Finding that many Earth-sized rocky bodies orbiting a star just 39 lightyears away, with the possibility that some of them may be able to have liquid water on their surface doesn't excite you?
It seems that nearby rocky exoplanets are all over the place so no this doesn't get me all that excited except as more evidence that many or even most stars have them. Gliese 581 is half the distance and even our companion system Proxima Centauri probably has one or more of them.
This does not mean that it isn't worth sending them an RF or laser message though to see if we get a reply in 80 years because well you never know. Although there are certainly more compelling targets in a 40 ly radius.
Need I continue? Is it too much work for you to take an extra 1-3 seconds to google before you make an ignorant statement like that? Actually it seems that most and perhaps even all stars have planets including rocky ones. What this really shows is the variability possible and that rocky planets are probably ubiquitous and can just be assumed to exist in most cases.
One of the most important changes I've seen in my lifetime has been this shift from pessimistically assuming that there were relatively few rocky planets in the galaxy and that many if not most stars lacked them to what we are actually seeing now: that they are in fact almost everywhere we look carefully enough to the point that it might be more useful to search for stars that don't have any rocky planets. There are plenty of systems where we haven't detected any but the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Small rocky planets are very difficult to detect.
Another star with some mythology behind it, Sirius (made famous by the Dogons) appears to lack planets, although again it's difficult for us to be sure of that. We have looked though.
Our most efficient drive system to date (in terms of how much acceleration you get for the amount of propellant used) are plasma/ion engines.
Has anyone actually proposed using those for even short interstellar missions? Since no one has actually even tried to build a craft for an interstellar mission no one has done the full engineering required but nuclear pulse (Orion) or fission fragment / dusty plasma fission engines could likely make Alpha Centauri in less than a century reaching speeds of.05 -.08c.
The ships could not be launched from earth and so would have to be constructed either from orbit, at a Lagrange point station, or on a moon base with nuclear power plants and mostly automated robotic mining/smelting/casting/milling capabilities. Just building the infrastructure to build such a rocket would probably take a century or two, but it's probably doable to build something like that with current tech. Just some (a lot of) engineering problems to work out. No fundamental advances necessary. Just a lot of money. I think Orion has been more fully engineered (by Freeman Dyson) than fission fragment. So might be more doable. Needless to say it would be expensive, but I'm guessing you'd be for it even if you had to sacrifice say an extra 10-15% of your income am I right? I'm sure we can all agree on 'anything to reach the stars'.
Are there any other countries where this sort of thing goes on?
Paris-CDG for flights to the US. I was treated worse there than I have ever been in the US and I've been treated very badly in the US (randomly chosen almost every time I fly for search/interrogations and multi-hour interrogations etc).
TSA does not generally fondle your cock-n-ball package. I mean aside from a few pervs they don't usually get in there with their fingers and fully explore the frank-n-beans and it has never happened to me there. They just get very close by slightly touching your balls with the back of their hands while they touch 'where the leg meets the torso' as they put it and this only happens if something goes wrong with the scanners etc. It isn't routine. However the TSA did not seem to tell the French security people about this subtle distinction and presumably the instructions are sufficiently vague that those guys seem to think that a full on prison search is what the US wants. Happened to me. Never had a dude actually grab or squeeze my dick before and I wasn't happy about it. I freaked and pushed the guy down and almost missed my flight. They refused to let me on the plane at first because I didn't want some guy fondling my package and no I am not exaggerating. He was really doing that. As if he was slowly and carefully searching for something that might be hidden under my dick or balls. I tried to explain to them that in the US they don't do that unless checking you into prison or something, but of course they didn't particularly care what I had to say.
I honestly don't know if that guy was gay. While he and I were arguing about his sexual assault on me he claimed not to be, but he would probably say the same even if he were. I don't see how a straight guy could do that job though, but whatever. Whether he actually wanted to do what he did, whether he enjoyed it, was not the point. I felt almost physically sick. I think it gave me a slight taste of what it must be like to get raped. I did not expect to be having some novel homosexual experience with some French airport security guy and I really felt violated and disgusted for days or even weeks afterward.
I actually begged them to let the very pretty French airport security chick standing right there finish the search That would have been fine. Hell I would have payed something for that. She smiled when I asked, but of course they refused. Why I don't understand. I mean they claim it isn't sexual so what difference does it make if the pretty female 'searches' me? Hell it's not like I would have asked her to touch my dick. I just wanted to get on the plane.
Luckily this was France where people do tend to be better/nicer than in the US and another one of the security guys took pity on me (and maybe risked his job) by searching me without touching my genitals at all. What was weird was that he could not promise me in advance that he wouldn't grab my dick. He made me understand that he understood what I wanted and that I shouldn't worry, but he apparently was not allowed to actually promise me in advance that he wouldn't sex me up. I decided to trust him and indeed he didn't get anywhere near. My experience makes me wonder why they don't insert gloved fingers into females to make sure they aren't hiding anything up there. Seems unfair. If they are going to fully explore every millimeter of male genitals they should be doing the same to the females. Of course they really shouldn't be doing any of this. The vast majority of countries in the world don't and I'm pretty sure France only does this ritual (male only) sexual molestation for flights to the US.
Non-programmers you mean? Seriously what kind of programmer doesn't expect a single '=' to be an assignment operator? C/C++ isn't the only language where that is the case. I have never made the error you mention even once in my entire life. In c/c++ == is the comparison operator and = is the assignment operator. I don't see how that is unclear.
I use Chrome too of course, but every time I do I think about how unpleasant the world will become if Google manages to exterminate all its rivals, both proprietary and open.
I like that Ãf course'. No need to exterminate them if you can get their product to be a clone of your own. Then there is no real reason for anyone to use their product over yours. With Mozilla killing customization or at least customization that is better than what Chrome already has, they have in every way become indistinguishable from Google's browser. Choosing one over the other becomes a hair splitting exercise.
Actually for a while Chrome will probably have better customization just because they have a huge head start in their extension ecosystem. Whether Firefox will eventually catch up is questionable but it may not. So one reason to use Chrome over Firefox may be that it is more customizable and that may never change.
Yes, i too would like to keep all the add-ons, but between a fast browser with fewer add-ons and a slow one with many outdated add-ons, i prefer the first one.
Doesn't a fast browser with fewer addons basically describe Google Chrome? Why don't you just switch to that if speed trumps customization for you? Do you really think the mozdevs can compete with the massive GoogleCorp at what they do best? You think they are going to outGoogle Google?
You can not complain about firefox being slow and also complain about keeping old add-ons.
I haven't seen a lot of people complaining about speed for any browser. I don't think speed is much of an issue for browsers. They have been fast enough for a very long time. Trying to make them faster is fixing a nonproblem. Finding a browser that will do what you want it to do if you want more than what Chrome can do otoh...that's about to be nontrivial.
I think its possible that killing the extension ecosystem may have a positive effect on the memory leak problem because at the very least the mozdevs will not be able to blame the extension devs for the leaks anymore. AFAIK the mozdevs don't recognize that there is a memory leak problem. I think they think they fixed it sometime in 3.x or earlier.
Well for me Firefox has never been about performance. It was about customization (and because IE has always sucked). When Chrome came along it was certainly an improvement on IE but it still could not do many of the things that Firefox + XUL extensions could do. It just did not have the same feature set. For me Firefox is fast enough as it is and I don't think a browser needs to use more than a single core or even more than a single thread. Well unless its only point is to compete in benchmarks. The only performance problem that I see Firefox having is memory leaks. That has always been its Achilles heel. Especially since the devs always blame the extensions. Now that they are killing the extensions maybe they will finally be able to fix the leaks. But whatever. I can just restart the browser as often as possible.
I use the browser because with XUL extensions it does what I want it to do and with those extensions it can do things that no other browser can. Whatever Mozilla does in the future it will have to be able to compete with FrozenFox/XULFox (nonupgraded Firefox) and Pale Moon or whatever the Pale Moon project becomes. In terms of competing with a XUL extension boosted feature set I don't think they have much of a chance and they definitely don't care. Their only goal seems to be being the best Chrome clone they can be and at that they are certainly going to be successful I think: to the point that they may eventually find it easier just to switch entirely to the Chrome codebase and put a slightly modified FireChrome UI on top of it.
There may be people who are disappointed with Firefox and want to switch to say Chrome because it is faster or more efficient at benchmarking or whatever but I am not one of those people. Nor do I care whether or not the browser functions as its own standalone operating system which I regard as a silly idea. I don't have a problem with tabs 'taking over' my browser, but maybe that's because I use noscript so that javascript cannot bend me over and have its way with me so easily. Perhaps the biggest problem with killing the more powerful (and they are) XUL extension standard is that Firefox will be no better than Chrome when it comes to extensions. So what is the point of using it then? Brand loyalty? Fuck that. After this Firefox will be Chrome. There will be no reason at all not to use Chrome at that point. The UIs are already almost identical. Now the extensions will be identical as well. So please tell me what is the point of Firefox even existing at that point?
Well I think the important thing is whether you can archive existing.xpi files from AMO now to use as part of the installation of FrozenFox until/unless a practical non Chrome clone exists or for the next decade or so whichever comes first. Presumably signatures won't be a problem if the.xpi files were originally sourced from AMO.
Ultimately, this will affect almost no one. Planning for this change has been happening for a long time now. Your favorite add-ons will continue to work.
Compared with XUL/XPCOM extensions, WebExtensions provide much more limited options for the add-on's UI, and a much more limited set of privileged JavaScript APIs.
WebExtensions can only access web content by injecting separate scripts into web pages and communicating with them using a messaging API (note, though, that this is also true of XUL/XPCOM extensions that expect to work with multiprocess Firefox).
Those are the facts. That is right from the horse's mouth. Not all extensions are going to be ported. Period. Maybe a few of the most popular, but it's basically going to be like porting your extension to Chrome. FF basically will be Chrome as far as extensions are concerned.
Pale Moon? This would be a perfect alternative for them to snatch up the alienated Firefox users by starting a new fork of the code base from the last version to support XUL extensions. Unfortunately, they're so insistent on NOT USING AUSTRALIS that they'll never do this, despite the fact that their current code base is old enough that it doesn't support a lot of the best Firefox extensions either.
The idea would be to rebase their core codebase on a more recent version and just factor out Australis. Apparently the Australis UI is not so tightly integrated as to make this not doable. From what I can see Pale Moon or whatever they end up calling the newer refork is going to be the *only* alternative to The Google Browser and its clones. Well aside from just disabling autoupdate on FF52 and living with that which is what I plan to do for the time being. That will probably work for the next 2-3 years. If I have time maybe I can help with the Pale Moon project now that FF has finally pounded a stake through its own heart. Customization is Firefox and once Mozilla kills that it really is dead and there is no reason to use it.
No new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Updates to existing legacy add-ons will still be accepted.
On April 18th. That's huge. Although to be fair you'd have to be the king of bad timing to be releasing a new firefox addon right before Mozilla is pounding a stake through the heart of them. I wonder how long Mozilla will even keep addons available. I'm guessing not very long after they have been deprecated in the current version. Mozilla clearly wants to do whatever it can to get and keep users on their newest and shiniest version and killing extensions on past versions will be a scorched earth way to do that.
Those of us who like Firefox should be archiving all of our favorite extensions soon. I want to archive versions that work with Pale Moon as well although that is much more difficult because I think they will all claim to be incompatible and have to actually be tested to see if they work. I am also going to do a major search for more extensions that I don't know about. So that I can archive those as well. Soon they will all be gone, and as with past Complete Themes, probably forever.
If I am being optimistic I could hope that this move to make Firefox much less customizable and feature poor (in the name of speed, stability, and simplicity for the developers) will push some extension developers to develop specifically for Pale Moon. Maybe someone will fork the last XUL compatible version of Firefox as well. I'm not completely clear on which version that will be. Maybe 52 since 53 starts disabling extensions that don't set the multiprocess flag, basically a start of the War on XUL.
The problem with Pale Moon is extension compatibility. It's the extensions that make Firefox worth using. As with Firefox it seems like extension archiving of most recent working versions is a necessity, but I don't know which versions of each extension I use will be compatible with Pale Moon and it's a bit of a research project to figure that out.
Nevertheless I guess I am going to have to do exactly that for Firefox itself soon while the mozilla addons site still works. Pretty soon Firefox itself will be a kind of Pale Moon: a browser frozen in time. Any extensions will have to be frozen along with it.
The so called science you are referring to was in a sense settled in late 19th century when the first greenhouses were built. It is very likely that an increase in CO2 will cause a rise in planetary temperatures (global warming) and we know that atmospheric CO2 is increasing from one year to the next, but what we don't know is how quickly CO2 will rise in the future (whether the current rate will or will not increase) and how much planetary warming per ppm rise this will create. We also don't know what changes each degree c of increased temperature will cause. So far it seems the 1 degree c increase in the 20th century has not caused Armageddon. Will another degree rise in the 21st century cause it though? We just don't know. Our record as a species in predicting the future has so far not been promising.
Due to the fact that fossil fuels are going to run out and probably relatively soon these details matter a lot and we just don't know them. So far, in the past 100 years, the 100ppm change has clearly not been catastrophic. Also we cannot be 100% sure that the 100ppm rise in CO2 in the past century was caused by human activity. It would be funny if after humanity converted to 99% nuclear electricity generation and only battery powered and direct connect electric cars, trucks, and buses we discovered that CO2 continued to rise at the same rate. Such a discovery might lead to just a bit less arrogance and a bit more humility on our part. The reason why the scientific method is so important is because we humans tend to think we are right even when we are not and also tend to believe we are a lot smarter than we really are. It also must be flattering to believe we have already mastered the art of terraforming. Although there probably is a lot to learn about terraforming from our little CO2 injection experiment here. Assuming of course we really are the cause of (most of) the increase and we probably are.
Well nuclear fusion is also only 10 years away, right? How does fusion power compare in terms of cost per kwh? Is there any reason to believe it would be less expsnsive than electricity generated by fission?
It sounds to me like this wasn't "human trafficking". If they said they put her on a plane to say Thailand or Burma or maybe some poor Eastern European country that would be human trafficking. This was just prostitution. It appears that 'human trafficking' is a new phrase that is intended to make all forms of prostitution sound worse than they really are. The truth is that there are a lot prostitutes who want to be doing exactly and you can 'reunite them with their families' as many times as you want and the next day they will be having sex for money again. Why? Because it's an easy and high paying job in pretty much every country in the world.
Well apparently there already is a question that basically asks, "Are you a terrorist". I think that should be sufficient to weed out the retarded ones, but if they are that stupid then it is unlikely they would be much of a threat anyway. I have noticed that stupid people tend to assume that everyone else is just as stupid as they are. This policy probably came from a mentally handicapped individual who thinks terrorists really are as dumb as they would be if they were terrorists.
One day I'd almost be tempted to answer yes myself to the question about being a terrorist, but answering yes to that question is itself probably a crime in the US.
Not everyone even has a 'social media' presence. So no it is not lying to claim that you don't have accounts at any of those retardo web sites and it's pretty stupid as well to assume terrorists are dumb enough to post on any accounts they may have about their secret activities.
As far as anti-US web sites how the hell could the US government possibly identify who posted that info? Even if the person has their own account at an ISP and even if the ISP were willing to just give out customer information to any government that might want it it is still a ridiculous amount of work for the government with basically no chance of any real benefit.
Finally just because someone dislikes the US for bombing children or whatever does not make them terrorists and no it doesn't make them someone worth watching either. Most people outside of the US don't particularly like US policies and no the majority of human beings on the planet are not terrorists.
I suspect they would be keeping their eyes on most slashdotters because how many of us would be stupid enough to supply our real usernames to online sites to the US government for any reason? Any tech savvy person with an IQ above 60 would leave it blank if optional or lie if made non-optional. This is more of a retardation detector than anything.
Yep. They should ban killer humans and even killer animals (like some of the big cats and sharks) before banning something that isn't even a problem yet.
Now that is what I call evidence. They are pretty sure so it must be true. Glad we have that all cleared up. I don't have a horse in this race, but these arguments are ridiculous. If the government wants to release actual evidence they can, but until or unless they do there is no evidence. Just because the government claims something doesn't make it true. And they don't have to be lying. They could just be mistaken.
This seems obvious to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned here. Most science fiction authors cannot create elegant and beautiful prose. So no they don't deserve awards for writing elegant and beautiful prose.
Iain Banks and Neal Stephenson are really the only examples I can think of. Nearly everyone else just writes simple and mostly uninteresting prose and a lot of popular science fiction authors are worse than that. Most have trouble composing sentences that don't strike one as clumsy constructions. Some have interesting plots and interesting characters but it just doesn't have the poetic beauty of truly great writing.
I think it also needs to be mentioned that not everyone can actually recognize beautiful writing for what it is. They can't see it. I'm not sure why. To those people there just isn't any difference. I guess it's sort of like being a non-native speaker. Others just don't care if the writing is beautiful or not.
Science fiction is my favorite sort of fiction, but I recognize that almost none of it, deserves a literary award.
Slashdot Mirror
Finding that many Earth-sized rocky bodies orbiting a star just 39 lightyears away, with the possibility that some of them may be able to have liquid water on their surface doesn't excite you?
It seems that nearby rocky exoplanets are all over the place so no this doesn't get me all that excited except as more evidence that many or even most stars have them. Gliese 581 is half the distance and even our companion system Proxima Centauri probably has one or more of them.
This does not mean that it isn't worth sending them an RF or laser message though to see if we get a reply in 80 years because well you never know. Although there are certainly more compelling targets in a 40 ly radius.
http://www.space.com/33840-alien-world-proxima-b-around-nearest-star-could-be-earth-like-video.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581
Need I continue? Is it too much work for you to take an extra 1-3 seconds to google before you make an ignorant statement like that? Actually it seems that most and perhaps even all stars have planets including rocky ones. What this really shows is the variability possible and that rocky planets are probably ubiquitous and can just be assumed to exist in most cases.
One of the most important changes I've seen in my lifetime has been this shift from pessimistically assuming that there were relatively few rocky planets in the galaxy and that many if not most stars lacked them to what we are actually seeing now: that they are in fact almost everywhere we look carefully enough to the point that it might be more useful to search for stars that don't have any rocky planets. There are plenty of systems where we haven't detected any but the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Small rocky planets are very difficult to detect.
When I first saw the 40 ly figure I thought of Zeta Reticulum which Betty Hill and Marjorie Fish made famous in the 60s. Zeta Reticulum may be one of those few systems that don't have any planets at all: not even gas giants.
Another star with some mythology behind it, Sirius (made famous by the Dogons) appears to lack planets, although again it's difficult for us to be sure of that. We have looked though.
Our most efficient drive system to date (in terms of how much acceleration you get for the amount of propellant used) are plasma/ion engines.
Has anyone actually proposed using those for even short interstellar missions? Since no one has actually even tried to build a craft for an interstellar mission no one has done the full engineering required but nuclear pulse (Orion) or fission fragment / dusty plasma fission engines could likely make Alpha Centauri in less than a century reaching speeds of .05 - .08c.
The ships could not be launched from earth and so would have to be constructed either from orbit, at a Lagrange point station, or on a moon base with nuclear power plants and mostly automated robotic mining/smelting/casting/milling capabilities. Just building the infrastructure to build such a rocket would probably take a century or two, but it's probably doable to build something like that with current tech. Just some (a lot of) engineering problems to work out. No fundamental advances necessary. Just a lot of money. I think Orion has been more fully engineered (by Freeman Dyson) than fission fragment. So might be more doable. Needless to say it would be expensive, but I'm guessing you'd be for it even if you had to sacrifice say an extra 10-15% of your income am I right? I'm sure we can all agree on 'anything to reach the stars'.
Are there any other countries where this sort of thing goes on?
Paris-CDG for flights to the US. I was treated worse there than I have ever been in the US and I've been treated very badly in the US (randomly chosen almost every time I fly for search/interrogations and multi-hour interrogations etc).
TSA does not generally fondle your cock-n-ball package. I mean aside from a few pervs they don't usually get in there with their fingers and fully explore the frank-n-beans and it has never happened to me there. They just get very close by slightly touching your balls with the back of their hands while they touch 'where the leg meets the torso' as they put it and this only happens if something goes wrong with the scanners etc. It isn't routine. However the TSA did not seem to tell the French security people about this subtle distinction and presumably the instructions are sufficiently vague that those guys seem to think that a full on prison search is what the US wants. Happened to me. Never had a dude actually grab or squeeze my dick before and I wasn't happy about it. I freaked and pushed the guy down and almost missed my flight. They refused to let me on the plane at first because I didn't want some guy fondling my package and no I am not exaggerating. He was really doing that. As if he was slowly and carefully searching for something that might be hidden under my dick or balls. I tried to explain to them that in the US they don't do that unless checking you into prison or something, but of course they didn't particularly care what I had to say.
I honestly don't know if that guy was gay. While he and I were arguing about his sexual assault on me he claimed not to be, but he would probably say the same even if he were. I don't see how a straight guy could do that job though, but whatever. Whether he actually wanted to do what he did, whether he enjoyed it, was not the point. I felt almost physically sick. I think it gave me a slight taste of what it must be like to get raped. I did not expect to be having some novel homosexual experience with some French airport security guy and I really felt violated and disgusted for days or even weeks afterward.
I actually begged them to let the very pretty French airport security chick standing right there finish the search That would have been fine. Hell I would have payed something for that. She smiled when I asked, but of course they refused. Why I don't understand. I mean they claim it isn't sexual so what difference does it make if the pretty female 'searches' me? Hell it's not like I would have asked her to touch my dick. I just wanted to get on the plane.
Luckily this was France where people do tend to be better/nicer than in the US and another one of the security guys took pity on me (and maybe risked his job) by searching me without touching my genitals at all. What was weird was that he could not promise me in advance that he wouldn't grab my dick. He made me understand that he understood what I wanted and that I shouldn't worry, but he apparently was not allowed to actually promise me in advance that he wouldn't sex me up. I decided to trust him and indeed he didn't get anywhere near. My experience makes me wonder why they don't insert gloved fingers into females to make sure they aren't hiding anything up there. Seems unfair. If they are going to fully explore every millimeter of male genitals they should be doing the same to the females. Of course they really shouldn't be doing any of this. The vast majority of countries in the world don't and I'm pretty sure France only does this ritual (male only) sexual molestation for flights to the US.
to anyone who doesn't know C-isms
Non-programmers you mean? Seriously what kind of programmer doesn't expect a single '=' to be an assignment operator? C/C++ isn't the only language where that is the case. I have never made the error you mention even once in my entire life. In c/c++ == is the comparison operator and = is the assignment operator. I don't see how that is unclear.
I use Chrome too of course, but every time I do I think about how unpleasant the world will become if Google manages to exterminate all its rivals, both proprietary and open.
I like that Ãf course'. No need to exterminate them if you can get their product to be a clone of your own. Then there is no real reason for anyone to use their product over yours. With Mozilla killing customization or at least customization that is better than what Chrome already has, they have in every way become indistinguishable from Google's browser. Choosing one over the other becomes a hair splitting exercise.
Actually for a while Chrome will probably have better customization just because they have a huge head start in their extension ecosystem. Whether Firefox will eventually catch up is questionable but it may not. So one reason to use Chrome over Firefox may be that it is more customizable and that may never change.
The Future of Pale Moon
Thought this would be a relevant link to the only (customizable) alternative to FrozenFox 52.
Yes, i too would like to keep all the add-ons, but between a fast browser with fewer add-ons and a slow one with many outdated add-ons, i prefer the first one.
Doesn't a fast browser with fewer addons basically describe Google Chrome? Why don't you just switch to that if speed trumps customization for you? Do you really think the mozdevs can compete with the massive GoogleCorp at what they do best? You think they are going to outGoogle Google?
You can not complain about firefox being slow and also complain about keeping old add-ons.
I haven't seen a lot of people complaining about speed for any browser. I don't think speed is much of an issue for browsers. They have been fast enough for a very long time. Trying to make them faster is fixing a nonproblem. Finding a browser that will do what you want it to do if you want more than what Chrome can do otoh...that's about to be nontrivial.
I think its possible that killing the extension ecosystem may have a positive effect on the memory leak problem because at the very least the mozdevs will not be able to blame the extension devs for the leaks anymore. AFAIK the mozdevs don't recognize that there is a memory leak problem. I think they think they fixed it sometime in 3.x or earlier.
Well for me Firefox has never been about performance. It was about customization (and because IE has always sucked). When Chrome came along it was certainly an improvement on IE but it still could not do many of the things that Firefox + XUL extensions could do. It just did not have the same feature set. For me Firefox is fast enough as it is and I don't think a browser needs to use more than a single core or even more than a single thread. Well unless its only point is to compete in benchmarks. The only performance problem that I see Firefox having is memory leaks. That has always been its Achilles heel. Especially since the devs always blame the extensions. Now that they are killing the extensions maybe they will finally be able to fix the leaks. But whatever. I can just restart the browser as often as possible.
I use the browser because with XUL extensions it does what I want it to do and with those extensions it can do things that no other browser can. Whatever Mozilla does in the future it will have to be able to compete with FrozenFox/XULFox (nonupgraded Firefox) and Pale Moon or whatever the Pale Moon project becomes. In terms of competing with a XUL extension boosted feature set I don't think they have much of a chance and they definitely don't care. Their only goal seems to be being the best Chrome clone they can be and at that they are certainly going to be successful I think: to the point that they may eventually find it easier just to switch entirely to the Chrome codebase and put a slightly modified FireChrome UI on top of it.
There may be people who are disappointed with Firefox and want to switch to say Chrome because it is faster or more efficient at benchmarking or whatever but I am not one of those people. Nor do I care whether or not the browser functions as its own standalone operating system which I regard as a silly idea. I don't have a problem with tabs 'taking over' my browser, but maybe that's because I use noscript so that javascript cannot bend me over and have its way with me so easily. Perhaps the biggest problem with killing the more powerful (and they are) XUL extension standard is that Firefox will be no better than Chrome when it comes to extensions. So what is the point of using it then? Brand loyalty? Fuck that. After this Firefox will be Chrome. There will be no reason at all not to use Chrome at that point. The UIs are already almost identical. Now the extensions will be identical as well. So please tell me what is the point of Firefox even existing at that point?
Well I think the important thing is whether you can archive existing .xpi files from AMO now to use as part of the installation of FrozenFox until/unless a practical non Chrome clone exists or for the next decade or so whichever comes first. Presumably signatures won't be a problem if the .xpi files were originally sourced from AMO.
Ultimately, this will affect almost no one. Planning for this change has been happening for a long time now. Your favorite add-ons will continue to work.
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
Those are the facts. That is right from the horse's mouth. Not all extensions are going to be ported. Period. Maybe a few of the most popular, but it's basically going to be like porting your extension to Chrome. FF basically will be Chrome as far as extensions are concerned.
It doesn't support the most recent versions of the best extensions,but if you go back to older versions you will probably find one that works. If you are referring to newer post-FF24 only extensions then yes that would be a problem, but... the palemoon team is probably going to end up doing exactly what you would like to see.
The idea would be to rebase their core codebase on a more recent version and just factor out Australis. Apparently the Australis UI is not so tightly integrated as to make this not doable. From what I can see Pale Moon or whatever they end up calling the newer refork is going to be the *only* alternative to The Google Browser and its clones. Well aside from just disabling autoupdate on FF52 and living with that which is what I plan to do for the time being. That will probably work for the next 2-3 years. If I have time maybe I can help with the Pale Moon project now that FF has finally pounded a stake through its own heart. Customization is Firefox and once Mozilla kills that it really is dead and there is no reason to use it.
On April 18th. That's huge. Although to be fair you'd have to be the king of bad timing to be releasing a new firefox addon right before Mozilla is pounding a stake through the heart of them. I wonder how long Mozilla will even keep addons available. I'm guessing not very long after they have been deprecated in the current version. Mozilla clearly wants to do whatever it can to get and keep users on their newest and shiniest version and killing extensions on past versions will be a scorched earth way to do that.
Those of us who like Firefox should be archiving all of our favorite extensions soon. I want to archive versions that work with Pale Moon as well although that is much more difficult because I think they will all claim to be incompatible and have to actually be tested to see if they work. I am also going to do a major search for more extensions that I don't know about. So that I can archive those as well. Soon they will all be gone, and as with past Complete Themes, probably forever.
If I am being optimistic I could hope that this move to make Firefox much less customizable and feature poor (in the name of speed, stability, and simplicity for the developers) will push some extension developers to develop specifically for Pale Moon. Maybe someone will fork the last XUL compatible version of Firefox as well. I'm not completely clear on which version that will be. Maybe 52 since 53 starts disabling extensions that don't set the multiprocess flag, basically a start of the War on XUL.
The problem with Pale Moon is extension compatibility. It's the extensions that make Firefox worth using. As with Firefox it seems like extension archiving of most recent working versions is a necessity, but I don't know which versions of each extension I use will be compatible with Pale Moon and it's a bit of a research project to figure that out.
Nevertheless I guess I am going to have to do exactly that for Firefox itself soon while the mozilla addons site still works. Pretty soon Firefox itself will be a kind of Pale Moon: a browser frozen in time. Any extensions will have to be frozen along with it.
The so called science you are referring to was in a sense settled in late 19th century when the first greenhouses were built. It is very likely that an increase in CO2 will cause a rise in planetary temperatures (global warming) and we know that atmospheric CO2 is increasing from one year to the next, but what we don't know is how quickly CO2 will rise in the future (whether the current rate will or will not increase) and how much planetary warming per ppm rise this will create. We also don't know what changes each degree c of increased temperature will cause. So far it seems the 1 degree c increase in the 20th century has not caused Armageddon. Will another degree rise in the 21st century cause it though? We just don't know. Our record as a species in predicting the future has so far not been promising.
Due to the fact that fossil fuels are going to run out and probably relatively soon these details matter a lot and we just don't know them. So far, in the past 100 years, the 100ppm change has clearly not been catastrophic. Also we cannot be 100% sure that the 100ppm rise in CO2 in the past century was caused by human activity. It would be funny if after humanity converted to 99% nuclear electricity generation and only battery powered and direct connect electric cars, trucks, and buses we discovered that CO2 continued to rise at the same rate. Such a discovery might lead to just a bit less arrogance and a bit more humility on our part. The reason why the scientific method is so important is because we humans tend to think we are right even when we are not and also tend to believe we are a lot smarter than we really are. It also must be flattering to believe we have already mastered the art of terraforming. Although there probably is a lot to learn about terraforming from our little CO2 injection experiment here. Assuming of course we really are the cause of (most of) the increase and we probably are.
Well nuclear fusion is also only 10 years away, right? How does fusion power compare in terms of cost per kwh? Is there any reason to believe it would be less expsnsive than electricity generated by fission?
It sounds to me like this wasn't "human trafficking". If they said they put her on a plane to say Thailand or Burma or maybe some poor Eastern European country that would be human trafficking. This was just prostitution. It appears that 'human trafficking' is a new phrase that is intended to make all forms of prostitution sound worse than they really are. The truth is that there are a lot prostitutes who want to be doing exactly and you can 'reunite them with their families' as many times as you want and the next day they will be having sex for money again. Why? Because it's an easy and high paying job in pretty much every country in the world.
Well apparently there already is a question that basically asks, "Are you a terrorist". I think that should be sufficient to weed out the retarded ones, but if they are that stupid then it is unlikely they would be much of a threat anyway. I have noticed that stupid people tend to assume that everyone else is just as stupid as they are. This policy probably came from a mentally handicapped individual who thinks terrorists really are as dumb as they would be if they were terrorists.
One day I'd almost be tempted to answer yes myself to the question about being a terrorist, but answering yes to that question is itself probably a crime in the US.
Not everyone even has a 'social media' presence. So no it is not lying to claim that you don't have accounts at any of those retardo web sites and it's pretty stupid as well to assume terrorists are dumb enough to post on any accounts they may have about their secret activities.
As far as anti-US web sites how the hell could the US government possibly identify who posted that info? Even if the person has their own account at an ISP and even if the ISP were willing to just give out customer information to any government that might want it it is still a ridiculous amount of work for the government with basically no chance of any real benefit.
Finally just because someone dislikes the US for bombing children or whatever does not make them terrorists and no it doesn't make them someone worth watching either. Most people outside of the US don't particularly like US policies and no the majority of human beings on the planet are not terrorists.
I suspect they would be keeping their eyes on most slashdotters because how many of us would be stupid enough to supply our real usernames to online sites to the US government for any reason? Any tech savvy person with an IQ above 60 would leave it blank if optional or lie if made non-optional. This is more of a retardation detector than anything.
Yep. They should ban killer humans and even killer animals (like some of the big cats and sharks) before banning something that isn't even a problem yet.
Upgrade to Windows 7 if you want more power over your computer.
we certainly believe
Now that is what I call evidence. They are pretty sure so it must be true. Glad we have that all cleared up. I don't have a horse in this race, but these arguments are ridiculous. If the government wants to release actual evidence they can, but until or unless they do there is no evidence. Just because the government claims something doesn't make it true. And they don't have to be lying. They could just be mistaken.
This seems obvious to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned here. Most science fiction authors cannot create elegant and beautiful prose. So no they don't deserve awards for writing elegant and beautiful prose.
Iain Banks and Neal Stephenson are really the only examples I can think of. Nearly everyone else just writes simple and mostly uninteresting prose and a lot of popular science fiction authors are worse than that. Most have trouble composing sentences that don't strike one as clumsy constructions. Some have interesting plots and interesting characters but it just doesn't have the poetic beauty of truly great writing.
I think it also needs to be mentioned that not everyone can actually recognize beautiful writing for what it is. They can't see it. I'm not sure why. To those people there just isn't any difference. I guess it's sort of like being a non-native speaker. Others just don't care if the writing is beautiful or not.
Science fiction is my favorite sort of fiction, but I recognize that almost none of it, deserves a literary award.