Popular, profitable, and with an ever growing market capitalization? What company wouldn't?
For years Apple was playing catch-up to Microsoft. Nowadays, Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to envision and bring to market new products people want. It seems like the last bunch of years, Microsoft has really lost whatever advantages they had, and have been trying to get "me too" products to market after everyone else already has had them for quite some time.
Getting away from needing to support every possible bit of hardware in random combinations might actually let Microsoft start to build interesting things again. Sure, they've got servers and operating systems mostly covered... but in terms of consumer devices, Apple has been kicking their ass for years now.
Like or hate Apple, you really can't deny their sales numbers and profits.
In all fairness, as someone with a BS in Computer Science, at our school most of those entry level computer usage classes WERE labeled as computer science classes (all 100 level courses), so the general population of students might would get the idea that that's what the major as about.
At my school, those classes were offered by the arts and commerce departments. The actual CS department stayed away from them.
Basic computer literacy is not the same as "Computer Science". Those courses have nothing to do with "what the major was about" -- they're more the basic skills you need to do anything, and if you don't have any of them, why are you pursuing a major in CS in the first place?
Why is it that stuff like user agents and other forms of AI mostly disappeared from the scene in the 90's? We have the power now to run the things that everyone seemed to be working on back then.
My guess would be that the tasks people were envisioning for them got taken up by something else. Like google maybe.
I just don't think that things like your own private thing to crawl the web are what people want/need any more. It wouldn't be the first time someone has postulated some "ground breaking" technology only to realize that nobody wanted it or knew what it was for.
I could be wrong... but I just can't think of anything I've been sitting around thinking "boy, if only I had a user agent" for this. That could mean I suffer from a stunning lack of imagination... or it could be that the class of problems has been sorted out elsewhere, or forgotten about completely.
Fifteen or so years is a lot of time in tech -- long enough for a concept to become abandoned because nobody cares.
Well, according to the definition of life, planets are already life anyway, just not self-replicating life, and probably not intelligent.
By what definition of 'life' is a planet 'alive'?? None that I've heard.
Me, I think the SETI guys are closed minded. They are always on about "habitable planets". What they are really getting at is habitable by US. An extraterrestrial life form may have developed without the need for water, oxygen, and our temperature range.
No, they're restricting their search to actual science.
They're not precluding a life form which exists in ways that we can't fathom or imagine. They're saying that we will restrict our search to things we can fathom and imagine since we have no idea of what to look for otherwise.
There would be no meaningful scientific basis to look for lifeforms based on chemistries we can't even begin to guess at. It's not like we know what we'd be looking for.
It seems every time this topic comes up, some clever guy comes along and says "we should be looking for life forms nothing like us"... what, exactly, would we be looking for? You could point at anything and say "well, something we can't imagine might live there"... you'd be right, but there would be nothing you could do with that. It's a completely vacuous statement to say that there could be something out there we can't imagine and that we should be looking for it.
The whole point is to look based on things we do know... otherwise, it's not science any more... it's random speculation based on, well, nothing actually. We can rule out places that couldn't support something like us... we can't rule out anything based on something so unlike us that we can't think of what it is.
Tell you what, help me find my keys. They look like no keys you've ever seen, and I'm not going to give you any information on where to look for them or how to know if you've found them. In fact, I won't even tell you if you succeed. That's more or less what you're proposing -- looking for something that you have no way of looking for and no way of identifying if you're even close.
The record companies commit wholesale copyright infringement, and take the stance they should be allowed to do it and will settle the costs later.
The rest of us download a fucking Brittany Spears song and they want to sue us for eleventy trillion dollars.
I think it's time to start feeding recording executives to wild dogs -- they want draconian laws to make sure we can't do anything, but they just walk around them and pretend they didn't do anything wrong. Arrogant bastards.
I've said it before, if they keep extending this "copyright levy" to everything under the sun, I'm going to start pirating on a large scale. I'm already paying for it, I might as well get my money's worth.
Telephone companies allow people to set up their own pay-by-the-minute number and willingly give their customers' money to that? Is there a legitimate use for setting up one's own number like that which I'm not thinking of?
There's loads of places where you see such numbers... phone sex is "legitimate" in that it is legal, and people can choose to do it. There's also probably lots of more 'mainstream' applications that I'm not thinking of. Generally, it's called "pay per call".
I can't even begin to count the number of "text this number for X" ads I see... most of which say it costs you money to text to that number (or to receive the texts you've just subscribed to until you text "STOP").
In the end, if it generates revenue for the phone company, and unless it's been proven to be fraudulent or illegal... the phone company has no incentive to police this stuff.
But, if you think there aren't plenty of businesses doing this already, you're grossly mistaken. This kind of mechanism has existed for probably decades and has probably both legit and shady companies. Fraudulently getting people to do it is probably not new either... I think there's an entire class of phone scam which gets you to connect to their number and pay through the nose.
While the search is a good reason to expand our tech and knowledge of our universe, when all is said and done, the Drake equation is really little more than a pastime in wishful thinking. Its just a logical formula based upon a lot of assumptions.
I don't know that I'd call it wishful thinking... it's a framework to discuss the likelihood that another planet exists out there with an intelligent civilization.
Whether or not we're alone in the universe has been one of the "great questions" of man for centuries now... I don't think knowing the answer to that, or working towards one it just wishful thinking.
Drake's equation is more of a starting point to have a discussion, it mostly just tries to frame the complexity of what's being discussed. It's like Moore's law -- it's value isn't so much in that it authoritatively explains anything. It certainly has very few assumptions inherently built into it -- it's an expression of what the chances are based on how much we think the values of the individual terms change. It is definitely more of a thought experiment than it is an equation, which was the whole point.
Quite frankly, I'd rather know that there's life out there, even if we can't ever reach it or communicate with it. If for nothing else, to have something to throw up in the face of the creationists who believe that god created the entire universe just for us -- not that I'd expect them to believe anything based on science.
I think now that we've started discovering hundreds of exoplanets, Drake's equation starts to get a few more terms filled in -- and the number of stars with planets has become a much greater number than previously thought. I seem to recall 15 or so years ago, the assumption was that stars with planets would be exceedingly rare and that we were a fluke. Change that one assumption alone, and you need to think about it differently.
And how in the universe can someone talk about how unlikely it is that other planets would have moons, when our own solar system has several planets with moons?
Because, the default position has been that life is exceedingly difficult to make happen, and that you needed a truck-load of favorable conditions to even hope it could happen. I think the notion was that we were a rare and unique solar system.
I seem to recall in the late 80s/early 90s when the notion of finding an exoplanet was pretty far fetched. I think the more we see and learn, it seems the more we start to realize that planets are anything but uncommon, and planets which could potentially house life are... maybe not common, but not quite so dramatically rare as we once thought.
The more time passes, the more it's hard not to look at Drake's equation and figure that he might have been onto something... if there's bazillions of planets, and a good chunk of those have moons, and a couple of those are in a habitable section... well, maybe it's possible that there is far more life in the universe than we've previously thought.
Hell, there could be life in this galaxy, and it would be still so far away as to make it something we could never find or get to. If there was just one or two civilizations in any galaxy, the universe would still have loads of them.
I think those guys from SETI seem less like crackpots every year... we may never find them or interact with them... but I'm increasingly finding it hard not to believe they're out there.
Why was there ever an assumption that a moon is required for complex life? Stabilization of the axis and climate regions? Or did we just assume it because it worked here?
As I recall, the moon itself protects the planet from some amount of meteors and asteroids. Might reduce the chances of life getting wiped out too early.
And, I think that the tides provided by a moon would keep things moving around instead of stagnating.
Don't be ridiculous; we in the US demand our beef with every meal, and slowly but surely that mindset is spreading. Where do you think the old forests went? Same place the remaining forests will go - to cattle land.
Don't forget suburbs.
Well, maybe not forests, but I know that a tremendous amount of really good quality, arable soil has become suburbs in a lot of places. Never to be usable as farmland again.
So, we give up forests to grow cows. And we give up farmland to grow cities. I think as a species, we're more or less screwed.
Exactly. If we already have people foolish enough to text and email on their blackberrys WHILE they're driving and that don't see what the problem is, imagine how attentive they would be when they're sitting in an armchair in 1st business class.
Well, flight safety and electronics aside...
Yes, I know there are floor lights and where they are, yes I know how the damned oxygen mask works and to put mine of first, yes I've checked where my nearest exit is, no I don't believe that the "wreckage location/floatation devices" will help in any way in the event of a water landing, and I do in fact know how to put that damned inflatable vest on and to use those little tubes on the sides, my seat belt is already buckled... now, where's by damned beer?
For anybody who has flown more than about 5-10 times, we pretty much know what the safety speech says, and we know how it all works.
Angry birds or no, I'm not exactly paying close attention now... I still understand why I need to be listening in case something goes wrong (and why I can't use headphones not attached to the plane), but the flight safety speech hasn't changed in the 17 or so years I've been flying.
Show was Walking Dead on AMC. They referenced it briefly in the article.
That's the one... it was really well done. Though, it seemed like they played a marathon of season 1, and then just stopped. I was looking forward to more of it... oh well, at least they're making a Zombieland sequel.:-P
I think it's hilarious that that they've got someone with the savvy to disguise a real emergency preparedness message in a "zombie apocalypse" thing... too funny!
I'm sure I saw this on a TV show not long ago... and by the time the good guys got to the CDC, they realized that had been wiped out too. Can't remember the name of the show at the moment.
Now, my next question... is WTF is the CDC doing talking about the zombie apocalypse? Or is this just a cleverly disguised way of giving real emergency preparedness instructions and using social networking?
That's just plain bizarre. Possibly quite clever, but definitely bizarre.
Once you reach the point where the police forces are there to enforce the rights and whims of corporations, you might as well accept the fact that you're no longer a democracy.
A lot of these things used to be civil law, but now all of a sudden we're using tax-payer funded agencies to police on behalf of copyright holders.
If people were astonished to realize that the FBI spends most of its cybercrime resources of child pornography... wait until traditional police forces and government agencies are spending much of their time policing copyright.
So, you'd like someone to write a natural language shell where you can describe what you'd like to happen, possibly badly, and the shell would magically know what you mean and do the right thing?
I can imagine such a system either completely failing to do what you wanted, or completely getting it wrong and messing things up... so far, we're not so good at writing natural languages to tell computers how to do things.
It actually really is hard to just ignore the "to" and assume that you meant to type "move" (as opposed to "more" or "make" or "man") -- I'll settle for the precision of the way things are now over the mostly-kind-sorta way you describe now.
Then again, I've been coding for over 20 years, and have a lot of years of UNIX command line under my belt, and don't find SQL to be all that obtuse.
I thought the whole point of a command line was that you didn't have to look at it while it was doing its automated thing.
Not so much that I don't have to look at it, as that it lends itself very well to scripting and automation... automation is good because it removes human error from it. The tools were modular enough that you just build what you needed as you went.
Once it's automated, you don't need to look at it I guess. But, certain kinds of chaining of operations based on the output of the previous stuff... I still can't find good ways to do that in a purely GUI environment.
I can gin up a couple of shell scripts to do file tree comparisons and get rid of anything which didn't change, ignore anything which wasn't part of the manifest, and write as output a text file which I can use to generate a patch for a remote server. In fact, we did our configuration management for quite some time like this.
I think he's onto something interesting... and he might be starting to bridge the two, but there are certain tasks that I have yet to find a better way than a series of UNIX command lines and shell scripts. A working knowledge of regexp and sed/grep can make an awful lot of things happen.
So... not a big deal. you can always build it yourself (if you have the skills). I would bet a third party would come along and pick up the task of porting if there is enough interest.
Except, those 3rd parties have already been contributing to it... as has been pointed out, Solaris has adopted and invested time and effort into it... it's been ported to the BSDs and likely has benefited from some bug fixes from them...
This more or less throws away the fact that people who aren't tied to Linux have been contributing to Gnome for as long as it's been around. Hell, Gnome originated as a cross-platform toolkit -- to suddenly pretend otherwise is self-serving.
Gnome is supposed to be written to support X Windows.
I currently use gnome on my Linux and FreeBSD platforms, and have for quite some years. Now they're looking to tell the rest of us to PFO because they've tied themselves too tightly to Linux... why is it even tied to the kernel anyway?
The end result will be that I and others won't use Gnome at all (not even on my Linux installs)... but, hey, if your "be all you can be" plan is all about working on only one system, that's fine. Just don't be surprised when the number of people who use it drops off.
Thanks (to you and the other posters who have actually explained this).
As I suspected, I was talking out of my ass -- nice to have it actually explained. It just seemed that some of this stuff might be "hard to see" (like a planet floating in space), but you're talking about stuff on a completely different scale.
If they're using a deflector beam to get microscopic particles out of the way, they're sure as hell not ripping through planets and stars.
I'm pretty sure if they did something like that, they'd pretty much be destroyed -- in rather a spectacular way I should think. You think a car driving into a wall creates carnage? A starship crashing into a star at warp speed is going to make one hell of a boom.
How come everyone around here knows more than the experts? Do you really think astronomers are too dumb to think of all the non-stellar matter in and between the galaxies?
Can't speak for the parent... I don't think astronomers are too dumb to do that, I know that at a minimum, I'm too dumb to fully understand this stuff... so I asked because if there's suddenly a lot more planets floating about in space, maybe it's mass we've not accounted for.
The problem with astronomy and the like... is that it is so specialized and arcane, that the rest of us have a hard time understanding WTF they're talking about.:-P
I have no idea what all astronomers have factored into their accounts of non-stellar matter... have they included the space poop from the space cows?;-)
Not much, seeing as you need to be in a "subspace" bubble to travel at warp speed.
Yeah, but you still don't want to bump into things, and you still need to navigate.
That's what the deflector dish is for... it's not like they could just run through a star due to the subspace bubble. You still need to avoid objects at warp speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Popular, profitable, and with an ever growing market capitalization? What company wouldn't?
For years Apple was playing catch-up to Microsoft. Nowadays, Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to envision and bring to market new products people want. It seems like the last bunch of years, Microsoft has really lost whatever advantages they had, and have been trying to get "me too" products to market after everyone else already has had them for quite some time.
Getting away from needing to support every possible bit of hardware in random combinations might actually let Microsoft start to build interesting things again. Sure, they've got servers and operating systems mostly covered ... but in terms of consumer devices, Apple has been kicking their ass for years now.
Like or hate Apple, you really can't deny their sales numbers and profits.
At my school, those classes were offered by the arts and commerce departments. The actual CS department stayed away from them.
Basic computer literacy is not the same as "Computer Science". Those courses have nothing to do with "what the major was about" -- they're more the basic skills you need to do anything, and if you don't have any of them, why are you pursuing a major in CS in the first place?
My guess would be that the tasks people were envisioning for them got taken up by something else. Like google maybe.
I just don't think that things like your own private thing to crawl the web are what people want/need any more. It wouldn't be the first time someone has postulated some "ground breaking" technology only to realize that nobody wanted it or knew what it was for.
I could be wrong ... but I just can't think of anything I've been sitting around thinking "boy, if only I had a user agent" for this. That could mean I suffer from a stunning lack of imagination ... or it could be that the class of problems has been sorted out elsewhere, or forgotten about completely.
Fifteen or so years is a lot of time in tech -- long enough for a concept to become abandoned because nobody cares.
By what definition of 'life' is a planet 'alive'?? None that I've heard.
No, they're restricting their search to actual science.
They're not precluding a life form which exists in ways that we can't fathom or imagine. They're saying that we will restrict our search to things we can fathom and imagine since we have no idea of what to look for otherwise.
There would be no meaningful scientific basis to look for lifeforms based on chemistries we can't even begin to guess at. It's not like we know what we'd be looking for.
It seems every time this topic comes up, some clever guy comes along and says "we should be looking for life forms nothing like us" ... what, exactly, would we be looking for? You could point at anything and say "well, something we can't imagine might live there" ... you'd be right, but there would be nothing you could do with that. It's a completely vacuous statement to say that there could be something out there we can't imagine and that we should be looking for it.
The whole point is to look based on things we do know ... otherwise, it's not science any more ... it's random speculation based on, well, nothing actually. We can rule out places that couldn't support something like us ... we can't rule out anything based on something so unlike us that we can't think of what it is.
Tell you what, help me find my keys. They look like no keys you've ever seen, and I'm not going to give you any information on where to look for them or how to know if you've found them. In fact, I won't even tell you if you succeed. That's more or less what you're proposing -- looking for something that you have no way of looking for and no way of identifying if you're even close.
The record companies commit wholesale copyright infringement, and take the stance they should be allowed to do it and will settle the costs later.
The rest of us download a fucking Brittany Spears song and they want to sue us for eleventy trillion dollars.
I think it's time to start feeding recording executives to wild dogs -- they want draconian laws to make sure we can't do anything, but they just walk around them and pretend they didn't do anything wrong. Arrogant bastards.
I've said it before, if they keep extending this "copyright levy" to everything under the sun, I'm going to start pirating on a large scale. I'm already paying for it, I might as well get my money's worth.
There's loads of places where you see such numbers ... phone sex is "legitimate" in that it is legal, and people can choose to do it. There's also probably lots of more 'mainstream' applications that I'm not thinking of. Generally, it's called "pay per call".
I can't even begin to count the number of "text this number for X" ads I see ... most of which say it costs you money to text to that number (or to receive the texts you've just subscribed to until you text "STOP").
In the end, if it generates revenue for the phone company, and unless it's been proven to be fraudulent or illegal ... the phone company has no incentive to police this stuff.
But, if you think there aren't plenty of businesses doing this already, you're grossly mistaken. This kind of mechanism has existed for probably decades and has probably both legit and shady companies. Fraudulently getting people to do it is probably not new either ... I think there's an entire class of phone scam which gets you to connect to their number and pay through the nose.
I don't know that I'd call it wishful thinking ... it's a framework to discuss the likelihood that another planet exists out there with an intelligent civilization.
Whether or not we're alone in the universe has been one of the "great questions" of man for centuries now ... I don't think knowing the answer to that, or working towards one it just wishful thinking.
Drake's equation is more of a starting point to have a discussion, it mostly just tries to frame the complexity of what's being discussed. It's like Moore's law -- it's value isn't so much in that it authoritatively explains anything. It certainly has very few assumptions inherently built into it -- it's an expression of what the chances are based on how much we think the values of the individual terms change. It is definitely more of a thought experiment than it is an equation, which was the whole point.
Quite frankly, I'd rather know that there's life out there, even if we can't ever reach it or communicate with it. If for nothing else, to have something to throw up in the face of the creationists who believe that god created the entire universe just for us -- not that I'd expect them to believe anything based on science.
I think now that we've started discovering hundreds of exoplanets, Drake's equation starts to get a few more terms filled in -- and the number of stars with planets has become a much greater number than previously thought. I seem to recall 15 or so years ago, the assumption was that stars with planets would be exceedingly rare and that we were a fluke. Change that one assumption alone, and you need to think about it differently.
Because, the default position has been that life is exceedingly difficult to make happen, and that you needed a truck-load of favorable conditions to even hope it could happen. I think the notion was that we were a rare and unique solar system.
I seem to recall in the late 80s/early 90s when the notion of finding an exoplanet was pretty far fetched. I think the more we see and learn, it seems the more we start to realize that planets are anything but uncommon, and planets which could potentially house life are ... maybe not common, but not quite so dramatically rare as we once thought.
The more time passes, the more it's hard not to look at Drake's equation and figure that he might have been onto something ... if there's bazillions of planets, and a good chunk of those have moons, and a couple of those are in a habitable section ... well, maybe it's possible that there is far more life in the universe than we've previously thought.
Hell, there could be life in this galaxy, and it would be still so far away as to make it something we could never find or get to. If there was just one or two civilizations in any galaxy, the universe would still have loads of them.
I think those guys from SETI seem less like crackpots every year ... we may never find them or interact with them ... but I'm increasingly finding it hard not to believe they're out there.
As I recall, the moon itself protects the planet from some amount of meteors and asteroids. Might reduce the chances of life getting wiped out too early.
And, I think that the tides provided by a moon would keep things moving around instead of stagnating.
Those are my best guesses from memory.
Don't forget suburbs.
Well, maybe not forests, but I know that a tremendous amount of really good quality, arable soil has become suburbs in a lot of places. Never to be usable as farmland again.
So, we give up forests to grow cows. And we give up farmland to grow cities. I think as a species, we're more or less screwed.
Why? The henchmen are expendable, and once the good guys have broken into your evil secret lair, it's really only you that needs to escape.
I mean, it mostly worked for Dr. Evil, didn't it?
Well, flight safety and electronics aside ...
Yes, I know there are floor lights and where they are, yes I know how the damned oxygen mask works and to put mine of first, yes I've checked where my nearest exit is, no I don't believe that the "wreckage location/floatation devices" will help in any way in the event of a water landing, and I do in fact know how to put that damned inflatable vest on and to use those little tubes on the sides, my seat belt is already buckled ... now, where's by damned beer?
For anybody who has flown more than about 5-10 times, we pretty much know what the safety speech says, and we know how it all works.
Angry birds or no, I'm not exactly paying close attention now ... I still understand why I need to be listening in case something goes wrong (and why I can't use headphones not attached to the plane), but the flight safety speech hasn't changed in the 17 or so years I've been flying.
That's the one ... it was really well done. Though, it seemed like they played a marathon of season 1, and then just stopped. I was looking forward to more of it ... oh well, at least they're making a Zombieland sequel. :-P
I think it's hilarious that that they've got someone with the savvy to disguise a real emergency preparedness message in a "zombie apocalypse" thing ... too funny!
I'm sure I saw this on a TV show not long ago ... and by the time the good guys got to the CDC, they realized that had been wiped out too. Can't remember the name of the show at the moment.
Now, my next question ... is WTF is the CDC doing talking about the zombie apocalypse? Or is this just a cleverly disguised way of giving real emergency preparedness instructions and using social networking?
That's just plain bizarre. Possibly quite clever, but definitely bizarre.
Kittens, and corporate profits.
You don't want to kill kittens, do you?
Once you reach the point where the police forces are there to enforce the rights and whims of corporations, you might as well accept the fact that you're no longer a democracy.
A lot of these things used to be civil law, but now all of a sudden we're using tax-payer funded agencies to police on behalf of copyright holders.
If people were astonished to realize that the FBI spends most of its cybercrime resources of child pornography ... wait until traditional police forces and government agencies are spending much of their time policing copyright.
This will only get worse.
So, you'd like someone to write a natural language shell where you can describe what you'd like to happen, possibly badly, and the shell would magically know what you mean and do the right thing?
I can imagine such a system either completely failing to do what you wanted, or completely getting it wrong and messing things up ... so far, we're not so good at writing natural languages to tell computers how to do things.
It actually really is hard to just ignore the "to" and assume that you meant to type "move" (as opposed to "more" or "make" or "man") -- I'll settle for the precision of the way things are now over the mostly-kind-sorta way you describe now.
Then again, I've been coding for over 20 years, and have a lot of years of UNIX command line under my belt, and don't find SQL to be all that obtuse.
Not so much that I don't have to look at it, as that it lends itself very well to scripting and automation ... automation is good because it removes human error from it. The tools were modular enough that you just build what you needed as you went.
Once it's automated, you don't need to look at it I guess. But, certain kinds of chaining of operations based on the output of the previous stuff ... I still can't find good ways to do that in a purely GUI environment.
I can gin up a couple of shell scripts to do file tree comparisons and get rid of anything which didn't change, ignore anything which wasn't part of the manifest, and write as output a text file which I can use to generate a patch for a remote server. In fact, we did our configuration management for quite some time like this.
I think he's onto something interesting ... and he might be starting to bridge the two, but there are certain tasks that I have yet to find a better way than a series of UNIX command lines and shell scripts. A working knowledge of regexp and sed/grep can make an awful lot of things happen.
Except, those 3rd parties have already been contributing to it ... as has been pointed out, Solaris has adopted and invested time and effort into it ... it's been ported to the BSDs and likely has benefited from some bug fixes from them ...
This more or less throws away the fact that people who aren't tied to Linux have been contributing to Gnome for as long as it's been around. Hell, Gnome originated as a cross-platform toolkit -- to suddenly pretend otherwise is self-serving.
Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean it's not happening. The BSD's are alive and well, thank you.
Gnome is supposed to be written to support X Windows.
I currently use gnome on my Linux and FreeBSD platforms, and have for quite some years. Now they're looking to tell the rest of us to PFO because they've tied themselves too tightly to Linux ... why is it even tied to the kernel anyway?
The end result will be that I and others won't use Gnome at all (not even on my Linux installs) ... but, hey, if your "be all you can be" plan is all about working on only one system, that's fine. Just don't be surprised when the number of people who use it drops off.
Thanks (to you and the other posters who have actually explained this).
As I suspected, I was talking out of my ass -- nice to have it actually explained. It just seemed that some of this stuff might be "hard to see" (like a planet floating in space), but you're talking about stuff on a completely different scale.
Cheers.
Things like planets and stars? I highly doubt it.
If they're using a deflector beam to get microscopic particles out of the way, they're sure as hell not ripping through planets and stars.
I'm pretty sure if they did something like that, they'd pretty much be destroyed -- in rather a spectacular way I should think. You think a car driving into a wall creates carnage? A starship crashing into a star at warp speed is going to make one hell of a boom.
Can't speak for the parent ... I don't think astronomers are too dumb to do that, I know that at a minimum, I'm too dumb to fully understand this stuff ... so I asked because if there's suddenly a lot more planets floating about in space, maybe it's mass we've not accounted for.
The problem with astronomy and the like ... is that it is so specialized and arcane, that the rest of us have a hard time understanding WTF they're talking about. :-P
I have no idea what all astronomers have factored into their accounts of non-stellar matter ... have they included the space poop from the space cows? ;-)
Yeah, but you still don't want to bump into things, and you still need to navigate.
That's what the deflector dish is for ... it's not like they could just run through a star due to the subspace bubble. You still need to avoid objects at warp speed.