If you could show there's an Alpha Centaurian snow-ball making machine flinging comets into our solar system, then the need for the Oort cloud vanishes. However, until you do, you should expect people to scoff at such a theory and pick something that actually seems plausible.
At the moment, the Oort cloud is the most plausible, and the alternatives (like the extra-solar snow-ball flinger, or the even less plausible exploding planet) are ignored. This is as it should be.
Composition? We can tell where various meteorites came from by their composition -- we know when a particular rock originated from the asteroid belt or was blasted off the surface of the moon or Mars by looking at the composition. Since we haven't done it yet we certainly don't know, but it's quite possible that it would be equally obvious whether a comet originated from our own cloud or some other star's, based on its composition, assuming each star has its own, detectably different balance of elements. This probably wouldn't be true of first generation stars, but second or third generation stars like our Sun will have an overall solar system composition that is dependent upon the exact size and nature of the star whose supernova explosion created the elements that later came together to form it and its surrounding planets. This may be easily detectable. Of course, we'll have to get our hands on some extra-solar comets to be sure. If it isn't, we'll just never know if we have or not, but if it is, it should be quickly obvious once we do.
But it *is* a poor security practice to use them on your website.
Bzzt. You don't even know what my website is, or what function it has. If you think you can render a judgment on whether it's poor security practice or not without knowing that, you aren't qualified to be giving advice on security matters.
Standard Oil was renamed to "Exxon", and recently posted the largest annual profits of ANY company, EVER.
Nope. Around here, all the Standard Oil stations were renamed Amoco, and later renamed BP. The company that was Standard Oil was ripped apart year ago. Parts of it went to Esso/Exxon, parts to Mobile (the two later merged into ExxonMobile), parts to Amoco (later absorbed by BP), parts to Chevron, parts to Texaco (Chevron and Texaco later merged into ChevronTexaco, then dropped Texaco from the name), parts to Conoco (now ConocoPhillips), and parts elsewhere as well. In fact, Standard Oil was broken up far more completely than Ma Bell, and although all the parts were larger merged into larger entities, they've not reformed with anywhere near the coherency than the baby bells have reformed. Unless ExxonMobile buys up BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon, and probably other companies that have various bits I don't even know about, Standard Oil will never be completely reformed into one.
Um, Standard Oil didn't "become" ExxonMobile any more than it became BP, or Chevon, or ConocoPhillips, to name a few other corporates that have subsequently gobbled up parts of Standard Oil.
It ought to be able to hold an Earth-like atmosphere indefinitely. It's not like an Earth-density atmosphere is anywhere near as dense as an atmosphere could be on an Earth-sized body. Two bodies to consider: Venus has an atmosphere much thicker than Earth's -- 90 atmospheres pressure at surface level, and Titan also at an atmosphere thicker than Earth's, with only a fraction of the mass of Mars. Mars is most definitely not too small to hold a dense atmosphere. It just doesn't happen to at the moment.
Cmon. They briefed the white house
about perchlorates? Really?
Yes.
They took time to tell the prez about perchlorates?
No. Is there some reason you believe the first implies the second? Are you under the impression that the only person in the White House is the president, or do you just suck at reading comprehension?
Neither display is actually telling you what you think it's telling you.
orly?
The signal strength bars on a mobile phone or laptop do, at least, say something about how strong the local signal is. But they don't tell you the ratio between that signal and the inevitable, and often very considerable, noise that accompanies it...
Um, yeah. Signal strength means signal strength, not signal-to-noise ratio. So what you're telling me is the signal strength bar tells me exactly what I thought it meant, my cell-phone is not lying to me, but if I was stupid enough to think signal strength means something other than signal strength, I might feel deceived later because I'm an idiot. Okie dokie.
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
Um, please tell me you don't actually work as an engineer at some reputable company. In any case, it should be noted that even if a coder can wave a magic wand and add a feature to a product in zero time, he's still just multiplied the amount of work QA needs to do, not to mention the additional work the documentation and support people need to do.
(Just wondering if you're not an engineer at all, not employed by a reputable company that actually supports its products, or are just a moron, unlike the people you accused of being morons because they have a more realistic picture of how actual companies work.)
The writing in the description is poorly constructed. When someone reads "It's an evolutionary release for the Norwegian software company, but it comes just days after Apple's iPhone 3G, with its highly capable Safari browser, went on sale" they would reasonably assume that in the context of the article, this "Browser War" has suddenly sprung up, and that all of the opening shots are being fired right now.
No they wouldn't. Why do so many people read things with the attitude of, "well, *I* understand what they said, but this is going to be confusing to the average reader [who is naturally not as smart as me] and thus I must step forward and defend these poor souls who will naturally draw wrong conclusions that only super-smart people [like me] will realize aren't true."
Of course, the "highly capable" Safari browser has been out for a year on the pre-3G iPhones too, a distinction that the text confuses terribly.
No it doesn't. It mentions that a new generation of iPhone is out, in context with a new version of Opera, and that entirely new browsers are coming. These are relevant facts, and there's nothing confused about them, despite your assertion that people [other than you] will misread what was said.
The 'browser war' has been mobile since the first day God crapped out a WAP-enabled cell phone, and just as humans went from sticks and rocks to atomic weapons, the years of mobile browsing 'warfare' has progressed to a point where the phones are almost within eyeshot of being as capable as the desktop machines.
Yup. And with a new generation of devices coming out with certain existing browsers, along with entirely new browsers being released soon, it's going to heat up quick.
To declare this a 'new war' is disingenuous at best, and manipulative of page hits for the purpose of generating advertising revenue at worst.
I think it goes without saying that humankind will eventually need more living space than what is offered here on Earth.
Why would such a highly questionable assertion "go without saying"? The more we modernize, the less we reproduce. In the most advanced and prosperous nations on Earth today, population growth figures are already trending into the negative, and there's no reason to assume this won't be true for the rest of the world as they too achieve higher levels of development. It's quite entirely possible we'll be using less living space in 2200 than we do today, given that there's a good possibility there will be a few billion people less on Earth than there are now.
Of course, there's no guarantee that will happen, either. But the reverse certainly doesn't "go without saying". It's far from obvious that such high levels of population will ever come to pass.
... Up until 60 years ago, traveling between the USA and Europe was on the order of months of time, rather than hours.
Excuse me? Believe it or not, we had something better than sailboats, even before 1948. The great trans-atlantic passenger lingers (e.g. the Titanic) would go between the USA and Europe in under a week. In 1938 (70 years ago), the Queen Mary did it in 3 days.
I know quite a bit of Russian, and that's news to me. According to this, Russian word for "soil" is pochva, and that's the word I'm familiar with.
Comments like this always leave me scratching my head. The second sentence is a complete non sequitur unless one has never heard of synonyms. I don't believe the author has never heard of synonyms. So what exactly were they thinking when they said this?
I really don't care. I'm gonna use whatever program I need to use to service my needs. If it behaves, great, if not I'm looking for something else.
I expect that there are more realists and people who use linux and other such software because it works and doesn't crash as opposed to it being pure OSS.
I used to be just like that. In fact, I still am, but I'm no longer a desktop Linux user. I still use Linux much of the time, I work with it daily on my servers, but my desktop is now OS X. I also have a WinXP desktop (mostly for games). I'll probably have a Linux desktop again in the future. I find the ideology commendable and I hope totally free software projects do well, but when I sit down in front of my own computer, I just want something that does what I need it to, and I'll use whatever does the job I need to do right now the best (which is why I end up working with three different operating systems every day -- each does something better than the other two, and when that's what I'm doing, I use the one that does it the best). I won't be swayed by philosophical arguments -- if you think one way it better, prove it. I'll run 100% free software 100% of the time on the day that 100% free software does 100% of the things I need done better than the alternatives. Until then, I'll be running mixed.
Heh. For the most part, you've just named a list of reasons why I prefer OS X over the alternatives. Probably the biggest thing on the list is the Zoom button. Windows got it completely wrong, and nearly every other GUI I've seen utterly borks it too. My biggest complaint about non-Mac GUI's was always the screwed up Zoom button, which would senselessly expand the window far beyond the limits of the contents, leaving huge amounts of empty space in the window blocking windows and desktop behind it for no reason at all whatsoever. I can understand why it's done that way -- it's easier to do. It's harder to get Zoom right than to just make a window take up the whole screen (whether that makes any sense or not) -- easy out for lazy programmers. But the lack of a proper Zoom button is a major GUI flaw IMHO, and throwing it a brain-dead Maximize button is a poor substitute.
The level of faith Americans have in corporations is utterly astounding. I don't quite get why it's okay to have huge, powerful organizations dictate policy undemocratically merely because they're doing it to make a profit. How does making a profit make the unilateral actions of powerful entities so much more trustworthy? Why is government by corporate fiat so much better than government by elected representatives?
If the FCC tells you what you can or can't do on the Internet, people are up in arms. When Comcast does it, people only grudgingly admit it might be a good idea for the FCC to tell them "don't do that". The mind boggles...
This reminds me of a friend of mine who always criticizes the prices of things he sees in restaurants. His big thing is how cheap all the materials are in a soda fountain. Setting aside initial cost for the machine and regular maintenance costs (which he always forgets for things), no matter what he's evaluating, he always leaves off the single most important cost: the cost of paying someone else to do all this for you. His cost evaluations always seem to assume the cook and the waitress are working for free. Not to mention the accountant, and apparently he thinks the landlord loans the land to the restaurant for free too. There's also licenses and taxes and probably a dozen other costs I don't even know about. And the business owner isn't apparently entitled to earn a little money, either.
If you can get these things for free, and are willing to do the work yourself, then fine, do so and don't pay Best Buy to do it for you. Best Buy, OTOH, shouldn't be expected to do it for you for free when it costs them money to do it.
NIH syndrome (n): A condition suffered by individuals or organizations that roll their own solutions tailored specifically for their needs, rather than using the most recently hyped hammer on every nail.
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If you could show there's an Alpha Centaurian snow-ball making machine flinging comets into our solar system, then the need for the Oort cloud vanishes. However, until you do, you should expect people to scoff at such a theory and pick something that actually seems plausible.
At the moment, the Oort cloud is the most plausible, and the alternatives (like the extra-solar snow-ball flinger, or the even less plausible exploding planet) are ignored. This is as it should be.
Composition? We can tell where various meteorites came from by their composition -- we know when a particular rock originated from the asteroid belt or was blasted off the surface of the moon or Mars by looking at the composition. Since we haven't done it yet we certainly don't know, but it's quite possible that it would be equally obvious whether a comet originated from our own cloud or some other star's, based on its composition, assuming each star has its own, detectably different balance of elements. This probably wouldn't be true of first generation stars, but second or third generation stars like our Sun will have an overall solar system composition that is dependent upon the exact size and nature of the star whose supernova explosion created the elements that later came together to form it and its surrounding planets. This may be easily detectable. Of course, we'll have to get our hands on some extra-solar comets to be sure. If it isn't, we'll just never know if we have or not, but if it is, it should be quickly obvious once we do.
But it *is* a poor security practice to use them on your website.
Bzzt. You don't even know what my website is, or what function it has. If you think you can render a judgment on whether it's poor security practice or not without knowing that, you aren't qualified to be giving advice on security matters.
They still have CRT TVs and monitors? Check under it, will ya? I lost my slide-rule somewhere...
C++ is a write-only language. That's why it receives so much hate.
All languages are write-only in the hands of incompetent programmers. No languages are in the hands of competent ones.
...
*whoosh!*
Not to pick nits but shouldn't that be it effects the other guys?
Nope. That would be exactly the opposite of correct. A affects B. B feels the effects.
There's nothing intellectually dishonest about having a point of view. (Pretending not to, on the other hand...)
Standard Oil was renamed to "Exxon", and recently posted the largest annual profits of ANY company, EVER.
Nope. Around here, all the Standard Oil stations were renamed Amoco, and later renamed BP. The company that was Standard Oil was ripped apart year ago. Parts of it went to Esso/Exxon, parts to Mobile (the two later merged into ExxonMobile), parts to Amoco (later absorbed by BP), parts to Chevron, parts to Texaco (Chevron and Texaco later merged into ChevronTexaco, then dropped Texaco from the name), parts to Conoco (now ConocoPhillips), and parts elsewhere as well. In fact, Standard Oil was broken up far more completely than Ma Bell, and although all the parts were larger merged into larger entities, they've not reformed with anywhere near the coherency than the baby bells have reformed. Unless ExxonMobile buys up BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon, and probably other companies that have various bits I don't even know about, Standard Oil will never be completely reformed into one.
Um, Standard Oil didn't "become" ExxonMobile any more than it became BP, or Chevon, or ConocoPhillips, to name a few other corporates that have subsequently gobbled up parts of Standard Oil.
I highly doubt he wrote in Cobal.
He did! He was a veritable Lord of Cobal!
Haha very true. You simply can't make a movie out of a PKD story. Instead, you make a movie inspired by a PKD story.
It ought to be able to hold an Earth-like atmosphere indefinitely. It's not like an Earth-density atmosphere is anywhere near as dense as an atmosphere could be on an Earth-sized body. Two bodies to consider: Venus has an atmosphere much thicker than Earth's -- 90 atmospheres pressure at surface level, and Titan also at an atmosphere thicker than Earth's, with only a fraction of the mass of Mars. Mars is most definitely not too small to hold a dense atmosphere. It just doesn't happen to at the moment.
Cmon. They briefed the white house about perchlorates? Really?
Yes.
They took time to tell the prez about perchlorates?
No. Is there some reason you believe the first implies the second? Are you under the impression that the only person in the White House is the president, or do you just suck at reading comprehension?
Neither display is actually telling you what you think it's telling you.
orly?
The signal strength bars on a mobile phone or laptop do, at least, say something about how strong the local signal is. But they don't tell you the ratio between that signal and the inevitable, and often very considerable, noise that accompanies it ...
Um, yeah. Signal strength means signal strength, not signal-to-noise ratio. So what you're telling me is the signal strength bar tells me exactly what I thought it meant, my cell-phone is not lying to me, but if I was stupid enough to think signal strength means something other than signal strength, I might feel deceived later because I'm an idiot. Okie dokie.
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
Um, please tell me you don't actually work as an engineer at some reputable company. In any case, it should be noted that even if a coder can wave a magic wand and add a feature to a product in zero time, he's still just multiplied the amount of work QA needs to do, not to mention the additional work the documentation and support people need to do.
(Just wondering if you're not an engineer at all, not employed by a reputable company that actually supports its products, or are just a moron, unlike the people you accused of being morons because they have a more realistic picture of how actual companies work.)
The writing in the description is poorly constructed. When someone reads "It's an evolutionary release for the Norwegian software company, but it comes just days after Apple's iPhone 3G, with its highly capable Safari browser, went on sale" they would reasonably assume that in the context of the article, this "Browser War" has suddenly sprung up, and that all of the opening shots are being fired right now.
No they wouldn't. Why do so many people read things with the attitude of, "well, *I* understand what they said, but this is going to be confusing to the average reader [who is naturally not as smart as me] and thus I must step forward and defend these poor souls who will naturally draw wrong conclusions that only super-smart people [like me] will realize aren't true."
Of course, the "highly capable" Safari browser has been out for a year on the pre-3G iPhones too, a distinction that the text confuses terribly.
No it doesn't. It mentions that a new generation of iPhone is out, in context with a new version of Opera, and that entirely new browsers are coming. These are relevant facts, and there's nothing confused about them, despite your assertion that people [other than you] will misread what was said.
The 'browser war' has been mobile since the first day God crapped out a WAP-enabled cell phone, and just as humans went from sticks and rocks to atomic weapons, the years of mobile browsing 'warfare' has progressed to a point where the phones are almost within eyeshot of being as capable as the desktop machines.
Yup. And with a new generation of devices coming out with certain existing browsers, along with entirely new browsers being released soon, it's going to heat up quick.
To declare this a 'new war' is disingenuous at best, and manipulative of page hits for the purpose of generating advertising revenue at worst.
Good thing they didn't do that, then.
I think it goes without saying that humankind will eventually need more living space than what is offered here on Earth.
Why would such a highly questionable assertion "go without saying"? The more we modernize, the less we reproduce. In the most advanced and prosperous nations on Earth today, population growth figures are already trending into the negative, and there's no reason to assume this won't be true for the rest of the world as they too achieve higher levels of development. It's quite entirely possible we'll be using less living space in 2200 than we do today, given that there's a good possibility there will be a few billion people less on Earth than there are now.
Of course, there's no guarantee that will happen, either. But the reverse certainly doesn't "go without saying". It's far from obvious that such high levels of population will ever come to pass.
... Up until 60 years ago, traveling between the USA and Europe was on the order of months of time, rather than hours.
Excuse me? Believe it or not, we had something better than sailboats, even before 1948. The great trans-atlantic passenger lingers (e.g. the Titanic) would go between the USA and Europe in under a week. In 1938 (70 years ago), the Queen Mary did it in 3 days.
I know quite a bit of Russian, and that's news to me. According to this, Russian word for "soil" is pochva, and that's the word I'm familiar with.
Comments like this always leave me scratching my head. The second sentence is a complete non sequitur unless one has never heard of synonyms. I don't believe the author has never heard of synonyms. So what exactly were they thinking when they said this?
I really don't care. I'm gonna use whatever program I need to use to service my needs. If it behaves, great, if not I'm looking for something else.
I expect that there are more realists and people who use linux and other such software because it works and doesn't crash as opposed to it being pure OSS.
I used to be just like that. In fact, I still am, but I'm no longer a desktop Linux user. I still use Linux much of the time, I work with it daily on my servers, but my desktop is now OS X. I also have a WinXP desktop (mostly for games). I'll probably have a Linux desktop again in the future. I find the ideology commendable and I hope totally free software projects do well, but when I sit down in front of my own computer, I just want something that does what I need it to, and I'll use whatever does the job I need to do right now the best (which is why I end up working with three different operating systems every day -- each does something better than the other two, and when that's what I'm doing, I use the one that does it the best). I won't be swayed by philosophical arguments -- if you think one way it better, prove it. I'll run 100% free software 100% of the time on the day that 100% free software does 100% of the things I need done better than the alternatives. Until then, I'll be running mixed.
Heh. For the most part, you've just named a list of reasons why I prefer OS X over the alternatives. Probably the biggest thing on the list is the Zoom button. Windows got it completely wrong, and nearly every other GUI I've seen utterly borks it too. My biggest complaint about non-Mac GUI's was always the screwed up Zoom button, which would senselessly expand the window far beyond the limits of the contents, leaving huge amounts of empty space in the window blocking windows and desktop behind it for no reason at all whatsoever. I can understand why it's done that way -- it's easier to do. It's harder to get Zoom right than to just make a window take up the whole screen (whether that makes any sense or not) -- easy out for lazy programmers. But the lack of a proper Zoom button is a major GUI flaw IMHO, and throwing it a brain-dead Maximize button is a poor substitute.
The level of faith Americans have in corporations is utterly astounding. I don't quite get why it's okay to have huge, powerful organizations dictate policy undemocratically merely because they're doing it to make a profit. How does making a profit make the unilateral actions of powerful entities so much more trustworthy? Why is government by corporate fiat so much better than government by elected representatives?
If the FCC tells you what you can or can't do on the Internet, people are up in arms. When Comcast does it, people only grudgingly admit it might be a good idea for the FCC to tell them "don't do that". The mind boggles...
This reminds me of a friend of mine who always criticizes the prices of things he sees in restaurants. His big thing is how cheap all the materials are in a soda fountain. Setting aside initial cost for the machine and regular maintenance costs (which he always forgets for things), no matter what he's evaluating, he always leaves off the single most important cost: the cost of paying someone else to do all this for you. His cost evaluations always seem to assume the cook and the waitress are working for free. Not to mention the accountant, and apparently he thinks the landlord loans the land to the restaurant for free too. There's also licenses and taxes and probably a dozen other costs I don't even know about. And the business owner isn't apparently entitled to earn a little money, either.
If you can get these things for free, and are willing to do the work yourself, then fine, do so and don't pay Best Buy to do it for you. Best Buy, OTOH, shouldn't be expected to do it for you for free when it costs them money to do it.
Definitions based on observed usage:
NIH syndrome (n): A condition suffered by individuals or organizations that roll their own solutions tailored specifically for their needs, rather than using the most recently hyped hammer on every nail.