What he said was the equivalent of, "If you want to write code or administer a LAN, you have to learn. The best way to learn is to get some free tools like gcc and linux and start practicing." Incidentally, that is the best way to learn, for both. He never implied that it was easy or quick.
However, it appears that these papers were detected nearly instantly, whereas my impression is that Sokal was not. But I can't find enough material (and I'm not looking hard enough, hooray!) to back that up too well.
Even so, I may have to rethink my opinion of deconstructionism, theoretical physics, or possibly both. Fun stuff!
I agree that the experiment does not quite demonstrate my claims, although it strongly indicates them to me. However, I don't think your analogy is very good. It's more like learning a foreign language from a teacher that, you hear, is very good and respected with this language. So you go through and you learn the basics, and you start saying "good morning" and "how are you?" and things like that when you come into the classroom. Then one day you come in and spout utter nonsense in the same places as your "good morning" lines, and the teacher takes it in stride, says "good morning" back to you, laughs on queue, and in general gives no indication of noticing that anything is different.
A few things are possible at this point. First, the teacher is a crank and your references were bad. Second, your teacher is a crank now, but he was good before, and your references are merely old. Last, the entire language you were supposed to be learning is gibberish.
So you're entirely right that it's possible this journal is simply crap, either it always has been or it has recently become crap. (I'm liberally interpreting "low peer-review standards" as "crap", here.)
However, the author seems to have had some praise for his work, and not much in the way of criticism. Nothing that comes out and says "this is total crap", that I can find. Of course, I can't find very much on this, so it's entirely possible I'm missing it. But I very much get the impression that the field at large did not see through this parody, which is damning if true. I can barely (only just barely) imagine somebody getting published in some physics journal because they skimmed the paper and the peer reviewers did the same, but it would be found out instantly after it was published.
It may be too far to say that the whole field is worthless crap, but I think it's a reasonable, if not totally supported, conclusion that the field has some serious issues.
Not to defend deconstuctionism too much -- because I really do think that it's a field with a lot of bullshit in it -- but it's important to keep in mind that every, every field can sound incredibly stupid if you don't have all the jargon, context, background, and indoctrination that it requires.
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
Apparently a scientist with not much training in "deconstructionism" can write a whole load of baloney and get it published in a journal. (See first +5 post of this article for the link, etc. etc.) The reverse could never happen. Imagine somebody with a humanities degree writing an article as a joke and getting it published in, say, a major physics journal. No matter how much training he has, he's not going to be able to create a work that passes even a glance test, unless he is a Grade-A certified genius who does his humanities and churns out physics in his spare time or something.
To me, this says that "deconstructionism" doesn't have its own technical vocabulary. It has a vocabulary, but it's not technical, because it's meaningless. If some bozo scientist can whip up something (not to insult him, I'm sure it was a lot of work) and get it published, then what does that say about the rest of the stuff in the field? If somebody who does not "have all the jargon, context, background, and indoctrination that it requires" can get published, then why is it a requirement to have all of that just to publish a bit of criticism?
No one seems to complain? Do you live in a cave or something? Just look at, to pull one obvious example up, the huge disagreement between "science" and "creationism". People complain all the time!
I'm not sure, but you may be confusing it with a similar problem:
"Relative responsibility syndrome": The idea that because you're ubercompetent in a field where the wrong answer results in things which don't work, lost money, and lawsuits, you're automatically qualified to give opinions on fields which you have studied, but not rigorously.
There's a similar but less common one, "Dependent lives expert syndrome": The idea that because major mistakes made by you can result in death, and no such deaths have happened until the present, you are (copy from above).
It's common to have the impression that your field is better and filled with smarter people than other fields. But in the sciences, at least, there's a backup provided by the universe; if you're wrong, you know it, because your stuff doesn't work.
Imagine Apple opened up their OS, let people build Mac compatibles, and ported their OS to x86.
Given this scenario, what is different about Apple that would let them survive, face to face against Microsoft on Microsoft's home turf, where every other company that tried this failed? OS/2 died, the DOS clones died, NeXT couldn't do it, Be couldn't do it, etc.
The thing you do not want to do is sell a product that directly competes with MS-DOS or Windows.
You don't harvest the atmosphere, you harvest the rock. There is a lot of He3 embedded in lunar rock.
He3 is a lot easier to fuse than anything else. It has two advantages. It takes less pressure and temperature, and it releases no radiation. This means that it would be very practical. We pretty much have break-even fusion today, the problems are basically engineering at this point. One major problem is that the reactor becomes radioactive after a while because of neutrons. He3 solves that.
I want to know what silly mod went to work on this post.
The Earth Simulator is less than two years old, counting from when it was turned on.
Assuming an optimistic 12 months of doubling for Moore's Law, that's a factor of four. So you've cut the cost by at most a factor of four if you built it today. The VA Tech supercomputer still utterly destroys it on price/performance.
Six letters, using all letters A through Z, gives you 300 million possibilities.
If you double that, then for each real combination, there are a billion ones that don't work. Twelve letters isn't too burdensome. They showed a cap with a code, and I forget how many letters there were, but it was on the order of ten to twelve.
No chance of guessing codes at random unless they are totally incompetent.
Ask your six-year-old kid if the planets move, and even he will know the answer.
According to this Mars Fact Sheet, the maximum distance between Earth and Mars is nearly exactly 1/4 billion miles. And while we're probably not at the maximum, we're nowhere near the minimum anymore either.
In six months, we move from one side of the sun to the exact opposite side.
NASA has axed at least one shuttle replacement/supplement project for non-financial reasons. Or rather, they had to pick something to axe, and they thought perhaps it was cheaper to keep flying the shuttle at $500 million a launch than to develop something more rational.
It's true that NASA is not funded as well as perhaps it should. But the problem is that they have no concept of the idea of doing things halfway. Whenever they are asked for a proposal or budget estimate for nearly any subject at all, they pretty much respond with a plan which culminates in landing men on Mars and costs $500 billion. "Propose a shuttle replacement and give a cost estimate." "We will build the replacement, proposed design here, use it to assemble a giant ship in orbit, and then fly to Mars! Total cost: $500 billion! What a bargain!"
Ok, so this is a bit of an exaggeration, but the idea is right. NASA is incapable of working with less than an ideal amount of money. They repeatedly make ridiculous budget requests and then do a terrible job when they are forced to make do with only half the money.
It does. But it's optional, since none of the programs that an average user will ever see need it, and not installed by default. And even if it were acceptable to make the user dig out their OS CDs and install another piece of software just to use an office program, it's X11, which means it takes a certain amount of expertise to use it. Apple has made it as simple as possible, but in this case, when the unstoppable force met the immovable object, the immovable X server won the usability battle.
As for the name (I'm hoping your post was sarcastic on that point, but you never know) X is the roman numeral for 10. Mac OS X came after Mac OS 9.
Well, I am a bit out of date, the last time I opened a US bank account was in the fall of 1998, which is before the publication of that article. (The account is still open, though!)
However, I don't get the impression that things have changed. Whenever I complain about how much crap you have to go through to open an account in France, and how it takes roughly 10 minutes with no paperwork in the US, nobody has ever jumped up and said, "Wait, that's not true, I opened an account last month and I had to...."
I don't think that such a system would be very practical, because there are quite a number of people who (legally) exist in the US without any ID at all. If you don't drive and don't travel outside the country, you can get away without having one. Suddenly requiring all of these people to get ID just to have a bank account would make a lot of people angry. There have been efforts to require ID to vote, and it has made a lot of people angry exactly because of that.
But I also could be wrong. Although I'm American, I haven't been involved enough in the American financial system to be anything remotely approaching authoritative.
I don't know what the bank example is doing in your list. If I want to store money in some bank under whatever name I want, why shouldn't I be able to do it? A bank account alone doesn't get me very far. Now, if I were to start taking out loans and so on, things get sticker, but if I just want a checking account, I shouldn't have to make an appointment a week in advance, then show up and have to show identity, proof of residency, proof of address, proof of salary, and on and on and on. (This isn't made-up, I actually had to do this.) When I last opened a bank account in the US, which was a while ago, they basically asked for my money. I like this. There isn't really an opportunity for fraud by providing bad information.
I have no real contention with the rest of your statements, just this one.
It means exactly that. Just TRY to boot System 6.0.8 on your iMac. It isn't going to happen. The needed ROM file isn't a part of the old Mac OS.
Oh please. What a strawman. What if I try to boot, say, Mac OS 9 on that iMac? It will work.
This is not the Windows world. It is possible to port OSes to a new processor architecture without totally changing the character of the OS.
If you think that Mac OS 9 and System 6 are not related just because they changed processors, think again. There is an unbelievable amount of old cruft running under the hood, even in the very last Mac OS.
From NeXT, X draws mostly inspiration as well. The original Mach kernel can't be run on a PowerPC. It had to be rewritten. NeXT did not code for the PowerPC because the chip did not exist when they were putting out hardware.
There are these cool things called 'high-level languages'. They allow you to write code which can be easily ported across processor architectures. You seem to be under the impression that moving from on processor architecture to another necessitates a total rewrite, which is an extremely odd idea to have. It is completely unimportant whether NeXT coded for the PowerPC or not. Apple is still using a ton of their code. Do you think kernels have to be written in assembly? Kernels can be ported without a total rewrite, just like any other piece of software. And beyond that, the kernel is a tiny piece of a full OS, and the full OS has tons of NeXT pieces wandering around in it.
That whole Yellow Box/Blue Box business went on at Apple, not NeXT.
You're right as far as the name goes, that was my mistake. But Yellow Box was a direct evolution of OpenStep Enterprise for Windows. OpenStep ran on a ton of different platforms. Apple's Cocoa sadly throws away the cross-platform goodness, but Cocoa is still a direct evolution of those APIs.
Somewhere stashed away, I have Rhapsody DR 1. I used to run in on a PowerMac 7300.
How fun! I followed all of the developer releases (yes, in an unofficial fashion) up through the Public Beta. There is a very clear evolution from Rhapsody through Mac OS X. Rhapsody really was just NeXT ported to the PowerPC, and OS X is just NeXT ported to the PowerPC, version 3 or something.
The entire point of buying NeXT (besides getting their old CEO back) was that Apple was completely unable to build a new OS from scratch. They tried three or four times, and each project fell flat on its nose. They looked at buying either Be or NeXT, and using their OS as a base to build a next-generation Apple OS. They decided to go with NeXT, and that's exactly what they did.
Pretty much every time a government decides to take matters in hand and help provide silly little things like food and shelter to people, it falls flat. Ironically, the things which are most necessary to life seem to be the things that are most necessary for the government to simply stay out and let the market work.
Most fuel spend in a modern airliner doesn't go into that airliner's kinetic energy, it goes into overcoming atmospheric drag. A scamjet running at mach ten is going to be experiencing much less drag than a regular airliner, because it will be much higher. To keep from using a truly nutty amount of fuel, as well as to avoid melting from the heat, it will fly high where the atmosphere is much less dense. As such, you can't come up with a simple relation between speed and fuel consumption. It is entirely possible and even realistic that a hypersonic airplane would use less fuel than a normal subsonic airliner when flying long distances.
Concorde's massive costs were mostly maintenance, not fuel. This is also why they managed to fly it for twenty years and then suddenly decided to drop it. As aircraft age, they get more expensive to maintain, and the Concorde fleet had become too old to run without losing money for its owners.
They can't rename the widgets. Their names are actually the names of the Objective-C classes that implement them. Changing those class names would break all Cocoa programs and all Cocoa code in existence. So they're stuck with them for life, it seems.
Feh, get a clue. The original Mac OS ran on m68k too, does that mean it can't run on my computer because I have a PowerPC?
Mac OS X draws from three sources, Mac OS, BSD, and NeXT. From BSD it draws a lot of low level stuff and part of the kernel. From NeXT it draws some other low level stuff and the rest of the kernel, along with a bunch of interface ideas. From Mac OS, it draws inspiration.
Yes, Apple did lots of work. But that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of NeXT code still working away under the surface. As just one minor example, look through any random Cocoa headers, and you'll find #ifdefs for WIN32, which are left over from Yellow Box's Windows NT days. Just look at the progression of developer releases, from Rhapsody on forward, all the way through to Mac OS X. The early developer releases were basically NeXT with a Mac-looking interface, ported to the PowerPC. The system evolved from there until you get what we have today.
The Internet's system of breaking all data up into small, discrete packets and routing each packet to its destination independently is totally different from the traditional telephone system, which creates 'connections' in the system, which take your data from point A to point B. Experience with the Internet is starting to show us that, while packet systems are somewhat harder to get right technically, they are incredibly more versatile and useful. Even the telcos are realizing this as they start to route voice traffic over IP-based systems. So it is entirely conceivable that the Internet will take over for everything, and even though you still have the traditional phone lines, they all just hook into somebody's IP system once they get out of your house.
iTunes uses QuickTime to play its files, meaning that it supports any file that QT supports, which is a hell of a lot. Not only that, but QT is very extensible, so third parties can add more formats. There's already an ogg plugin out there, and anybody who wanted to could make whatever they wanted. Although as far as I know, it only supports arbitrary QT formats for playback, not for encoding.
I love how people always compare things to Windows, which is the most backwards, un-advanced OS ever.
If you want to compare GUIs, compare with Mac OS X. OpenGL-accelerated drawing? Check. Incredibly rich graphics in apps? Check. No need to wait until 2006. And of course, by definition, right now X is still where it is now.
If Linux always strove to play catch-up with Windows, it would be horrible. Fortunately, it doesn't do that, except in the area of the GUI. It's no surprise, then, that Linux's GUI isn't very good.
Exposure to danger from cars is not voluntary. There is almost no place in the world where you can have a reasonable standard of living and not have to move from place to place in a space that is shared with cars. Whether you are driving a car, riding a bicycle, or walking, you are exposed to random danger from other people's mistakes. There are a very few regions in a very few cities where no cars are allowed, but not really enough to count. How many people could find housing and a job in that area and never have to leave it?
Of course, people don't think that way, so there is a perception of responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Good lord, what an overreaction.
What he said was the equivalent of, "If you want to write code or administer a LAN, you have to learn. The best way to learn is to get some free tools like gcc and linux and start practicing." Incidentally, that is the best way to learn, for both. He never implied that it was easy or quick.
Fascinating! Thanks for the pointer.
However, it appears that these papers were detected nearly instantly, whereas my impression is that Sokal was not. But I can't find enough material (and I'm not looking hard enough, hooray!) to back that up too well.
Even so, I may have to rethink my opinion of deconstructionism, theoretical physics, or possibly both. Fun stuff!
I agree that the experiment does not quite demonstrate my claims, although it strongly indicates them to me. However, I don't think your analogy is very good. It's more like learning a foreign language from a teacher that, you hear, is very good and respected with this language. So you go through and you learn the basics, and you start saying "good morning" and "how are you?" and things like that when you come into the classroom. Then one day you come in and spout utter nonsense in the same places as your "good morning" lines, and the teacher takes it in stride, says "good morning" back to you, laughs on queue, and in general gives no indication of noticing that anything is different.
A few things are possible at this point. First, the teacher is a crank and your references were bad. Second, your teacher is a crank now, but he was good before, and your references are merely old. Last, the entire language you were supposed to be learning is gibberish.
So you're entirely right that it's possible this journal is simply crap, either it always has been or it has recently become crap. (I'm liberally interpreting "low peer-review standards" as "crap", here.)
However, the author seems to have had some praise for his work, and not much in the way of criticism. Nothing that comes out and says "this is total crap", that I can find. Of course, I can't find very much on this, so it's entirely possible I'm missing it. But I very much get the impression that the field at large did not see through this parody, which is damning if true. I can barely (only just barely) imagine somebody getting published in some physics journal because they skimmed the paper and the peer reviewers did the same, but it would be found out instantly after it was published.
It may be too far to say that the whole field is worthless crap, but I think it's a reasonable, if not totally supported, conclusion that the field has some serious issues.
Not to defend deconstuctionism too much -- because I really do think that it's a field with a lot of bullshit in it -- but it's important to keep in mind that every, every field can sound incredibly stupid if you don't have all the jargon, context, background, and indoctrination that it requires.
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
Apparently a scientist with not much training in "deconstructionism" can write a whole load of baloney and get it published in a journal. (See first +5 post of this article for the link, etc. etc.) The reverse could never happen. Imagine somebody with a humanities degree writing an article as a joke and getting it published in, say, a major physics journal. No matter how much training he has, he's not going to be able to create a work that passes even a glance test, unless he is a Grade-A certified genius who does his humanities and churns out physics in his spare time or something.
To me, this says that "deconstructionism" doesn't have its own technical vocabulary. It has a vocabulary, but it's not technical, because it's meaningless. If some bozo scientist can whip up something (not to insult him, I'm sure it was a lot of work) and get it published, then what does that say about the rest of the stuff in the field? If somebody who does not "have all the jargon, context, background, and indoctrination that it requires" can get published, then why is it a requirement to have all of that just to publish a bit of criticism?
No one seems to complain? Do you live in a cave or something? Just look at, to pull one obvious example up, the huge disagreement between "science" and "creationism". People complain all the time!
I'm not sure, but you may be confusing it with a similar problem:
"Relative responsibility syndrome": The idea that because you're ubercompetent in a field where the wrong answer results in things which don't work, lost money, and lawsuits, you're automatically qualified to give opinions on fields which you have studied, but not rigorously.
There's a similar but less common one, "Dependent lives expert syndrome": The idea that because major mistakes made by you can result in death, and no such deaths have happened until the present, you are (copy from above).
It's common to have the impression that your field is better and filled with smarter people than other fields. But in the sciences, at least, there's a backup provided by the universe; if you're wrong, you know it, because your stuff doesn't work.
I don't really understand this line of thinking.
Imagine Apple opened up their OS, let people build Mac compatibles, and ported their OS to x86.
Given this scenario, what is different about Apple that would let them survive, face to face against Microsoft on Microsoft's home turf, where every other company that tried this failed? OS/2 died, the DOS clones died, NeXT couldn't do it, Be couldn't do it, etc.
The thing you do not want to do is sell a product that directly competes with MS-DOS or Windows.
Open mouth, insert clue.
You don't harvest the atmosphere, you harvest the rock. There is a lot of He3 embedded in lunar rock.
He3 is a lot easier to fuse than anything else. It has two advantages. It takes less pressure and temperature, and it releases no radiation. This means that it would be very practical. We pretty much have break-even fusion today, the problems are basically engineering at this point. One major problem is that the reactor becomes radioactive after a while because of neutrons. He3 solves that.
I want to know what silly mod went to work on this post.
The Earth Simulator is less than two years old, counting from when it was turned on.
Assuming an optimistic 12 months of doubling for Moore's Law, that's a factor of four. So you've cut the cost by at most a factor of four if you built it today. The VA Tech supercomputer still utterly destroys it on price/performance.
Apply a little math.
Six letters, using all letters A through Z, gives you 300 million possibilities.
If you double that, then for each real combination, there are a billion ones that don't work. Twelve letters isn't too burdensome. They showed a cap with a code, and I forget how many letters there were, but it was on the order of ten to twelve.
No chance of guessing codes at random unless they are totally incompetent.
Ask your six-year-old kid if the planets move, and even he will know the answer.
According to this Mars Fact Sheet, the maximum distance between Earth and Mars is nearly exactly 1/4 billion miles. And while we're probably not at the maximum, we're nowhere near the minimum anymore either.
In six months, we move from one side of the sun to the exact opposite side.
NASA has axed at least one shuttle replacement/supplement project for non-financial reasons. Or rather, they had to pick something to axe, and they thought perhaps it was cheaper to keep flying the shuttle at $500 million a launch than to develop something more rational.
It's true that NASA is not funded as well as perhaps it should. But the problem is that they have no concept of the idea of doing things halfway. Whenever they are asked for a proposal or budget estimate for nearly any subject at all, they pretty much respond with a plan which culminates in landing men on Mars and costs $500 billion. "Propose a shuttle replacement and give a cost estimate." "We will build the replacement, proposed design here, use it to assemble a giant ship in orbit, and then fly to Mars! Total cost: $500 billion! What a bargain!"
Ok, so this is a bit of an exaggeration, but the idea is right. NASA is incapable of working with less than an ideal amount of money. They repeatedly make ridiculous budget requests and then do a terrible job when they are forced to make do with only half the money.
It does. But it's optional, since none of the programs that an average user will ever see need it, and not installed by default. And even if it were acceptable to make the user dig out their OS CDs and install another piece of software just to use an office program, it's X11, which means it takes a certain amount of expertise to use it. Apple has made it as simple as possible, but in this case, when the unstoppable force met the immovable object, the immovable X server won the usability battle.
As for the name (I'm hoping your post was sarcastic on that point, but you never know) X is the roman numeral for 10. Mac OS X came after Mac OS 9.
Well, I am a bit out of date, the last time I opened a US bank account was in the fall of 1998, which is before the publication of that article. (The account is still open, though!)
However, I don't get the impression that things have changed. Whenever I complain about how much crap you have to go through to open an account in France, and how it takes roughly 10 minutes with no paperwork in the US, nobody has ever jumped up and said, "Wait, that's not true, I opened an account last month and I had to...."
I don't think that such a system would be very practical, because there are quite a number of people who (legally) exist in the US without any ID at all. If you don't drive and don't travel outside the country, you can get away without having one. Suddenly requiring all of these people to get ID just to have a bank account would make a lot of people angry. There have been efforts to require ID to vote, and it has made a lot of people angry exactly because of that.
But I also could be wrong. Although I'm American, I haven't been involved enough in the American financial system to be anything remotely approaching authoritative.
I don't know what the bank example is doing in your list. If I want to store money in some bank under whatever name I want, why shouldn't I be able to do it? A bank account alone doesn't get me very far. Now, if I were to start taking out loans and so on, things get sticker, but if I just want a checking account, I shouldn't have to make an appointment a week in advance, then show up and have to show identity, proof of residency, proof of address, proof of salary, and on and on and on. (This isn't made-up, I actually had to do this.) When I last opened a bank account in the US, which was a while ago, they basically asked for my money. I like this. There isn't really an opportunity for fraud by providing bad information.
I have no real contention with the rest of your statements, just this one.
It means exactly that. Just TRY to boot System 6.0.8 on your iMac. It isn't going to happen. The needed ROM file isn't a part of the old Mac OS.
Oh please. What a strawman. What if I try to boot, say, Mac OS 9 on that iMac? It will work.
This is not the Windows world. It is possible to port OSes to a new processor architecture without totally changing the character of the OS.
If you think that Mac OS 9 and System 6 are not related just because they changed processors, think again. There is an unbelievable amount of old cruft running under the hood, even in the very last Mac OS.
From NeXT, X draws mostly inspiration as well. The original Mach kernel can't be run on a PowerPC. It had to be rewritten. NeXT did not code for the PowerPC because the chip did not exist when they were putting out hardware.
There are these cool things called 'high-level languages'. They allow you to write code which can be easily ported across processor architectures. You seem to be under the impression that moving from on processor architecture to another necessitates a total rewrite, which is an extremely odd idea to have. It is completely unimportant whether NeXT coded for the PowerPC or not. Apple is still using a ton of their code. Do you think kernels have to be written in assembly? Kernels can be ported without a total rewrite, just like any other piece of software. And beyond that, the kernel is a tiny piece of a full OS, and the full OS has tons of NeXT pieces wandering around in it.
That whole Yellow Box/Blue Box business went on at Apple, not NeXT.
You're right as far as the name goes, that was my mistake. But Yellow Box was a direct evolution of OpenStep Enterprise for Windows. OpenStep ran on a ton of different platforms. Apple's Cocoa sadly throws away the cross-platform goodness, but Cocoa is still a direct evolution of those APIs.
Somewhere stashed away, I have Rhapsody DR 1. I used to run in on a PowerMac 7300.
How fun! I followed all of the developer releases (yes, in an unofficial fashion) up through the Public Beta. There is a very clear evolution from Rhapsody through Mac OS X. Rhapsody really was just NeXT ported to the PowerPC, and OS X is just NeXT ported to the PowerPC, version 3 or something.
The entire point of buying NeXT (besides getting their old CEO back) was that Apple was completely unable to build a new OS from scratch. They tried three or four times, and each project fell flat on its nose. They looked at buying either Be or NeXT, and using their OS as a base to build a next-generation Apple OS. They decided to go with NeXT, and that's exactly what they did.
Pretty much every time a government decides to take matters in hand and help provide silly little things like food and shelter to people, it falls flat. Ironically, the things which are most necessary to life seem to be the things that are most necessary for the government to simply stay out and let the market work.
Most fuel spend in a modern airliner doesn't go into that airliner's kinetic energy, it goes into overcoming atmospheric drag. A scamjet running at mach ten is going to be experiencing much less drag than a regular airliner, because it will be much higher. To keep from using a truly nutty amount of fuel, as well as to avoid melting from the heat, it will fly high where the atmosphere is much less dense. As such, you can't come up with a simple relation between speed and fuel consumption. It is entirely possible and even realistic that a hypersonic airplane would use less fuel than a normal subsonic airliner when flying long distances.
Concorde's massive costs were mostly maintenance, not fuel. This is also why they managed to fly it for twenty years and then suddenly decided to drop it. As aircraft age, they get more expensive to maintain, and the Concorde fleet had become too old to run without losing money for its owners.
They can't rename the widgets. Their names are actually the names of the Objective-C classes that implement them. Changing those class names would break all Cocoa programs and all Cocoa code in existence. So they're stuck with them for life, it seems.
Feh, get a clue. The original Mac OS ran on m68k too, does that mean it can't run on my computer because I have a PowerPC?
Mac OS X draws from three sources, Mac OS, BSD, and NeXT. From BSD it draws a lot of low level stuff and part of the kernel. From NeXT it draws some other low level stuff and the rest of the kernel, along with a bunch of interface ideas. From Mac OS, it draws inspiration.
Yes, Apple did lots of work. But that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of NeXT code still working away under the surface. As just one minor example, look through any random Cocoa headers, and you'll find #ifdefs for WIN32, which are left over from Yellow Box's Windows NT days. Just look at the progression of developer releases, from Rhapsody on forward, all the way through to Mac OS X. The early developer releases were basically NeXT with a Mac-looking interface, ported to the PowerPC. The system evolved from there until you get what we have today.
The Internet's system of breaking all data up into small, discrete packets and routing each packet to its destination independently is totally different from the traditional telephone system, which creates 'connections' in the system, which take your data from point A to point B. Experience with the Internet is starting to show us that, while packet systems are somewhat harder to get right technically, they are incredibly more versatile and useful. Even the telcos are realizing this as they start to route voice traffic over IP-based systems. So it is entirely conceivable that the Internet will take over for everything, and even though you still have the traditional phone lines, they all just hook into somebody's IP system once they get out of your house.
iTunes uses QuickTime to play its files, meaning that it supports any file that QT supports, which is a hell of a lot. Not only that, but QT is very extensible, so third parties can add more formats. There's already an ogg plugin out there, and anybody who wanted to could make whatever they wanted. Although as far as I know, it only supports arbitrary QT formats for playback, not for encoding.
I love how people always compare things to Windows, which is the most backwards, un-advanced OS ever.
If you want to compare GUIs, compare with Mac OS X. OpenGL-accelerated drawing? Check. Incredibly rich graphics in apps? Check. No need to wait until 2006. And of course, by definition, right now X is still where it is now.
If Linux always strove to play catch-up with Windows, it would be horrible. Fortunately, it doesn't do that, except in the area of the GUI. It's no surprise, then, that Linux's GUI isn't very good.
Exposure to danger from cars is not voluntary. There is almost no place in the world where you can have a reasonable standard of living and not have to move from place to place in a space that is shared with cars. Whether you are driving a car, riding a bicycle, or walking, you are exposed to random danger from other people's mistakes. There are a very few regions in a very few cities where no cars are allowed, but not really enough to count. How many people could find housing and a job in that area and never have to leave it?
Of course, people don't think that way, so there is a perception of responsibility.
I obviously forgot about the other end of things. I was only thinking about the Moon end of the whole operation. My apologies.