The radio spectrum is widely searched because radio waves permeate the universe in a way other portions of the EM spectrum do not. The hydrogen band is a popular because any civilization looking to map interstellar hydrogen in the galaxy will come across the signal. You want to put up a billboard where people will pass by. Radio also tends to be pretty easy to generate and listen to.
However you're under a common misconception, we're not likely to find other civilizations based on the TV signals leaked into space. Even our most powerful radar systems wouldn't be detectable more than a few lightyears from our solar system, as the signals travel though space they'll become harder andharder to pick out of the background noise. In order for someone to find us or for us to find someone else we'll need to see a direct and powerful signal. Something like sending the Arecibo message repeatedly to hundreds of thousands of stars all day everyday. If a civilization wanted to be found that is how they would likely do it, a bunch of automated radios beaming a signal all around their galactic neighborhood.
Going on about wild advanced technologies alien civilizations might have is meaningless in the context of ETI searches. There's ways to be found in the universe while making the fewest assumptions possible. If you've advanced to the point of sub-etha communication you're well aware of the path to that technological level and simply start at the beginning. Radio waves are the first communication technology that offer the possibility of interstellar communication.
If there are alien civilizations so unlike us we would never see their signals as communication then we miss out on finding them. Thems the breaks. space is so vast and the galaxy so filled with stars that entities similar to us are highly likely to exist, as likely as the ones entirely unlike us.
No one has really ever verified the assertion that Ogg Vorbis is not covered by any patents. The patent situation for Vorbis is a big unknown whereas it is well established for MP3 and AAC (and WMA for manufacturers that use it). If a big manufacturer researched Vorbis' patent situation and found it infringed on some patents somewhere they would have spent all that time and money for nothing. If they avoid Vorbis all together it costs them nothing. An insignificant number of people even know what Ogg Vorbis is and only a fraction of that will only buy a music player that supports it. Small manufacturers are free to include Ogg Vorbis support because people holding submarine patents covering technology in Vorbis don't give a shit about them. They're waiting for someone actually making money to support the codec.
Supergiant and hypergiant stars (like Eta Carinae and SN 2006gy's progenitor) don't have long lifetimes and were likely prevalent in the early universe. Their deaths could have formed a lot of the heavy elements in HE 1523-0901. Five hundred million years is plenty of time for a lot of 100-120 solar mass giants to burn out and go supernova. It's likely the remnants of these early giants produced most of the stellar nurseries the next generation of less massive stars were born in.
The fact the SSHCL is able to get 67kW out of a solid state system is very impressive. Most solid state lasers of this sort have been stuck below 10kW and are only about 1% efficient, a 1kW laser needs 1MW of input power 99% of which needs to be shed by a cooling system. Solid state lasers have a definite advantage over chemical ones like the THEL and ABL because their "ammunition" supply is essentially only limited by the amount of electricity they've got available. Chemical lasers consumer reactants in the lasing process and have a finite number of shots before those reactants are exhausted. Those reactants take up a lot of space as well, Isreal's THEL system requires four semi trailers worth of equipment to shoot down small katyusha rockets and mortar rounds.
The Air Force has a real hard on for laser systems. Though it doesn't say specifically in the article it appears this lab was awarded the AFRL's contract to produce a solid state equivalent to the ATL system being developed largely by Boeing. The ATL is a smaller cousin of the ABL weighing in at about 70kW. It's an order of magnitude lower power than the roughly 1MW ABL but is also quite a bit smaller. The ABL requires a 747, the ATL is being developed to be mounted on a C-130 or V-22 Osprey. A solid state ATL would be far more useful for the Air Force than a chemical one. A solid state laser system on an aircraft could be powered by generators hooked to the engines and fired an indefinite number of times in flight.
That sounds nice in theory, but really, how often are people passing around documents to other people for shared editing, when these people don't have access to the same word processor?
All the time.
We can already share documents for display and printing - it's not a problem (pdf, html, etc.). Multiple people editing the same document have access to the same word processor in just about every scenario I can think of (corporations, school).
Not every company decides to mass-upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Office as soon as it is released. Most companes wait until their next buying cycle comes up and grab what it available then. It is not unheard of for systems in the same company to be running different versions of software packages. The situation is similar in schools, institution machines are likely running whatever was purchased in the last upgrade cycle while the freshmen class starting in the fall has whatever new software was available when they got their shiny new laptops. In both corporations and schools any number of versions of Office may have to coexist.
Puzzle games that make you think don't have a place anymore, in a world where if there's no walkthrough or FAQ about a game, it is considered "frustrating and impossible".
I don't think it's puzzle adventure games not having a place. The problem is too many developers over the years have stuck puzzles where they don't belong and/or have made them illogical and obfuscated. I want to play thorugh a game and be part of a story, not decipher Linear A to get to level 2. When resorting to a FAQ or walkthru I very rarely think "doh, I should have thought of that!" and more often it's "WTF were these people on when they came up with that?".
I'm in the exact same situation. Every now and again I get tempted with cable. There's some shows either not available on iTunes or ones I would only watch in passing but still might like to watch. Then the analytical part of my brain kicks in and starts tossing numbers around. I'm not home at all during the day and busy myself for a while even after I get home. As such I'm only going to watch TV between maybe 10-12. Many of the shows I'd like to watch aren't in that time slot on any channel. The ones that are I can buy cheaply on iTunes (Daily Show and Colbert Report).
In order to watch TV on my schedule I need to pay for dozens of channels I'll never watch to have access to the handful I will watch. I also need to pay for some sort of PVR to timeshift the things I want. I'm also contracted to pay the cable bill even when there's nothing on I want to see. I also can't take my PVR and TV with me to watch at lunch or when I go get coffee.
What a red herring. There's no physical or logical lockouts on music on an iPod. The interface of the iPod relies on song indexing. When songs are added to it they're given a four character file name which is much cheaper to store as an index in RAM than a 255 character name. The song's metadata is added to the iPod's database and displayed in a variety of ways. Smart Albums and different sorting methods (by Artist, Album, Song, Composer, etc.) aren't going to work without an index of the device's content. Dragging files to arbitrary directories is not condusive to indexing as the iPod would then have to store file names up to 255 characters and do all the indexing itself instead of the host computer. A 2GHz PC can do the indexing and file organization a lot faster than an 80MHz iPod. A feature to make the iPod useful to a large number of people and an effective device is definitely not a defect.
If you want drop and drop support stop complaining about the iPod and go buy a player that supports it.
Unfortunately big data carriers want to collect the toll and the tax. I pay for my internet access from AT&T, Google pays for their access through whomever. We've both paid our taxes and should be able to communicate as fast as network conditions allow. However AT&T wants Google to pay a toll for their packets to enter their network to get to me. If Google doesn't pay their packets will get throttled while Yahoo! (who did pay) will get full speed.
This means that Google and Yahoo! can only compete on fair ground if they both pay AT&T's extortion fees. This year it might be $1 but next year it might be $2. Smaller companies than Yahoo! and Google are in an even bigger rut as they may not have the capital to pay AT&T's extortion fees. They will never have the opportunity to compete with the likes of Google or Yahoo! even if they provide a better product that more people want.
The Tier 1 carriers can also throttle/filter traffic based on content if they're immune to common carrier rules. As a common carrier they only have to provide the connection for their customers. This is a low margin business so they want to offer services with better margins (IPTV, VoIP, etc). Being a carrier and service provider means they can make the competition's services unattractive by throttling them or increasing the competition's overhead by charging them for access to carrier's customers. This is compounded by the fact ILECs are owned by the Tier 1 carriers so competing services have to traverse the carrier's lines to get to end users.
Fair use does not involve using a sublicensed product against the terms of the license agreement. When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth you can license it and do with it what you please. Until then you have to deal with the licenses Google Earth's data falls under or not use it. Google is actually being pretty generous in providing a Google Earth/Maps API as they're going out on a limb licensing content from other vendors. There's a reason all of the images have Google logo watermarks or watermarks of the company that collected the data.
You want less violence, life in the United States is just too rough for you, leave.
If someone has a dissenting opinion they should not have to leave the country. What that statement suggests is they you do not believe in the system of government this country was founded on. You're accepting violence as a way of life and shutting down any possibilities for civil discourse which the founders of this country would likely endorse. I doubt you really believe those things but that's what your statement suggests. If the US is too violent that is something that needs to be corrected, not run away from.
When I was a kid we would dub tapes for our friends. A generation or two down the line the audio sounded like shit. Reripping an iTS song to CD then to AAC/MP3 sounds scores better than our dubs used to. The quality difference is such I doubt most people could tell the difference. With tape-tape dubbing you definitely could tell the difference. So you're trying to give someone something they didn't pay for. Oh no boo hoo you can't give them a pristine digital copy when you buy off iTunes unless you load it on their iPod. If this solution does not fit your needs buy CDs.
While the early CRT-based iMacs did help Apple, in my opinion it wasn't until the arrival of the second-generation LCD-based iMac that that sales really took off.
You would be wrong about that. The G3 iMac sold extremely well during its lifetime. In the four years after its introduction about six million were sold. At the time selling an AiO computer was pretty novel, configuring it out of the box to easily connect to the internet even moreso.
I think Apple's stuck with wires up to this point because they're pretty foolproof. If you want to hook your iPod up to your TV or computer you just plug it in. There's no waiting while it searches for a connection, there's no selecting some device's name, there's not even really much thought behind it. Anyone can plug something in. It's also much higher bandwidth and more reliable than pretty much any wireless system you're going to find. Bluetooth is horrifically slow for transfering large files and 802.11b isn't much better.
There's also the question of interface. Say you want to share some files between devices. You need to turn on the sharing, select the device you want to share with (once your device has scanned for other devices), then select a file to send. Hopefully it goes right or you'll have to do half of the process over again. Now imagine doing all of this with a single directional button on a Zune. No thanks.
iChat with a DV camera also tends to work really well. A big advantage of a DV camera is a big lens and manual controls. Instead of having to trust the iSight's auto white balance and brightness (or use iGlasses) you can manually set what you need to get a good shot. A DV cam with an IR remote also works well when doing presentations or group chats where you might want the camera to zoom in on the frame sometimes but zoom out to emcompass everyone.
Yahoo! couldn't be popular because it is the default homepage of millions of SBC/AT&T customers who don't know any better? Nah that's silly. Yahoo! has some nice services and some are indeed better than Google's offerings but for the most part people simply stick with their ISP's default homepage.
The WMAP mission lent evidence to the theory that early on after the Big Bang there was a period of rapid inflation of the universe. During and right after the big bang our current physical laws didn't exist in their current state because of the fabulous amount of energy. The inflation period of the universe could have very well happened at some velocity above c because there wasn't really an upper limit to c. Because this would have happened before the first galaxies started emitting light it is entirely possible that the upper boundries of the universe are farther away than we can actually see.
You're conflating two different markets and grouping all of their potential problems into one single lump and trying to use it as an argument. We'll start with your corporate user example. Let's make it into a hypothetical situation, Joe has an older ThinkPad he wants to replace with a MacBook. The MacBook he is eyeing is $1499, a similarly configured Lenovo R60 is $1498. On the ThinkPad Joe can keep using his old Windows software without much of an issue. On the MacBook a copy of Windows XP with either BootCamp ($0) or Parallels ($50) and he could use the same existing software. In raw dollar value Joe is paying a little more for the MacBook in order to run his old Windows software. For that price however he gains the ability to run not only MacOS X (legally) on his notebook but also Windows. The business value of his notebook has increased with the Mac because it can run two major operating systems. Depending on Joe's job this can be a huge benefit to him.
Your next viable argument is hardware compatibility. This is a very vague argument as there's no specification of what you would have to miss out on. The MacBook has optical/analog audio in and out ports, USB and 6-pin FireWire ports, and comes with a built-in camera. It also has an IR remote which works just as well with FrontRow as it does with Keynote (a feature of my MBP I used this week). The MacBook also has a mini-DVI port that supports DVI, VGA, and S-video/composite adapters. So out of the box the MacBook has a bit nicer hardware than the ThinkPad. There's also pretty broad support for external USB and FireWire devices. A shitty Dell AiO printer/scanner/fax might be only partly supported but since you aren't giving specifics it is hard to say how the MacBook would fare.
You bring up gaming in the same breath as business software needs. Is this a business laptop or a personal gaming machine? The ThinkPad probably isn't going to be a gaming powerhouse and probably shouldn't be if it is your work computer. The MacBook running Windows will play any game a comparable PC laptop (Core Duo w/ Intel GMA 950) will. You're picking a topic you think is an unarguable position from the Mac side since you know there's fewer games available. This is a little disingenuous on your part. You then mention hardware upgrades in the same post you mention a ThinkPad. Are you speaking specifically to notebooks or are you encompassing every type of computer made? I've yet to see a majority of PC laptops be upgradable in any meaningful sense, tablet PCs most certainly are not. I'm also wondering what PC OEMs support meaningful hardware upgrades to their systems. It seems to me Dell and HP would rather see you buy a new PC than upgrade a tower sitting on your desk. I've never asked HP how much it would cost to upgrade the motherboard and processor in my grandparents' PC, I suppose you have asked Apple?
I think the biggest mistake you make is to write off the technical capability of the average computer user. They're far more sophisticated than you give them credit for. In 1996 you might have been a bit closer to the truth. Now you've got a lot of people owning PCs at home and using them at work or school. The "average" PC using teen likely has a MySpace page, has posted pictures/video online, listens to music on an iPod, uses some form of web-based e-mail (Yahoo!, Hotmail), and has a working knowlege of Google. This was all stuff geeks were lauded for ten years ago. To have a website or even an e-mail address was entirely uncommon. It's hard to find people now without websites and e-mail addresses. There's entire generations of computer users that have grown up with them. They might be a little young to be buying their own computers but they heavily influence their parents buying decisions. Even their parents now have a pretty decent amount of experience using computers. They likely used them in high school and college. They are also pretty likely to use them professionally in some respect. Even "basic" users now do far more than they ever used to with computers. To suggest they wouldn't grasp a fully GUI environment with common visual metaphors (a Mac) to their old PC is foolish. I think you're writing these people off based on some sort of mythical archetype you've created for yourself.
I don't think you fully understand the maxim. It isn't that you must select the easier explainations of some phenomena. It does however lend itself to the idea that when two ideas have equal amounts of predictive capability you should probably choose the one making the fewest number of assumptions. Your comments about the Earth being flat and plate tectonics are not situations where the maxim would even apply. A flat Earth hypothesis does not explain observed phenomena so it can't possibly compete with a round Earth hypothesis. The same goes for plate tectonics, the idea might not have made sense to ancient peoples as they might not have had an accurate enough picture of the Earth as a whole, some still thought it was flat and the stars were holes in a gigantic crystal sphere encircling it.
In general I think responding to "Slashdot is wrong" posts is pointless. The/. blurb was confused, while people probably shouldn't believe everything seen on the main page having a post that corrects the issue doesn't hurt. Not that my post has been modded up to 5, someone skimming the comments at +3 will see it and find correct links and maybe discover something new. Maybe possibly an editor will see my correction and post a correction to the article so people simply skimming the main page of RSS feed won't be getting the wrong information. A stupid blurb about three halves being confused liars that are wrong is absurd. Don't be a dildo.
The posted/. story is confusing the Mars Pathfinder mission and the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The Pathfinder mission was in 1997. The MERs landed in January of 2004 and is still running, far beyond the expected lifetime of the rovers.
This sentiment is baffling to me. You're living on a big hunk of emperical evidence. If the planets of our solar system can form it follows logically that planets can form around other stars. If our solar system is like even a small fraction of other solar systems we can use information about ours to look for other ones. There's several methods to find extrasolar planets, and quite often multiple methods can be used on the same system to verify the findings of other observations. Large planets cause a star to appear to wobble. This happens because the two bodies are orbiting their mutual barycenter. By keeping track of a star's periodic doppler shift it is possible to determine the mass of an orbiting planet or planets. This method can also be used to confirm findings from planetary transit observations. When a planet's orbit brings it between its parent star and us the light of the star will dim slightly and for a period of time related to the size of the planet and length of its orbital period. With this information the mass of the planet can be determined. If this meshes with the star's wobble you've got pretty good evidence of a planet orbiting that star.
Slashdot Mirror
The radio spectrum is widely searched because radio waves permeate the universe in a way other portions of the EM spectrum do not. The hydrogen band is a popular because any civilization looking to map interstellar hydrogen in the galaxy will come across the signal. You want to put up a billboard where people will pass by. Radio also tends to be pretty easy to generate and listen to.
However you're under a common misconception, we're not likely to find other civilizations based on the TV signals leaked into space. Even our most powerful radar systems wouldn't be detectable more than a few lightyears from our solar system, as the signals travel though space they'll become harder andharder to pick out of the background noise. In order for someone to find us or for us to find someone else we'll need to see a direct and powerful signal. Something like sending the Arecibo message repeatedly to hundreds of thousands of stars all day everyday. If a civilization wanted to be found that is how they would likely do it, a bunch of automated radios beaming a signal all around their galactic neighborhood.
Going on about wild advanced technologies alien civilizations might have is meaningless in the context of ETI searches. There's ways to be found in the universe while making the fewest assumptions possible. If you've advanced to the point of sub-etha communication you're well aware of the path to that technological level and simply start at the beginning. Radio waves are the first communication technology that offer the possibility of interstellar communication.
If there are alien civilizations so unlike us we would never see their signals as communication then we miss out on finding them. Thems the breaks. space is so vast and the galaxy so filled with stars that entities similar to us are highly likely to exist, as likely as the ones entirely unlike us.
No one has really ever verified the assertion that Ogg Vorbis is not covered by any patents. The patent situation for Vorbis is a big unknown whereas it is well established for MP3 and AAC (and WMA for manufacturers that use it). If a big manufacturer researched Vorbis' patent situation and found it infringed on some patents somewhere they would have spent all that time and money for nothing. If they avoid Vorbis all together it costs them nothing. An insignificant number of people even know what Ogg Vorbis is and only a fraction of that will only buy a music player that supports it. Small manufacturers are free to include Ogg Vorbis support because people holding submarine patents covering technology in Vorbis don't give a shit about them. They're waiting for someone actually making money to support the codec.
Supergiant and hypergiant stars (like Eta Carinae and SN 2006gy's progenitor) don't have long lifetimes and were likely prevalent in the early universe. Their deaths could have formed a lot of the heavy elements in HE 1523-0901. Five hundred million years is plenty of time for a lot of 100-120 solar mass giants to burn out and go supernova. It's likely the remnants of these early giants produced most of the stellar nurseries the next generation of less massive stars were born in.
The fact the SSHCL is able to get 67kW out of a solid state system is very impressive. Most solid state lasers of this sort have been stuck below 10kW and are only about 1% efficient, a 1kW laser needs 1MW of input power 99% of which needs to be shed by a cooling system. Solid state lasers have a definite advantage over chemical ones like the THEL and ABL because their "ammunition" supply is essentially only limited by the amount of electricity they've got available. Chemical lasers consumer reactants in the lasing process and have a finite number of shots before those reactants are exhausted. Those reactants take up a lot of space as well, Isreal's THEL system requires four semi trailers worth of equipment to shoot down small katyusha rockets and mortar rounds.
The Air Force has a real hard on for laser systems. Though it doesn't say specifically in the article it appears this lab was awarded the AFRL's contract to produce a solid state equivalent to the ATL system being developed largely by Boeing. The ATL is a smaller cousin of the ABL weighing in at about 70kW. It's an order of magnitude lower power than the roughly 1MW ABL but is also quite a bit smaller. The ABL requires a 747, the ATL is being developed to be mounted on a C-130 or V-22 Osprey. A solid state ATL would be far more useful for the Air Force than a chemical one. A solid state laser system on an aircraft could be powered by generators hooked to the engines and fired an indefinite number of times in flight.
All the time.
Not every company decides to mass-upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Office as soon as it is released. Most companes wait until their next buying cycle comes up and grab what it available then. It is not unheard of for systems in the same company to be running different versions of software packages. The situation is similar in schools, institution machines are likely running whatever was purchased in the last upgrade cycle while the freshmen class starting in the fall has whatever new software was available when they got their shiny new laptops. In both corporations and schools any number of versions of Office may have to coexist.
Oh shit you just invented load balancing!
I'm in the exact same situation. Every now and again I get tempted with cable. There's some shows either not available on iTunes or ones I would only watch in passing but still might like to watch. Then the analytical part of my brain kicks in and starts tossing numbers around. I'm not home at all during the day and busy myself for a while even after I get home. As such I'm only going to watch TV between maybe 10-12. Many of the shows I'd like to watch aren't in that time slot on any channel. The ones that are I can buy cheaply on iTunes (Daily Show and Colbert Report).
In order to watch TV on my schedule I need to pay for dozens of channels I'll never watch to have access to the handful I will watch. I also need to pay for some sort of PVR to timeshift the things I want. I'm also contracted to pay the cable bill even when there's nothing on I want to see. I also can't take my PVR and TV with me to watch at lunch or when I go get coffee.
What a red herring. There's no physical or logical lockouts on music on an iPod. The interface of the iPod relies on song indexing. When songs are added to it they're given a four character file name which is much cheaper to store as an index in RAM than a 255 character name. The song's metadata is added to the iPod's database and displayed in a variety of ways. Smart Albums and different sorting methods (by Artist, Album, Song, Composer, etc.) aren't going to work without an index of the device's content. Dragging files to arbitrary directories is not condusive to indexing as the iPod would then have to store file names up to 255 characters and do all the indexing itself instead of the host computer. A 2GHz PC can do the indexing and file organization a lot faster than an 80MHz iPod. A feature to make the iPod useful to a large number of people and an effective device is definitely not a defect.
If you want drop and drop support stop complaining about the iPod and go buy a player that supports it.
Unfortunately big data carriers want to collect the toll and the tax. I pay for my internet access from AT&T, Google pays for their access through whomever. We've both paid our taxes and should be able to communicate as fast as network conditions allow. However AT&T wants Google to pay a toll for their packets to enter their network to get to me. If Google doesn't pay their packets will get throttled while Yahoo! (who did pay) will get full speed.
This means that Google and Yahoo! can only compete on fair ground if they both pay AT&T's extortion fees. This year it might be $1 but next year it might be $2. Smaller companies than Yahoo! and Google are in an even bigger rut as they may not have the capital to pay AT&T's extortion fees. They will never have the opportunity to compete with the likes of Google or Yahoo! even if they provide a better product that more people want.
The Tier 1 carriers can also throttle/filter traffic based on content if they're immune to common carrier rules. As a common carrier they only have to provide the connection for their customers. This is a low margin business so they want to offer services with better margins (IPTV, VoIP, etc). Being a carrier and service provider means they can make the competition's services unattractive by throttling them or increasing the competition's overhead by charging them for access to carrier's customers. This is compounded by the fact ILECs are owned by the Tier 1 carriers so competing services have to traverse the carrier's lines to get to end users.
Fair use does not involve using a sublicensed product against the terms of the license agreement. When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth you can license it and do with it what you please. Until then you have to deal with the licenses Google Earth's data falls under or not use it. Google is actually being pretty generous in providing a Google Earth/Maps API as they're going out on a limb licensing content from other vendors. There's a reason all of the images have Google logo watermarks or watermarks of the company that collected the data.
If someone has a dissenting opinion they should not have to leave the country. What that statement suggests is they you do not believe in the system of government this country was founded on. You're accepting violence as a way of life and shutting down any possibilities for civil discourse which the founders of this country would likely endorse. I doubt you really believe those things but that's what your statement suggests. If the US is too violent that is something that needs to be corrected, not run away from.
Hey Cory Doctrow is posting AC again.
When I was a kid we would dub tapes for our friends. A generation or two down the line the audio sounded like shit. Reripping an iTS song to CD then to AAC/MP3 sounds scores better than our dubs used to. The quality difference is such I doubt most people could tell the difference. With tape-tape dubbing you definitely could tell the difference. So you're trying to give someone something they didn't pay for. Oh no boo hoo you can't give them a pristine digital copy when you buy off iTunes unless you load it on their iPod. If this solution does not fit your needs buy CDs.
You would be wrong about that. The G3 iMac sold extremely well during its lifetime. In the four years after its introduction about six million were sold. At the time selling an AiO computer was pretty novel, configuring it out of the box to easily connect to the internet even moreso.
Wireless...right...
I think Apple's stuck with wires up to this point because they're pretty foolproof. If you want to hook your iPod up to your TV or computer you just plug it in. There's no waiting while it searches for a connection, there's no selecting some device's name, there's not even really much thought behind it. Anyone can plug something in. It's also much higher bandwidth and more reliable than pretty much any wireless system you're going to find. Bluetooth is horrifically slow for transfering large files and 802.11b isn't much better.
There's also the question of interface. Say you want to share some files between devices. You need to turn on the sharing, select the device you want to share with (once your device has scanned for other devices), then select a file to send. Hopefully it goes right or you'll have to do half of the process over again. Now imagine doing all of this with a single directional button on a Zune. No thanks.
iChat with a DV camera also tends to work really well. A big advantage of a DV camera is a big lens and manual controls. Instead of having to trust the iSight's auto white balance and brightness (or use iGlasses) you can manually set what you need to get a good shot. A DV cam with an IR remote also works well when doing presentations or group chats where you might want the camera to zoom in on the frame sometimes but zoom out to emcompass everyone.
Yahoo! couldn't be popular because it is the default homepage of millions of SBC/AT&T customers who don't know any better? Nah that's silly. Yahoo! has some nice services and some are indeed better than Google's offerings but for the most part people simply stick with their ISP's default homepage.
The WMAP mission lent evidence to the theory that early on after the Big Bang there was a period of rapid inflation of the universe. During and right after the big bang our current physical laws didn't exist in their current state because of the fabulous amount of energy. The inflation period of the universe could have very well happened at some velocity above c because there wasn't really an upper limit to c. Because this would have happened before the first galaxies started emitting light it is entirely possible that the upper boundries of the universe are farther away than we can actually see.
You're conflating two different markets and grouping all of their potential problems into one single lump and trying to use it as an argument. We'll start with your corporate user example. Let's make it into a hypothetical situation, Joe has an older ThinkPad he wants to replace with a MacBook. The MacBook he is eyeing is $1499, a similarly configured Lenovo R60 is $1498. On the ThinkPad Joe can keep using his old Windows software without much of an issue. On the MacBook a copy of Windows XP with either BootCamp ($0) or Parallels ($50) and he could use the same existing software. In raw dollar value Joe is paying a little more for the MacBook in order to run his old Windows software. For that price however he gains the ability to run not only MacOS X (legally) on his notebook but also Windows. The business value of his notebook has increased with the Mac because it can run two major operating systems. Depending on Joe's job this can be a huge benefit to him.
Your next viable argument is hardware compatibility. This is a very vague argument as there's no specification of what you would have to miss out on. The MacBook has optical/analog audio in and out ports, USB and 6-pin FireWire ports, and comes with a built-in camera. It also has an IR remote which works just as well with FrontRow as it does with Keynote (a feature of my MBP I used this week). The MacBook also has a mini-DVI port that supports DVI, VGA, and S-video/composite adapters. So out of the box the MacBook has a bit nicer hardware than the ThinkPad. There's also pretty broad support for external USB and FireWire devices. A shitty Dell AiO printer/scanner/fax might be only partly supported but since you aren't giving specifics it is hard to say how the MacBook would fare.
You bring up gaming in the same breath as business software needs. Is this a business laptop or a personal gaming machine? The ThinkPad probably isn't going to be a gaming powerhouse and probably shouldn't be if it is your work computer. The MacBook running Windows will play any game a comparable PC laptop (Core Duo w/ Intel GMA 950) will. You're picking a topic you think is an unarguable position from the Mac side since you know there's fewer games available. This is a little disingenuous on your part. You then mention hardware upgrades in the same post you mention a ThinkPad. Are you speaking specifically to notebooks or are you encompassing every type of computer made? I've yet to see a majority of PC laptops be upgradable in any meaningful sense, tablet PCs most certainly are not. I'm also wondering what PC OEMs support meaningful hardware upgrades to their systems. It seems to me Dell and HP would rather see you buy a new PC than upgrade a tower sitting on your desk. I've never asked HP how much it would cost to upgrade the motherboard and processor in my grandparents' PC, I suppose you have asked Apple?
I think the biggest mistake you make is to write off the technical capability of the average computer user. They're far more sophisticated than you give them credit for. In 1996 you might have been a bit closer to the truth. Now you've got a lot of people owning PCs at home and using them at work or school. The "average" PC using teen likely has a MySpace page, has posted pictures/video online, listens to music on an iPod, uses some form of web-based e-mail (Yahoo!, Hotmail), and has a working knowlege of Google. This was all stuff geeks were lauded for ten years ago. To have a website or even an e-mail address was entirely uncommon. It's hard to find people now without websites and e-mail addresses. There's entire generations of computer users that have grown up with them. They might be a little young to be buying their own computers but they heavily influence their parents buying decisions. Even their parents now have a pretty decent amount of experience using computers. They likely used them in high school and college. They are also pretty likely to use them professionally in some respect. Even "basic" users now do far more than they ever used to with computers. To suggest they wouldn't grasp a fully GUI environment with common visual metaphors (a Mac) to their old PC is foolish. I think you're writing these people off based on some sort of mythical archetype you've created for yourself.
I don't think you fully understand the maxim. It isn't that you must select the easier explainations of some phenomena. It does however lend itself to the idea that when two ideas have equal amounts of predictive capability you should probably choose the one making the fewest number of assumptions. Your comments about the Earth being flat and plate tectonics are not situations where the maxim would even apply. A flat Earth hypothesis does not explain observed phenomena so it can't possibly compete with a round Earth hypothesis. The same goes for plate tectonics, the idea might not have made sense to ancient peoples as they might not have had an accurate enough picture of the Earth as a whole, some still thought it was flat and the stars were holes in a gigantic crystal sphere encircling it.
In general I think responding to "Slashdot is wrong" posts is pointless. The /. blurb was confused, while people probably shouldn't believe everything seen on the main page having a post that corrects the issue doesn't hurt. Not that my post has been modded up to 5, someone skimming the comments at +3 will see it and find correct links and maybe discover something new. Maybe possibly an editor will see my correction and post a correction to the article so people simply skimming the main page of RSS feed won't be getting the wrong information. A stupid blurb about three halves being confused liars that are wrong is absurd. Don't be a dildo.
The posted /. story is confusing the Mars Pathfinder mission and the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The Pathfinder mission was in 1997. The MERs landed in January of 2004 and is still running, far beyond the expected lifetime of the rovers.
This sentiment is baffling to me. You're living on a big hunk of emperical evidence. If the planets of our solar system can form it follows logically that planets can form around other stars. If our solar system is like even a small fraction of other solar systems we can use information about ours to look for other ones. There's several methods to find extrasolar planets, and quite often multiple methods can be used on the same system to verify the findings of other observations. Large planets cause a star to appear to wobble. This happens because the two bodies are orbiting their mutual barycenter. By keeping track of a star's periodic doppler shift it is possible to determine the mass of an orbiting planet or planets. This method can also be used to confirm findings from planetary transit observations. When a planet's orbit brings it between its parent star and us the light of the star will dim slightly and for a period of time related to the size of the planet and length of its orbital period. With this information the mass of the planet can be determined. If this meshes with the star's wobble you've got pretty good evidence of a planet orbiting that star.
Without its hardware division Apple could go in the bin right next to other OS producing companies: Be, IBM's OS/2 division, Digital Research, NeXT.