I've dropped my iPhone 4 a couple of times without problems, it's not anywhere near as fragile as people make it out to be. They hear glass and think it's the normal sodium glass they use for plate glass windows or cups. This is gorilla glass, much more scratch- and impact-resistant than sodium glass and it's even stronger than most polycarbonate plastics from which other phones are constructed.
That being said, things break. I've seen tons of people with slider phones that don't slide right anymore, or have a keyboard with a stuck or missing key, or have a plastic face all scratched to hell and back. These are devices that get used in harsh environments and which are dropped, banged-up, slid across tables, soaked, spit on while talking, grimed over with dirty hands. At least the iPhone has very few moving parts to get gummed up, extra resistant to scratches, and they are easy to clean. Are they still going to break? Of course!
If you want to be extra careful then throw on a bumper case and you take care of most of the issues since it makes it that much harder for the glass to touch anything and it makes for a softer landing if it does get dropped.
Correction: the OS has supported contextual menus since Mac OS 8.0 (1997), but right-clicking was not supported natively until Mac OS X (2001, but nobody used 10.0 because it was terrible). Prior to that, right-clicking was only supported through the use of third-party drivers (example) that simulated a control-click.
Mmmm, I'm pretty sure I was using a two-button mouse with the standard Mac drivers in MacOS 8.0. It's too far back to remember exactly when it was put in a while but native support of right-clicking has been in there quite a while, almost definitely before Mac OS X came out.
I guess you haven't spent much time at a CLI, have you? To those of us who were using computers before the broad acceptance of the GUI, hitting enter is how you make things happen.
Ad hominem much? I spent many years working in command line environments before GUI became widely-available. I still stand by my explanation of why Apple made their decision for the return/rename action, They also were pretty much the first ones to do it, the return/open action used in Windows et al. came later.
Read some more of my responses and if you have anything positive to add to the discussion, please do! If you just want to be cranky and combative then >/dev/null
My father-in-law said that it's possible to walk a deer down: we humans have one the highest endurance in the animal kingdom.
You sure can, if you can find it after it sprints/hops through the brush into places nearly impossible for a person to follow until it's far away from you and then blends right back in to the underbrush. Rinse and repeat that for most of the day until the deer finally can't run any more and you can walk up to it and snap the neck defended with rock-hard hooves, powerful legs, and nasty teeth and antlers.
Is it just me or does it seem as if "fucktards" are the only people buying guns in the US?
No, they are the ones getting all the headlines but the reality is that the typical gun owner tends to be a very responsible, level-headed, person. It's like how most people can enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine without causing any commotion but alcohol still has a bad reputation because some idiot overdoes it and then drives and kills a bunch of people.
I've been around guns my entire life and have many friends who had the same kind of upbringing. At no point have I EVER seen a legal gun owner brandish his weapon or use it in some sort of unsafe or idiotic manner. In fact most hunters and gun owners that I know are extremely responsible, civically-minded, kind-hearted people - MUCH more so than the average public.
On the other hand illegal gun owners tend to be unsavory and uncaring about the damage they do with their weapons. They are the ones likely to shoot the gun in the air on New Year's Eve, shoot out signs and lights, brandish it at any provocation, keep it unsafely around minors, etc. Any illegal gun ownership or usage should be harshly punished.
The word "fucktards" comes to mind. This is what you get when you have some kind of right to own a gun combined with a bunch of low-IQ fuckwits.
Yeah because then people wouldn't use a bow and arrow to do the same thing...
Every activity, from computer engineering to hunting to anything else, has its idiots. All you can do is take sane steps to protect yourself from the idiots while still allowing the responsible people to enjoy their activities. Personally, as a gun owner, I'd LOVE to see these morons caught and harshly punished. It gives the average, responsible gun owner an undeserved bad reputation.
The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
At the time of the Macintosh introduction the typewriter was hardly dead and forgotten, in fact it was still the primary document creation tool for the majority of people and one on which they had been trained their entire lives. Keyboard entry on computers was still a newfangled thing that few people had experience with. For these people the return key meant "end/begin a line to type on", not "execute a sequence of commands". Remember that the intention of the Macintosh and its GUI was to introduce these people to computing through metaphors with common, familiar objects such as files, folders, desktops, and even typewriters! Most of the actions of the GUI were designed with this in mind and, for better or worse, the edit toggling was one of these design choices.
The logical jump is that return ends the editing. Once you make that jump there's a second logical jump that since return ends the editing maybe it should toggle the editing and thus put both starting the edit and ending the edit on one key rather than two. In Windows I believe it's the F2 key to edit the name and the enter key to end the editing, in Mac OS the return key does both. That's one less shortcut to have to remember, plus it frees up one of the limited number of F-keys for some other shortcut.
In a command-line environment it makes sense that you should be able to execute a statement with a single key press. You took the time to set up the statement and it's part of a larger sequence so (hopefully) you've put some thought into hitting return. Plus, for the most part, you'll remain in the same window after the execution and not suffer a contextual switch.
In a graphical environment you generally don't want a single keypress to execute (open) a file since it's probably going to switch your context and you may have many items selected, causing a large number of context switches and clutter. Under a GUI the execute action should be a more complicated action, like a keyboard chord, so that it is most likely a purposeful action, not an accidental one.
There's also the difference in user expertise, someone using the command-line is most likely a more advanced user than the average GUI user. Immediate execution with a single keypress makes more sense on the command-line than in the GUI because it's a more advanced way of using the computer and an expert should know exactly what effect that keypress will have before they perform it. A GUI user should have more safety nets than a command-line user and keyboard chords protect the GUI user from accidentally executing something.
In the end it's not a major distinction, both schools of thought have their reasons and merits. Your choice of OS dictates which one you're going to have to get used to.
The one thing that can't be done with keyboard and that drives me insane is switching to the non-default option in Yes/No boxes. Neither arrow keys, nor Tab works.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts, at the bottom you'll see Full Keyboard Access, select All Controls
You can also hit control-F7 to toggle it without going into System Preferences.
Now tab to the button you want to activate (click) and hit the space bar to activate the button. You can also shift-tab to move backwards in the tab order, which helps because usually the rightmost button is the default active one.
Some other shortcuts:
command-period or the esc key usually activates the "Cancel" button
command-d is the "Don't Save" button in file dialogs
many times if you hold down the command key then after a second each button will be labeled with its keyboard combination.
No, the worst part of Finder is not being able to navigate it with just the keyboard. Why in the world is the "return" key mapped to "rename file/folder"?
Because it's not Windows. Ever since the original Macintosh (before Windows came along) the return key renamed a file. It was Windows that changed the meaning of the return key. To open a file under Mac OS you use command-o. That's "o" as in "open".
Why would anyone assume that return means open? If anything return would mean close, after all it ends a line when you are typing. You learned that return equals open because that's how Windows defined the action, not because it's an intrinsic meaning. Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
It makes more sense to have to use a key combo rather than a single key to perform an action which will likely bring you from the Finder to another program. That way it's harder to accidentally hit a key and have 50 windows open up because you had the contents of an entire folder selected. If you hit return with a bunch of selected items in the Mac Finder then nothing happens. It's a ton better than having to deal with the mess of open windows you'll get in Windows.
You're used to hitting return to open something because you are used to Windows, take some time with Mac OS and you'll find that opening a file with command-o is just as natural as using return. It's all what you are used to.
Also, you can completely operate the Finder using only the keyboard. In fact, you can operate nearly every aspect of a Mac using only the keyboard. Much of it can be done using keyboard shortcuts built-in to the Finder, however if you want to use some menus, controls, and such using only the keyboard you may have to use the "Universal Access" System Preference Panel to enable some additional keyboard and mouse navigation. If you want to see the keyboard navigation shortcuts then just go to the "Keyboard" System Preference Panel, there's tons of useful shortcuts in there.
"For example, every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it." - TFS What?
It's called caching. When an iPhone application switches to another application it can quickly store an image of the app's current state. When the user switches back it displays that image while the real view is being built. That way the user gets an immediate view of the last state of the app rather than having to wait around for that state to be re-built.
Your desktop computer's web browser (and many other programs and devices) does the same thing, it stores data for quick access and responsiveness. You'd be surprised at just how many devices use this technique, the iPhone is far from the only device to cache data.
It's a smart technique but yeah, if you're committing crimes then too bad for you. I'd suggest that maybe you shouldn't be using ANY electronic device during a crime that you don't completely understand what data it sends and stores and how to deal with it before it becomes evidence.
Small gold coins are much more waterproof. Being able to find with a metal detector, is a double edged sword.
You could always go with precious gems, they are both non-metallic and waterproof.
However, PVC would work just fine for paper money. You seal the end caps with PVC glue and include some desiccant material in the pipe to dry up any traces of moisture. Cloth packets filled with activated carbon which have been dried at low temperatures in the oven works very well at adsorbing moisture, volatile organics, it'll even suck up some of the oxygen in the tube.
Then after realizing it was all coming from Taiwan and China I thought "Invented in America, Made in China" but I still imagined this premium I was paying lead to good American ethics and proper treatment of employees to consumers. The deaths of nine or more plastics workers in Apple's iPhone supplier followed by a million in kickbacks being stored in shoe boxes by a corrupt Apple Manager and suddenly I realize that buying Apple just means you're paying a premium on something that might provide you a better experience but really employs all the same corruption inherent in almost any very large business.
Did you know that the rate of those suicides was significantly less than the rate for China overall? So working for Apple actually DECREASES the suicide rate, who'd have thought!
Here's an article on the subject. In it we learn that Foxconn employs over 1/2 million people and have had 12 suicides in the past year. Lets extrapolate that to 24 in a calendar year, the article wasn't specific on what they meant by this year, that's a rate of less than 1 for every 2,000 workers. The national average for China is 12 for every 1,000 people - approximately 25 times higher for all of China when compared to Foxconn.
Maybe Apple's investments in Foxconn have lead to "good American ethics and proper treatment of employees" after all...
Bacteria do not just mutate into unrecognizable species over night. It took E. coli more than 20 years to accumulate just 100 point mutations, in a genome megabases long, and that is in an exceptionally favorable laboratory environment.
Of course that's in an environment with very little population pressure or external evolving factors such as a harsh environment involving wide swings in temperature, pressure, radiation, food, moisture levels, and so on. The journey to Mars and the subsequent Mars environment would certainly be a much more mutating environment than a carefully-controlled experiment whose purpose is to avoid nearly any factor which might change the inherent rate of mutation.
Now, I'm not saying that you would definitely end up with organisms indistinguishable from ones which had evolved for thousands of years, just that you might end up with some odd enough to raise debate about the source and age of the species.
It's pretty unlikely that any Martian microbes will be strains at all similar to ones found on Earth - billions of years of evolution will have resulted in wildly different genomes and selected behaviours.
Then if we find microbes on Mars the question will be are they ones native to Mars or just recent ones from Earth that have undergone rapid mutation and evolution in the face of radiation and other radical environmental factors during the journey and the stay on Mars? Yes, there are some ways of classifying such mutated bacteria but it will still muddy the waters a bit.
In the end the question becomes kind of moot anyways. Either way, if life can survive on Mars it will be an exciting discovery.
make it illegal for Apple & Microsoft and any other company to shutdown or "brick" a cellphone or game console any other product...
It already IS illegal to shutdown a product that you don't own. That is, unless the person has GIVEN you the right to shutdown the device. If you don't want someone else to have the ability to legally shut down your device then DON'T GIVE THEM THE RIGHT!
If they won't sell you the device without giving away that right then simply don't buy the device.
Additionally, they still support throwing it in the trash as well, although it's hardly the only way to eject a drive.
Even then what happens is the trash icon turns into an eject icon and when you mouse over the icon it has the word "Eject" instead of "Trash". It's mostly there for historical reasons anyways, most people are used to right-clicking on a disk to eject it now and that works just fine under Mac OS X (as well as many of the earlier versions of Mac OS).
So, if we're going to piss and moan about where that $1500 rebate came from for the hybrid, I guess we should delve into the billions of goverment subsidies on the oil and gas industry too.
I didn't take the price difference as between the base Civic and the HCH because the HCH was much closer to the EX version in terms of features. I got a $1500 tax rebate, did not have to pay excise tax, and until I switched to Michelin tires, was getting 50-54 mpg.
So the question becomes: did you save money even without the $1500 tax rebate?
That tax rebate basically means that the rest of us are paying for part of your car. You have to include that in the total costs of the car because even though you don't personally pay it, it's still part of the owning and operating costs of the car. If the hybrid without the rebate costs more than an equivalent non-hybrid then it really isn't saving anything.
Unfortunately all these government programs do is hide the actual costs of an item or service. The same thing happens with solar panels, they look great to an individual but overall they cost society more than they produce because they are heavily government-subsidized. If a technology is truly worth owning then it should stand alone without any government programs that hide the true costs.
The trouble is that a lot of our punctuation has multiple meanings. For example, the full stop or period is used to indicate the end of a sentence but it's also used in abbreviations, math, computer programming, and so on.If we ONLY used the full stop for the end of a sentence then we could forget about ever having to use spaces after a full stop. You would write the sentence, end it with a full stop, and let the typesetter (your computer, for example) handle the spacing.
Since the full stop is used in places where you don't intend to have a full stop your typesetter has to guess your intent. This means it's often more reliable to skip the typesetter and do the spacing yourself, resulting in the current confusion.
Honestly, I don't understand why sentences are ended with a tiny point anyways. Shouldn't there be some better indication as to the end of a thought? That's why we need all the extra spaces in the first place, because the period is too weak to indicate the end of a sentence by itself. Maybe we should just replace the period with a better glyph!
The more likely model of what will happen is not that the internet companies will favor conservatives over liberals, but rather that they will favor companies by size. The cable companies will say that companies need to pay their fair share for bandwidth, and so they'll announce that any internet hosting that doesn't pay a certain amount of usage fees to the ISP will be throttled.
So what you're saying is that you have to pay more for more service? Say it ain't so!
If I pay $10 a month for my connection and someone else pays $100 then it's a no-brainer that the person paying more should get more service. Now, there's probably a ton more $10 users than $100 users and as long as there's competition among providers then there will be providers who will cater to the $10 users in order to attract them to their service. This is the free market and it does work.
What the government needs to do is just assure that the rules are fair, guarding against bait-and-switch tactics and providers not providing the service that they promised.
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I've dropped my iPhone 4 a couple of times without problems, it's not anywhere near as fragile as people make it out to be. They hear glass and think it's the normal sodium glass they use for plate glass windows or cups. This is gorilla glass, much more scratch- and impact-resistant than sodium glass and it's even stronger than most polycarbonate plastics from which other phones are constructed.
That being said, things break. I've seen tons of people with slider phones that don't slide right anymore, or have a keyboard with a stuck or missing key, or have a plastic face all scratched to hell and back. These are devices that get used in harsh environments and which are dropped, banged-up, slid across tables, soaked, spit on while talking, grimed over with dirty hands. At least the iPhone has very few moving parts to get gummed up, extra resistant to scratches, and they are easy to clean. Are they still going to break? Of course!
If you want to be extra careful then throw on a bumper case and you take care of most of the issues since it makes it that much harder for the glass to touch anything and it makes for a softer landing if it does get dropped.
The thing that's odd to me is, why start an arena season when nobody is geared to take part in it yet??
You get gear during the season. People have been gearing up for season nine during the whole of season eight. PVE doesn't really factor into it.
Correction: the OS has supported contextual menus since Mac OS 8.0 (1997), but right-clicking was not supported natively until Mac OS X (2001, but nobody used 10.0 because it was terrible). Prior to that, right-clicking was only supported through the use of third-party drivers (example) that simulated a control-click.
Mmmm, I'm pretty sure I was using a two-button mouse with the standard Mac drivers in MacOS 8.0. It's too far back to remember exactly when it was put in a while but native support of right-clicking has been in there quite a while, almost definitely before Mac OS X came out.
I guess you haven't spent much time at a CLI, have you? To those of us who were using computers before the broad acceptance of the GUI, hitting enter is how you make things happen.
Ad hominem much? I spent many years working in command line environments before GUI became widely-available. I still stand by my explanation of why Apple made their decision for the return/rename action, They also were pretty much the first ones to do it, the return/open action used in Windows et al. came later.
Read some more of my responses and if you have anything positive to add to the discussion, please do! If you just want to be cranky and combative then > /dev/null
My father-in-law said that it's possible to walk a deer down: we humans have one the highest endurance in the animal kingdom.
You sure can, if you can find it after it sprints/hops through the brush into places nearly impossible for a person to follow until it's far away from you and then blends right back in to the underbrush. Rinse and repeat that for most of the day until the deer finally can't run any more and you can walk up to it and snap the neck defended with rock-hard hooves, powerful legs, and nasty teeth and antlers.
Good luck!
Is it just me or does it seem as if "fucktards" are the only people buying guns in the US?
No, they are the ones getting all the headlines but the reality is that the typical gun owner tends to be a very responsible, level-headed, person. It's like how most people can enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine without causing any commotion but alcohol still has a bad reputation because some idiot overdoes it and then drives and kills a bunch of people.
I've been around guns my entire life and have many friends who had the same kind of upbringing. At no point have I EVER seen a legal gun owner brandish his weapon or use it in some sort of unsafe or idiotic manner. In fact most hunters and gun owners that I know are extremely responsible, civically-minded, kind-hearted people - MUCH more so than the average public.
On the other hand illegal gun owners tend to be unsavory and uncaring about the damage they do with their weapons. They are the ones likely to shoot the gun in the air on New Year's Eve, shoot out signs and lights, brandish it at any provocation, keep it unsafely around minors, etc. Any illegal gun ownership or usage should be harshly punished.
The word "fucktards" comes to mind. This is what you get when you have some kind of right to own a gun combined with a bunch of low-IQ fuckwits.
Yeah because then people wouldn't use a bow and arrow to do the same thing...
Every activity, from computer engineering to hunting to anything else, has its idiots. All you can do is take sane steps to protect yourself from the idiots while still allowing the responsible people to enjoy their activities. Personally, as a gun owner, I'd LOVE to see these morons caught and harshly punished. It gives the average, responsible gun owner an undeserved bad reputation.
The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
At the time of the Macintosh introduction the typewriter was hardly dead and forgotten, in fact it was still the primary document creation tool for the majority of people and one on which they had been trained their entire lives. Keyboard entry on computers was still a newfangled thing that few people had experience with. For these people the return key meant "end/begin a line to type on", not "execute a sequence of commands". Remember that the intention of the Macintosh and its GUI was to introduce these people to computing through metaphors with common, familiar objects such as files, folders, desktops, and even typewriters! Most of the actions of the GUI were designed with this in mind and, for better or worse, the edit toggling was one of these design choices.
The logical jump is that return ends the editing. Once you make that jump there's a second logical jump that since return ends the editing maybe it should toggle the editing and thus put both starting the edit and ending the edit on one key rather than two. In Windows I believe it's the F2 key to edit the name and the enter key to end the editing, in Mac OS the return key does both. That's one less shortcut to have to remember, plus it frees up one of the limited number of F-keys for some other shortcut.
In a command-line environment it makes sense that you should be able to execute a statement with a single key press. You took the time to set up the statement and it's part of a larger sequence so (hopefully) you've put some thought into hitting return. Plus, for the most part, you'll remain in the same window after the execution and not suffer a contextual switch.
In a graphical environment you generally don't want a single keypress to execute (open) a file since it's probably going to switch your context and you may have many items selected, causing a large number of context switches and clutter. Under a GUI the execute action should be a more complicated action, like a keyboard chord, so that it is most likely a purposeful action, not an accidental one.
There's also the difference in user expertise, someone using the command-line is most likely a more advanced user than the average GUI user. Immediate execution with a single keypress makes more sense on the command-line than in the GUI because it's a more advanced way of using the computer and an expert should know exactly what effect that keypress will have before they perform it. A GUI user should have more safety nets than a command-line user and keyboard chords protect the GUI user from accidentally executing something.
In the end it's not a major distinction, both schools of thought have their reasons and merits. Your choice of OS dictates which one you're going to have to get used to.
The one thing that can't be done with keyboard and that drives me insane is switching to the non-default option in Yes/No boxes. Neither arrow keys, nor Tab works.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts, at the bottom you'll see Full Keyboard Access, select All Controls
You can also hit control-F7 to toggle it without going into System Preferences.
Now tab to the button you want to activate (click) and hit the space bar to activate the button. You can also shift-tab to move backwards in the tab order, which helps because usually the rightmost button is the default active one.
Some other shortcuts:There is a nice summary of various Mac keyboard shortcuts here:
Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts
No, the worst part of Finder is not being able to navigate it with just the keyboard. Why in the world is the "return" key mapped to "rename file/folder"?
Because it's not Windows. Ever since the original Macintosh (before Windows came along) the return key renamed a file. It was Windows that changed the meaning of the return key. To open a file under Mac OS you use command-o. That's "o" as in "open".
Why would anyone assume that return means open? If anything return would mean close, after all it ends a line when you are typing. You learned that return equals open because that's how Windows defined the action, not because it's an intrinsic meaning. Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
It makes more sense to have to use a key combo rather than a single key to perform an action which will likely bring you from the Finder to another program. That way it's harder to accidentally hit a key and have 50 windows open up because you had the contents of an entire folder selected. If you hit return with a bunch of selected items in the Mac Finder then nothing happens. It's a ton better than having to deal with the mess of open windows you'll get in Windows.
You're used to hitting return to open something because you are used to Windows, take some time with Mac OS and you'll find that opening a file with command-o is just as natural as using return. It's all what you are used to.
Also, you can completely operate the Finder using only the keyboard. In fact, you can operate nearly every aspect of a Mac using only the keyboard. Much of it can be done using keyboard shortcuts built-in to the Finder, however if you want to use some menus, controls, and such using only the keyboard you may have to use the "Universal Access" System Preference Panel to enable some additional keyboard and mouse navigation. If you want to see the keyboard navigation shortcuts then just go to the "Keyboard" System Preference Panel, there's tons of useful shortcuts in there.
How about this line of thinking: "I hate those people, I'd like to destroy all their stuff. I'll go get an engineering degree to learn how to do it!"
"For example, every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it." - TFS What?
It's called caching. When an iPhone application switches to another application it can quickly store an image of the app's current state. When the user switches back it displays that image while the real view is being built. That way the user gets an immediate view of the last state of the app rather than having to wait around for that state to be re-built.
Your desktop computer's web browser (and many other programs and devices) does the same thing, it stores data for quick access and responsiveness. You'd be surprised at just how many devices use this technique, the iPhone is far from the only device to cache data.
It's a smart technique but yeah, if you're committing crimes then too bad for you. I'd suggest that maybe you shouldn't be using ANY electronic device during a crime that you don't completely understand what data it sends and stores and how to deal with it before it becomes evidence.
No way to archive Entourage data with Spotlight.
Actually, there is:
Using Spotlight to search Entourage.
Small gold coins are much more waterproof. Being able to find with a metal detector, is a double edged sword.
You could always go with precious gems, they are both non-metallic and waterproof.
However, PVC would work just fine for paper money. You seal the end caps with PVC glue and include some desiccant material in the pipe to dry up any traces of moisture. Cloth packets filled with activated carbon which have been dried at low temperatures in the oven works very well at adsorbing moisture, volatile organics, it'll even suck up some of the oxygen in the tube.
Then after realizing it was all coming from Taiwan and China I thought "Invented in America, Made in China" but I still imagined this premium I was paying lead to good American ethics and proper treatment of employees to consumers. The deaths of nine or more plastics workers in Apple's iPhone supplier followed by a million in kickbacks being stored in shoe boxes by a corrupt Apple Manager and suddenly I realize that buying Apple just means you're paying a premium on something that might provide you a better experience but really employs all the same corruption inherent in almost any very large business.
Did you know that the rate of those suicides was significantly less than the rate for China overall? So working for Apple actually DECREASES the suicide rate, who'd have thought!
Here's an article on the subject. In it we learn that Foxconn employs over 1/2 million people and have had 12 suicides in the past year. Lets extrapolate that to 24 in a calendar year, the article wasn't specific on what they meant by this year, that's a rate of less than 1 for every 2,000 workers. The national average for China is 12 for every 1,000 people - approximately 25 times higher for all of China when compared to Foxconn.
Maybe Apple's investments in Foxconn have lead to "good American ethics and proper treatment of employees" after all...
Bacteria do not just mutate into unrecognizable species over night. It took E. coli more than 20 years to accumulate just 100 point mutations, in a genome megabases long, and that is in an exceptionally favorable laboratory environment.
Of course that's in an environment with very little population pressure or external evolving factors such as a harsh environment involving wide swings in temperature, pressure, radiation, food, moisture levels, and so on. The journey to Mars and the subsequent Mars environment would certainly be a much more mutating environment than a carefully-controlled experiment whose purpose is to avoid nearly any factor which might change the inherent rate of mutation.
Now, I'm not saying that you would definitely end up with organisms indistinguishable from ones which had evolved for thousands of years, just that you might end up with some odd enough to raise debate about the source and age of the species.
It's pretty unlikely that any Martian microbes will be strains at all similar to ones found on Earth - billions of years of evolution will have resulted in wildly different genomes and selected behaviours.
Then if we find microbes on Mars the question will be are they ones native to Mars or just recent ones from Earth that have undergone rapid mutation and evolution in the face of radiation and other radical environmental factors during the journey and the stay on Mars? Yes, there are some ways of classifying such mutated bacteria but it will still muddy the waters a bit.
In the end the question becomes kind of moot anyways. Either way, if life can survive on Mars it will be an exciting discovery.
This is why we should be able to rate stories -1 Troll.
They should also have a karma system for submitters/authors so that stories can start out a little lower/higher based on that person's history!
make it illegal for Apple & Microsoft and any other company to shutdown or "brick" a cellphone or game console any other product...
It already IS illegal to shutdown a product that you don't own. That is, unless the person has GIVEN you the right to shutdown the device. If you don't want someone else to have the ability to legally shut down your device then DON'T GIVE THEM THE RIGHT!
If they won't sell you the device without giving away that right then simply don't buy the device.
It's actually pretty straightforward.
Additionally, they still support throwing it in the trash as well, although it's hardly the only way to eject a drive.
Even then what happens is the trash icon turns into an eject icon and when you mouse over the icon it has the word "Eject" instead of "Trash". It's mostly there for historical reasons anyways, most people are used to right-clicking on a disk to eject it now and that works just fine under Mac OS X (as well as many of the earlier versions of Mac OS).
So, if we're going to piss and moan about where that $1500 rebate came from for the hybrid, I guess we should delve into the billions of goverment subsidies on the oil and gas industry too.
Sounds good to me!
I didn't take the price difference as between the base Civic and the HCH because the HCH was much closer to the EX version in terms of features. I got a $1500 tax rebate, did not have to pay excise tax, and until I switched to Michelin tires, was getting 50-54 mpg.
So the question becomes: did you save money even without the $1500 tax rebate?
That tax rebate basically means that the rest of us are paying for part of your car. You have to include that in the total costs of the car because even though you don't personally pay it, it's still part of the owning and operating costs of the car. If the hybrid without the rebate costs more than an equivalent non-hybrid then it really isn't saving anything.
Unfortunately all these government programs do is hide the actual costs of an item or service. The same thing happens with solar panels, they look great to an individual but overall they cost society more than they produce because they are heavily government-subsidized. If a technology is truly worth owning then it should stand alone without any government programs that hide the true costs.
Also, if you put quick look in fullscreen mode you can't navigate through the pictures using arrow keys, or whatever.
Sure you can. It's just that the controls are hidden until you mouse over it. Just mouse over the middle, a bit above the bottom and they will appear.
Most of Apple programs, such as the DVD Player app, work exactly the same way.
The only one that matters: Is it still readable?
Of course, the real answer is: no extra spaces
The trouble is that a lot of our punctuation has multiple meanings. For example, the full stop or period is used to indicate the end of a sentence but it's also used in abbreviations, math, computer programming, and so on.If we ONLY used the full stop for the end of a sentence then we could forget about ever having to use spaces after a full stop. You would write the sentence, end it with a full stop, and let the typesetter (your computer, for example) handle the spacing.
Since the full stop is used in places where you don't intend to have a full stop your typesetter has to guess your intent. This means it's often more reliable to skip the typesetter and do the spacing yourself, resulting in the current confusion.
Honestly, I don't understand why sentences are ended with a tiny point anyways. Shouldn't there be some better indication as to the end of a thought? That's why we need all the extra spaces in the first place, because the period is too weak to indicate the end of a sentence by itself. Maybe we should just replace the period with a better glyph!
The more likely model of what will happen is not that the internet companies will favor conservatives over liberals, but rather that they will favor companies by size. The cable companies will say that companies need to pay their fair share for bandwidth, and so they'll announce that any internet hosting that doesn't pay a certain amount of usage fees to the ISP will be throttled.
So what you're saying is that you have to pay more for more service? Say it ain't so!
If I pay $10 a month for my connection and someone else pays $100 then it's a no-brainer that the person paying more should get more service. Now, there's probably a ton more $10 users than $100 users and as long as there's competition among providers then there will be providers who will cater to the $10 users in order to attract them to their service. This is the free market and it does work.
What the government needs to do is just assure that the rules are fair, guarding against bait-and-switch tactics and providers not providing the service that they promised.