Unless, of course, he was presented the camera by NASA as a gift as he says he was.
At which point any assertion that he's a thief or acting in bad faith becomes factually inaccurate and anybody saying it is talking about things they know nothing about.
Now, do I have anything to suggest that he was or wasn't given this camera... nope. Other than NASA having no record of it, do they have anything to back up their claims either? Nope.
So, maybe before you start saying he's a thief (which makes you guilty of libel if untrue), you should wait until someone provides some actual evidence of this. At this point, it's purely "he said/they said".
If he was given this by someone at NASA, then maybe NASA is acting like dicks and behaving unreasonably because someone didn't fill out some government form correctly.
And yet, millions of people disagree with you and have bought these phones. One person's "working better" is another person's junk.
The fact that the pre-orders are sold out means that there are people with different opinions than you. They may also like a different flavor of ice cream or drink a different soda than you. How shocking.
There is no universally right answer, it's a subjective decision.
Instead of being so high and mighty... oh never mind, whats the point, its not your fault, its someone elses, your code is awesome and everyone will bow down to you guys. I know you guys like to think Linux is ruling the world, but you're still no where near big enough to start trying to pull an Apple/Google/Microsoft and force people to do it your way. You've tried this before and again, you'll lose.
Um, did you even read the article?
Someone released a driver for Virtual Box, said driver causes instability and crashes.
Do you think it's the job of the Linux Kernel devs to re-tool the kernel to work around this, or do you think it's just easier to push it back to the people who wrote the driver?
I mean, seriously, from TFA:
Even though this VirtualBox driver is open-source (it's under the GPL), the quality of the driver is quite poor and continues to cause issues for many users. In particular, kernel developers have become frustrated that this virtualization driver is causing random memory corruption. Specifically cited is "corrupt linked lists, corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes."
The code comment for the patch mentions, "vbox is garbage." The VirtualBox kernel driver is needed for providing some features to guests on this Sun/Oracle virtualization platform. While the VirtualBox kernel driver is open-source, it doesn't live within the mainline kernel tree and is distributed separately with the VirtualBox software package.
So, if you start off with a working, stable kernel, apply this patch, and then end up with a broken, flaky kernel... what is the conclusion other than the driver is crap?
I'm not a Linux kernel developer... but I have had someone try to write some badly written code on top of some systems I supported, only to have them come back and start filing large amounts of bug reports... and by the time you waste your own time to realize this has nothing to do with your own code, it's too late. Hell, I even had one occasion where someone ignored the explicit statement that it wasn't thread safe, and definitely didn't implement transactions... only to submit a bug report whining that the transactions didn't work like he wished them to. Of course it didn't, it said right up front it didn't and never would... but he figured if he just pretended that it did, he'd be able to force us to make it do so. How was that my fault?
If this module is leading to support issues, I can see why they'd draw the line and say "not our fault or problem".
If I wrote crappy code for a Windows app, do you think Microsoft would be willing to listen to me submitting bug reports in Windows if it was becoming readily apparent that the problem wasn't in their code? Because, that's really what this is about from the sounds of it.
I mean, really, Oracle throws poor code over the fence into production and makes the user be the beta tester... that's not exactly new. Anyone ever seen Beehive? When I first saw it, it was a freshly steaming turd. No idea what it's like now, but at the time it was largely broken.
I don't see this so much about NIH as "WTF makes this my problem".
Haven't you been paying attention? What do you think ACTA is?
Basically, the US pressured everyone to sign onto this to ramp up copyright protection around the world. The next step, is the USA adopts this, and the recording/movie industry owns the worlds police forces.
ACTA basically puts the world on the hook to enforce US copyright interests... oh, and maybe the odd domestic ones can piggyback on it too now and then. But, really, it's more about Hollywood and Disney.
"I don't understand how people can act this way. Their souls will be delivered to eternal torment in Hell. We HAVE to keep trying to change them to prevent that!"
Despite religion being mostly a community of mythologists, some people feel that Hell is as real as an oncoming bus while you're standing in the road. You NEED to listen! You need to get out of the road! Can't you see!
I wish these people would STFU and stop worrying about my 'immortal soul'. I don't believe in their god, I don't care what they think is going to happen to me... and anybody who gets that close up to me who feels the need to worry about my salvation should be more worried about what I might do to them. (I once had to inform such a person that if he didn't step back I would be putting him into the adjacent wall rather forcefully, possibly more than once.)
As my father says, if heaven is full of assholes like them, I don't want to be there. And, if I'm so bad, you'd think they wouldn't want me there anyway.
If people are that deluded that they feel they need to be changing me from my evil ways, they should be locked up. Because they've moved into the delusional range where they are incapable of dealing with reality.
I don't want to be part of your club, and I don't want to meet your imaginary friend.
Statements like this make me no longer care about the inappropriate timing of the comment I'm about to make, but I'll make it anyway: I sure hope the latest news means that objectivity will return to how devices are rated
But, the decision to buy something isn't purely an objective decision. It's as much about preference as anything else -- do you need a customizable, extensible command line, or do you want something that's largely idiot proof?
When I was in university, Linux was the coolest thing ever because I could endlessly discover all of the free stuff there was... not to mention coolness and multi-tasking.
Now, for sitting in my recliner, or in an airplane, or a hotel room and essentially just noodling around, my iPad is pretty much exactly something I've always wanted. I'm not writing code on it, or tuning databases... I'm playing games, watching videos, surfing the web. And in a way a netbook would never be appealing to me.
From the fall of AOL to the rise of iComputing, we had a 12 year golden age where walled gardens were derided, people owned their own devices, and the landscape of the internet formed more or less naturally.
And, the notion of a walled garden and openness is a political position... to a lot of people the ease of a well-managed 'walled garden' makes for a pleasant user experience. They have no idea what you're talking about for the most part, they just want to click the pretty buttons.
To put it in free market terms (which I generally avoid using), the market has decided they like these products. People have exercised their free will and chosen to buy these products.
You can say it's because these buyers are stupid, or trendy idiots, or smug people in coffee houses with pony tails all you like... it's awfully hard to argue with the sales figures Jobs drove Apple to with these devices.
And, contrary to your expectation of objectivity, I must say that subjectively I like the iPods, iTunes, and now iPad progression of nice toys. And, maybe, just maybe, all of these people buying these devices subjectively believe they get value for money.
At which point you might as well be complaining about Coke vs Pepsi. Because there is no objective criteria, and just because you don't like the product doesn't mean that other people are required to not like it either.
I saw one of these on a business trip not long ago... 500+ HP of performance station wagon. The mind reels.
There might not even be all that much latency at those speeds.;-)
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The big problem is that in a lot of programs you need more than just the pure functions; you need I/O and other side-effects.
See, a computer language without IO is generally something which doesn't do anything useful. If all they are is something which is elegant and pretty, it's hard not to write them off as something that academics crow over but which have no actual value.
Obviously, that's a gross overstatement, but usually I get the impression that people fawn over it because it's pretty and plays into a certain aesthetic that only a very few people I've ever known are swayed by.
Mostly it was a former co-worker who occasionally got the notion in his head that everything we'd done over the last few years should be thrown away and started from scratch, because he had read something in an academic journal that made him rethink the world and that we were All Horribly Wrong and that he'd Seen The Light.
Obviously, management and other people mostly treated it as an academic indulgence and told him that what he said was great in theory, but had no relation to the real world. It was mostly about how elegant the language would be, and how it would solve a bunch of issues which nobody had identified as needing to be solved.
In no way shape or form did it relate to the actual shipping products we had, what we were trying to accomplish, or how we actually generated revenue. Eventually when he brought up the topic, people just tuned him out. He's a smart guy, but after a while he was saying stuff that was more about something purely theoretical and irrelevant.
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See, as an old school user of vi, emacs doesn't make the case for a functional language being useful.
In fact, quite the opposite.:-P
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Yeah, every now and then I've known someone who firmly believed we should all be writing in Haskell and the like.
Mostly it seems like they're suggesting it because they're geeky people who like some of the features they claim the language has, and because this meets some level of mathematical elegance that resonates with them.
My recollection of functional programming from university was that it was kind cute, seemed to be geared to solving a problem domain I never found a use for, but that ultimately I hated the syntax and structure of it. I never really "got it", or really understood what it was supposed to be useful for.
Other than someone doing an Othello game in lisp, I'm not sure I've ever actually seen these languages used for anything... at least, not outside of AI type things or university.
But, that was a long time ago. To me it's mostly theorists talking about how clean and pretty the code is, but it just doesn't seem like it's all that useful in the real world.
And, really, let's face it... I don't recall ever seeing "wanted, one haskell programmer". So, do people actually use it for commercial software?
I've had hotter than Pure Cap. You have to work up to it to be able to handle it, but it's very doable.
I just don't see the point, to be honest.
Years ago, a friendly pub owner offered to make several of us his "stupid hot" wings... basically, fresh habaneros and lots of other stuff.
It numbed my face, and the next day was... unpleasant. Since then, my stomach literally can't handle anything excessively hot, and I no longer derive pleasure from it.
I just don't want to play anymore -- I can get tasty with some heat long before the ridiculous threshold that playing around with some of those peppers are at.
Though, a friend of my wife has been eating hot spicy foods for so long, that I'm fairly convinced that if food isn't crazy hot (and super salty), she can't even taste it any more. Because everything she cooks is very spicy. So she's either worn out the taste buds, or with age they're less sensitive. I don't want to be in my 50s and not taste anything less corrosive than battery acid.:-P
from the article: "it appears capsaicin does not cause permanent tissue damage, even in high doses" So we can all chill out:)
I'm not so sure of that... a friend had a bottle of "100% pure cap". Basically, it was in a two-layer glass container with an eye dropper and a whole lot of cautionary notes.
Apparently, the sellers of this stuff (and I have no idea where he got it) felt that in it's pure form, this stuff could basically chew through your stomach lining, blind you, and all sorts of crazy stuff.
It scared the hell outta me. I wouldn't want to be the one to verify that it can't cause tissue damage.:-P
Sure, it seems reasonable... but the universe is big and vast and complex and sneaky.
Essentially, we can only restrict ourselves to what we know. We can't rule out the possibility of some of this stuff, but we can't seriously consider it because it's basically science fiction since we have nothing to suggest it. So, from a science perspective, the answer is to ignore it.
If you can have a cloud of alcohol in space, and all of the other wacky stuff we see... I'd be reluctant to be the one to say "you simply can't have life without water".
For all we know, there's something living in a sea of liquid methanol right now... drunk, happy, and utterly alien.:-P (Or, if you evolved in methanol, you'd likely not be drunk from it, but you get my point.)
The point is, there is no way to search for alien life that is so alien as to be something we can't make any guesses about. I'll certainly defer to your chemistry knowledge... but I wouldn't bet against the universe.:-P
Why do we still put a mandate of "liquid water" in the hospitable zone requirement? Are we really naive enough to think that life out there CAN'T POSSIBLY FORM without water?
Someone asks this damned question EVERY time this topic comes up... the answer is always the same: We don't know how to look for life that we can't say anything about it's chemical composition.
By looking for liquid water, we limit the search to places where something like us could exist.
How do you propose we look for a life form which has no chemical similarity to us? By your standard, we could look at anything, and say "well, there could be some unfathomable form of life there"... which doesn't do anything to narrow the field.
Your way isn't science... it's just pointing and saying "maybe". It has no useful input to actually looking for anything. So, unless you can provide some mechanism still using the scientific method to search for life in the galaxy that DOESN'T look for parameters similar to our own... it's pretty much a non-starter.
Sure, there could be Jupiter Methane Bats... and Rigel 7 could be teeming with Silicon Sharks... but we have no meaningful way to look for them.
With the right benchmarks, my minivan outperforms a Maserati. The T4 is a minivan
Well, like all benchmarks, it depends on your needs.
If it's getting 6 kids to soccer practice in a vehicle with a high safety rating, then the mini-van is more suited to your purposes.
Of course, what CPU functionality in this car analogy corresponds to having the mini-van be preferable to a Maserati... I don't think I can answer that.:-P
*shrug* You're full of shit, and you're saying things as if they're facts.
I know a lot about how the proponents of free markets claim they work. I spent over a decade having drunk the kool-aid and reading Ayn Rand and Adam Smith and the Libertarians. I've got the whole set.
I've just come to the conclusion that it's a complete farce, doesn't work the way people claim it does, and is largely a Libertarian fantasy in which if everybody would just play by your rules we'd live in a utopian society -- same old dogmatic bullshit.
In my considered estimation, it's a completely unworkable theory, and mostly just leads to the rich and powerful exploiting the weak. It doesn't achieve the optimal solutions it claims to, and the players all attempt to distort the rules so they have an unfair advantage over everybody else. Eventually, they all become monopolized or oligarchized -- your perfect and ideal abstraction doesn't actually happen in the real world. Believing otherwise is entirely naive and dogmatic that this is a perfect solution.
But, hey, go back to your Libertarian coloring books, because nothing I say to you is going to sway you from this belief of yours... it has likely moved into the blind faith stage.
Don't pretend like I don't know anything about it... I've read far more about it than most people, and at the time I believed in it.
If you don't like the product. Do not buy the product. That is what Free Enterprise is all about. Let the market, not the courts decide.
Blah blah blah.
The free market never reaches optimal conditions. The free market allows the big players to change the rules and fuck us all over. The free market is an abstraction that doesn't exist.
If we let the markets decide, we'd all be running Microsoft operating systems on closed hardware, and it would spy on us. And we'd probably be driving cars which explode on contact.
Oh, and most of us wouldn't have survived to adulthood because companies would have replaces melamine for protein powder or other toxic shortcuts.
Your market does nothing more than look out for its own interests. It's incapable of doing the things you ascribe to it... mostly it's just the rich eating the poor.
But truth is this is a manufactured story that really has yet to cause anyone any problems.
Because they haven't shipped any yet, that's why.
Let me ask you this: Who has built a system with a UEFI subsystem which doesn't allow Secure Boot to be disabled by the user? Answer: Nobody.
And, who has seen a UEFI system which says it's been designed for Windows 8 they could test this against? Answer: Nobody.
In the hands of Microsoft, I believe entirely they would insist their vendors build a machine which is really only capable of booting Windows without basically violating ACTA or something. They've never demonstrated any compunction about forcing lock-in if they get a chance. In fact, they have a strong preference for it.
Hell, it took literally years and a bunch of lawsuits to buy a whitebox PC without Microsoft getting paid for the OS even if you didn't want it and weren't going to use it... you think they'd hesitate to insist vendors ship something locked down to them?
The reality is, almost any tech company would lock you into their product so fast it's not funny.
Sadly, that is pretty much exactly what will happen.
ACTA has been more or less authored by the content industry... and all of us who aren't in the US are getting this rammed down our throats. There's no public consultation, and they won't release the text of this for the most part.
But you can bet your ass this will be used to force really excessive controls on the rest of the world (at the behest of the US content industry), and then it will be brought back to your own lawmakers with a "see, we need to be on par with everyone else".
Trust me, the US at this point has more or less under threat of trade barriers forced everybody to accept this treaty, and now it will turn inward. This has become SOP for US copyright issues over the last few years.
I suspect as of when this becomes law, ripping a CD or DVD I bought will be something I can go to prison for. It's like colonialism, but with treaties and secret back room deals.
Thanks a lot, your leaders are screwing us all over in favor of preserving the profits of the multinationals they work for. I doubt very much there is any balance to preserve fair-use and other rights we've always enjoyed.
Yeah, but from the link I provided, they've also muddied the waters somewhat...
One element of uncertainty that will be created by this Act, at least for the next five to ten years, is the definition of invalidating prior art. Prior to this reform, decades of case law had been established to define what was necessary for prior art to be invalidating because it was "known," "used," "patented," "described in a printed publication," "in public use" or "on sale." However, 35 U.S.C. Â102, as amended, has introduced a new standard of "otherwise available to the public." The statute does not define this phrase and it will take time for the Federal Circuit to sort out. While this Act has created some certainty as to what may qualify as invalidating prior art with respect to the invention date, it has introduced a new level of uncertainty as to what types or quality of publications or events may qualify as invalidating prior art.
So, it might take some time until there is clear enough case law to establish what all this means and the like.
Did you miss the part where with the America Invents Act has now entrenched First-to-File?
Who needs prior are if you're the first one to file for a patent?
Welcome to a huge step backwards in the already bad intellectual property laws. You don't have the to be the one to come up with an idea, just the one to beat someone else on your patent filing.
Well, MIME is Multi-part Internet Mail Extensions... It certainly was never the be-all and end-all of how to work with file formats, just how to send email messages with binary stuff attached.
It's now at least 17 years old. Maybe not obsolete, but there is room for improvement.
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Unless, of course, he was presented the camera by NASA as a gift as he says he was.
At which point any assertion that he's a thief or acting in bad faith becomes factually inaccurate and anybody saying it is talking about things they know nothing about.
Now, do I have anything to suggest that he was or wasn't given this camera ... nope. Other than NASA having no record of it, do they have anything to back up their claims either? Nope.
So, maybe before you start saying he's a thief (which makes you guilty of libel if untrue), you should wait until someone provides some actual evidence of this. At this point, it's purely "he said/they said".
If he was given this by someone at NASA, then maybe NASA is acting like dicks and behaving unreasonably because someone didn't fill out some government form correctly.
Surely you don't expect people to listen to facts about the iPhone around here do you?
They're too busy being smug and hip by blaming the users of Apple products of being smug and hip.
And yet, millions of people disagree with you and have bought these phones. One person's "working better" is another person's junk.
The fact that the pre-orders are sold out means that there are people with different opinions than you. They may also like a different flavor of ice cream or drink a different soda than you. How shocking.
There is no universally right answer, it's a subjective decision.
Um, did you even read the article?
Someone released a driver for Virtual Box, said driver causes instability and crashes.
Do you think it's the job of the Linux Kernel devs to re-tool the kernel to work around this, or do you think it's just easier to push it back to the people who wrote the driver?
I mean, seriously, from TFA:
So, if you start off with a working, stable kernel, apply this patch, and then end up with a broken, flaky kernel ... what is the conclusion other than the driver is crap?
I'm not a Linux kernel developer ... but I have had someone try to write some badly written code on top of some systems I supported, only to have them come back and start filing large amounts of bug reports ... and by the time you waste your own time to realize this has nothing to do with your own code, it's too late. Hell, I even had one occasion where someone ignored the explicit statement that it wasn't thread safe, and definitely didn't implement transactions ... only to submit a bug report whining that the transactions didn't work like he wished them to. Of course it didn't, it said right up front it didn't and never would ... but he figured if he just pretended that it did, he'd be able to force us to make it do so. How was that my fault?
If this module is leading to support issues, I can see why they'd draw the line and say "not our fault or problem".
If I wrote crappy code for a Windows app, do you think Microsoft would be willing to listen to me submitting bug reports in Windows if it was becoming readily apparent that the problem wasn't in their code? Because, that's really what this is about from the sounds of it.
I mean, really, Oracle throws poor code over the fence into production and makes the user be the beta tester ... that's not exactly new. Anyone ever seen Beehive? When I first saw it, it was a freshly steaming turd. No idea what it's like now, but at the time it was largely broken.
I don't see this so much about NIH as "WTF makes this my problem".
Haven't you been paying attention? What do you think ACTA is?
Basically, the US pressured everyone to sign onto this to ramp up copyright protection around the world. The next step, is the USA adopts this, and the recording/movie industry owns the worlds police forces.
ACTA basically puts the world on the hook to enforce US copyright interests ... oh, and maybe the odd domestic ones can piggyback on it too now and then. But, really, it's more about Hollywood and Disney.
Or even iProphet.
I wish these people would STFU and stop worrying about my 'immortal soul'. I don't believe in their god, I don't care what they think is going to happen to me ... and anybody who gets that close up to me who feels the need to worry about my salvation should be more worried about what I might do to them. (I once had to inform such a person that if he didn't step back I would be putting him into the adjacent wall rather forcefully, possibly more than once.)
As my father says, if heaven is full of assholes like them, I don't want to be there. And, if I'm so bad, you'd think they wouldn't want me there anyway.
If people are that deluded that they feel they need to be changing me from my evil ways, they should be locked up. Because they've moved into the delusional range where they are incapable of dealing with reality.
I don't want to be part of your club, and I don't want to meet your imaginary friend.
But, the decision to buy something isn't purely an objective decision. It's as much about preference as anything else -- do you need a customizable, extensible command line, or do you want something that's largely idiot proof?
When I was in university, Linux was the coolest thing ever because I could endlessly discover all of the free stuff there was ... not to mention coolness and multi-tasking.
Now, for sitting in my recliner, or in an airplane, or a hotel room and essentially just noodling around, my iPad is pretty much exactly something I've always wanted. I'm not writing code on it, or tuning databases ... I'm playing games, watching videos, surfing the web. And in a way a netbook would never be appealing to me.
And, the notion of a walled garden and openness is a political position ... to a lot of people the ease of a well-managed 'walled garden' makes for a pleasant user experience. They have no idea what you're talking about for the most part, they just want to click the pretty buttons.
To put it in free market terms (which I generally avoid using), the market has decided they like these products. People have exercised their free will and chosen to buy these products.
You can say it's because these buyers are stupid, or trendy idiots, or smug people in coffee houses with pony tails all you like ... it's awfully hard to argue with the sales figures Jobs drove Apple to with these devices.
And, contrary to your expectation of objectivity, I must say that subjectively I like the iPods, iTunes, and now iPad progression of nice toys. And, maybe, just maybe, all of these people buying these devices subjectively believe they get value for money.
At which point you might as well be complaining about Coke vs Pepsi. Because there is no objective criteria, and just because you don't like the product doesn't mean that other people are required to not like it either.
Especially if it's one of these.
I saw one of these on a business trip not long ago ... 500+ HP of performance station wagon. The mind reels.
There might not even be all that much latency at those speeds. ;-)
See, a computer language without IO is generally something which doesn't do anything useful. If all they are is something which is elegant and pretty, it's hard not to write them off as something that academics crow over but which have no actual value.
Obviously, that's a gross overstatement, but usually I get the impression that people fawn over it because it's pretty and plays into a certain aesthetic that only a very few people I've ever known are swayed by.
Mostly it was a former co-worker who occasionally got the notion in his head that everything we'd done over the last few years should be thrown away and started from scratch, because he had read something in an academic journal that made him rethink the world and that we were All Horribly Wrong and that he'd Seen The Light.
Obviously, management and other people mostly treated it as an academic indulgence and told him that what he said was great in theory, but had no relation to the real world. It was mostly about how elegant the language would be, and how it would solve a bunch of issues which nobody had identified as needing to be solved.
In no way shape or form did it relate to the actual shipping products we had, what we were trying to accomplish, or how we actually generated revenue. Eventually when he brought up the topic, people just tuned him out. He's a smart guy, but after a while he was saying stuff that was more about something purely theoretical and irrelevant.
See, as an old school user of vi, emacs doesn't make the case for a functional language being useful.
In fact, quite the opposite. :-P
Yeah, every now and then I've known someone who firmly believed we should all be writing in Haskell and the like.
Mostly it seems like they're suggesting it because they're geeky people who like some of the features they claim the language has, and because this meets some level of mathematical elegance that resonates with them.
My recollection of functional programming from university was that it was kind cute, seemed to be geared to solving a problem domain I never found a use for, but that ultimately I hated the syntax and structure of it. I never really "got it", or really understood what it was supposed to be useful for.
Other than someone doing an Othello game in lisp, I'm not sure I've ever actually seen these languages used for anything ... at least, not outside of AI type things or university.
But, that was a long time ago. To me it's mostly theorists talking about how clean and pretty the code is, but it just doesn't seem like it's all that useful in the real world.
And, really, let's face it ... I don't recall ever seeing "wanted, one haskell programmer". So, do people actually use it for commercial software?
I just don't see the point, to be honest.
Years ago, a friendly pub owner offered to make several of us his "stupid hot" wings ... basically, fresh habaneros and lots of other stuff.
It numbed my face, and the next day was ... unpleasant. Since then, my stomach literally can't handle anything excessively hot, and I no longer derive pleasure from it.
I just don't want to play anymore -- I can get tasty with some heat long before the ridiculous threshold that playing around with some of those peppers are at.
Though, a friend of my wife has been eating hot spicy foods for so long, that I'm fairly convinced that if food isn't crazy hot (and super salty), she can't even taste it any more. Because everything she cooks is very spicy. So she's either worn out the taste buds, or with age they're less sensitive. I don't want to be in my 50s and not taste anything less corrosive than battery acid. :-P
I'm not so sure of that ... a friend had a bottle of "100% pure cap". Basically, it was in a two-layer glass container with an eye dropper and a whole lot of cautionary notes.
Apparently, the sellers of this stuff (and I have no idea where he got it) felt that in it's pure form, this stuff could basically chew through your stomach lining, blind you, and all sorts of crazy stuff.
It scared the hell outta me. I wouldn't want to be the one to verify that it can't cause tissue damage. :-P
Sure, it seems reasonable ... but the universe is big and vast and complex and sneaky.
Essentially, we can only restrict ourselves to what we know. We can't rule out the possibility of some of this stuff, but we can't seriously consider it because it's basically science fiction since we have nothing to suggest it. So, from a science perspective, the answer is to ignore it.
If you can have a cloud of alcohol in space, and all of the other wacky stuff we see ... I'd be reluctant to be the one to say "you simply can't have life without water".
For all we know, there's something living in a sea of liquid methanol right now ... drunk, happy, and utterly alien. :-P (Or, if you evolved in methanol, you'd likely not be drunk from it, but you get my point.)
The point is, there is no way to search for alien life that is so alien as to be something we can't make any guesses about. I'll certainly defer to your chemistry knowledge ... but I wouldn't bet against the universe. :-P
Someone asks this damned question EVERY time this topic comes up ... the answer is always the same: We don't know how to look for life that we can't say anything about it's chemical composition.
By looking for liquid water, we limit the search to places where something like us could exist.
How do you propose we look for a life form which has no chemical similarity to us? By your standard, we could look at anything, and say "well, there could be some unfathomable form of life there" ... which doesn't do anything to narrow the field.
Your way isn't science ... it's just pointing and saying "maybe". It has no useful input to actually looking for anything. So, unless you can provide some mechanism still using the scientific method to search for life in the galaxy that DOESN'T look for parameters similar to our own ... it's pretty much a non-starter.
Sure, there could be Jupiter Methane Bats ... and Rigel 7 could be teeming with Silicon Sharks ... but we have no meaningful way to look for them.
Well, like all benchmarks, it depends on your needs.
If it's getting 6 kids to soccer practice in a vehicle with a high safety rating, then the mini-van is more suited to your purposes.
Of course, what CPU functionality in this car analogy corresponds to having the mini-van be preferable to a Maserati ... I don't think I can answer that. :-P
*shrug* You're full of shit, and you're saying things as if they're facts.
I know a lot about how the proponents of free markets claim they work. I spent over a decade having drunk the kool-aid and reading Ayn Rand and Adam Smith and the Libertarians. I've got the whole set.
I've just come to the conclusion that it's a complete farce, doesn't work the way people claim it does, and is largely a Libertarian fantasy in which if everybody would just play by your rules we'd live in a utopian society -- same old dogmatic bullshit.
In my considered estimation, it's a completely unworkable theory, and mostly just leads to the rich and powerful exploiting the weak. It doesn't achieve the optimal solutions it claims to, and the players all attempt to distort the rules so they have an unfair advantage over everybody else. Eventually, they all become monopolized or oligarchized -- your perfect and ideal abstraction doesn't actually happen in the real world. Believing otherwise is entirely naive and dogmatic that this is a perfect solution.
But, hey, go back to your Libertarian coloring books, because nothing I say to you is going to sway you from this belief of yours ... it has likely moved into the blind faith stage.
Don't pretend like I don't know anything about it ... I've read far more about it than most people, and at the time I believed in it.
Blah blah blah.
The free market never reaches optimal conditions. The free market allows the big players to change the rules and fuck us all over. The free market is an abstraction that doesn't exist.
If we let the markets decide, we'd all be running Microsoft operating systems on closed hardware, and it would spy on us. And we'd probably be driving cars which explode on contact.
Oh, and most of us wouldn't have survived to adulthood because companies would have replaces melamine for protein powder or other toxic shortcuts.
Your market does nothing more than look out for its own interests. It's incapable of doing the things you ascribe to it ... mostly it's just the rich eating the poor.
Because they haven't shipped any yet, that's why.
And, who has seen a UEFI system which says it's been designed for Windows 8 they could test this against? Answer: Nobody.
In the hands of Microsoft, I believe entirely they would insist their vendors build a machine which is really only capable of booting Windows without basically violating ACTA or something. They've never demonstrated any compunction about forcing lock-in if they get a chance. In fact, they have a strong preference for it.
Hell, it took literally years and a bunch of lawsuits to buy a whitebox PC without Microsoft getting paid for the OS even if you didn't want it and weren't going to use it ... you think they'd hesitate to insist vendors ship something locked down to them?
The reality is, almost any tech company would lock you into their product so fast it's not funny.
Sadly, that is pretty much exactly what will happen.
ACTA has been more or less authored by the content industry ... and all of us who aren't in the US are getting this rammed down our throats. There's no public consultation, and they won't release the text of this for the most part.
But you can bet your ass this will be used to force really excessive controls on the rest of the world (at the behest of the US content industry), and then it will be brought back to your own lawmakers with a "see, we need to be on par with everyone else".
Trust me, the US at this point has more or less under threat of trade barriers forced everybody to accept this treaty, and now it will turn inward. This has become SOP for US copyright issues over the last few years.
I suspect as of when this becomes law, ripping a CD or DVD I bought will be something I can go to prison for. It's like colonialism, but with treaties and secret back room deals.
Thanks a lot, your leaders are screwing us all over in favor of preserving the profits of the multinationals they work for. I doubt very much there is any balance to preserve fair-use and other rights we've always enjoyed.
America has been reduced to a nation of lawyers.
Yeah, but from the link I provided, they've also muddied the waters somewhat ...
So, it might take some time until there is clear enough case law to establish what all this means and the like.
Did you miss the part where with the America Invents Act has now entrenched First-to-File?
Who needs prior are if you're the first one to file for a patent?
Welcome to a huge step backwards in the already bad intellectual property laws. You don't have the to be the one to come up with an idea, just the one to beat someone else on your patent filing.
Well, MIME is Multi-part Internet Mail Extensions ... It certainly was never the be-all and end-all of how to work with file formats, just how to send email messages with binary stuff attached.
It's now at least 17 years old. Maybe not obsolete, but there is room for improvement.
Actually, I definitely have to agree ... leave the kids out of it ... didn't think that through as I typed it.