Why does Microsoft still sell 32 bit versions of Windows? Because there is a demand for it. Some customers have a need for a 32 bit version of the OS, for either legacy hardware or software (or both). I don't work at Microsoft, but I would guess that the demand for a 32 bit version of the software is greater than the cost of producing and maintaining it. Therefore, they sell it.
As the market for a 32 bit version of their OS dwindles, it will probably be retired when they don't make money by selling it. Until then, I would guess that they will keep producing it, since they want to, you know, make money by selling a product that people want to buy.
It makes sense. Most of the 'news' outlets (Fox News, CNN, etc) report news and reaction from the most extreme, biased, and ridiculous viewpoints. The narrative is controlled from the extremes, which does not represent the views of almost anyone. Slashdot, aka News for Nerds, posts a 'story' that is intended to get people from 2 sides of an issue to yell at each other. The Apple haters will post stuff about how people must be idiots for buying Apple, and the Apple zealots will yell back.
The entire story is flawed. The majority of people who use Apple products also use other products as well. The premise that "many Apple users would never dream of switching to a non-Apple product" is ridiculous. But hey, it should start a flame war, generate clicks from people who just want to watch the train wreck, so it gets posted.
The larger problem is that you are inflating the income of *some* members of a group. This means that the overall average income of the people in this group will be slightly higher, but most people in the group will be unchanged. Given that the percentage of people getting this income is low, the overall effect will be minimal. This is not indicative of what would happen with inflation for basic goods and services if this were applied to everyone.
As the above post says, this test will not show long term effects on attitudes or consequences. I would add that given the scope, it would also probably not show accurate results on short term effects either.
Seriously, I shouldn't bother posting in political threads. The butt hurt is so strong, I only ever get modded down, despite not trying to troll, but simply not repeating the same line as everyone else. But I'm a glutton for punishment, so I'll bite, again.
The "whole point" of the electoral college is not to block a winner that the college doesn't like. The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers. It was clear, even at the start of the country, that more rural areas of the country, while being lower in population, need to have a way to have their voice heard, and their interests protected. The electoral college provides votes for states based on population, but gives a larger voice to the smaller population states. While it is true that states like Florida, California, and New York have very large populations and therefore more electoral votes, the voice of those states alone cannot dictate the course of the country.
But whatever... I'm sure I'm just an ignorant troll, so mod me down accordingly.
The electoral college were the agreed upon rules of the competition, before the competition started. If enough people dislike the system, it can be changed. However everyone who was running for president knew all the rules before the votes were cast. Asking to go back and change the rules based on the results is never a good idea.
I can only imagine the outcry, if HRC had won and the republicans were asking to ignore the votes of Americans, because they voted incorrectly. Seriously, the people who were honestly hoping that the electoral college voters would ignore the votes of the people of their states, and simply disenfranchise however many million voters it would take, just so they can get their way?
I personally think Trump will be a horrible, horrible president. I cannot imagine any good coming from his presidency. The world climate alone may never recover. My only hope is that he will do something that can get him impeached relatively quickly, before too much damage can be done. Having said that, I still cannot understand the thought process behind attempting to tell 50% of the country, "your vote doesn't count, unless you vote the way you are supposed to". If that actually happened, the utter and complete demise of any semblance of democracy in the USA would have happened, and there would either be a) a revolt, or b) a new, non-democratic country.
Yes, they will, but that's not really a bad thing. You can give accurate results well before the 99% mark in almost every election. Certain districts have a very repeatable voting pattern (meaning a district will vote nearly all republican or democrat in every election), and you can get voter turn out numbers well before results are counted. In addition, polling data, exit polls, and statistics can give you a prediction, and if the first 15% of the results are following the pattern, you can say with a reasonable amount of mathematical certainty that the rest of the results will follow. As most races are not decided by only a few hundred votes, it's not even an interesting math problem...
As long as the results are not posted until after everyone has had a chance to vote, it really doesn't matter. Google (or anyone) could wait until 30 minutes after the polls close, and no one is left in line, and declare that New York has been won by Jill Stein. While that would almost certainly be incorrect, it wouldn't impact the results of the election, as no one is still voting. It would make for an interesting night of TV, but otherwise, who cares what the result predictions are? The only thing that matters is what is certified by the state official in charge of certifying elections.
Although the practice has been stopped after the 2000 election, it used to be common place for network television to call results of elections before the polls even closed. This was done based entirely on exit polls and previous polling data. After the debacle in the 2000 election where Florida was called for Bush (before the polls closed), then back to undecided (I think after the polls closed), then to Bush again, then (if I remember correctly) Gore, the Easter Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and finally, "we have no idea"... all of which left a bunch of people very upset before they even got into the issues of the "butterfly ballot".
Google can have the same data that the networks used to have, but can wait to post it until 1 second after the polls close. Which is technically following the rules, but is still a bad idea. One of the main issues that people had in Florida was that the state was called while the western part of the state still had polls open, and some reports surfaced of people leaving the polls and going home after the state was called, since their vote didn't matter any more. You can debate the validity of those reports, but it is possible that people could still be in line at polls after the closing time, and see the results on their phones leading to exactly the same issue as 2000. In more contested districts, it is more common to have longer lines at the polls, which can mean that people technically vote after the poll close times, if they arrived before that time. People waiting in line and giving up based on speculated information, like what Google will be providing, is exactly what happened before.
Wow, I will try to respond rationally. According to all polls, the margin between Hillary and Trump is within a few percentage points. While I am not a fan of either candidate, I do feel that the country would be far, far worse off if Trump is elected. If I vote for a third party candidate, I am giving up the small voice I have to try to block Trump.
The current system we have for voting in the United States is a first past the post election system. To understand why I (and others) mathematically can't vote for third parties without hurting themselves, I refer you to this video.
I hope that will help you understand why I would vote for a candidate I don't love, over one I detest. Or you can continue in your ignorance to consider me a "fucking asshole", and go about your day.
I'm sorry. For the sake of brevity, I did not provide a detailed list of all the things Donald Trump has said or done that in my opinion make him a worse option. I will refrain from doing so now, but if you would like a list, I refer you to anything Trump has said, ever. Full stop.
I do not believe that voting for the only viable candidate that is not named Trump is "abject stupidity", merely the only rational choice in a very distressed election cycle.
The report generated by the FBI regarding their investigation of Clinton was worse than this. The responses to direct questions made HC look at the very best completely incompetent.
Having said that, I would vote for Hillary Clinton even if you could prove that she was a functional illiterate who's only thought processes centered around how to break the law. That option would still be miles ahead of the competition.
It's meant to make your apartment feel bigger on the inside than it is on the outside... so it folds space and time. Sort of. Well not really folds, simply occupies a time and relative dimension in space, but that acronym was taken.
My first thought would be not entirely, although it would make life simpler. The signal will be seen directly, and from reflections from the ground (or in this case roof). You would limit the reflections from nearby walls, interruptions due to cover (like trees), etc. and the reflections would be fairly constant. It would not eliminate them, however.
The link in the article, to here, gives a much better description of the SP algorithm. In fact, it's a much more informative article, but it doesn't have a picture of a guy with a cell phone strapped to his face.
Yes, I understand this. I understand that they can look for most common answers among correct control responses, and crowd source the OCR of difficult street view images. My point is that is not what the experiment is doing. The point of the experiment is to determine if these images are as effective as the current images used in the tests. For the purposes of that experiment, it would be much easier (and probably more scientifically accurate) to use images where the correct answer is already known. As Google already has a large number of those images where it has extracted street names and numbers, they would have a large sample size to use for this experiment. They do not need, at this point, to use the unknown images.
If the experiment shows the street view images are equally effective, people can debate whether it's ok to have random web users do your OCR for you. Until then I'm not going to panic.
I have read the quote from Google about what they are doing several times, and I don't see what everyone else sees. It appears to me that they are using the already known street names and numbers as possible ReCAPTCHA images. What they are NOT doing is using the results given by people to define what the image says. The point of the experiment is to determine whether these images are sufficient to separate people from web-bots. I imagine that they will look at the number of 'wrong' answers from both sides of the test, and see if bots are able to parse the street view images significantly more often than the standard test images.
So... can anyone point to something in the Google quote to show me where I went wrong? From TFA, here is the quote:
We’re currently running an experiment in which characters from Street View images are appearing in CAPTCHAs. We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations. Based on the data and results of these reCaptcha tests, we’ll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online.
At end of product life cycle (when a new, shinier iPad comes out, for example), old stock could be offloaded through places like Amazon, which already provides for selling of used electronics. This business plan is very similar to what car rental agencies have used for quite a while.
Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration
I have seen quotes similar to this by several CEOs, including from Microsoft. I really think this more than anything shows a lack of vision. We currently have laptops with docking stations that people can set up to use both a "desktop computer" they carry easily from work and home. While these are ok, they are typically limited to a specific make (and often model) of laptop. A shift to a more generic docking station is hopefully not too far off. As the processor market continues to evolve, I think we will start to see something similar for tablets. While on the go, you can maybe do simple things, like browse the web, etc. When you get home or to work, it plugs in and becomes your computer. Longer term, the same may be true even for phones, although that may be a decade or more from now.
I can imagine buying a "monitor" with a sort of universal phone jack on the back of it. You get one for home, work provides one at the office. Coffee shops install a few of them for pretentious writer types. You carry your computer with you as you do a phone now, and wherever you go you plug it into a monitor that has a keyboard & mouse. Imagine if every computer you logged into (by connecting your phone) had the same OS, desktop, all of you files, applications, contacts, internet connection (from the phone), etc.
Dismissing the tablet (and phone) as never replacing the computer is probably short sighted. Will there still be high end systems? Of course. Some consumers will always either have or want more processing power, be it for regression modelling, compiling, ego boosting, or whatever else. For the majority of people.. if you can buy a phone that has the processing power to do everything you need, buying a full power PC becomes a lot less interesting.
While this is true, it misses the larger issue. There are a number of factors that change driving performance. Eating while driving has a similar effect to talking on a cell phone, much like applying makeup, shaving, etc. In contrast, having a second person (or more) seems to improve driving performance. A young child who is sleeping in the back seat can greatly improve performance, while a small child who is screaming and crying has a negative effect.
If we want to use the logic "it hurts performance", we should ban all electronic devices, and have the radios in cars have 1 big button that can turn on or off road information messages. We should ban all eating while driving. We should require any children that are in cars to be drugged and remain unconscious, and it should be illegal to drive without a second person in the car. That would, statistically, increase driving performance across the board.
Banning cell phones simply because they can be shown to have a negative performance is singling out a single cause because we don't like it. Instead, as usual, the problem is larger and more problematic to fix. Personally, it comes down to how much risk we, as a society, are willing to accept. The current rates of traffic accidents and fatalities are lower than they have been in previous years[*]. Personally, I am comfortable with the current level of risk when I step into a vehicle, either to drive or to ride as a passenger. If society, in general, would like to make changes to improve those numbers, we should have a realistic discussion about what would changes would help, how much each change would help, and what cost would be associated with each change. Simply pointing out one cause, and removing it, without addressing any other issues, is simply punishing a behavior based on personal bias.
Over analyzing the reason for mass appeal, as well as statistical distributions showing cross cultural appeal of various game genres is just how these people have fun, you insensitive clod.
I could be wrong, but I believe the logic goes that if the entire area was land, the cities in the area were allied with each other and this allowed for the sharing of technology between them. When the sea rushed in, it destroyed all but the few cities left at the edge of the new sea, leaving us with the "mystery" of how these few cities connected by only the sea could all have independently developed this tech, when no one else did.
I read an interesting paper about 10 or 15 years ago positing that during the last ice age the levels of the oceans were reduced to the point that the Mediterranean Sea was either much smaller or non existent. Unfortunately the people at that time didn't get the warning about climate change coming.. as the global ice caps shrunk back to "normal" levels, the Mediterranean was formed. (In reality, this was aprox 20k years ago, not the 10 to 12k spoken of in regards to Atlantis.)
I don't really follow Atlantis stuff much, but there has been at least some scientific research along the lines of what H.G. Wells was making up; Whether that theory has been confirmed or tossed out I really have no idea, but I wouldn't say that "scientific theories" don't cover this.
I also doubt that a "conviction is still likely", unless they have some other material to show. Convictions in these cases are almost always due to the shock value created by showing the dirty films and pictures to the jury. If they cannot recover the images and movies, they will actually have to cover their burden of proof a lot more than prosecutors are used to in this case, and the defense might actually have a shot.
If the jury actually thinks about the fact that the only evidence is what some cops say they saw, but can't prove. If the prosecution somehow gets to show "similar images" or some such nonsense, the defense is hosed.
This is probably too late to be read, but here goes anyway...
Yes, SLC-6 (pronounced slick-6) was expensive and never used for a shuttle launch. After the Challenger disaster, shuttle operations went from expanding to contracting, and despite what they will tell you publicly, it never recovered. Not only was SLC-6 built, but rather extensive work was done at Vandenberg AFB to allow for moving the shuttle. Hills were flattened, and certain roads still have short road signs, so they fit under the wings when it was to be driven to/from SLC-6.
When Challenger happened, NASA needed an excuse, and found one. They claimed that the hills near SLC-6 would reflect the thrust from the shuttle back on it, shaking it apart before it ever took off. And they can't knock the hills down, because they could be seen from a public beach, so Californian law says they can't be touched. It was basically a convienent way to slim down the shuttle program.
As a side note, the runway at Vandenberg was also expanded, and is still an alternate landing site for the shuttle. I assume it is the same size as KSC. I remember a private pilot telling me the thing was so wide you could land a cessna on it sideways. It was so long, you could do 3 touch and go's in one pass
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's really not hurting them. Or at least, if it is, this study isn't in any way proof that it is: Source
Why does Microsoft still sell 32 bit versions of Windows? Because there is a demand for it. Some customers have a need for a 32 bit version of the OS, for either legacy hardware or software (or both). I don't work at Microsoft, but I would guess that the demand for a 32 bit version of the software is greater than the cost of producing and maintaining it. Therefore, they sell it.
As the market for a 32 bit version of their OS dwindles, it will probably be retired when they don't make money by selling it. Until then, I would guess that they will keep producing it, since they want to, you know, make money by selling a product that people want to buy.
It makes sense. Most of the 'news' outlets (Fox News, CNN, etc) report news and reaction from the most extreme, biased, and ridiculous viewpoints. The narrative is controlled from the extremes, which does not represent the views of almost anyone. Slashdot, aka News for Nerds, posts a 'story' that is intended to get people from 2 sides of an issue to yell at each other. The Apple haters will post stuff about how people must be idiots for buying Apple, and the Apple zealots will yell back.
The entire story is flawed. The majority of people who use Apple products also use other products as well. The premise that "many Apple users would never dream of switching to a non-Apple product" is ridiculous. But hey, it should start a flame war, generate clicks from people who just want to watch the train wreck, so it gets posted.
The larger problem is that you are inflating the income of *some* members of a group. This means that the overall average income of the people in this group will be slightly higher, but most people in the group will be unchanged. Given that the percentage of people getting this income is low, the overall effect will be minimal. This is not indicative of what would happen with inflation for basic goods and services if this were applied to everyone.
As the above post says, this test will not show long term effects on attitudes or consequences. I would add that given the scope, it would also probably not show accurate results on short term effects either.
Seriously, I shouldn't bother posting in political threads. The butt hurt is so strong, I only ever get modded down, despite not trying to troll, but simply not repeating the same line as everyone else. But I'm a glutton for punishment, so I'll bite, again.
The "whole point" of the electoral college is not to block a winner that the college doesn't like. The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers. It was clear, even at the start of the country, that more rural areas of the country, while being lower in population, need to have a way to have their voice heard, and their interests protected. The electoral college provides votes for states based on population, but gives a larger voice to the smaller population states. While it is true that states like Florida, California, and New York have very large populations and therefore more electoral votes, the voice of those states alone cannot dictate the course of the country.
But whatever... I'm sure I'm just an ignorant troll, so mod me down accordingly.
The electoral college were the agreed upon rules of the competition, before the competition started. If enough people dislike the system, it can be changed. However everyone who was running for president knew all the rules before the votes were cast. Asking to go back and change the rules based on the results is never a good idea.
I can only imagine the outcry, if HRC had won and the republicans were asking to ignore the votes of Americans, because they voted incorrectly. Seriously, the people who were honestly hoping that the electoral college voters would ignore the votes of the people of their states, and simply disenfranchise however many million voters it would take, just so they can get their way?
I personally think Trump will be a horrible, horrible president. I cannot imagine any good coming from his presidency. The world climate alone may never recover. My only hope is that he will do something that can get him impeached relatively quickly, before too much damage can be done. Having said that, I still cannot understand the thought process behind attempting to tell 50% of the country, "your vote doesn't count, unless you vote the way you are supposed to". If that actually happened, the utter and complete demise of any semblance of democracy in the USA would have happened, and there would either be a) a revolt, or b) a new, non-democratic country.
Yes, they will, but that's not really a bad thing. You can give accurate results well before the 99% mark in almost every election. Certain districts have a very repeatable voting pattern (meaning a district will vote nearly all republican or democrat in every election), and you can get voter turn out numbers well before results are counted. In addition, polling data, exit polls, and statistics can give you a prediction, and if the first 15% of the results are following the pattern, you can say with a reasonable amount of mathematical certainty that the rest of the results will follow. As most races are not decided by only a few hundred votes, it's not even an interesting math problem...
As long as the results are not posted until after everyone has had a chance to vote, it really doesn't matter. Google (or anyone) could wait until 30 minutes after the polls close, and no one is left in line, and declare that New York has been won by Jill Stein. While that would almost certainly be incorrect, it wouldn't impact the results of the election, as no one is still voting. It would make for an interesting night of TV, but otherwise, who cares what the result predictions are? The only thing that matters is what is certified by the state official in charge of certifying elections.
Although the practice has been stopped after the 2000 election, it used to be common place for network television to call results of elections before the polls even closed. This was done based entirely on exit polls and previous polling data. After the debacle in the 2000 election where Florida was called for Bush (before the polls closed), then back to undecided (I think after the polls closed), then to Bush again, then (if I remember correctly) Gore, the Easter Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and finally, "we have no idea"... all of which left a bunch of people very upset before they even got into the issues of the "butterfly ballot".
Google can have the same data that the networks used to have, but can wait to post it until 1 second after the polls close. Which is technically following the rules, but is still a bad idea. One of the main issues that people had in Florida was that the state was called while the western part of the state still had polls open, and some reports surfaced of people leaving the polls and going home after the state was called, since their vote didn't matter any more. You can debate the validity of those reports, but it is possible that people could still be in line at polls after the closing time, and see the results on their phones leading to exactly the same issue as 2000. In more contested districts, it is more common to have longer lines at the polls, which can mean that people technically vote after the poll close times, if they arrived before that time. People waiting in line and giving up based on speculated information, like what Google will be providing, is exactly what happened before.
Wow, I will try to respond rationally. According to all polls, the margin between Hillary and Trump is within a few percentage points. While I am not a fan of either candidate, I do feel that the country would be far, far worse off if Trump is elected. If I vote for a third party candidate, I am giving up the small voice I have to try to block Trump.
The current system we have for voting in the United States is a first past the post election system. To understand why I (and others) mathematically can't vote for third parties without hurting themselves, I refer you to this video.
I hope that will help you understand why I would vote for a candidate I don't love, over one I detest. Or you can continue in your ignorance to consider me a "fucking asshole", and go about your day.
I'm sorry. For the sake of brevity, I did not provide a detailed list of all the things Donald Trump has said or done that in my opinion make him a worse option. I will refrain from doing so now, but if you would like a list, I refer you to anything Trump has said, ever. Full stop.
I do not believe that voting for the only viable candidate that is not named Trump is "abject stupidity", merely the only rational choice in a very distressed election cycle.
The report generated by the FBI regarding their investigation of Clinton was worse than this. The responses to direct questions made HC look at the very best completely incompetent.
Having said that, I would vote for Hillary Clinton even if you could prove that she was a functional illiterate who's only thought processes centered around how to break the law. That option would still be miles ahead of the competition.
It's meant to make your apartment feel bigger on the inside than it is on the outside... so it folds space and time. Sort of. Well not really folds, simply occupies a time and relative dimension in space, but that acronym was taken.
My first thought would be not entirely, although it would make life simpler. The signal will be seen directly, and from reflections from the ground (or in this case roof). You would limit the reflections from nearby walls, interruptions due to cover (like trees), etc. and the reflections would be fairly constant. It would not eliminate them, however.
The link in the article, to here, gives a much better description of the SP algorithm. In fact, it's a much more informative article, but it doesn't have a picture of a guy with a cell phone strapped to his face.
Yes, I understand this. I understand that they can look for most common answers among correct control responses, and crowd source the OCR of difficult street view images. My point is that is not what the experiment is doing. The point of the experiment is to determine if these images are as effective as the current images used in the tests. For the purposes of that experiment, it would be much easier (and probably more scientifically accurate) to use images where the correct answer is already known. As Google already has a large number of those images where it has extracted street names and numbers, they would have a large sample size to use for this experiment. They do not need, at this point, to use the unknown images.
If the experiment shows the street view images are equally effective, people can debate whether it's ok to have random web users do your OCR for you. Until then I'm not going to panic.
I have read the quote from Google about what they are doing several times, and I don't see what everyone else sees. It appears to me that they are using the already known street names and numbers as possible ReCAPTCHA images. What they are NOT doing is using the results given by people to define what the image says. The point of the experiment is to determine whether these images are sufficient to separate people from web-bots. I imagine that they will look at the number of 'wrong' answers from both sides of the test, and see if bots are able to parse the street view images significantly more often than the standard test images.
So... can anyone point to something in the Google quote to show me where I went wrong? From TFA, here is the quote:
We’re currently running an experiment in which characters from Street View images are appearing in CAPTCHAs. We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations. Based on the data and results of these reCaptcha tests, we’ll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online.
At end of product life cycle (when a new, shinier iPad comes out, for example), old stock could be offloaded through places like Amazon, which already provides for selling of used electronics. This business plan is very similar to what car rental agencies have used for quite a while.
Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration
I have seen quotes similar to this by several CEOs, including from Microsoft. I really think this more than anything shows a lack of vision. We currently have laptops with docking stations that people can set up to use both a "desktop computer" they carry easily from work and home. While these are ok, they are typically limited to a specific make (and often model) of laptop. A shift to a more generic docking station is hopefully not too far off. As the processor market continues to evolve, I think we will start to see something similar for tablets. While on the go, you can maybe do simple things, like browse the web, etc. When you get home or to work, it plugs in and becomes your computer. Longer term, the same may be true even for phones, although that may be a decade or more from now.
I can imagine buying a "monitor" with a sort of universal phone jack on the back of it. You get one for home, work provides one at the office. Coffee shops install a few of them for pretentious writer types. You carry your computer with you as you do a phone now, and wherever you go you plug it into a monitor that has a keyboard & mouse. Imagine if every computer you logged into (by connecting your phone) had the same OS, desktop, all of you files, applications, contacts, internet connection (from the phone), etc.
Dismissing the tablet (and phone) as never replacing the computer is probably short sighted. Will there still be high end systems? Of course. Some consumers will always either have or want more processing power, be it for regression modelling, compiling, ego boosting, or whatever else. For the majority of people.. if you can buy a phone that has the processing power to do everything you need, buying a full power PC becomes a lot less interesting.
While this is true, it misses the larger issue. There are a number of factors that change driving performance. Eating while driving has a similar effect to talking on a cell phone, much like applying makeup, shaving, etc. In contrast, having a second person (or more) seems to improve driving performance. A young child who is sleeping in the back seat can greatly improve performance, while a small child who is screaming and crying has a negative effect.
If we want to use the logic "it hurts performance", we should ban all electronic devices, and have the radios in cars have 1 big button that can turn on or off road information messages. We should ban all eating while driving. We should require any children that are in cars to be drugged and remain unconscious, and it should be illegal to drive without a second person in the car. That would, statistically, increase driving performance across the board.
Banning cell phones simply because they can be shown to have a negative performance is singling out a single cause because we don't like it. Instead, as usual, the problem is larger and more problematic to fix. Personally, it comes down to how much risk we, as a society, are willing to accept. The current rates of traffic accidents and fatalities are lower than they have been in previous years[*]. Personally, I am comfortable with the current level of risk when I step into a vehicle, either to drive or to ride as a passenger. If society, in general, would like to make changes to improve those numbers, we should have a realistic discussion about what would changes would help, how much each change would help, and what cost would be associated with each change. Simply pointing out one cause, and removing it, without addressing any other issues, is simply punishing a behavior based on personal bias.
Over analyzing the reason for mass appeal, as well as statistical distributions showing cross cultural appeal of various game genres is just how these people have fun, you insensitive clod.
I could be wrong, but I believe the logic goes that if the entire area was land, the cities in the area were allied with each other and this allowed for the sharing of technology between them. When the sea rushed in, it destroyed all but the few cities left at the edge of the new sea, leaving us with the "mystery" of how these few cities connected by only the sea could all have independently developed this tech, when no one else did.
I read an interesting paper about 10 or 15 years ago positing that during the last ice age the levels of the oceans were reduced to the point that the Mediterranean Sea was either much smaller or non existent. Unfortunately the people at that time didn't get the warning about climate change coming.. as the global ice caps shrunk back to "normal" levels, the Mediterranean was formed. (In reality, this was aprox 20k years ago, not the 10 to 12k spoken of in regards to Atlantis.)
I don't really follow Atlantis stuff much, but there has been at least some scientific research along the lines of what H.G. Wells was making up; Whether that theory has been confirmed or tossed out I really have no idea, but I wouldn't say that "scientific theories" don't cover this.
I also doubt that a "conviction is still likely", unless they have some other material to show. Convictions in these cases are almost always due to the shock value created by showing the dirty films and pictures to the jury. If they cannot recover the images and movies, they will actually have to cover their burden of proof a lot more than prosecutors are used to in this case, and the defense might actually have a shot.
If the jury actually thinks about the fact that the only evidence is what some cops say they saw, but can't prove. If the prosecution somehow gets to show "similar images" or some such nonsense, the defense is hosed.
This is probably too late to be read, but here goes anyway...
Yes, SLC-6 (pronounced slick-6) was expensive and never used for a shuttle launch. After the Challenger disaster, shuttle operations went from expanding to contracting, and despite what they will tell you publicly, it never recovered. Not only was SLC-6 built, but rather extensive work was done at Vandenberg AFB to allow for moving the shuttle. Hills were flattened, and certain roads still have short road signs, so they fit under the wings when it was to be driven to/from SLC-6.
When Challenger happened, NASA needed an excuse, and found one. They claimed that the hills near SLC-6 would reflect the thrust from the shuttle back on it, shaking it apart before it ever took off. And they can't knock the hills down, because they could be seen from a public beach, so Californian law says they can't be touched. It was basically a convienent way to slim down the shuttle program.
As a side note, the runway at Vandenberg was also expanded, and is still an alternate landing site for the shuttle. I assume it is the same size as KSC. I remember a private pilot telling me the thing was so wide you could land a cessna on it sideways. It was so long, you could do 3 touch and go's in one pass