I think you've got it exactly backwards. Apple's move to Intel hardware, and especially its decision to use off-the-shelf Intel chipsets, demonstrates that Apple has decided to leave the heavy hardware engineering to someone else, and concentrate instead on software. OS X is the big thing Apple has that e.g. Dell doesn't. Pretty cases are nice, but not something on which to base a serious grab for market share.
If you look at how Apple is presenting Boot Camp, everything from the text of the press release to the design of the icon suggests Apple is positioning it as the new Classic; it's a tool to allow people to run their old apps while they transition to OS X. In other words, the shift here is that Apple is positioning OS X not just as an alternative to Windows, but as a successor.
So, why shouldn't Apple bundle Windows, then? After all, they bundled OS 9 with OS X, for use in the Classic environment. Well, I don't think there's much point in this case. Regular users are not going to be interested in dual booting; they can barely use one operating system. Two markets will take an interest: the enterprise market, and tech enthusiasts. In both of these markets, people don't really care if Windows is pre-installed, as they probably have copies kicking around already. As such there's no good reason for Apple to put itself in a position where it's relying on Microsoft for OEM copies of Windows.
It's doubtful Microsoft would have been taken up on the offer. Apple offered OS X, but the project organizers wanted something that was totally open source. I'm a big OS X fan, but I think that choice made sense, for this application.
You can tell the difference with film or video, it's just a little more subtle. A lot of people actually prefer the 24 fps look for narrative works. There are all sorts of theories about why this is the case. Some people claim it looks less realistic, which causes the audience to suspend disbelief more easily. My guess is it's just that people have come to associate the 24 fps look with movies (usually high-quality production), and the 60 fps look with television (often 'extruded consumer product'). So, they see the 24 fps look and immediately think "Hey, this must be good."
Of course, you do need the motion blur, or 24 fps becomes unwatchable pretty fast. But modern video cards support motion blur. Sooner or later (maybe after we've got somewhat more photorealistic rendering), I'm sure someone is going to make a game that deliberately runs at 24 fps (with motion blur) to try to get that 'cinematic look'.
The idea is simple enough. Blast a liquid with waves of ultrasound and tiny bubbles of gas are created, which release a burst of heat and light when they implode. The core of the bubble reaches 15,000 C, hot enough to wrench molecules apart.
This isn't cold fusion, it's just a sneaky way of achieving hot fusion without huge x-ray lasers and giant magnets and such.
Yes, but countries that have substantial uranium deposits include Canada, the United States, France, South Africa, Australia, Russia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even the worst of those is a better country to be in business with than, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. There's also no uranium equivalent of OPEC manipulating prices.
The Japanese think they'll be able to extract uranium from sea water, at a price of ~$300/kg. Which sounds expensive, but would only add about a penny per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
And there's enough uranium around to last, at current consumption rates, for millions of years.
I suspect, actually, that Apple doesn't like it much at all. They're basically forced to try to patent any technology they might ever use, no matter how obvious, because otherwise someone else will patent it and sue them. That's just the way the system currently works. You can't blame companies for trying to protect themselves.
Now, companies that use these sorts of patents offensively are a different matter. But Apple, and most other large tech companies, don't do that. It tends to be small companies, often with no real products, that decide to try to strike it rich suing the big guys.
Why don't dashboard widgets a) get bounded by a normal window and b) follow the same window stacking rules as every other application?
Because then you'd have to actually manage all of them like normal windows. One of Apple's major goals with OS X (vs. OS 9) has been to reduce the amount of manual window management users need to do.
I've been using Rails for about 7 months, and have done two major projects in it. I completely disagree with your assessment. For starters, it's not at all tied to MySQL. PgSQL support is also very good. My understanding is that Oracle support is not so great at the moment. But I expect that will change. My real point here is that Rails is not inherently tied to any specific database; it's just a matter of what ActiveRecord adaptors happen to be out there right now.
As far as requiring the user to write SQL code, yes, you do have to write fragments of SQL code, sometimes. But SQL is a useful way to describe queries -- that's the whole point. Would using some other query language, that got translated to SQL, be any better? I don't see why it would.
Your comment about Rails not abstracting functionality from interface seems off base as well. Rails adopts a standard MVC architecture, which is pretty much the standard method for abstracting functionality from interface. If you're not getting such abstraction in your Rails apps, you probably just need to think about exactly what should go in the models, what should go in the controllers, and what should go in the views, and rearrange things a bit. Like any other MVC environment, Rails can't prevent you from e.g. putting view-specific code in your model. All it can do is provide a structure that allows you to properly separate these things if you take the time to think about your design properly.
Finally, on the charge that Rails only provides proof-of-concept features, I think you've misunderstood one of the major design principles of Rails. Rails is intended to provide a framework to build on, not a bunch of components you can plug together to get a web app without writing any code. As such, many of its components focus on the core functionality that's really useful, to the exclusion of other stuff. That other stuff might sometimes be nice to have, but it frequently locks you into doing things the way the framework does them, instead of the way that's most appropriate to your app. The Rails approach is a very refreshing change, for me anyway, and I hope the project will continue to maintain this focus.
On OS X I just set up my IM client to use text-to-speech to announce sign-ons. So if I'm off playing UT or whatever, I still know when someone I want to talk to shows up.
Actually, an indicator on the mouse would be completely useless to me. I have my machine on one of those computer desks with a slide-out keyboard/mouse tray, but I don't actually bother to slide it out; I leave it all the way in under the desk. As a result, I can't even see the keyboard or mouse.
The Canadian system is structurally better; it spends a larger fraction of every dollar on actual health care. The US spends something like twice as much per capita, though, so it generally comes out ahead on quality. Unless you're one of the 45 million people who isn't covered, of course.
When the rumors first stated circulating about.Mac, and nobody knew what it really was, I speculated that Apple was going to do something like this to create a Mac-exclusive section of the Internet. It turned out the name was mostly just poking fun at.NET, though. Still, it's an interesting idea.
This is why it's best to use internal names like "whatever.mycompany.com", even if they're not resolvable from outside the local network. You control mycompany.com; you don't control the top-level namespace, and occasionally stuff will get added to it that you didn't expect.
(If you really want to distinguish between internal and external names at a glance, you can always use the form "whatever.internal.mycompany.com".)
T-Mobile's phone support system is actually really nice. I called them a couple of months back, got a human fairly quickly, but in the middle of the conversation, the call dropped. Their system automatically called me back! And not only did it offer to let me talk to an agent then, it offered to let me schedule a callback for later, which I did. The callback came right on time, and offered an option to reschedule if the time wasn't convenient. When I got a rep on the line, he actually knew what I'd called about before, so whatever system they've got for logging customer calls seemed to be in good shape as well.
I guess T-Mobile needs this kind of thing more than most places, since presumably a lot of people calling their support line are calling from flaky cell phones, but really, why don't all these systems have this feature?
While I agree that forcing one particular view in the classroom is bad, most of our society is based on religious / spiritual values. Most of our laws, rules, codes and structure is based on principles from the bible, which again comes from Asian religions and spiritual practices (although distorted in some uncomfortable ways sometimes). Without spirituality, humanity is lost.
Why are you stopping with religion? Why do so many systems of belief, that developed among people who had no contact with each other, share so many concepts in common about how society should be run? God-given morality is not a good answer, because if God gave everyone the same morality, why'd he give them such different beliefs about everything else?
It seems much more likely to me that codified morality, including that found in religious traditions, arose from party from cooperative instincts that humans evolved living as social animals, and partly from simple experience with what rules work and don't work for setting up sustainable societies.
In other words, religion is a byproduct of morality, not a source of it. In today's world, there's no particular reason why we have to take our morality from specific religions. We still have those social instincts, and in terms of experience with what principles do and don't work for organizing a society, we've got a lot more experience than the people who wrote religious texts thousands of years ago. Notably, they had absolutely no experience with what strategies worked well in huge, diverse, technologically advanced societies.
"Freedom of speech" doesn't mean you're free from me speaking louder than you because I'm persuasive enough to get get several other people to join me (pool funds, whatever).
There's no problem if your message is louder because you've made a good case and convinced a larger number of people that it's correct. It is a bit of a problem if your message is louder simply because you, personally, have more money to spend on it than I do. We don't let rich people buy extra votes; the extent that it's possible, we shouldn't let them buy control over public discourse.
Getting money out of politics would bring us much closer to what you describe; ideas would gain exposure and support relative to their merits, rather than the disposable incomes of their supporters.
The constitution's guarantee of free speech refers to your freedom from interference by the government. That's why the campaign finance laws limiting speech are such a bad idea - they involve the government judging when and how you can express your opinion about something... something that's exactly contrary to the founder's strong words on the subject.
This is, quite honestly, a subject on which the Constitution did not display so much foresight. The Constitution provides checks on the power of government, but government is not the only center of power within society which is capable of wielding undue influence.
If you can't manage to get enough people to see your point, and thus attract the same communications horsepower as the people you oppose, then you need to re-examine the merits of your position.
Except it's not a matter of simply counting people. When you're talking about money, some people are worth more than others. That's not a good situation to have when you're talking about a process that's supposed to be supporting democracy
I think to understand the argument against unlimited campaign contributions, you have to go past the letter of the First Amendment and look at its purpose. Why is it important, from the perspective of society, that we have a right to free speech?
I would argue that it's important because it's essential for democracy. It allows ideas to be introduced and challenged, accepted or rejected, on a level playing field. When you allow unlimited spending on things like political advertising, the playing field is no longer level. It's like having a debate between two sides, where both sides show up with the largest PA systems they can afford and try to drown each other out.
Does it really serve freedom in the larger sense to allow people to act in ways that subvert an essential component of liberal democracy? We don't allow people to tamper with voting machines -- we should not allow them to distort the public discourse either.
Basic things like not randomly dropping calls are not solved problems. Most people blame the network. I live in Manhattan, though, which judging by both the carrier's maps an my own personal experience, has essentially perfect cellular coverage. If you are outside, you will have a strong signal. So, around here, when a call drops, it's not the network's fault.
Once that variable gets eliminated, it becomes very, very obvious that some phones do much better than others for reliability and reception. In particular, although there are differences between models, in general Nokia seems to do quite a lot better than Motorola and Sony Ericsson. That's the major reason I keep buying their phones even though they're ugly.
Re:it's all just rumor...
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Apple, like many companies, has its financial quarters offset from calendar quarters for tax purposes. Apple's third quarter ended June 25th.
A nuclear detonation on the scale terrorists might manage would only do fairly localized damage; if you survived the blast and the radiation, you could probably walk to areas with mostly intact infrastructure in an hour or two. In about two hours, I could walk from my house up to the GWB and into New Jersey. It wouldn't take me more than five or six hours from anywhere in Manhattan. Of course, the elderly and people with disabilities would need still need emergency evacuation.
And I'd make damn sure to bring my data; it's the product of a couple of decades of work. 'Starting over' would take on a whole new meaning without it. I'd probably grab my 500 GB external drive (which has everything) and my laptop. The laptop would give me a second copy of my really important stuff, and could come in handy. Katrina showed that the Internet can play a pretty important role in getting out information when infrastructure fails, in providing local information that traditional media overlooks, and in helping people stay in touch.
Try a host that doesn't suck. I've got a site with Media Temple and when transferring data from that site to other well-connected hosts, I've seen transfer rates upwards of 8 MB/s. That's megabytes, not megabits. This is with a dedicated virtual hosting package that only costs $50/month (though admittedly there's a rather long commitment required to get that price) -- anyone operating anything beyond the level of a hobby site could afford that.
You might need to consider tweaking your definition of "intelligence". Don't think of the sort of intelligence it requires to write computer software -- think of the sort of intelligence it requires to make people laugh at parties, or to successfully navigate social hierarchies. These types of intelligence are definitely not selected against.
Moreover, I'd like to see a study showing an actual selection against more technical sorts of intelligence. The stereotypical anti-social geek isn't, in my experience, actually all that representative of the total pool of people with strong technical skills. And anyway, even geeks seem to primarily be at a disadvantage with members of the opposite sex during high school and college. It's not clear that there's any significant correlation between being popular in school and having kids later in life.
This is such total nonsense. The BSD operating systems get plenty of community contributions. In some cases, BSD-licensed code is more likely to to spur contributions, because it can be used in more scenarios -- companies can use it with no worries about code contamination, for instance, and while they don't have to contribute back to the community, in many cases they will, because it's still in their own best interests.
If they contribute their changes back to the main trunk, they'll (probably) be able benefit from future versions of the software without having to merge their changes back in with every update. If they keep their changes private, they're effectively forking the software, and most organizations don't have the resources to maintain their own forks of major projects.
Uh, not quite. With any of the semi-realistic elevator proposals, the rope will be more like a thin strip of plastic. True, it'll all weigh a lot, but air resistance will still cause it to flutter down harmlessly.
(And, of course, anything above the point where the cable gets cut, doesn't come down at all.
Re:side by side image of the patented player &
on
Apple Sued Over iTunes UI
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· Score: 3, Informative
What's the major similarity? The three-column browser at the top of the window? That's basically just a Miller-column browser, like the Finder's 'Column View', but designed for music. Miller-column browsers have been around forever. NeXTStep had one in 1988. This is an obvious application.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've got it exactly backwards. Apple's move to Intel hardware, and especially its decision to use off-the-shelf Intel chipsets, demonstrates that Apple has decided to leave the heavy hardware engineering to someone else, and concentrate instead on software. OS X is the big thing Apple has that e.g. Dell doesn't. Pretty cases are nice, but not something on which to base a serious grab for market share.
If you look at how Apple is presenting Boot Camp, everything from the text of the press release to the design of the icon suggests Apple is positioning it as the new Classic; it's a tool to allow people to run their old apps while they transition to OS X. In other words, the shift here is that Apple is positioning OS X not just as an alternative to Windows, but as a successor.
So, why shouldn't Apple bundle Windows, then? After all, they bundled OS 9 with OS X, for use in the Classic environment. Well, I don't think there's much point in this case. Regular users are not going to be interested in dual booting; they can barely use one operating system. Two markets will take an interest: the enterprise market, and tech enthusiasts. In both of these markets, people don't really care if Windows is pre-installed, as they probably have copies kicking around already. As such there's no good reason for Apple to put itself in a position where it's relying on Microsoft for OEM copies of Windows.
It's doubtful Microsoft would have been taken up on the offer. Apple offered OS X, but the project organizers wanted something that was totally open source. I'm a big OS X fan, but I think that choice made sense, for this application.
You can tell the difference with film or video, it's just a little more subtle. A lot of people actually prefer the 24 fps look for narrative works. There are all sorts of theories about why this is the case. Some people claim it looks less realistic, which causes the audience to suspend disbelief more easily. My guess is it's just that people have come to associate the 24 fps look with movies (usually high-quality production), and the 60 fps look with television (often 'extruded consumer product'). So, they see the 24 fps look and immediately think "Hey, this must be good."
Of course, you do need the motion blur, or 24 fps becomes unwatchable pretty fast. But modern video cards support motion blur. Sooner or later (maybe after we've got somewhat more photorealistic rendering), I'm sure someone is going to make a game that deliberately runs at 24 fps (with motion blur) to try to get that 'cinematic look'.
From the article:
The idea is simple enough. Blast a liquid with waves of ultrasound and tiny bubbles of gas are created, which release a burst of heat and light when they implode. The core of the bubble reaches 15,000 C, hot enough to wrench molecules apart.
This isn't cold fusion, it's just a sneaky way of achieving hot fusion without huge x-ray lasers and giant magnets and such.
Yes, but countries that have substantial uranium deposits include Canada, the United States, France, South Africa, Australia, Russia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even the worst of those is a better country to be in business with than, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. There's also no uranium equivalent of OPEC manipulating prices.
The Japanese think they'll be able to extract uranium from sea water, at a price of ~$300/kg. Which sounds expensive, but would only add about a penny per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
And there's enough uranium around to last, at current consumption rates, for millions of years.
I suspect, actually, that Apple doesn't like it much at all. They're basically forced to try to patent any technology they might ever use, no matter how obvious, because otherwise someone else will patent it and sue them. That's just the way the system currently works. You can't blame companies for trying to protect themselves.
Now, companies that use these sorts of patents offensively are a different matter. But Apple, and most other large tech companies, don't do that. It tends to be small companies, often with no real products, that decide to try to strike it rich suing the big guys.
Why don't dashboard widgets a) get bounded by a normal window and b) follow the same window stacking rules as every other application?
Because then you'd have to actually manage all of them like normal windows. One of Apple's major goals with OS X (vs. OS 9) has been to reduce the amount of manual window management users need to do.
I've been using Rails for about 7 months, and have done two major projects in it. I completely disagree with your assessment. For starters, it's not at all tied to MySQL. PgSQL support is also very good. My understanding is that Oracle support is not so great at the moment. But I expect that will change. My real point here is that Rails is not inherently tied to any specific database; it's just a matter of what ActiveRecord adaptors happen to be out there right now.
As far as requiring the user to write SQL code, yes, you do have to write fragments of SQL code, sometimes. But SQL is a useful way to describe queries -- that's the whole point. Would using some other query language, that got translated to SQL, be any better? I don't see why it would.
Your comment about Rails not abstracting functionality from interface seems off base as well. Rails adopts a standard MVC architecture, which is pretty much the standard method for abstracting functionality from interface. If you're not getting such abstraction in your Rails apps, you probably just need to think about exactly what should go in the models, what should go in the controllers, and what should go in the views, and rearrange things a bit. Like any other MVC environment, Rails can't prevent you from e.g. putting view-specific code in your model. All it can do is provide a structure that allows you to properly separate these things if you take the time to think about your design properly.
Finally, on the charge that Rails only provides proof-of-concept features, I think you've misunderstood one of the major design principles of Rails. Rails is intended to provide a framework to build on, not a bunch of components you can plug together to get a web app without writing any code. As such, many of its components focus on the core functionality that's really useful, to the exclusion of other stuff. That other stuff might sometimes be nice to have, but it frequently locks you into doing things the way the framework does them, instead of the way that's most appropriate to your app. The Rails approach is a very refreshing change, for me anyway, and I hope the project will continue to maintain this focus.
On OS X I just set up my IM client to use text-to-speech to announce sign-ons. So if I'm off playing UT or whatever, I still know when someone I want to talk to shows up.
Actually, an indicator on the mouse would be completely useless to me. I have my machine on one of those computer desks with a slide-out keyboard/mouse tray, but I don't actually bother to slide it out; I leave it all the way in under the desk. As a result, I can't even see the keyboard or mouse.
The Canadian system is structurally better; it spends a larger fraction of every dollar on actual health care. The US spends something like twice as much per capita, though, so it generally comes out ahead on quality. Unless you're one of the 45 million people who isn't covered, of course.
When the rumors first stated circulating about .Mac, and nobody knew what it really was, I speculated that Apple was going to do something like this to create a Mac-exclusive section of the Internet. It turned out the name was mostly just poking fun at .NET, though. Still, it's an interesting idea.
This is why it's best to use internal names like "whatever.mycompany.com", even if they're not resolvable from outside the local network. You control mycompany.com; you don't control the top-level namespace, and occasionally stuff will get added to it that you didn't expect.
(If you really want to distinguish between internal and external names at a glance, you can always use the form "whatever.internal.mycompany.com".)
T-Mobile's phone support system is actually really nice. I called them a couple of months back, got a human fairly quickly, but in the middle of the conversation, the call dropped. Their system automatically called me back! And not only did it offer to let me talk to an agent then, it offered to let me schedule a callback for later, which I did. The callback came right on time, and offered an option to reschedule if the time wasn't convenient. When I got a rep on the line, he actually knew what I'd called about before, so whatever system they've got for logging customer calls seemed to be in good shape as well.
I guess T-Mobile needs this kind of thing more than most places, since presumably a lot of people calling their support line are calling from flaky cell phones, but really, why don't all these systems have this feature?
While I agree that forcing one particular view in the classroom is bad, most of our society is based on religious / spiritual values. Most of our laws, rules, codes and structure is based on principles from the bible, which again comes from Asian religions and spiritual practices (although distorted in some uncomfortable ways sometimes). Without spirituality, humanity is lost.
Why are you stopping with religion? Why do so many systems of belief, that developed among people who had no contact with each other, share so many concepts in common about how society should be run? God-given morality is not a good answer, because if God gave everyone the same morality, why'd he give them such different beliefs about everything else?
It seems much more likely to me that codified morality, including that found in religious traditions, arose from party from cooperative instincts that humans evolved living as social animals, and partly from simple experience with what rules work and don't work for setting up sustainable societies.
In other words, religion is a byproduct of morality, not a source of it. In today's world, there's no particular reason why we have to take our morality from specific religions. We still have those social instincts, and in terms of experience with what principles do and don't work for organizing a society, we've got a lot more experience than the people who wrote religious texts thousands of years ago. Notably, they had absolutely no experience with what strategies worked well in huge, diverse, technologically advanced societies.
"Freedom of speech" doesn't mean you're free from me speaking louder than you because I'm persuasive enough to get get several other people to join me (pool funds, whatever).
There's no problem if your message is louder because you've made a good case and convinced a larger number of people that it's correct. It is a bit of a problem if your message is louder simply because you, personally, have more money to spend on it than I do. We don't let rich people buy extra votes; the extent that it's possible, we shouldn't let them buy control over public discourse.
Getting money out of politics would bring us much closer to what you describe; ideas would gain exposure and support relative to their merits, rather than the disposable incomes of their supporters.
The constitution's guarantee of free speech refers to your freedom from interference by the government. That's why the campaign finance laws limiting speech are such a bad idea - they involve the government judging when and how you can express your opinion about something... something that's exactly contrary to the founder's strong words on the subject.
This is, quite honestly, a subject on which the Constitution did not display so much foresight. The Constitution provides checks on the power of government, but government is not the only center of power within society which is capable of wielding undue influence.
If you can't manage to get enough people to see your point, and thus attract the same communications horsepower as the people you oppose, then you need to re-examine the merits of your position.
Except it's not a matter of simply counting people. When you're talking about money, some people are worth more than others. That's not a good situation to have when you're talking about a process that's supposed to be supporting democracy
I think to understand the argument against unlimited campaign contributions, you have to go past the letter of the First Amendment and look at its purpose. Why is it important, from the perspective of society, that we have a right to free speech?
I would argue that it's important because it's essential for democracy. It allows ideas to be introduced and challenged, accepted or rejected, on a level playing field. When you allow unlimited spending on things like political advertising, the playing field is no longer level. It's like having a debate between two sides, where both sides show up with the largest PA systems they can afford and try to drown each other out.
Does it really serve freedom in the larger sense to allow people to act in ways that subvert an essential component of liberal democracy? We don't allow people to tamper with voting machines -- we should not allow them to distort the public discourse either.
Basic things like not randomly dropping calls are not solved problems. Most people blame the network. I live in Manhattan, though, which judging by both the carrier's maps an my own personal experience, has essentially perfect cellular coverage. If you are outside, you will have a strong signal. So, around here, when a call drops, it's not the network's fault.
Once that variable gets eliminated, it becomes very, very obvious that some phones do much better than others for reliability and reception. In particular, although there are differences between models, in general Nokia seems to do quite a lot better than Motorola and Sony Ericsson. That's the major reason I keep buying their phones even though they're ugly.
Apple, like many companies, has its financial quarters offset from calendar quarters for tax purposes. Apple's third quarter ended June 25th.
A nuclear detonation on the scale terrorists might manage would only do fairly localized damage; if you survived the blast and the radiation, you could probably walk to areas with mostly intact infrastructure in an hour or two. In about two hours, I could walk from my house up to the GWB and into New Jersey. It wouldn't take me more than five or six hours from anywhere in Manhattan. Of course, the elderly and people with disabilities would need still need emergency evacuation.
And I'd make damn sure to bring my data; it's the product of a couple of decades of work. 'Starting over' would take on a whole new meaning without it. I'd probably grab my 500 GB external drive (which has everything) and my laptop. The laptop would give me a second copy of my really important stuff, and could come in handy. Katrina showed that the Internet can play a pretty important role in getting out information when infrastructure fails, in providing local information that traditional media overlooks, and in helping people stay in touch.
Try a host that doesn't suck. I've got a site with Media Temple and when transferring data from that site to other well-connected hosts, I've seen transfer rates upwards of 8 MB/s. That's megabytes, not megabits. This is with a dedicated virtual hosting package that only costs $50/month (though admittedly there's a rather long commitment required to get that price) -- anyone operating anything beyond the level of a hobby site could afford that.
That's a pretty big error margin. 0.000000386 parsecs is around 7.4 million miles.
This is why you should never use real units in technobabble.
You might need to consider tweaking your definition of "intelligence". Don't think of the sort of intelligence it requires to write computer software -- think of the sort of intelligence it requires to make people laugh at parties, or to successfully navigate social hierarchies. These types of intelligence are definitely not selected against.
Moreover, I'd like to see a study showing an actual selection against more technical sorts of intelligence. The stereotypical anti-social geek isn't, in my experience, actually all that representative of the total pool of people with strong technical skills. And anyway, even geeks seem to primarily be at a disadvantage with members of the opposite sex during high school and college. It's not clear that there's any significant correlation between being popular in school and having kids later in life.
This is such total nonsense. The BSD operating systems get plenty of community contributions. In some cases, BSD-licensed code is more likely to to spur contributions, because it can be used in more scenarios -- companies can use it with no worries about code contamination, for instance, and while they don't have to contribute back to the community, in many cases they will, because it's still in their own best interests.
If they contribute their changes back to the main trunk, they'll (probably) be able benefit from future versions of the software without having to merge their changes back in with every update. If they keep their changes private, they're effectively forking the software, and most organizations don't have the resources to maintain their own forks of major projects.
Uh, not quite. With any of the semi-realistic elevator proposals, the rope will be more like a thin strip of plastic. True, it'll all weigh a lot, but air resistance will still cause it to flutter down harmlessly.
(And, of course, anything above the point where the cable gets cut, doesn't come down at all.
What's the major similarity? The three-column browser at the top of the window? That's basically just a Miller-column browser, like the Finder's 'Column View', but designed for music. Miller-column browsers have been around forever. NeXTStep had one in 1988. This is an obvious application.