They don't need an irrevocable, perpetual right to do that. A 10-minute right would be plenty.
Not necessarily. ICQ (also owned by AOL) allows you to send messages to people who aren't signed on. The message will get delivered to the user when they sign on. I've seen the server deliver messages that are several weeks old. I have no idea how long they hold on to a message before discarding it though.
No, FireFox and Thunderbird don't share the same libraries. The code is just coupled too tightly for the libraries to really be seperated out. Mozilla.org has had seperating the libraries on their todo list for years. The target date has always been "6-12 months from now", but it's simply not a priority and doesn't look like it'll happen anytime soon.
But why would I want an IRC client built in to my browser anyhow?... Still, it seems to me that it's a better approach to only put things together in the same application if they're related tasks.
Mozilla isn't a browser. It's a suite of internet applications, including a browser. In that context, IRC makes perfect sense to include. Look at the sizes of the XPI files - IRC only adds 160k to the suite, which is essentially free when you realize the full suite is around 13MB (give or take depending on your OS).
The efficiency difference between running the suite verses the different standalone Mozilla applications comes down to something like 90% of the code is shared between all of them. The standalone apps make no effort to share them. The apps were designed to share a core, but are being artificially seperated to shut up the whining of people who think its more efficient that way.
I don't see an OS X version of the net installer either. Looking back at past releases, it looks like MacOS Classic had a net installer, but OS X never did. Apparently either their isn't much demand for one, or no one cares even to code one.
The Firefox UI has a lot of features removed. The idea was to make the core browser "simple" and allow it to be customized via extensions.
Firefox generally used IE's UI as its model, whereas Mozilla used Netscape 4.x as its model.
Once the browser is loaded, rendering and speed wise they're the same. Benchmarks recently posted on Slashdot showed that the 1.8 versions of the suite were significantly faster than Firefox (based on 1.7). The next Firefox release should gain those improvements.
If you use FireFox and Thunderbird, you end up with higher memory usage as you get two copies of the Mozilla core loaded, whereas with the Suite you only have one copy loaded. This problem gets worse if you also use the standalone Composer or Calendar.
The biggest difference is to get a change done in the Mozilla UI, you have to get a large group of people to agree. Firefox has about 2 people who decide on the UI, so its easier to get changes done there.
Really, the biggest difference in Firefox is it shuts up the people who want to be able to download just a browser without the other stuff, but who also refuse to use the Mozilla net installer. If you used the Suite's net installer, you've always been able to tell it not to download the extra junk, but there's a large portion of people that liked to ignore the net installer and then bitch about being forced to download and install the parts they don't want.
In other words, developers could keep trying to innovate on the Super-Mario-type games, but gamers and developers seem more focused on creating more realistic first-person-shooter war simulations. (Not that I'm criticizing)
Try playing console games and you'll see things shifted much more the other way. It just comes down to First Person Shooter games play much better with a keyboard and mouse than with a controller, whereas a classic Nintendo style game needs a fairly well defined controller to play well, and would absolutely suck with a keyboard or mouse.
PC gaming is driven by the keyboard and mouse. Controllers are available, but not very common, and even more importantly, not at all standardized. So developers mainly stick to games that work well with the keyboard and mouse (FPS, RTS, RPG).
K-A got changed to E a few years ago. The idea was to simply the ratings so every rating was just one letter. They seem to be abandoning that idea now with E10+ though.
The story I've heard is that the teen rating is due to Princess Peach and Zelda being added to the game. Supposedly violence against women automatically bumps a game up to a Teen rating. Yes, Samus was in the original game, but you can't tell that Samus is female due to the full body armor.
Saying "The license to your BIOS doesn't matter as long as you can run stuff on it" is like saying "The fact that my car's engine is sealed in a lead black box doesn't matter as long as I can still drive." Yeah, on the surface it's true but when you think of the subject with any actual depth it just doesn't make sense.
Try calling your car manufacturer and asking for the full design specifications of the engine with enough detail that you could make one yourself from scratch (assuming you had the necessary tools). You'll just get laughed at.
Your car engine is readily replacable. You can build your own engine from scratch if you want, but it's very unlikely you would. The car manufacturer certainly isn't going to tell you how they made theirs. Engines happen to be similar enough that other people can make a compatible one you can use instead.
The BIOS is readily replacable. You can make your own BIOS from scratch if you want, but it's very unlikely you would. If you're lucky, the motherboard manufacturer might tell you how to make one, but they most likely have better things to do. After all, the whole point of the BIOS is to take the custom design of their motherboard and put a standard interface on it that everyone knows how to work with.
Where I work we've got an Asterisk based phone system. For some reason we haven't managed to figure out, the caller id on outbound calls shows up simply as the 4 digit extension of the phone making the call.
It causes problems sometimes, as some companies we deal with (I think mainly airlines) route your call differently depending on the caller id. When they can't figure out what to do with it, the phone just keeps ringing until you hang up.
On date A, 1 out of 100 Moms play computer games, and 20 out of 100 Slashdot readers play computer games.
At date B, 2 out of 100 Moms play computer games. 22 out of 100 Slashdot readers play computer games.
Over this time period, the market segment "Mom who play games" is showing 200% growth. The segment "Slashdotters who play games" only showed 10% growth.
Clearly, Moms who play games is a much faster growing market and where the money is to be made.
More serously speaking, puzzle games and the like that casual gamers will play are a dime a dozen. Your average Linux distro comes with several dozen of these games. Pick your average obscure OS, and you also have at least several dozen simialar games to choose from. These games don't exactly take very long to make, and will get made by the dozens *very* quickly if an OS starts to gain any significant ground.
Most people who say "Linux needs games" are talking about the latest 3D games. When it comes to those games, who the hell really cares. Once you look past the very top tier games like Half Life, Doom, and Warcraft, what's considered good sales for a PC game is only considered mediocre for a console game. Consoles are where the serious gaming is.
I noticed that too and started to wonder. I can understand Mozilla being a bit faster than Firefox since they used the latest 1.8 builds, whereas Firefox branched off the trunk last summer. What really surprised me was that Mozilla beat Firefox in startup time significantly. That means either the Mozilla.org people did a hell of a job optimizing the startup time of the suite, or the extra complexity of the suite doesn't drag it down nearly as much as Firefox fans want to believe. I'm leaning towards the latter being the more significant factor.
You do realize that we all have CD ROMs and sound cards because of games, right?
Sound cards certainly did originate because of games, sound feedback is useful in everyday computing.
CDROMs were sold on the basis of things like encyclopedias and information archives. CDROM games weren't that common until well after CDROM drives became standard.
Windows gamers are numbered in the 10s of millions. If you don't believe me, then I'd like you to explain why EB is stuffed with Windows games on the shelves with little to no support for any other OS.
EB is stuffed with Windows games because there aren't enough people not using Windows to bother. I don't see how to statement is supposed to disprove my point that games go to the dominant OS. Do you really think that if EB cleared their shelves of Windows games and replaced them all with Linux games that Linux would become the dominant OS ?
And yet they created the entire 3D accellerator market, and have been a major driving force behind making already excessivly fast processors even faster.
Does the average computer user buy a 3D high end NVIDIA or ATI card just because gamers do? No. They either have an integrated graphics card or bottom of the line graphics card that came with their computer. They just have the cheapest graphics card simply because you have to have one. They don't care what it is, nor do they really know that there is a difference.
And are you really trying to imply that Intel and AMD would stop releasing faster chips if people didn't play games on their computers? If nothing else, the movie industry and scientific computing have a far higher need for increased speed, and are far more willing to pay for it.
Doom ran on practically anything. I remember playing it on SparcStations and SGI Indy Workstations back in 95. Doom would've just been written for whatever was the dominant platform at the time.
Games go where the users are. Not the other way around. Gamers are too small a percentage of computer users to dictate platforms to everyone else.
An aggrivating control scheme which requires you to drive your character like an RC car.
To me, that's what defines Resident Evil. I have the RE Remake, but I've never gotten very far into it before giving up due to the frustratingness of the controls.
That said, I've heard that RE4 changes the control scheme. No idea how much better it is though. Anyone with the game want to comment?
I'd love to see a Resident Evil game built off the Eternal Darkness engine. Eternal Darkness had a very RE like interface, but with excellent control and camera management. Unfortunately Eternal Darkness ended up being more of an interactive movie than a game.
Have you tried using the suite anytime remotely recently?
The only place it's slower than Thunderbird or Firefox is in startup time. If you turn on the preload feature, then the suite will load faster than the individual apps will. I consider the preload worthwhile, since I've got a browser open the vast majority of the time I'm working on the computer, and if not, I usually at least want the email app open.
If you use multiple individual apps, the suite ends up using less memory as the apps each have their own instance of the Gecko core.
Type ahead fine works better in the suite. I prefer a links only search if i just start typing, with / for the fulltext. Firefox always does fulltext.
Type ahead find doesn't work in the View Source window of FireFox.
Type ahead find doesn't work in Thunderbird.
Too many options have been removed from the preferences window in FF/TB. The new design isn't very usable for the more complicated tabs (such as Advanced).
I like right clicking a link in an email and selecting "Open in New Tab".
TB/FF don't have a window menu, making it slower to navigate between multiple windows.
Those are the main ones I can think of. Probably more that I don't run into as often.
Using XUL won't really help make a media player more portable. The hard parts of porting a media player are the sound output and the video display. XUL only helps with the front end. You'd still need to write ALSA and X11 video overlay code to get it to run on Linux.
I've been using the suite for years now. A few weeks ago I decided I'd use FireFox and ThunderBird at work to give them a chance. I'm still using the suite at home though. I'm currently still prefering the suite over the FF/TB combo, altho it's much closer now than it was even a few months ago.
Here's a few things I like better in the suite:
1) Type ahead find is nicer in the suite. I prefer it to only search links if I start typing. Even messing with about:config, I haven't gotten FireFox to work like that. Closest I can get is to hit ' to start the links only search.
2) In the suite, type-ahead find works everywhere. That includes the View Source window and email messages. In the seperate apps, it only works in the main browser window.
3) With the suite, I can right click a link in an email and choose "Open in New Tab". I can't do that in Thunderbird.
4) It's easier to find stuff in the suite Preferences window than in FF/TB. FF/TB group half the options under the Advanced tab, making it a huge scrolling mess. The FF/TB Options dialog is awkward when you have to scroll and/or collapse the right side.
5) The History window in the suite is much easier to use than FireFox's sidebar when you're searching for something you're not totally sure of. OTOH, the sidebar is easier when you want to go back to something near the top of the list.
6) Thunderbird doesn't have a clear button next to the quick search field. That gets annoying fast.
7) The lack of a Window menu in FF/TB is annoying. When I've got a lot of Windows open, the Windows taskbar is a pain to find things in.
The startup time isn't really an issue. Since I have email and/or the browser open the vast majority of the time, I just turn on the preload option. It makes Mozilla come up instantly - faster than IE or FireFox. It's certainly worth the unnoticable increase in system startup time, and I have enough RAM that it isn't an issue.
I don't notice a difference in response times between the suite or the individual apps.
I will agree that FF/TB have cleaner menus than the suite, but that's mainly because the Privacy tab of the Options window is a mess instead.
and another change to call evolution an unproven theory.
We can never prove that man evolved from apes. We can find evidence to suggest that it's highly likely that it happened, but that's as far as we can go.
Well, if you invent time travel and set out to document you entirely ancestry all the way back to an ape, you could prove it, but I wouldn't bet on the odds of that happening.
So yes, evolution is an unproven theory. It just happens to best one that we have at the moment.
If she, or Kerry, were to prefix all changes in opinion with, "I have come to a new understanding of this," I think I'd have a lot less problem with it. For example, if Kerry had said, "I have had conversations with Americans from all over our glorious land. I think I can see, now, how certain aspects of can be abused. I will take my first opportunity to fix this oversight by a) repealing the law, b) amending the law, c) ???," I think I would have a lot more respect for him than I do now.
That's exactly what Kerry said at the 2nd debate when asked about the Patriot Act. He said most of the law was good, but it came to his attention that parts were being abused, which is why he is co-sponsoring the SAFE Act.
At that same debate he also explained voting against the $87 billion - that version of the bill had $20 billion for a no-bid Halliburton contract, and a tax cut for the rich. He also claimed that not enough of the money was allocated toward supplies for our troups.
Those are the two I know of off the top of my head. There's probably more, but you have to remember that that kind of stuff doesn't fit into the 10 second clips the news likes to show.
Even the idea that it is proof of parallel universes is not original. Michael Crichton made that claim in his book Timeline. It's an excellent book (despite the horrible movie loosely based on it), but it is fiction.
At the end of the book are several pages of sources he used for his scientific information. It'd be rather interesting to look at the list and figure out where he got the information from.
He also never claims that the parallel universes theory is correct (or that it is incorrect). He simply says its a common theory and that it makes a good basis for a story.
Being backward compatible with the GameBoy Advance does not automatically mean it's compatible with the GameBoy and GameBoy Color.
The GB and GBC used a Z80 processor. The GBA uses an ARM7, but also has a Z80 which is used for running older games.
Nintendo has said that the DS has an ARM9 and an ARM7. To implement GB/GBC compatibility, they'd either have to add in a Z80, or build a GB/GBC emulator into the DS. So far they haven't said anything to suggest they were doing that.
If anything, Nintendo has hinted that the DS won't play GB/GBC games. They claimed GBA compatibility provided the DS with a catalog of over 500 games compatible with it. When Nintendo announced the GameBoy Player, they claimed that it added over 1200 games to the GameCube library.
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They don't need an irrevocable, perpetual right to do that. A 10-minute right would be plenty.
Not necessarily. ICQ (also owned by AOL) allows you to send messages to people who aren't signed on. The message will get delivered to the user when they sign on. I've seen the server deliver messages that are several weeks old. I have no idea how long they hold on to a message before discarding it though.
No, FireFox and Thunderbird don't share the same libraries. The code is just coupled too tightly for the libraries to really be seperated out. Mozilla.org has had seperating the libraries on their todo list for years. The target date has always been "6-12 months from now", but it's simply not a priority and doesn't look like it'll happen anytime soon.
But why would I want an IRC client built in to my browser anyhow? ... Still, it seems to me that it's a better approach to only put things together in the same application if they're related tasks.
Mozilla isn't a browser. It's a suite of internet applications, including a browser. In that context, IRC makes perfect sense to include. Look at the sizes of the XPI files - IRC only adds 160k to the suite, which is essentially free when you realize the full suite is around 13MB (give or take depending on your OS).
The efficiency difference between running the suite verses the different standalone Mozilla applications comes down to something like 90% of the code is shared between all of them. The standalone apps make no effort to share them. The apps were designed to share a core, but are being artificially seperated to shut up the whining of people who think its more efficient that way.
I don't see an OS X version of the net installer either. Looking back at past releases, it looks like MacOS Classic had a net installer, but OS X never did. Apparently either their isn't much demand for one, or no one cares even to code one.
Here's the differences:
Firefox starts up slightly faster.
The Firefox UI has a lot of features removed. The idea was to make the core browser "simple" and allow it to be customized via extensions.
Firefox generally used IE's UI as its model, whereas Mozilla used Netscape 4.x as its model.
Once the browser is loaded, rendering and speed wise they're the same. Benchmarks recently posted on Slashdot showed that the 1.8 versions of the suite were significantly faster than Firefox (based on 1.7). The next Firefox release should gain those improvements.
If you use FireFox and Thunderbird, you end up with higher memory usage as you get two copies of the Mozilla core loaded, whereas with the Suite you only have one copy loaded. This problem gets worse if you also use the standalone Composer or Calendar.
The biggest difference is to get a change done in the Mozilla UI, you have to get a large group of people to agree. Firefox has about 2 people who decide on the UI, so its easier to get changes done there.
Really, the biggest difference in Firefox is it shuts up the people who want to be able to download just a browser without the other stuff, but who also refuse to use the Mozilla net installer. If you used the Suite's net installer, you've always been able to tell it not to download the extra junk, but there's a large portion of people that liked to ignore the net installer and then bitch about being forced to download and install the parts they don't want.
In other words, developers could keep trying to innovate on the Super-Mario-type games, but gamers and developers seem more focused on creating more realistic first-person-shooter war simulations. (Not that I'm criticizing)
Try playing console games and you'll see things shifted much more the other way. It just comes down to First Person Shooter games play much better with a keyboard and mouse than with a controller, whereas a classic Nintendo style game needs a fairly well defined controller to play well, and would absolutely suck with a keyboard or mouse.
PC gaming is driven by the keyboard and mouse. Controllers are available, but not very common, and even more importantly, not at all standardized. So developers mainly stick to games that work well with the keyboard and mouse (FPS, RTS, RPG).
The Mac has a tiny market share, but it's a market that's used to paying Apple money, even if the Apple option costs more than a non-Apple option.
Then you have Linux users, most of which don't like to pay for things, and bitch like hell if a product doesn't come with the full source code.
K-A got changed to E a few years ago. The idea was to simply the ratings so every rating was just one letter. They seem to be abandoning that idea now with E10+ though.
The story I've heard is that the teen rating is due to Princess Peach and Zelda being added to the game. Supposedly violence against women automatically bumps a game up to a Teen rating. Yes, Samus was in the original game, but you can't tell that Samus is female due to the full body armor.
Saying "The license to your BIOS doesn't matter as long as you can run stuff on it" is like saying "The fact that my car's engine is sealed in a lead black box doesn't matter as long as I can still drive." Yeah, on the surface it's true but when you think of the subject with any actual depth it just doesn't make sense.
Try calling your car manufacturer and asking for the full design specifications of the engine with enough detail that you could make one yourself from scratch (assuming you had the necessary tools). You'll just get laughed at.
Your car engine is readily replacable. You can build your own engine from scratch if you want, but it's very unlikely you would. The car manufacturer certainly isn't going to tell you how they made theirs. Engines happen to be similar enough that other people can make a compatible one you can use instead.
The BIOS is readily replacable. You can make your own BIOS from scratch if you want, but it's very unlikely you would. If you're lucky, the motherboard manufacturer might tell you how to make one, but they most likely have better things to do. After all, the whole point of the BIOS is to take the custom design of their motherboard and put a standard interface on it that everyone knows how to work with.
Where I work we've got an Asterisk based phone system. For some reason we haven't managed to figure out, the caller id on outbound calls shows up simply as the 4 digit extension of the phone making the call.
It causes problems sometimes, as some companies we deal with (I think mainly airlines) route your call differently depending on the caller id. When they can't figure out what to do with it, the phone just keeps ringing until you hang up.
On date A, 1 out of 100 Moms play computer games, and 20 out of 100 Slashdot readers play computer games.
At date B, 2 out of 100 Moms play computer games. 22 out of 100 Slashdot readers play computer games.
Over this time period, the market segment "Mom who play games" is showing 200% growth. The segment "Slashdotters who play games" only showed 10% growth.
Clearly, Moms who play games is a much faster growing market and where the money is to be made.
More serously speaking, puzzle games and the like that casual gamers will play are a dime a dozen. Your average Linux distro comes with several dozen of these games. Pick your average obscure OS, and you also have at least several dozen simialar games to choose from. These games don't exactly take very long to make, and will get made by the dozens *very* quickly if an OS starts to gain any significant ground.
Most people who say "Linux needs games" are talking about the latest 3D games. When it comes to those games, who the hell really cares. Once you look past the very top tier games like Half Life, Doom, and Warcraft, what's considered good sales for a PC game is only considered mediocre for a console game. Consoles are where the serious gaming is.
I noticed that too and started to wonder. I can understand Mozilla being a bit faster than Firefox since they used the latest 1.8 builds, whereas Firefox branched off the trunk last summer. What really surprised me was that Mozilla beat Firefox in startup time significantly. That means either the Mozilla.org people did a hell of a job optimizing the startup time of the suite, or the extra complexity of the suite doesn't drag it down nearly as much as Firefox fans want to believe. I'm leaning towards the latter being the more significant factor.
You do realize that we all have CD ROMs and sound cards because of games, right?
Sound cards certainly did originate because of games, sound feedback is useful in everyday computing.
CDROMs were sold on the basis of things like encyclopedias and information archives. CDROM games weren't that common until well after CDROM drives became standard.
Windows gamers are numbered in the 10s of millions. If you don't believe me, then I'd like you to explain why EB is stuffed with Windows games on the shelves with little to no support for any other OS.
EB is stuffed with Windows games because there aren't enough people not using Windows to bother. I don't see how to statement is supposed to disprove my point that games go to the dominant OS. Do you really think that if EB cleared their shelves of Windows games and replaced them all with Linux games that Linux would become the dominant OS ?
And yet they created the entire 3D accellerator market, and have been a major driving force behind making already excessivly fast processors even faster.
Does the average computer user buy a 3D high end NVIDIA or ATI card just because gamers do? No. They either have an integrated graphics card or bottom of the line graphics card that came with their computer. They just have the cheapest graphics card simply because you have to have one. They don't care what it is, nor do they really know that there is a difference.
And are you really trying to imply that Intel and AMD would stop releasing faster chips if people didn't play games on their computers? If nothing else, the movie industry and scientific computing have a far higher need for increased speed, and are far more willing to pay for it.
Doom ran on practically anything. I remember playing it on SparcStations and SGI Indy Workstations back in 95. Doom would've just been written for whatever was the dominant platform at the time.
Games go where the users are. Not the other way around. Gamers are too small a percentage of computer users to dictate platforms to everyone else.
An aggrivating control scheme which requires you to drive your character like an RC car.
To me, that's what defines Resident Evil. I have the RE Remake, but I've never gotten very far into it before giving up due to the frustratingness of the controls.
That said, I've heard that RE4 changes the control scheme. No idea how much better it is though. Anyone with the game want to comment?
I'd love to see a Resident Evil game built off the Eternal Darkness engine. Eternal Darkness had a very RE like interface, but with excellent control and camera management. Unfortunately Eternal Darkness ended up being more of an interactive movie than a game.
Have you tried using the suite anytime remotely recently?
The only place it's slower than Thunderbird or Firefox is in startup time. If you turn on the preload feature, then the suite will load faster than the individual apps will. I consider the preload worthwhile, since I've got a browser open the vast majority of the time I'm working on the computer, and if not, I usually at least want the email app open.
If you use multiple individual apps, the suite ends up using less memory as the apps each have their own instance of the Gecko core.
Tabs are great for the browser, but don't help when you're using multiple parts of the suite at once.
Type ahead fine works better in the suite. I prefer a links only search if i just start typing, with / for the fulltext. Firefox always does fulltext.
Type ahead find doesn't work in the View Source window of FireFox.
Type ahead find doesn't work in Thunderbird.
Too many options have been removed from the preferences window in FF/TB. The new design isn't very usable for the more complicated tabs (such as Advanced).
I like right clicking a link in an email and selecting "Open in New Tab".
TB/FF don't have a window menu, making it slower to navigate between multiple windows.
Those are the main ones I can think of. Probably more that I don't run into as often.
Using XUL won't really help make a media player more portable. The hard parts of porting a media player are the sound output and the video display. XUL only helps with the front end. You'd still need to write ALSA and X11 video overlay code to get it to run on Linux.
I've been using the suite for years now. A few weeks ago I decided I'd use FireFox and ThunderBird at work to give them a chance. I'm still using the suite at home though. I'm currently still prefering the suite over the FF/TB combo, altho it's much closer now than it was even a few months ago.
Here's a few things I like better in the suite:
1) Type ahead find is nicer in the suite. I prefer it to only search links if I start typing. Even messing with about:config, I haven't gotten FireFox to work like that. Closest I can get is to hit ' to start the links only search.
2) In the suite, type-ahead find works everywhere. That includes the View Source window and email messages. In the seperate apps, it only works in the main browser window.
3) With the suite, I can right click a link in an email and choose "Open in New Tab". I can't do that in Thunderbird.
4) It's easier to find stuff in the suite Preferences window than in FF/TB. FF/TB group half the options under the Advanced tab, making it a huge scrolling mess. The FF/TB Options dialog is awkward when you have to scroll and/or collapse the right side.
5) The History window in the suite is much easier to use than FireFox's sidebar when you're searching for something you're not totally sure of. OTOH, the sidebar is easier when you want to go back to something near the top of the list.
6) Thunderbird doesn't have a clear button next to the quick search field. That gets annoying fast.
7) The lack of a Window menu in FF/TB is annoying. When I've got a lot of Windows open, the Windows taskbar is a pain to find things in.
The startup time isn't really an issue. Since I have email and/or the browser open the vast majority of the time, I just turn on the preload option. It makes Mozilla come up instantly - faster than IE or FireFox. It's certainly worth the unnoticable increase in system startup time, and I have enough RAM that it isn't an issue.
I don't notice a difference in response times between the suite or the individual apps.
I will agree that FF/TB have cleaner menus than the suite, but that's mainly because the Privacy tab of the Options window is a mess instead.
and another change to call evolution an unproven theory.
We can never prove that man evolved from apes. We can find evidence to suggest that it's highly likely that it happened, but that's as far as we can go.
Well, if you invent time travel and set out to document you entirely ancestry all the way back to an ape, you could prove it, but I wouldn't bet on the odds of that happening.
So yes, evolution is an unproven theory. It just happens to best one that we have at the moment.
If she, or Kerry, were to prefix all changes in opinion with, "I have come to a new understanding of this," I think I'd have a lot less problem with it. For example, if Kerry had said, "I have had conversations with Americans from all over our glorious land. I think I can see, now, how certain aspects of can be abused. I will take my first opportunity to fix this oversight by a) repealing the law, b) amending the law, c) ???," I think I would have a lot more respect for him than I do now.
That's exactly what Kerry said at the 2nd debate when asked about the Patriot Act. He said most of the law was good, but it came to his attention that parts were being abused, which is why he is co-sponsoring the SAFE Act.
At that same debate he also explained voting against the $87 billion - that version of the bill had $20 billion for a no-bid Halliburton contract, and a tax cut for the rich. He also claimed that not enough of the money was allocated toward supplies for our troups.
Those are the two I know of off the top of my head. There's probably more, but you have to remember that that kind of stuff doesn't fit into the 10 second clips the news likes to show.
Even the idea that it is proof of parallel universes is not original. Michael Crichton made that claim in his book Timeline. It's an excellent book (despite the horrible movie loosely based on it), but it is fiction.
At the end of the book are several pages of sources he used for his scientific information. It'd be rather interesting to look at the list and figure out where he got the information from.
He also never claims that the parallel universes theory is correct (or that it is incorrect). He simply says its a common theory and that it makes a good basis for a story.
Being backward compatible with the GameBoy Advance does not automatically mean it's compatible with the GameBoy and GameBoy Color.
The GB and GBC used a Z80 processor. The GBA uses an ARM7, but also has a Z80 which is used for running older games.
Nintendo has said that the DS has an ARM9 and an ARM7. To implement GB/GBC compatibility, they'd either have to add in a Z80, or build a GB/GBC emulator into the DS. So far they haven't said anything to suggest they were doing that.
If anything, Nintendo has hinted that the DS won't play GB/GBC games. They claimed GBA compatibility provided the DS with a catalog of over 500 games compatible with it. When Nintendo announced the GameBoy Player, they claimed that it added over 1200 games to the GameCube library.