NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds.
It's exactly the non-brokenness of IPv6 in this regard that makes some people think twice about it. NAT is perfect for consumers, because you can't have *servers* strewn about every household with it, while you can perfectly consume (as you should). With IPv6 you can have every device having its own (even static) IP and as such can have it act as a reliably reachable server. This thought is a nightmare for some.
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.
Dark matter is still nothing else than a placeholder for something not understood and it may very well be that the actual problem is that we're just missing something subtle but crucial in our understanding of mass and gravity. There are other possibly connected things like the Pioneer Anomaly or the Flyby Anomaly which dark matter doesn't help at all to explain.
Dark matter is a name like "x" for something that must be there if our understanding of many things were right, but most probably they just aren't.
Explain me how "dark matter" explains why precisely measured fly-by velocities of probes are consistently off by a tiny amount from the velocities our understanding of mass and gravity dictate and I may start to believe in dark matter.
Ask yourself: There is a service (like GMail) which is both free and very convenient. Enough so that the users just flock to it. You're not hesitating? You willingly trust your email to the single most data-collecting entity in the known universe without thinking twice? A free lunch, isn't it?
I've seen whole companies transferring their email to GMail, all over the world. It's just insane. I mean, for more or less irrelevant personal online stuff, no problem. If you like to hand all that over to Google, do it.
But if email is important for you and you may receive confidential stuff, don't do that. You'll never know where it ends up and who may read and index and search it, you have no real support, you have no way to even expect the thing to be continued or to work flawlessly -- you get what you pay for and you pay nothing.
GMail and the like are the Soylent Green of the Internet. Free, convenient and ultimately made from human flesh. Have a happy free lunch! You have just to sell your freedom and your privacy and your dignity and all will be easy then.
But there's nothing insightful, informative, or interesting to say. The summary covered that: "they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."
OK, here's something informative: Slashdot linked to a Gizmodo article, which made fun of a Sky and Telescope article, which reports about a scientific paper and then 95% of those commenting the Slashdot article never even read the Gizmodo article, 95% of those looking at the Gizmodo article never got as far as looking at the Sky and Telescope article and only about 3 Persons read the actual paper.
Within the next hundred years or so we will have a total, worldwide economic collapse leading to wars large and small everywhere. World population will shrink by one order of magnitude or more. Then things will settle down on a much simpler level, with only basic industry, most people working in agriculture, religion either forgotten or diversified into meaningless local customs. Centuries come and go peacefully. Then, one day, some bloke finds that rosetta thing and finally manages to read it somehow, even if badly and full of errors. He instantly declares that this has to be of divine origin (since man cannot write that tiny) and ALL STARTS OVER AGAIN! Arghhh!
I mean, I'm all for conserving knowledge. But I don't care for all that cultural and religious stuff. People are fully able to come up with their own myths and their own culture and fiction and stories and music everywhere, at any time. But *knowledge* (as in hard scientific, medical, physical, biological knowledge) is our real treasure. *This* has to be secured, not all this religious and cultural stuff. You can whip up a religion and good stories from nothing, but the scientific knowledge we've accumulated takes generations of hard work (and often equipment you can't produce from stone and wood). If this is lost at some point in the future the chances are high that it will be lost for good and we will be back into the stone age.
To me, even the most basic medical knowledge is worth more than the whole fucking bible. People have been coming up with creation myths and religions since ages and none of these is better or worse than any other. The most basic antibiotic is worth more than all of them together. Wasting efforts to conserve useless myths for thousands of years is a sure sign of us being just a bunch of mad apes.
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
Dunno about that one... The Gemini program's launch vehicles tended to suffer what was called the "Pogo" effect once they reached a certain speed and altitude. Tended to scare the shit out of the first astronauts to experience it.
The Apollo program had solved that.
/P
That's a different thing. Ares is aerodynamically unstable, because it has a thin and heavy first stage and a large-diameter, light second stage -- that thing will constantly try to turn around while flying through the atmosphere and needs constant control to keep it flying with the engine pointing backwards.
Try to throw a dart with the light and fluffy bit forward and the thin and heavy bit backward and you know what it is like.
And this is where electric cars really let us down. For, you see, that 'Transportation' cost carries with it a large portion of over-the-road trucks. And as far as I know, there are no plans of replacing those with battery-powered beauties any time soon.
So, if you want to make money you've just got an idea here. Trucks are actually suited quite perfectly for electric motors and nobody seems to build electric trucks. Well, you'd need to reduce power needs (trucks are usually really bad in the aerodynamic department) and make sure you have both the range and (since it won't be enough) the infrastructure for recharging. There's surely money waiting here for those who want to pull this trough. Could easily be the next boom.
One thing that many people seem to miss: Autonomy. Electricity is *much* easier to generate on a small-scale basis than gasoline. Believe me, there are ways for small and large communities to generate electric power from many sources, enough to keep you going for a long time. Maybe not as comfortable, but it will be enough to meet the dearest needs. If your transport depends on gasoline, you're totally screwed if there isn't any. With electric cars, you'll still be able to get around and get things done, even when you've got nothing than a few windmills. Beets a handcart any time.
I'm kind of curious -- now that the App Store is ramping up with useful stuff (there are, for example, at least two SSH apps posted now, with more to come), what's the compelling reason to jailbreak? Is it just tethering?
Well, a terminal with all that Unix goodness under the hood could be a reason. Why have a SSH app if you can have ssh and everything else, too?
One thing I love about reading old Usenet posts is how innocent and safe it all seemed before the Internet boom of the 1990s. People often had their full names and even phone numbers in their sigs.
And a working, real email address, yes.
And I still do this. There're more than 10000 postings carrying my name and my address, the latest posted about 30 minutes ago.
The world is full of cowards, denying their names because they fear ads being thrown at them... One wonders what they would give up when under a *real* threat...
Free servers are free, but most of them suck -- they are unreliable, spam-ridden and badly managed. There are a few subscription-based (but rather cheap) servers without binary-groups caring for quality of service and spam-filtering. news.individual.net is one of them -- 10 EUR a year, great service with 25000 text-only groups and hardly any spam. Yeah, it feels strange to pay for Usenet access, but it's nearly as good as back then.
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
There are still many fringe groups worth reading and posting in. Most of these are much better than the average blog and much less work to follow. And if you happen to have access to a sanely managed server (like news.individual.net), spam is almost non-existent. As a rule of thumb avoid all servers carrying the binary groups.
I've been trying to think of how I might write a web 2.0 forum that is easy to use and yet still contains what made usenet nice. The problem I have with most web forums is just that they're near impossible to keep track of what's new to read. So I find they tend to just have a bunch of AOL smiley icons, and stupid fark pictures and not much real content.
Do it the other way round: Pull RSS-feeds off all the Blogs and post the entries as articles in a (new) Usenet hierarchy, one group per Blog. You can now "comment" on those entries by normal Usenet means (write a followup) and when the blog authors want to see what people are writing they have to get into Usenet -- job done.
By the way: A really good "Web 2.0 forum" is news. gmane.org -- it's a web-frontend for many mailinglists and also available via NNTP, so you can read the groups/lists via your newsreader. Coincidentally it's also one of the very few web-based software for forums and such that is actually usable.
> Now if you post anything, you are guaranteed to be spammed on the newsgroup and off. At least the forums are too numerous to attack effectively and are at least somewhat moderated. They are also more anonymous as you get to use different identities, with no public email address for each one. Sure, if spam were outlawed, usenet might come back, but as for me, I haven't posted on a newsgroup in almost a decade.
I'm using the same (working) email address for Usenet postings since about ten years and more than 10000 postings and rarely get spam through it. Certainly less than my other address I use for other things. And yes, both addresses are used in the open (I have never obfuscated them) and still spam is very much a non-problem -- I use a server-side filter (Spamassassin) and get about 2 two 5 spam emails a day.
Yeah, but then you don't know *if* the thing is actually going to hit earth, since you can't measure its trajectory with enough precision. And once you're sure, it might be too late. The most ironic thing to happen would be to try and deflect an object early on and then realizing later that you've given it exactly the nudge it needed to finally impact earth...
1. This is intentional and Apple just tries to control this device with all means. By keeping up the NDA they can tolerate what they like to tolerate (and come on, there *are* mailingslists for iPhone developers and there's also code posted) and at the same time sue everyone to hell and back who they don't like. Of course this means that there will be hardly any books, courses, forums and so on. Which makes first-hand knowledge and programming experience with the iPhone a kind of intellectual capital which is very valuable to companies. And this might launch the next stage of the Intellectual Property madness. Doom!
2. They just forgot to pull the NDA or haven't been able yet to modify their developer program and paperwork to allow protection of future betas while opening up the currently released NDA. Apple is totally overburdened right now and it may well be that there are quite a few people taking a few weeks off after launching the G3, appstore and SDK, working 60h/week for a while. You know how it is.
If they really want to use Firefox as a kind of OS/GUI and webapps for everything, they've got a problem. To do this, you need a *large* screen (at least 12"), because webapps are made to be viewed at large screens and controlled with a mouse -- controls are too tiny and cramped to be used on a small touchscreen (without a stylus). And with a large screen they need either a really large battery or the battery life of the thing will be pathetic.
With an optimized GUI you can get away with a smaller screen (look at the iPhone), but this would mean to have actually applications written for that...
So, nice idea, but a cheap web tablet seems to be just not possible right now.
No. If you throw something from a satellite in a circular orbit, giving it a small 'downward' velocity component, the object will just end up in a slightly elliptical orbit.
If the object has a very low mass for its cross-section (as a paper plane certainly has) it will de-orbit very soon on its own. The reason is that there's still a bit of an atmosphere up there and low-mass objects experience significant drag that slows them down. The carbon fiber segment of the wing leading edge that drifted away on-orbit from Columbia in 2003 was tracked and it deorbited within 48 hours. You could probably just shove a paper plane out of the airlock and within 24 hours it would've slowed down enough to reentry. The problem would be to track it and if it really survives reentry, to find it...
I mean, really. The stinkin' rich will have their hearts replicated and grown one after another just in case, while you and me will just drop down, carried to a hospital, and die. Somehow that's *not* the future I was thinking of when I was young. The bits and pieces (hah!) are there meanwhile, but our society isn't there at all.
A friend of mine was working in a hospital when some old and ill VIP had a heart failure and he not only got a replacement right away (while others died waiting for a replacement for months), no, he also got a second heart when the first one was rejected by his immune system within a day. Well, he died anyway from unrelated causes soon after, but I can't get over the vision of two otherwise perfectly healthy normal guys dying just because two hearts were *wasted* this way. I want to vomit each time I have to think of that event.
What's wrong with that? As long as no one can tell the difference, we might as well go on living as we have. How much would it influence your actions to know that you were a simulation within a simulation? Everything still happens the same way.
Iain Banks has in "The Algebraist" a very interesting (fictional) religion constructed on that belief, called "The Truth". It works like this: The world is a simulation and the only way to break free of it is to *really*, really believe into that religion -- only if finally all (or enough people) believe ("know") that they are in a simulation, the simulation will end and you're freed into the "real" world. Another option is to kill all those unbelievers, if you can't convert them. Of course the leaders don't really believe in that, but it's quite useful to have others believe in it...
Actually the gimmick of the simulation thingy is the same as with nearly all religions: You've got a second world in your pocket, so you don't have to really care for the one you're in right now -- neglect the here and now, kill others, be unlucky and a slave to those knowing the truth and all will be well later. A scam, actually, and as with all scams it works best with the greedy ones who will happily exchange quite a bit of current inconveniences with eternal bliss later.
So, you grab a brick, hold it out. Let go. It falls. The effect of it falling on release we can call "gravity", but whether gravity exists as a REAL force in the universe, or just some weird effect of space/time warpage is another issue. So, yes, you CAN write a law that says "gravity doesn't exist" as long as your law accounts for the behaviour exhibited in the test of your dropping the brick.
Yeah, but things get interesting if you don't ask yourself if gravity exists or not, but how *exactly* it works and if we in fact do understand it in all cases. An interesting problem right now is the flyby anomaly which basically describes that satellites doing a gravity-assist flyby of the earth gain an yet unexplained energy (speed) increase in doing so. This has been observed several times with measurements beyond doubt and still there's no known mechanism to explain this effect. This phenomenon basically says that there's something fishy with our understanding of mass, speed and gravity. We can describe how these work in most cases, but in some fringe cases there seems to be something very subtle going on we just don't have any clue of yet.
So it may well be that it's not enough to know that gravity exists -- we need to know how *exactly* it works and it may work in a subtle different way than we think it does. Such things working in slightly different way than they should are the most interesting things in science and they make clear beyond any doubt that we *discover* the laws of nature. It's basically like plotting a curve through a set of data points and trying to find the function that describes the curve. There *are* deeper dependencies and "laws" behind what we see, although our guesses aren't always the best at first. *How* we describe those laws and what we think how things depend on each other are of course incomplete, often only half-right and always less than perfect. But you can't really deny that there *are* mechanisms at work deep in the structure of the universe, we're just not clever enough (yet) to do more than plucking this and that one out of it and describe it. Every now and then we stumble on something that we can't explain with our "laws" and after a lot of work we may find a way to change (yes, change) our "laws" to account for these strange things.
I guess I'm not really following what you're saying, unless it's "OSX has unix API's and other ones too". Well, duh. There are lots of API's in all operating systems that aren't anything to do with unix - GTK is hardly a unix requirement, nanosleep() probably isn't in the spec, device-driver api's are almost always specific to the OS in question, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
So OS X is also "X11 based", because it has X11?
Anyway, if you want to treat OS X as a "Unix with a nice GUI", you can surely do it.
Since Tiger, however, the BSD subsystem is no longer able to be separated from the system; there's no longer a 'BSD Subsystem' package, and trying to remove the BSD stuff would break, well, everything; the Custom Installs in Mac OS X 10.4 knowledge base article at Apple sums this up with the simple 'BSD subsystem is always installed' note. This is true of Leopard as well; there's no longer separation between subsystem and OS.
Ah, thanks. I haven't looked at that for quite a time...
In addition, as was mentioned by other posters, Leopard actually fully conforms to the Single Unix Specification and the POSIX standards right out of box, so quite legitimately can call itself a UNIX system. But you are absolutely right that previous versions of Mac OS X were not eligible, and could at best have been called 'UNIX-like' (and with the earliest versions, even that much only if you were feeling very generous).
It's absolutely clear that previous versions where somewhat UNIX-like and the certified versions now are, well, certified UNIX. But that was not what I meant: I meant to say that OS X is not just a UNIX with a GUI and as such is not "Unix based". Many of the most essential OS X APIs don't care at all for POSIX or any unixy stuff. It's probably a matter of what you mean with "based upon something".
So OS X is UNIX (among other things), but it is not "based on UNIX". Actually I just tried to warn people to think that OS X is just another UNIX with a nice GUI. Any Unix knowledge will help you only with the Unix aspects of OS X, but these are often quite irrelevant when it comes to admin tasks or software development there. Yeah, you can use symlinks, but the Finder creates Aliases instead (which POSIX says nothing about), for example. An OS that is "Unix based" wouldn't do that, it would use symbolic links in the file manager. And OS X is *full* of such things.
OS X is UNIX, but it is also 95% other stuff totally different from UNIX.
Slashdot Mirror
It's exactly the non-brokenness of IPv6 in this regard that makes some people think twice about it. NAT is perfect for consumers, because you can't have *servers* strewn about every household with it, while you can perfectly consume (as you should). With IPv6 you can have every device having its own (even static) IP and as such can have it act as a reliably reachable server. This thought is a nightmare for some.
Dark matter is still nothing else than a placeholder for something not understood and it may very well be that the actual problem is that we're just missing something subtle but crucial in our understanding of mass and gravity. There are other possibly connected things like the Pioneer Anomaly or the Flyby Anomaly which dark matter doesn't help at all to explain.
Dark matter is a name like "x" for something that must be there if our understanding of many things were right, but most probably they just aren't.
Explain me how "dark matter" explains why precisely measured fly-by velocities of probes are consistently off by a tiny amount from the velocities our understanding of mass and gravity dictate and I may start to believe in dark matter.
Ask yourself: There is a service (like GMail) which is both free and very convenient. Enough so that the users just flock to it. You're not hesitating? You willingly trust your email to the single most data-collecting entity in the known universe without thinking twice? A free lunch, isn't it?
I've seen whole companies transferring their email to GMail, all over the world. It's just insane. I mean, for more or less irrelevant personal online stuff, no problem. If you like to hand all that over to Google, do it.
But if email is important for you and you may receive confidential stuff, don't do that. You'll never know where it ends up and who may read and index and search it, you have no real support, you have no way to even expect the thing to be continued or to work flawlessly -- you get what you pay for and you pay nothing.
GMail and the like are the Soylent Green of the Internet. Free, convenient and ultimately made from human flesh. Have a happy free lunch! You have just to sell your freedom and your privacy and your dignity and all will be easy then.
But there's nothing insightful, informative, or interesting to say. The summary covered that: "they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."
OK, here's something informative: Slashdot linked to a Gizmodo article, which made fun of a Sky and Telescope article, which reports about a scientific paper and then 95% of those commenting the Slashdot article never even read the Gizmodo article, 95% of those looking at the Gizmodo article never got as far as looking at the Sky and Telescope article and only about 3 Persons read the actual paper.
Within the next hundred years or so we will have a total, worldwide economic collapse leading to wars large and small everywhere. World population will shrink by one order of magnitude or more. Then things will settle down on a much simpler level, with only basic industry, most people working in agriculture, religion either forgotten or diversified into meaningless local customs. Centuries come and go peacefully. Then, one day, some bloke finds that rosetta thing and finally manages to read it somehow, even if badly and full of errors. He instantly declares that this has to be of divine origin (since man cannot write that tiny) and ALL STARTS OVER AGAIN! Arghhh!
I mean, I'm all for conserving knowledge. But I don't care for all that cultural and religious stuff. People are fully able to come up with their own myths and their own culture and fiction and stories and music everywhere, at any time. But *knowledge* (as in hard scientific, medical, physical, biological knowledge) is our real treasure. *This* has to be secured, not all this religious and cultural stuff. You can whip up a religion and good stories from nothing, but the scientific knowledge we've accumulated takes generations of hard work (and often equipment you can't produce from stone and wood). If this is lost at some point in the future the chances are high that it will be lost for good and we will be back into the stone age.
To me, even the most basic medical knowledge is worth more than the whole fucking bible. People have been coming up with creation myths and religions since ages and none of these is better or worse than any other. The most basic antibiotic is worth more than all of them together. Wasting efforts to conserve useless myths for thousands of years is a sure sign of us being just a bunch of mad apes.
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
Dunno about that one... The Gemini program's launch vehicles tended to suffer what was called the "Pogo" effect once they reached a certain speed and altitude. Tended to scare the shit out of the first astronauts to experience it.
The Apollo program had solved that.
That's a different thing. Ares is aerodynamically unstable, because it has a thin and heavy first stage and a large-diameter, light second stage -- that thing will constantly try to turn around while flying through the atmosphere and needs constant control to keep it flying with the engine pointing backwards.
Try to throw a dart with the light and fluffy bit forward and the thin and heavy bit backward and you know what it is like.
Well, all of your (and mine) ancestors back through the ages obviously did *not* die in infancy...
And this is where electric cars really let us down. For, you see, that 'Transportation' cost carries with it a large portion of over-the-road trucks. And as far as I know, there are no plans of replacing those with battery-powered beauties any time soon.
So, if you want to make money you've just got an idea here. Trucks are actually suited quite perfectly for electric motors and nobody seems to build electric trucks. Well, you'd need to reduce power needs (trucks are usually really bad in the aerodynamic department) and make sure you have both the range and (since it won't be enough) the infrastructure for recharging. There's surely money waiting here for those who want to pull this trough. Could easily be the next boom.
One thing that many people seem to miss: Autonomy. Electricity is *much* easier to generate on a small-scale basis than gasoline. Believe me, there are ways for small and large communities to generate electric power from many sources, enough to keep you going for a long time. Maybe not as comfortable, but it will be enough to meet the dearest needs. If your transport depends on gasoline, you're totally screwed if there isn't any. With electric cars, you'll still be able to get around and get things done, even when you've got nothing than a few windmills. Beets a handcart any time.
I'm kind of curious -- now that the App Store is ramping up with useful stuff (there are, for example, at least two SSH apps posted now, with more to come), what's the compelling reason to jailbreak? Is it just tethering?
Well, a terminal with all that Unix goodness under the hood could be a reason. Why have a SSH app if you can have ssh and everything else, too?
One thing I love about reading old Usenet posts is how innocent and safe it all seemed before the Internet boom of the 1990s. People often had their full names and even phone numbers in their sigs.
And a working, real email address, yes.
And I still do this. There're more than 10000 postings carrying my name and my address, the latest posted about 30 minutes ago.
The world is full of cowards, denying their names because they fear ads being thrown at them... One wonders what they would give up when under a *real* threat...
Free servers are free, but most of them suck -- they are unreliable, spam-ridden and badly managed. There are a few subscription-based (but rather cheap) servers without binary-groups caring for quality of service and spam-filtering. news.individual.net is one of them -- 10 EUR a year, great service with 25000 text-only groups and hardly any spam. Yeah, it feels strange to pay for Usenet access, but it's nearly as good as back then.
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
There are still many fringe groups worth reading and posting in. Most of these are much better than the average blog and much less work to follow. And if you happen to have access to a sanely managed server (like news.individual.net), spam is almost non-existent. As a rule of thumb avoid all servers carrying the binary groups.
I've been trying to think of how I might write a web 2.0 forum that is easy to use and yet still contains what made usenet nice. The problem I have with most web forums is just that they're near impossible to keep track of what's new to read. So I find they tend to just have a bunch of AOL smiley icons, and stupid fark pictures and not much real content.
Do it the other way round: Pull RSS-feeds off all the Blogs and post the entries as articles in a (new) Usenet hierarchy, one group per Blog. You can now "comment" on those entries by normal Usenet means (write a followup) and when the blog authors want to see what people are writing they have to get into Usenet -- job done.
By the way: A really good "Web 2.0 forum" is news. gmane.org -- it's a web-frontend for many mailinglists and also available via NNTP, so you can read the groups/lists via your newsreader. Coincidentally it's also one of the very few web-based software for forums and such that is actually usable.
> Now if you post anything, you are guaranteed to be spammed on the newsgroup and off. At least the forums are too numerous to attack effectively and are at least somewhat moderated. They are also more anonymous as you get to use different identities, with no public email address for each one. Sure, if spam were outlawed, usenet might come back, but as for me, I haven't posted on a newsgroup in almost a decade.
I'm using the same (working) email address for Usenet postings since about ten years and more than 10000 postings and rarely get spam through it. Certainly less than my other address I use for other things. And yes, both addresses are used in the open (I have never obfuscated them) and still spam is very much a non-problem -- I use a server-side filter (Spamassassin) and get about 2 two 5 spam emails a day.
Yeah, but then you don't know *if* the thing is actually going to hit earth, since you can't measure its trajectory with enough precision. And once you're sure, it might be too late. The most ironic thing to happen would be to try and deflect an object early on and then realizing later that you've given it exactly the nudge it needed to finally impact earth...
1. This is intentional and Apple just tries to control this device with all means. By keeping up the NDA they can tolerate what they like to tolerate (and come on, there *are* mailingslists for iPhone developers and there's also code posted) and at the same time sue everyone to hell and back who they don't like. Of course this means that there will be hardly any books, courses, forums and so on. Which makes first-hand knowledge and programming experience with the iPhone a kind of intellectual capital which is very valuable to companies. And this might launch the next stage of the Intellectual Property madness. Doom!
2. They just forgot to pull the NDA or haven't been able yet to modify their developer program and paperwork to allow protection of future betas while opening up the currently released NDA. Apple is totally overburdened right now and it may well be that there are quite a few people taking a few weeks off after launching the G3, appstore and SDK, working 60h/week for a while. You know how it is.
Take a pick.
If they really want to use Firefox as a kind of OS/GUI and webapps for everything, they've got a problem. To do this, you need a *large* screen (at least 12"), because webapps are made to be viewed at large screens and controlled with a mouse -- controls are too tiny and cramped to be used on a small touchscreen (without a stylus). And with a large screen they need either a really large battery or the battery life of the thing will be pathetic.
With an optimized GUI you can get away with a smaller screen (look at the iPhone), but this would mean to have actually applications written for that...
So, nice idea, but a cheap web tablet seems to be just not possible right now.
If the object has a very low mass for its cross-section (as a paper plane certainly has) it will de-orbit very soon on its own. The reason is that there's still a bit of an atmosphere up there and low-mass objects experience significant drag that slows them down. The carbon fiber segment of the wing leading edge that drifted away on-orbit from Columbia in 2003 was tracked and it deorbited within 48 hours. You could probably just shove a paper plane out of the airlock and within 24 hours it would've slowed down enough to reentry. The problem would be to track it and if it really survives reentry, to find it...
The case in question did not happen in the US of A. And of course it *is* hearsay, although I have no reason to doubt any of the details.
I mean, really. The stinkin' rich will have their hearts replicated and grown one after another just in case, while you and me will just drop down, carried to a hospital, and die. Somehow that's *not* the future I was thinking of when I was young. The bits and pieces (hah!) are there meanwhile, but our society isn't there at all.
A friend of mine was working in a hospital when some old and ill VIP had a heart failure and he not only got a replacement right away (while others died waiting for a replacement for months), no, he also got a second heart when the first one was rejected by his immune system within a day. Well, he died anyway from unrelated causes soon after, but I can't get over the vision of two otherwise perfectly healthy normal guys dying just because two hearts were *wasted* this way. I want to vomit each time I have to think of that event.
Iain Banks has in "The Algebraist" a very interesting (fictional) religion constructed on that belief, called "The Truth". It works like this: The world is a simulation and the only way to break free of it is to *really*, really believe into that religion -- only if finally all (or enough people) believe ("know") that they are in a simulation, the simulation will end and you're freed into the "real" world. Another option is to kill all those unbelievers, if you can't convert them. Of course the leaders don't really believe in that, but it's quite useful to have others believe in it...
Actually the gimmick of the simulation thingy is the same as with nearly all religions: You've got a second world in your pocket, so you don't have to really care for the one you're in right now -- neglect the here and now, kill others, be unlucky and a slave to those knowing the truth and all will be well later. A scam, actually, and as with all scams it works best with the greedy ones who will happily exchange quite a bit of current inconveniences with eternal bliss later.
Yeah, but things get interesting if you don't ask yourself if gravity exists or not, but how *exactly* it works and if we in fact do understand it in all cases. An interesting problem right now is the flyby anomaly which basically describes that satellites doing a gravity-assist flyby of the earth gain an yet unexplained energy (speed) increase in doing so. This has been observed several times with measurements beyond doubt and still there's no known mechanism to explain this effect. This phenomenon basically says that there's something fishy with our understanding of mass, speed and gravity. We can describe how these work in most cases, but in some fringe cases there seems to be something very subtle going on we just don't have any clue of yet.
So it may well be that it's not enough to know that gravity exists -- we need to know how *exactly* it works and it may work in a subtle different way than we think it does. Such things working in slightly different way than they should are the most interesting things in science and they make clear beyond any doubt that we *discover* the laws of nature. It's basically like plotting a curve through a set of data points and trying to find the function that describes the curve. There *are* deeper dependencies and "laws" behind what we see, although our guesses aren't always the best at first. *How* we describe those laws and what we think how things depend on each other are of course incomplete, often only half-right and always less than perfect. But you can't really deny that there *are* mechanisms at work deep in the structure of the universe, we're just not clever enough (yet) to do more than plucking this and that one out of it and describe it. Every now and then we stumble on something that we can't explain with our "laws" and after a lot of work we may find a way to change (yes, change) our "laws" to account for these strange things.
So OS X is also "X11 based", because it has X11?
Anyway, if you want to treat OS X as a "Unix with a nice GUI", you can surely do it.
Ah, thanks. I haven't looked at that for quite a time...
It's absolutely clear that previous versions where somewhat UNIX-like and the certified versions now are, well, certified UNIX. But that was not what I meant: I meant to say that OS X is not just a UNIX with a GUI and as such is not "Unix based". Many of the most essential OS X APIs don't care at all for POSIX or any unixy stuff. It's probably a matter of what you mean with "based upon something".
So OS X is UNIX (among other things), but it is not "based on UNIX". Actually I just tried to warn people to think that OS X is just another UNIX with a nice GUI. Any Unix knowledge will help you only with the Unix aspects of OS X, but these are often quite irrelevant when it comes to admin tasks or software development there. Yeah, you can use symlinks, but the Finder creates Aliases instead (which POSIX says nothing about), for example. An OS that is "Unix based" wouldn't do that, it would use symbolic links in the file manager. And OS X is *full* of such things.
OS X is UNIX, but it is also 95% other stuff totally different from UNIX.