there is a vast middle ground between communism, in which a tiny cabal of government officials make economic decisions for everybody, and abstractions such as "the people" are idolized while real people are screwed; and the current form of hypercapitalism, in which a tiny cabal of corporate officials make economic decisions for everybody, and abstractions such as "intellectual property" are idolized while real property accumulates in the hands of oligarchs. False dichotomies such as those you present -- speaking of "alternatives" as though we had to make a clear choice between one system and another -- are precisely equivalent to the way communist leaders managed to get and keep power throughout much of the last century (and tyrants of various stripes have held onto power for far longer throughout history) by convincing their subjects that they were the only alternative to chaos and starvation.
You think the ONLY cost involved with your CD is the actual printing of the CD?
No, I don't, which is why I wrote this in my original post (emphasis added):
what's the total production and distribution cost of a mass-market CD these days? Well under a buck, I'm guessing, all the way from the factory to the buyer's hands
The actual printing of the CD costs a few cents, if that. Everything else -- the packaging, the shipping and receiving, the physical placement on store shelves -- still adds up to less than a dollar, I'm pretty sure. This is not a wild guess, but is based on what I've read about music industry costs and on my own experience shipping software on CD (with, I might add, a gen-yoo-wine printed manual which is a lot bigger and more expensive than any jewel box liner.) Ergo, a retail price of $5.00/CD would still allow plenty of profit for everyone involved.
"Compelling physical product" in this context means "crippleware crap that hopefully some sucker will shell out cash for." Bizspeak 101.
You know what would be a "compelling physical product?" CD's for $5.00. Seriously. All of them. Standard price. They could still make a profit (what's the total production and distribution cost of a mass-market CD these days? Well under a buck, I'm guessing, all the way from the factory to the buyer's hands) and sales would pick up. Of course, at this point there are a lot of people who have got used to the idea of acquiring music entirely in electronic form -- either buying it from iTunes et al., or downloading it illegally, what the labels have to realize is that to most people it doesn't matter -- but I think that by and large, people still like to have a physical object they can hold in their hands.
So here's my proposal to the labels. Give up on DRM and crippleware and rootkits and all the rest of it. Just make CD's, regular, plain, unencumbered, shiny discs with music on them, and sell them for five bucks a pop. Watch sales soar. Sit back and, you know, enjoy the music, man.
Your obscene analogy would have been stronger if you could have worked in suicide bombers, nazi's, incest, rape, genocide, cannibalisim, and 9-11.
How is it "obscene?" I wasn't the one who came up with the idea of using the word "virus" to describe a malicious piece of self-replicating code, after all. If we accept that it's valid to call such code by the same name we use to describe smallpox, polio, HIV, ebola, and other nasties, then the analogy makes perfect sense.
And, given that, I think it's a pretty good analogy. Using OS X, or Linux, or BSD, or pretty much any modern OS that isn't Windows, is like having a functioning, healthy immune system -- yes, it's always possible that you'll get sick, but it's not terribly likely at any given time, and if you do, it will probably be something minor that is easily taken care of. Using Windows is like having AIDS: the disease itself probably won't kill you, but you are terribly vulnerable to infection by just about every pathogen floating around, including many that healthy people shrug off with ease.
If you're so concerned about the "obscenity" of talking about computers in these terms, then start with the phrase "computer virus," and please go after people who talk about "grammar nazis" and "software pirates" too. Oh yeah, could you also do something about how any act of hacking (or cracking, if you prefer) no matter how minor the intrusion is labeled "terrorism?" Thanks.
1. Even if the healthy person is doing this, in which case he's an asshole, he's still just got a cold, which will go away by itself with no serious aftereffects -- and the person with AIDS still has AIDS, which won't.
2. I think the perception of this kind of behavior is much more widespread than the behavior itself. I don't know how many times I've had a conversation along the lines of the following:
Them: "Hey, you're a computer guy. How do you protect your computer from viruses?"
Me: "I use a Mac."
Them: "You Mac fanatics are so fucking smug all the time!"
Me: "I wasn't being smug, honest. I'm just answering your question, that's what I do."
Windows users are always accusing Mac users of smugness, but there's nobody more smug than a Windows user observing that one (1) particular security vulnerability has been found for Macs. This strikes me as akin to someone with AIDS being smug because some previously healthy person has caught a cold.
I am sick and tired of the Times and other blatantly anti war publications like them putting our soldiers and our security at risk.
The phrase "blatantly anti war" makes it sound like there's something wrong with being anti-war, which pretty much says what side you're on, but anyway --
1. One of the reporters under investigation, Judith Miller, was not only a Times employee, but also one of the major cheerleaders during the build-up to the Iraq war. I know this doesn't fit into your little Fox bubble-world, but it's the truth, and easily verified.
2. There is no evidence whatsoever that out soldiers and our security were in any way put at risk by anything published in the Times, and not even the government is claiming that there is.
3. Anyone who opposes freedom of the press is un-American scum.
When I was carrying a radio in the Army, my call sign was "November one one." Not too many of my fellow infantrymen understood the morbid humor in that, but those who did enjoyed it.
Later, when I went over the the Air Force, my original ETS (expiration of term of service, i.e. the day you get out) was also November 11th. Alas, I re-enlisted -- although that worked out well in another way, since my new ETS was my birthday. But getting out of the service on 11/11 (perhaps I could have stuck around until 11:00, then covered myself with mud and plodded off base?) would have been even cooler, at least from a history geek's POV.
Once it is past the Earth's escape velocity, it's gone, regardless of the planet's orbital velocity. If the rocket is launched on a sunward trajectory, the sun's gravity will pull it in (unless some other body interferes).
No, because it's still carrying the Earth's velocity in orbit around the Sun with it. All launching it as greater than escape velocity means is that it won't go into orbit around the Earth; instead it will settle into another orbit around the Sun. If we launch it sunward, this orbit will tend to be somewhat tighter than Earth's -- but not a whole lot, and it will also be somewhat eccentric, which means there's a good chance of it intersecting Earth's orbit at some point in the future. Congratulations! You've solved the nuclear waste burial problem, and replaced it with the nuclear waste meteorite problem.
Distance in time reduces our level of resolution just as surely as distance in space; we tend to think of recent decades as homogeneous chunks of time (and, if we go back a century or so, we think of centuries the same way; go back further, and it's millennia.) But they are not homogeneous at all to the people living in them. In the case of 1960's music, what made it an exciting time for music journalism was that it was changing so fast.
the Germans are so sorry for having been Nazis, and so eager to show the world how tolerant they have become, that now if anyone in their country professes Nazi-like beliefs, they are sent right to the gas chambers.
Please give the name, and date of execution, of the last person executed by gas chamber (or any other means) in the Federal Republic of Germany for having "Nazi-like beliefs."
Today, questioning thoughts about human evolution or global warming are practically considered hate speech.
No, the "questioning thoughts" are not hateful; they are, however, universally incoherent and contradictory with the data. What's hateful is that they are then picked up by political partisans and used in an attempt to control policy.
They still can not prove that our solar system is not in a bottle on an alien's desk sitting in a diaroama surrrounded by a construction paper universe waiting to go to school to be judged for a science fair project.
Blah blah blah. By that standard, no scientist in any field can "prove" anything -- you can't prove that it is not the case that the Universe was created five minutes ago by a deity that's having fun with his creations making them think that it's anywhere between six thousand and several billion years old; you can't prove that it is not the case that our eyes are completely deceiving us and the air is actually filled with floating jellyfish that want to eat our brains; you can't prove that it is not the case that "bacteria" and "viruses" are actually a clever Freemason conspiracy to hide from the rest of the world the truth that disease is caused by an imbalance of bodily humors... etc. So keep enjoying your fantasies. Meanwhile, those of us who rely on data collected by observations made to the best of our abilities, and rigorous theories representing the state of current knowledge, will go on doing our best to understand the world around us.
It is true that Americans are, right now, dissatisfied with the current administration. It is also true that Americans, as a whole, react with mindless outrage to the idea of America, as a whole, giving up any of its power over anything. Every serious debate over Iraq, f'rinstance, centers around whether or not staying in Iraq is good for American power, not over whether we had any right to go to war in the first place with a nation that had not attacked us nor showed any indication of doing so. Certainly other countries also get touchy about their sovereignty, sometimes absurdly so, but it is the fate of Empire (the British were like this in their day, and the French, and the Spanish, and the Ottomans, and the Byzantines, and the Romans, and...) to believe that its sovereignty extends over the globe, until it is forcefully proven wrong.
France, 1940: bumbling, senile wreck of a once-great man (Phillipe "Ils ne passeront pas" Petain) makes a fool of himself trying to defend his country against a technologically superior force.
USA, 2006: bumbling, senile wreck of a once-great man (Ted "It's a series of tubes" Stevens) makes a fool of himself trying to defend his country against a technologically superior force.
MacOS and Free operating systems like Ubuntu are very similar in terms of what they can do and how easy they are to use
[shrug] In your experience, maybe. In mine, and in many other OS X users', not so much. OS X still has a slickness about it that no desktop Linux I've ever seen has been able to match (largely because they're all chasing the Windows chimera.) A lot of techies sneer at valuing aesthetic considerations at the same level as technical or ideological ones, but personally, spending as much time at my computer as I do, I find that enjoying the experience means a hell of a lot.
Actually, I tend to agree with you; when I'm working in a case-sensitive file system, I still never have files named "Foo.txt" and "foo.txt". (Of course, this may be simply force of habit, since I move around between OS X, Linux, and Solaris all the time; it's just safer if I don't do things on one platform that will mess me up on another.) OTOH, as a programmer, I do find it useful sometimes to have variables named "X" and "x" -- since most of what I do these days is statistical programming, it's useful to follow the convention that "X" is a random variable and "x" is an observation, i.e. a fixed value; I also tend to capitalize the names of vectors since there's no way to represent boldface in ASCII.;) On the occasions when I'm forced to use SAS (the Windows of the stat world!) its case-insensitivity drives me nuts.
So by extension, I can imagine programming conventions where it would be useful -- e.g., suppose you always capitalize class names, so "Foo.cpp" contains the class definition for class Foo, while "foo.cpp" contains functions which operate on objects of class Foo but which, for whatever reason, don't belong inside the class. I'm not saying this is a good idea, mind, but it could happen.
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OS X has never been worth the upgrade in single increments. Nor have most other software packages (Adobe in particular) but there are plenty of people who only upgrade every-other release. Going from 10.3 to 10.5 makes sense.
With the exception of 10.0 --> 10.1, which meant going from a godawful beta to a usable OS, I think you're right. Historically (back to the System 7 days, if not before) even-numbered point releases of the Mac OS have been when Apple introduced new features, and odd-numbered point releases have been when those features actually worked right.
slavish adherence to a pretty obviously false religion
As opposed to all the other, true religions?
Or the One True religion (i.e., whichever one you happen to follow)?
Leaders have always tried to simulatenously exploit and control the power of whatever media was current at the time. Does anyone doubt that the skald who came up with the original version of Beowulf was paid off to chant about the virtues of the king -- and knew exactly what would happen if he didn't? Through the age of pamphlet, newspaper, radio, and TV, nothing changed; I don't see why we should be terribly surprised now that it's ON THE INTERNET (tm).
How bad can a game about a kid countering a bully possibly be?
...
Oh, very, very bad.
You see, kids who fight back against bullies are just like Harris and Klebold! They wear black and listen to scary music and have guns, lots of guns! And they kill people with them! Lots and lots of people!
In fact, any kid who fights back against a bully might just be
A TERRORIST! LOOK! LOOK, OVER THERE! SCARY, SCARY TERRORISTS!
TERRORISTS! 9/11! ROCKSTAR GAMES! 9/11! AL-QAEDA! 9/11! COLUMBINE! 9/11! TERRORISTS! RED LAKE! 9/11! THEY'RE ALL IN IT TOGETHER! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHIIIIIIIIIILDREN!
There. I hope this clears things up for you.
To be honest, any behavior where people go "I am willing to fuck up my own body because I know if it comes to the crunch I'll be seen by a doctor" is highly questionable and probably should be illegal. Yes that goes for smoking too.
Two responses to this:
1) Where do you stop? Okay, smoking is an obvious one. What about drinking? (You may recall that there was a little experiment called Prohibition a few decades back.) Eating crappy fast food? Not exercising enough (whatever the government decides "enough" is)? Exercising too much, to the point of injury? Living in a particularly polluted place, or in a place prone to natural disasters? All of these things can fuck your body up just as much as heroin, and all of them are personal choices. There is no clear cutoff line between "too dangerous" and "dangerous, but just safe enough that we'll tolerate it."
2) Total cost. Yes, all of the behaviors mentioned above, as well as illegal drug use, have costs to society, which we all have to pay. But against this, you have to measure the cost to society of illegalization. We spend an insane amount of money on the War on Drugs: the salaries of the law enforcement personnel, the maintenance of the prisoners, and the high-tech equipment are only the most obvious ones. How about the cost of productive working lives wasted in prison? How about the general rise in the power of organized crime, and all the ills it brings with it, which have a ripple effect far beyond the drug money which provides the initial funding? (The venture capital, if you will.) How about the medical costs incurred by the violence inherent in any illegal trade? (Liquor store owners may tend toward alcoholism, sure -- but since 1933, their rate of death by Tommy gun has gone down to almost nothing.) Add these up, and I suspect they dwarf the direct costs of drug use. Ban smoking, or drinking, or McDonald's, and you'd see a cost to our government and society that would make the current budget for the WoD look like chicken feed.
Once it's legalised it's really hard to go back if it turns out to have been a mistake.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that Moses came down from the mountain with a stone tablet reading "Thou shalt not smoke up," and since then, thus hath it ever been -- in other words, that illegality is the natural state of drugs. But cannabis, coca, poppies, and for that matter tobacco have all been growing for a long time before the law ever even came into existence. Drugs, of any kind, haven't always been illegal. People made those laws, and did so fairly recently in historical terms. We can unmake or remake them as we choose.
"...a date which will live in infamy."
I guess the problem lies with the fact that no one I know, republican or otherwise, supports "setting up torture and murder camps." We just realize that, for example, touching someone's koran isn't "torture." Or maybe, for example, we know that the incidents at Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents conducted by a few morons who deserved to be punished, and that doesn't make Abu Ghraib some hell-hole of a detention facility.
How do you feel about practices such as waterboarding, which is not an "isolated incident" but is in fact official policy? Do you think you would consider it "torture" after having it applied to you, or would you consider to say it was equivalent to "touching someone's koran"?
As one of the other replies pointed out, people like you are cowards. You support the policy, but you don't have the guts to face up to the consequences.
"I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
-- A. Lincoln
The point is that there is a vast middle ground between communism, in which a tiny cabal of government officials make economic decisions for everybody, and abstractions such as "the people" are idolized while real people are screwed; and the current form of hypercapitalism, in which a tiny cabal of corporate officials make economic decisions for everybody, and abstractions such as "intellectual property" are idolized while real property accumulates in the hands of oligarchs. False dichotomies such as those you present -- speaking of "alternatives" as though we had to make a clear choice between one system and another -- are precisely equivalent to the way communist leaders managed to get and keep power throughout much of the last century (and tyrants of various stripes have held onto power for far longer throughout history) by convincing their subjects that they were the only alternative to chaos and starvation.
You think the ONLY cost involved with your CD is the actual printing of the CD?
No, I don't, which is why I wrote this in my original post (emphasis added):
what's the total production and distribution cost of a mass-market CD these days? Well under a buck, I'm guessing, all the way from the factory to the buyer's hands
The actual printing of the CD costs a few cents, if that. Everything else -- the packaging, the shipping and receiving, the physical placement on store shelves -- still adds up to less than a dollar, I'm pretty sure. This is not a wild guess, but is based on what I've read about music industry costs and on my own experience shipping software on CD (with, I might add, a gen-yoo-wine printed manual which is a lot bigger and more expensive than any jewel box liner.) Ergo, a retail price of $5.00/CD would still allow plenty of profit for everyone involved.
"Compelling physical product" in this context means "crippleware crap that hopefully some sucker will shell out cash for." Bizspeak 101.
You know what would be a "compelling physical product?" CD's for $5.00. Seriously. All of them. Standard price. They could still make a profit (what's the total production and distribution cost of a mass-market CD these days? Well under a buck, I'm guessing, all the way from the factory to the buyer's hands) and sales would pick up. Of course, at this point there are a lot of people who have got used to the idea of acquiring music entirely in electronic form -- either buying it from iTunes et al., or downloading it illegally, what the labels have to realize is that to most people it doesn't matter -- but I think that by and large, people still like to have a physical object they can hold in their hands.
So here's my proposal to the labels. Give up on DRM and crippleware and rootkits and all the rest of it. Just make CD's, regular, plain, unencumbered, shiny discs with music on them, and sell them for five bucks a pop. Watch sales soar. Sit back and, you know, enjoy the music, man.
Your obscene analogy would have been stronger if you could have worked in suicide bombers, nazi's, incest, rape, genocide, cannibalisim, and 9-11.
How is it "obscene?" I wasn't the one who came up with the idea of using the word "virus" to describe a malicious piece of self-replicating code, after all. If we accept that it's valid to call such code by the same name we use to describe smallpox, polio, HIV, ebola, and other nasties, then the analogy makes perfect sense.
And, given that, I think it's a pretty good analogy. Using OS X, or Linux, or BSD, or pretty much any modern OS that isn't Windows, is like having a functioning, healthy immune system -- yes, it's always possible that you'll get sick, but it's not terribly likely at any given time, and if you do, it will probably be something minor that is easily taken care of. Using Windows is like having AIDS: the disease itself probably won't kill you, but you are terribly vulnerable to infection by just about every pathogen floating around, including many that healthy people shrug off with ease.
If you're so concerned about the "obscenity" of talking about computers in these terms, then start with the phrase "computer virus," and please go after people who talk about "grammar nazis" and "software pirates" too. Oh yeah, could you also do something about how any act of hacking (or cracking, if you prefer) no matter how minor the intrusion is labeled "terrorism?" Thanks.
1. Even if the healthy person is doing this, in which case he's an asshole, he's still just got a cold, which will go away by itself with no serious aftereffects -- and the person with AIDS still has AIDS, which won't.
..."
2. I think the perception of this kind of behavior is much more widespread than the behavior itself. I don't know how many times I've had a conversation along the lines of the following:
Them: "Hey, you're a computer guy. How do you protect your computer from viruses?"
Me: "I use a Mac."
Them: "You Mac fanatics are so fucking smug all the time!"
Me: "I wasn't being smug, honest. I'm just answering your question, that's what I do."
Them: "FANATIC! FANATIC! YOU'RE A FANATIC!"
Me: "Uh, yeah
Windows users are always accusing Mac users of smugness, but there's nobody more smug than a Windows user observing that one (1) particular security vulnerability has been found for Macs. This strikes me as akin to someone with AIDS being smug because some previously healthy person has caught a cold.
I am sick and tired of the Times and other blatantly anti war publications like them putting our soldiers and our security at risk.
The phrase "blatantly anti war" makes it sound like there's something wrong with being anti-war, which pretty much says what side you're on, but anyway --
1. One of the reporters under investigation, Judith Miller, was not only a Times employee, but also one of the major cheerleaders during the build-up to the Iraq war. I know this doesn't fit into your little Fox bubble-world, but it's the truth, and easily verified.
2. There is no evidence whatsoever that out soldiers and our security were in any way put at risk by anything published in the Times, and not even the government is claiming that there is.
3. Anyone who opposes freedom of the press is un-American scum.
When I was carrying a radio in the Army, my call sign was "November one one." Not too many of my fellow infantrymen understood the morbid humor in that, but those who did enjoyed it.
Later, when I went over the the Air Force, my original ETS (expiration of term of service, i.e. the day you get out) was also November 11th. Alas, I re-enlisted -- although that worked out well in another way, since my new ETS was my birthday. But getting out of the service on 11/11 (perhaps I could have stuck around until 11:00, then covered myself with mud and plodded off base?) would have been even cooler, at least from a history geek's POV.
Once it is past the Earth's escape velocity, it's gone, regardless of the planet's orbital velocity. If the rocket is launched on a sunward trajectory, the sun's gravity will pull it in (unless some other body interferes).
No, because it's still carrying the Earth's velocity in orbit around the Sun with it. All launching it as greater than escape velocity means is that it won't go into orbit around the Earth; instead it will settle into another orbit around the Sun. If we launch it sunward, this orbit will tend to be somewhat tighter than Earth's -- but not a whole lot, and it will also be somewhat eccentric, which means there's a good chance of it intersecting Earth's orbit at some point in the future. Congratulations! You've solved the nuclear waste burial problem, and replaced it with the nuclear waste meteorite problem.
For a whole decade, teenagers wanted music that was, essentially, unchanged for the whole decade.
No.
Top 40 hits for:
1960
1965
1969
Distance in time reduces our level of resolution just as surely as distance in space; we tend to think of recent decades as homogeneous chunks of time (and, if we go back a century or so, we think of centuries the same way; go back further, and it's millennia.) But they are not homogeneous at all to the people living in them. In the case of 1960's music, what made it an exciting time for music journalism was that it was changing so fast.
It's just a group of galaxies packed together more closely than other clusters.
And a galaxy is just a group of stars packed together, etc.
[applause]
the Germans are so sorry for having been Nazis, and so eager to show the world how tolerant they have become, that now if anyone in their country professes Nazi-like beliefs, they are sent right to the gas chambers.
Please give the name, and date of execution, of the last person executed by gas chamber (or any other means) in the Federal Republic of Germany for having "Nazi-like beliefs."
Today, questioning thoughts about human evolution or global warming are practically considered hate speech.
No, the "questioning thoughts" are not hateful; they are, however, universally incoherent and contradictory with the data. What's hateful is that they are then picked up by political partisans and used in an attempt to control policy.
They still can not prove that our solar system is not in a bottle on an alien's desk sitting in a diaroama surrrounded by a construction paper universe waiting to go to school to be judged for a science fair project.
... etc. So keep enjoying your fantasies. Meanwhile, those of us who rely on data collected by observations made to the best of our abilities, and rigorous theories representing the state of current knowledge, will go on doing our best to understand the world around us.
Blah blah blah. By that standard, no scientist in any field can "prove" anything -- you can't prove that it is not the case that the Universe was created five minutes ago by a deity that's having fun with his creations making them think that it's anywhere between six thousand and several billion years old; you can't prove that it is not the case that our eyes are completely deceiving us and the air is actually filled with floating jellyfish that want to eat our brains; you can't prove that it is not the case that "bacteria" and "viruses" are actually a clever Freemason conspiracy to hide from the rest of the world the truth that disease is caused by an imbalance of bodily humors
It is true that Americans are, right now, dissatisfied with the current administration. It is also true that Americans, as a whole, react with mindless outrage to the idea of America, as a whole, giving up any of its power over anything. Every serious debate over Iraq, f'rinstance, centers around whether or not staying in Iraq is good for American power, not over whether we had any right to go to war in the first place with a nation that had not attacked us nor showed any indication of doing so. Certainly other countries also get touchy about their sovereignty, sometimes absurdly so, but it is the fate of Empire (the British were like this in their day, and the French, and the Spanish, and the Ottomans, and the Byzantines, and the Romans, and ...) to believe that its sovereignty extends over the globe, until it is forcefully proven wrong.
(Imagine it was France:)
France, 1940: bumbling, senile wreck of a once-great man (Phillipe "Ils ne passeront pas" Petain) makes a fool of himself trying to defend his country against a technologically superior force.
USA, 2006: bumbling, senile wreck of a once-great man (Ted "It's a series of tubes" Stevens) makes a fool of himself trying to defend his country against a technologically superior force.
The names change, the story remains the same.
MacOS and Free operating systems like Ubuntu are very similar in terms of what they can do and how easy they are to use
[shrug] In your experience, maybe. In mine, and in many other OS X users', not so much. OS X still has a slickness about it that no desktop Linux I've ever seen has been able to match (largely because they're all chasing the Windows chimera.) A lot of techies sneer at valuing aesthetic considerations at the same level as technical or ideological ones, but personally, spending as much time at my computer as I do, I find that enjoying the experience means a hell of a lot.
Actually, I tend to agree with you; when I'm working in a case-sensitive file system, I still never have files named "Foo.txt" and "foo.txt". (Of course, this may be simply force of habit, since I move around between OS X, Linux, and Solaris all the time; it's just safer if I don't do things on one platform that will mess me up on another.) OTOH, as a programmer, I do find it useful sometimes to have variables named "X" and "x" -- since most of what I do these days is statistical programming, it's useful to follow the convention that "X" is a random variable and "x" is an observation, i.e. a fixed value; I also tend to capitalize the names of vectors since there's no way to represent boldface in ASCII. ;) On the occasions when I'm forced to use SAS (the Windows of the stat world!) its case-insensitivity drives me nuts.
So by extension, I can imagine programming conventions where it would be useful -- e.g., suppose you always capitalize class names, so "Foo.cpp" contains the class definition for class Foo, while "foo.cpp" contains functions which operate on objects of class Foo but which, for whatever reason, don't belong inside the class. I'm not saying this is a good idea, mind, but it could happen.