I meant "text format" as in, format which is used for distributing text. I suppose I should have said "document format".
It annoys the hell out of me to download a 3 MB PDF to read a dozen pages of text and see three pictures, 2 of which are the company logo and the third poorly illustrating a concept already described well by the text.
I don't know whether it's inherently lousy or just widely misused, but I've never seen a PDF that wouldn't be better in another format.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Now, a vector representation of graphics is an entirely different beast. Instead of using 0s and 1s or As and Bs, you use high-level parameterized operations, like DRAWLINE(3x5,5x9).
Complex vector graphics are composed mostly of coordinates, just as large bitmapped graphics are composed mostly of pixels.
You don't think you can build up bitmapped graphics from smaller components? I guess you've never works with sprite and tile sets.
What about slightly more complex bitmapped graphic languages, that support tiles:
stone start
light_green light_grey dark_grey
light_green dark_grey dark_grey
light_green light_green light_green
end
field start
grass grass grass grass grass
grass grass grass stone grass
grass stone grass grass grass
grass grass grass grass grass
grass grass grass grass grass
end
or perhaps:
field = tiled(grass,5x5)
changetile(field,4x2,stone)
changetile(field,2x3,stone)
Sometimes, I do stuff somewhat like this when I want a quick hacked-up solution that I can easily manipulate with Perl, but I'd never think of using it as a network standard, and I'd never expect a sufficient number of people to want to edit pictures with vi. Even at my laziest, I always have a binary end-use format.
The advantages are similar, but clearly insufficient. You get a tiny advantage in readability which means maybe a few hours of programmer time saved, and you get a huge increase in file size and a big performance hit in decoding.
The human mind just can't make a picture out of hundreds of DRAWLINE commands any more than it can make a picture out of a grid of hundreds of thousands of #A08EFF style pixels. Unlike something like HTML, it isn't significantly human-readable. Using text just doesn't help much; the proper way to work with these files is in a graphical editor, with the actual format of the data completely hidden from the user.
If they were talking about compiling these specs into an efficient binary format, I'd be cheering them on, but it's just nuts to distribute bloated XML text (compressed or not).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The fact that is is a text-based (actually XML-based) format is a strength as well as a weakness. Yes, it tends to be bigger than Flash binaries, but its open and extendible whereas Flash is a closed, proprietary binary format controlled by Macromedia. Its a bit like comparing HTML with the page description languages used internally by desktop publishing apps. Which one was better suited for creating the Web? Which one would you rather work with?
These are all advantages of having an open, well-documented format, not of having a text format.
The only advantage of having a text format is being able to read it and make some small amount of sense out of it with an ordinary ASCII text editor, and it adds a lot of overhead. Similarly, the only advantage of XML over making up a format specially suited to the data is the ability to make some educated guesses about the format from the data, and it adds even more overhead (XML is a lot of things, but it's not terse).
HTML works as text because there's relatively little formatting information and it's almost all text already; a human being can reasonably sit down and manually write HTML to produce anything it is capable of, so it's a good tradeoff. The best you might do by switching to a binary format is cut the average HTML file in half, whereas when you start using a markup language for graphics, you'll probably see a size increase of tenfold or more. People aren't going to be writing a lot of vector graphics in text; this is a huge expense to all the users for a small gain in the convenience of a relatively tiny number programmers.
It's not worth it, not by a long shot.
Text can be compressed, and will usually compress better than binaries.
That doesn't mean that it'll be smaller than the binaries. Quite the contrary, the overhead of storing the necessary data to regenerate the text makes it inherently larger. Not to mention the overhead of decompressing to a file 10X as big, and having to keep that in temporary store and processing it.
Any arguments for and against readable text vector graphics formats apply to bitmapped graphics formats, and we all know how popular readable text bitmapped graphics formats are.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Just for the moment, assuming that you've got an ideal application and totally ignoring all other factors, what is the cheapest MIPS source?
Would you get more MIPS/buck out of massive piles of $5 microcontrollers, or out of, say, K6 500 MHz chips with cheap MOBOs?
Again, just totally ignoring all other factors, no matter how silly you think that is.
Personally, I'd like to hijack a top-of-the-line fab and put grids of hundreds of little computers, each with a few K of memory, on dies that would normally be used for one microprocessor. I don't know what I'd do with them, but I'm sure I'd find some cool app like massive neural nets.
Ahhh... to set up a massive pile of millions of parallel processors that could start from "I think therefore I am" and get all the way up to deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before I hook up the data banks...
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Note the reference to emulation. I want a universal sandbox for cross-platform development.
And, yes, I'm working on one... sort of. I'm trying to make a language that can be used for defining the function and interfaces of arbitrary computing devices. A universal sandbox is one application for it. It's kind of a life project, so don't expect to hear about it in the near future.
For a long time, I wanted to call it C**, because of the Alpha Centauri reference, and just to be perverse, but I slowly came to realize that it would be just a little too perverse. I think I might name it "Restraint".
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It is only the _relative_ masses and positions of the objects that matter. Absolute scale is irrelevant - it just imposes a scaling factor on time. This means that I can make valid conclusions by comparing the Eridani system to the Sol system.
With comments like this, I don't see any point in continuing this discussion. You obviously have no conception of the complexities of planet formation and orbital dynamics and how fragile a stable orbit is if you think you can just make a few linear extrapolations and come up with valid answers.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I can't help see how this is something someone wants to change... it enforces planning, enhances readability and almost certainly does good things for run times.
It's the old self-modifying code versus static code argument on a lesser scale. There are plenty of neat things you can do if you can define objects dynamically, but it makes the system harder to analyse at compile time and can take a lot more debugging.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I just finished dealing with that! I wrote Cugar to make C and C++ look clean and graceful, like Python. Now I suppose I'm going to have to write #ugar.
(ladies and gentlemen, please keep the barrage of rotten fruit to a bare minimum. I like Python syntax)
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Usually, in a classless OO language, most of the explicitly defined objects clone themselves and act like classes anyway. It's a step towards a fully imperative language, like Perl or Forth, where the definition parts of the language are just more commands to be executed in sequence, unlike, say C, where struct and function definitions are all read and analysed before you are allowed to run any commands.
However, I think in newtonscript's case, the classes are just hidden and called "types" (however, I could be wrong; I only skimmed the page).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You could write a C compiler that had safe pointers. It would generate significantly slower code, but it could be done quite easily. You just treat all memory as bounded arrays, and each pointer as having an array and an index. If the index is outside of the range when you attempt to access the pointer, you get a fatal error. Simple.
I'm still disappointed that nobody seems to have come out with a universal sandbox that isn't tied to any system or language. Emulation of real-world systems is very complex (and therefore hard to optimize and debug), and if you put in mandatory features like garbage collection in the Java runtime, it's very hard to write compilers for certain languages.
BTW, I think calling it C# is a cheap stunt that will just add to name confusion. C is all about pointers, if pointers are frowned on as "unsafe", rather than the default way of doing things, it's not C.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You remember that great scene in I, Robot (by Asimov) where the robot had to walk around a big tiled floor to change all the tile colors while someone was trying to zap him with lasers, don't you? The arcade was a perfectly faithful adaptation of the story, and totally preserved the deep and meaningful plotline.
Yeah, that kind of stuff really makes you think about whether our machines will someday develop to the point where they have souls of their own.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
*Sigh*. For the nth time - this is because of fractioning of the protoplanetary disk *BEFORE* planets formed!
Look, jerk, stop misinterpreting what I'm saying to make me look stupid. I don't know whether you're doing it on purpose or you just think I'm a moron because you can't grasp what I'm saying, but it's bloody annoying. If it doesn't make sense the first time you read it without thinking about it, read it again and think for a minute before you post back to "correct" me.
It doesn't matter whether the gasses were blown away before or after the planet formed. I've never cared about that, and it's never made a speck of difference. I only ever mentioned it to establish what planets could form at which distances.
We know that E.E. is a small star with weak radiation. I didn't infer that from the existence of the gas giant; it's known from other observations. Everything we know about the formation of the solar system says that the gas giant could have, and probably did, form in the orbit it is currently in (where the radiation is weaker than that at Jupiter), and any rock planets would have to form much closer in (and my original post on the topic admitted the possibility that they could, at least, form). That only leaves the question of whether any rock planets between E.E. and the gas giant could have a stable orbit.
As for that, I think your analysis of the possibility of stable orbits is naive. Your conclusion might be right, but your method isn't valid. Whether an orbit in a many-body system are stable over millions of cycles is not trivial to calculate, and the effects of a perturbing force like a large planet do not just scale linearly with the force of its gravity.
We're talking about a gas giant close enough and big enought to make the star wobble noticably. That's a very rough gravitational environment for a small planet to find a stable orbit in.
The point can certainly be argued, but can't be resolved with quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Mars is bereft of atmosphere because it its escape velocity is low enough that the atmosphere can boil off - solar influence has nothing to do with it.
I'm not talking about the piddling little difference between a Marslike atmosphere and an Earthlike atmosphere, I'm talking about the difference between a gas giant atmosphere and a rock planet atmosphere. The point was that a Mercury-distance planet might be a rock planet like Mars is.
I was explaining why there might be rock planets for the gas giant to throw around. That should have been obvious.
With a Jupiter-mass planet at the distance of the asteroid belt, you'd have stable planetary orbits from Earth-distance on in.
Just what are you basing that specific distance on? You just pulled it out of your hat, didn't you?
Even that effect has nothing to do with the sun "blowing away" the atmosphere
Ugh, as if "blowing away" meant anything other than "removing". If you want to write a short statement about astrophysics, you have to use imperfect analogies to terrestrial phenomena, and it takes quite a jackass to point out how the analogy isn't an accurate literal description.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Real civilizations use Xkkqpli-based (sorry, I know your primitive mouth-parts can't form this sound) communications to access their massive computer archives of goat porn.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I didn't even think of that. With the way gas giants pick up moons, I'd almost say it's likely.
It wouldn't be too comfortable, though. Not lots of light for photosynthesis, but with enough greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere it could probably be warm enough for liquid water.
Damn, there might be somewhat Earthlike life on a satellite of E.E.!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
There's still the little problem of a gas giant in the inner solar system pulling any smaller planets out of their orbits. If you recall, that's the real reason I said there won't be a rocky planet in a stable orbit.
While I didn't mention it, obviously a weaker star can still blow out the gasses from closer-in planets (a Mercury-distance planet there might get the treatment Mars did here). That's why I left the possibility of Pluto-like (or even more eccentric) planets.
The relevance of the weak gas-pushing power is that it left a Jupiter where it would make a real mess of any sort of inner solar system (and I do believe that it formed there and wasn't thrown in by near passes of several distant gas giants; E.E. is only about half as bright as Sol).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Second question: do we find their females attractive? (hey, you never know!)
Third question: do we have better weapons than they do?
Fourth question: are they an enlightened, peaceful society that has evolved beyond the memory of war?
If you have answered yes to one of questions 1 or 2 and yes to one of questions 3 or 4, the obvious indicated action is invasion.
I've seen a lot of old movies about contact with aliens, and I they all pretty much go the same way. I think that we, as weird space aliens, have a duty to run amok, eat a few of them, and kidnap the most attractive of their females.
Oh, I forgot a few very important questions.
5) is their version of the common cold a deadly disease to us?
6) (if you answered "yes" to 4) do they have an an ancient weapon of great power which can be reactivated by an epic quest undertaken by one of their most dashing young males whose favorite female we kidnapped and a sufficient number of expendable henchmen?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I know, they said Jupiter-type, but there is lots of speculation here that there might also be smaller ones.
There won't.
We've got rock planets here in the inner solar-system because our manly yellow star blew off most of the atmosphere of the nearest planets.
Epsilon Eridani is a little pansy orange dwarf that couldn't blow the atmosphere off of this Jupiter-type planet as close as the asteroid belt.
With a gas giant in the inner solar system, no tiny little rock planet is going to find a stable orbit. It would get tossed out into an eccentric orbit, assuming it didn't just get tossed into the sun.
Of course, by Earthlike planet, I mean a rock planet with a gaseous atmosphere in a stable, near circular orbit at a near-constant distance from the sun (yes, dammit, I call Epsilon Eridani the sun, meaning the big hot ball). There might be an Earthlike planet if you're willing to accept a really big unlivable asteroid like Pluto as "Earthlike".
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant "text format" as in, format which is used for distributing text. I suppose I should have said "document format".
It annoys the hell out of me to download a 3 MB PDF to read a dozen pages of text and see three pictures, 2 of which are the company logo and the third poorly illustrating a concept already described well by the text.
I don't know whether it's inherently lousy or just widely misused, but I've never seen a PDF that wouldn't be better in another format.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Now, a vector representation of graphics is an entirely different beast. Instead of using 0s and 1s or As and Bs, you use high-level parameterized operations, like DRAWLINE(3x5,5x9).
Complex vector graphics are composed mostly of coordinates, just as large bitmapped graphics are composed mostly of pixels.
You don't think you can build up bitmapped graphics from smaller components? I guess you've never works with sprite and tile sets.
What about slightly more complex bitmapped graphic languages, that support tiles:
light_green = #00FF00
dark_green = #00A000
light_grey = #A0A0A0
dark_grey = #404040
Grass start
light_green dark_green light_green
light_green dark_green light_green
light_green light_green light_green
end
stone start
light_green light_grey dark_grey
light_green dark_grey dark_grey
light_green light_green light_green
end
field start
grass grass grass grass grass
grass grass grass stone grass
grass stone grass grass grass
grass grass grass grass grass
grass grass grass grass grass
end
or perhaps:
field = tiled(grass,5x5)
changetile(field,4x2,stone)
changetile(field,2x3,stone)
Sometimes, I do stuff somewhat like this when I want a quick hacked-up solution that I can easily manipulate with Perl, but I'd never think of using it as a network standard, and I'd never expect a sufficient number of people to want to edit pictures with vi. Even at my laziest, I always have a binary end-use format.
The advantages are similar, but clearly insufficient. You get a tiny advantage in readability which means maybe a few hours of programmer time saved, and you get a huge increase in file size and a big performance hit in decoding.
The human mind just can't make a picture out of hundreds of DRAWLINE commands any more than it can make a picture out of a grid of hundreds of thousands of #A08EFF style pixels. Unlike something like HTML, it isn't significantly human-readable. Using text just doesn't help much; the proper way to work with these files is in a graphical editor, with the actual format of the data completely hidden from the user.
If they were talking about compiling these specs into an efficient binary format, I'd be cheering them on, but it's just nuts to distribute bloated XML text (compressed or not).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
PDF is the most ridiculously bloated text format around! I cringe every time I see it used.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The fact that is is a text-based (actually XML-based) format is a strength as well as a weakness. Yes, it tends to be bigger than Flash binaries, but its open and extendible whereas Flash is a closed, proprietary binary format controlled by Macromedia. Its a bit like comparing HTML with the page description languages used internally by desktop publishing apps. Which one was better suited for creating the Web? Which one would you rather work with?
These are all advantages of having an open, well-documented format, not of having a text format.
The only advantage of having a text format is being able to read it and make some small amount of sense out of it with an ordinary ASCII text editor, and it adds a lot of overhead. Similarly, the only advantage of XML over making up a format specially suited to the data is the ability to make some educated guesses about the format from the data, and it adds even more overhead (XML is a lot of things, but it's not terse).
HTML works as text because there's relatively little formatting information and it's almost all text already; a human being can reasonably sit down and manually write HTML to produce anything it is capable of, so it's a good tradeoff. The best you might do by switching to a binary format is cut the average HTML file in half, whereas when you start using a markup language for graphics, you'll probably see a size increase of tenfold or more. People aren't going to be writing a lot of vector graphics in text; this is a huge expense to all the users for a small gain in the convenience of a relatively tiny number programmers.
It's not worth it, not by a long shot.
Text can be compressed, and will usually compress better than binaries.
That doesn't mean that it'll be smaller than the binaries. Quite the contrary, the overhead of storing the necessary data to regenerate the text makes it inherently larger. Not to mention the overhead of decompressing to a file 10X as big, and having to keep that in temporary store and processing it.
Any arguments for and against readable text vector graphics formats apply to bitmapped graphics formats, and we all know how popular readable text bitmapped graphics formats are.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Just for the moment, assuming that you've got an ideal application and totally ignoring all other factors, what is the cheapest MIPS source?
Would you get more MIPS/buck out of massive piles of $5 microcontrollers, or out of, say, K6 500 MHz chips with cheap MOBOs?
Again, just totally ignoring all other factors, no matter how silly you think that is.
Personally, I'd like to hijack a top-of-the-line fab and put grids of hundreds of little computers, each with a few K of memory, on dies that would normally be used for one microprocessor. I don't know what I'd do with them, but I'm sure I'd find some cool app like massive neural nets.
Ahhh... to set up a massive pile of millions of parallel processors that could start from "I think therefore I am" and get all the way up to deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before I hook up the data banks...
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Note the reference to emulation. I want a universal sandbox for cross-platform development.
And, yes, I'm working on one... sort of. I'm trying to make a language that can be used for defining the function and interfaces of arbitrary computing devices. A universal sandbox is one application for it. It's kind of a life project, so don't expect to hear about it in the near future.
For a long time, I wanted to call it C**, because of the Alpha Centauri reference, and just to be perverse, but I slowly came to realize that it would be just a little too perverse. I think I might name it "Restraint".
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It is only the _relative_ masses and positions of the objects that matter. Absolute scale is irrelevant - it just imposes a scaling factor on time. This means that I can make valid conclusions by comparing the Eridani system to the Sol system.
With comments like this, I don't see any point in continuing this discussion. You obviously have no conception of the complexities of planet formation and orbital dynamics and how fragile a stable orbit is if you think you can just make a few linear extrapolations and come up with valid answers.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I can't help see how this is something someone wants to change... it enforces planning, enhances readability and almost certainly does good things for run times.
It's the old self-modifying code versus static code argument on a lesser scale. There are plenty of neat things you can do if you can define objects dynamically, but it makes the system harder to analyse at compile time and can take a lot more debugging.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They just had to pick that ugly C syntax.
I just finished dealing with that! I wrote Cugar to make C and C++ look clean and graceful, like Python. Now I suppose I'm going to have to write #ugar.
(ladies and gentlemen, please keep the barrage of rotten fruit to a bare minimum. I like Python syntax)
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Usually, in a classless OO language, most of the explicitly defined objects clone themselves and act like classes anyway. It's a step towards a fully imperative language, like Perl or Forth, where the definition parts of the language are just more commands to be executed in sequence, unlike, say C, where struct and function definitions are all read and analysed before you are allowed to run any commands.
However, I think in newtonscript's case, the classes are just hidden and called "types" (however, I could be wrong; I only skimmed the page).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You could write a C compiler that had safe pointers. It would generate significantly slower code, but it could be done quite easily. You just treat all memory as bounded arrays, and each pointer as having an array and an index. If the index is outside of the range when you attempt to access the pointer, you get a fatal error. Simple.
I'm still disappointed that nobody seems to have come out with a universal sandbox that isn't tied to any system or language. Emulation of real-world systems is very complex (and therefore hard to optimize and debug), and if you put in mandatory features like garbage collection in the Java runtime, it's very hard to write compilers for certain languages.
BTW, I think calling it C# is a cheap stunt that will just add to name confusion. C is all about pointers, if pointers are frowned on as "unsafe", rather than the default way of doing things, it's not C.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
And here I thought I was just being a jerk...
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
lynx -dump http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.htm l | perl -e 'print -1 + scalar split /innovat/s,join "",<>;'
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Quicker to type, anyhow. I can't bear to see an explicit loop in a one-liner.
m l | perl -e 'print -1 + scalar split /innovat/s,join "",;'
lynx -dump http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.ht
Innovative bogosity rating: 8
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You remember that great scene in I, Robot (by Asimov) where the robot had to walk around a big tiled floor to change all the tile colors while someone was trying to zap him with lasers, don't you? The arcade was a perfectly faithful adaptation of the story, and totally preserved the deep and meaningful plotline.
Yeah, that kind of stuff really makes you think about whether our machines will someday develop to the point where they have souls of their own.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
When I got an ATI TV tuner card and an ATI Rage with TV output, giving me the ability to watch TV on my TV, through a $2000 computer.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
*Sigh*. For the nth time - this is because of fractioning of the protoplanetary disk *BEFORE* planets formed!
Look, jerk, stop misinterpreting what I'm saying to make me look stupid. I don't know whether you're doing it on purpose or you just think I'm a moron because you can't grasp what I'm saying, but it's bloody annoying. If it doesn't make sense the first time you read it without thinking about it, read it again and think for a minute before you post back to "correct" me.
It doesn't matter whether the gasses were blown away before or after the planet formed. I've never cared about that, and it's never made a speck of difference. I only ever mentioned it to establish what planets could form at which distances.
We know that E.E. is a small star with weak radiation. I didn't infer that from the existence of the gas giant; it's known from other observations. Everything we know about the formation of the solar system says that the gas giant could have, and probably did, form in the orbit it is currently in (where the radiation is weaker than that at Jupiter), and any rock planets would have to form much closer in (and my original post on the topic admitted the possibility that they could, at least, form). That only leaves the question of whether any rock planets between E.E. and the gas giant could have a stable orbit.
As for that, I think your analysis of the possibility of stable orbits is naive. Your conclusion might be right, but your method isn't valid. Whether an orbit in a many-body system are stable over millions of cycles is not trivial to calculate, and the effects of a perturbing force like a large planet do not just scale linearly with the force of its gravity.
We're talking about a gas giant close enough and big enought to make the star wobble noticably. That's a very rough gravitational environment for a small planet to find a stable orbit in.
The point can certainly be argued, but can't be resolved with quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Mars is bereft of atmosphere because it its escape velocity is low enough that the atmosphere can boil off - solar influence has nothing to do with it.
I'm not talking about the piddling little difference between a Marslike atmosphere and an Earthlike atmosphere, I'm talking about the difference between a gas giant atmosphere and a rock planet atmosphere. The point was that a Mercury-distance planet might be a rock planet like Mars is.
I was explaining why there might be rock planets for the gas giant to throw around. That should have been obvious.
With a Jupiter-mass planet at the distance of the asteroid belt, you'd have stable planetary orbits from Earth-distance on in.
Just what are you basing that specific distance on? You just pulled it out of your hat, didn't you?
Even that effect has nothing to do with the sun "blowing away" the atmosphere
Ugh, as if "blowing away" meant anything other than "removing". If you want to write a short statement about astrophysics, you have to use imperfect analogies to terrestrial phenomena, and it takes quite a jackass to point out how the analogy isn't an accurate literal description.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Real civilizations use Xkkqpli-based (sorry, I know your primitive mouth-parts can't form this sound) communications to access their massive computer archives of goat porn.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I didn't even think of that. With the way gas giants pick up moons, I'd almost say it's likely.
It wouldn't be too comfortable, though. Not lots of light for photosynthesis, but with enough greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere it could probably be warm enough for liquid water.
Damn, there might be somewhat Earthlike life on a satellite of E.E.!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It isn't "elephantly" or "whalely" or "enormous subterranean fungusly" but it is definitely manly.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
There's still the little problem of a gas giant in the inner solar system pulling any smaller planets out of their orbits. If you recall, that's the real reason I said there won't be a rocky planet in a stable orbit.
While I didn't mention it, obviously a weaker star can still blow out the gasses from closer-in planets (a Mercury-distance planet there might get the treatment Mars did here). That's why I left the possibility of Pluto-like (or even more eccentric) planets.
The relevance of the weak gas-pushing power is that it left a Jupiter where it would make a real mess of any sort of inner solar system (and I do believe that it formed there and wasn't thrown in by near passes of several distant gas giants; E.E. is only about half as bright as Sol).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Second question: do we find their females attractive? (hey, you never know!)
Third question: do we have better weapons than they do?
Fourth question: are they an enlightened, peaceful society that has evolved beyond the memory of war?
If you have answered yes to one of questions 1 or 2 and yes to one of questions 3 or 4, the obvious indicated action is invasion.
I've seen a lot of old movies about contact with aliens, and I they all pretty much go the same way. I think that we, as weird space aliens, have a duty to run amok, eat a few of them, and kidnap the most attractive of their females.
Oh, I forgot a few very important questions.
5) is their version of the common cold a deadly disease to us?
6) (if you answered "yes" to 4) do they have an an ancient weapon of great power which can be reactivated by an epic quest undertaken by one of their most dashing young males whose favorite female we kidnapped and a sufficient number of expendable henchmen?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I know, they said Jupiter-type, but there is lots of speculation here that there might also be smaller ones.
There won't.
We've got rock planets here in the inner solar-system because our manly yellow star blew off most of the atmosphere of the nearest planets.
Epsilon Eridani is a little pansy orange dwarf that couldn't blow the atmosphere off of this Jupiter-type planet as close as the asteroid belt.
With a gas giant in the inner solar system, no tiny little rock planet is going to find a stable orbit. It would get tossed out into an eccentric orbit, assuming it didn't just get tossed into the sun.
Of course, by Earthlike planet, I mean a rock planet with a gaseous atmosphere in a stable, near circular orbit at a near-constant distance from the sun (yes, dammit, I call Epsilon Eridani the sun, meaning the big hot ball). There might be an Earthlike planet if you're willing to accept a really big unlivable asteroid like Pluto as "Earthlike".
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Let's see:
computer + windows = $1000
computer = $1030
So... solve for windows:
windows = $1000 - computer
substitute the known quantity:
windows = $1000 - $1030
and reduce:
windows = -$30
There you have it folks: a mathematical proof that Windows has a negative value!
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.