It is, however, possible to flood the market for particular commodities. A few centuries ago, for example, Spain mishandled their newfound wealth from Central America and flooded the European gold market. OPEC has repeatedly been held together because the country with the largest production has consistently and deliberately reduced their production to compensate whenever other member nations produce too much in a given year. If they had not done so, the market would have been saturated and the commodity price of crude oil would have dropped significantly.
An asteroid made of mostly iron, to have any impact on the commodity market for iron or steel, would have to be worth a good deal more than $139 billion. An asteroid containing significant amounts of some less common material (e.g., rare earth metals) could potentially have an impact on the commodity prices of those -- if it were economic to capture and mine the thing, which of course it's not, at our current level of technology.
In fact, however, this asteroid probably doesn't contain anywhere near $139 billion worth of metals at commodity prices. (It's only about the size of a football field, and they don't yet know precisely what it's made of.) The article talks about how much its materials would be worth in orbit, which is mostly a function of how expensive it is to get things up there from the surface. For example, they're imagining it might contain water, which could be used as reaction mass for spacecraft. On the surface, water is one of the cheapest materials there is. (Air is even cheaper.) But it costs money to lift it out of Earth's gravity well.
They're dreaming, though. Without sci-fi technology (e.g., a tractor beam), capturing (let alone mining) a passing asteroid would be a ridiculously expensive (and also dangerous) operation, and all the equipment and personnel needed to do it would have to be lifted to orbit from the surface.
> Generally, might as well show a rotating propeller > or a cylon helmet moving dot, neither of which > has a beginning or an end.
The problem with that is, the user can't necessarily tell if the whole thing hangs and altogether stops making any actual progress. Which is the whole point of a progress bar in the first place. This is one reason some progress-bar dialogs have a "show details" button that (if clicked) provides a breakdown of what specific subtask is being performed at any given moment.
For that much money, I'd think these rich customers could hire a team of engineers to design a custom phone just for them, with their name spelled out in the actual circuitry as well as embossed on the case, which could be custom-ergonomized to fit perfectly in their personal hand.
Oh, I think putting your syllabus on the web is worth doing.
Then again, all the syllabi for all the classes and all the professors in all the departments in the entire school could be easily put on the web (assuming you can get the professors to allow it) using one three-year-old midrange consumer-grade computer and a copy of Debian, and if you can't get an IT major to set it all up for free as a class project you need to seriously re-evaluate the quality of your IT program, so yeah, the "course management" software may well be unnecessary.
$500 in mid-seventies money for an appliance? (That's, what, a couple thousand in today's money?) You're making my point for me. Normal people can't afford things like that.
That's a shame. It's preposterously expensive for "just a phone". If only it were capable of playing music and videos and browsing the web and a whole bunch of other things, in addition to making phone calls, there might potentially be some market for it.
Can jew nazi that holocaust jokes aren't funny? Nobody in their reich mind would laugh at these, anne frankly the people who tell them are a little off.
(Oh, wait, did I just... I'm very sorry. I must have taken Lief off my census.)
The map shows northeastern Ohio getting about the same amount of sun as western Michigan. I don't know what they based that on, but I've lived in both those places, and nothing could be further from the truth. Western Michigan gets more sunshine per week in its darkest month than northeastern Ohio gets cumulatively from September through May.
When my family moved from Canal Fulton to Hastings, we arrived at night, and the next morning I got my camera out and took pictures of the sky, because I didn't think anyone would believe me or understand that what I was saying was literal when I said that the sky was *blue*. It was a much, MUCH brighter blue than I had seen living in NEO. The second day, the sky was blue again, and I got out my camera again. It took me a while to become accustomed to regular blue skies. I'd grown up assuming that the sky being depicted as "blue" was a cultural thing (kind of like the sun being drawn with a couple dozen evenly spaced yellow lines going out from it in all directions). The sky in northeastern Ohio is actually gray perpetually -- medium gray in the winter, darker in the spring and fall, lighter in the summer, but pretty much always gray.
Now I live in north central Ohio, and we're somewhere in between. We have blue skies for most of the summer and occasionally on isolated days during the rest of the year. The map shows this area as getting *more* sun than western Michigan. The people who compiled the map are clearly missing something. Maybe they are ignoring cloud cover entirely? I don't know, but whatever it is, the map is wrong.
Yes, they theoretically existed, but they weighed more than refrigerators and were more expensive than houses and pretty much nobody actually had one. (Ham radios for example were MUCH more common.) Yuppies started getting household microwave ovens in the early-to-mid eighties, and they didn't really penetrate to lower middle class until the early nineties.
Cellphones weren't common yet either. Many households didn't have a camera, most rural households didn't have an electric clothes dryer, and many didn't have an electric washer either. The number of cars per household was less than 1. (On the other hand, most teenagers didn't talk back to adults, because they knew if it got back to their parents they'd be in trouble. The "good old days" weren't _all_ bad.)
> Use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and install > appropriate software. Maybe even hook it up to a > larger screen via whatever video output is available.
If it has a keyboard and mouse and full-sized display, then it arguably might qualify as a PC (albeit with a slightly unusual form factor). What percentage of the tablets and phones that Apple has manufactured have these things? Enough to make them the number one PC vendor?
I guess she did OK with the copy/paste part, but she appears to have omitted too many citations. Maybe her doctoral supervisor should have gone through the thing and helpfully added {citation_needed} to the end of every sentence and passed it back to her.
The fact that it is an enumerated power means that the Federal Government constitutionally _can_ do it. That does not, in itself, mean that they are _required_ to do so. (If you have questions about this, see the tenth amendment.)
Furthermore, the word "establish" does not necessarily imply "subsidize". I don't know of anyone who is saying that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to enact legislation to subsidize the postal service, but it definitely _would_ require an act of Congress to do so; i.e., the constitution does not in any way require it.
Additionally, plain common sense will tell you that the postal service lost a great deal of its importance with the introduction of pervasive residential phone lines then lost most of what was left of its relevance with the advent of the internet and pervasive cellphone coverage. Nobody (so far as I am aware) is advocating tearing it down the post offices and getting rid of them. They're still going to be there, for the forseeable future. Nobody is denying that having post offices around is good.
Even if you take the postal clause as a mandate, however, there's absolutely no wording in it to indicate that delivery routes must reach every home. The establishment of "postal roads" implies delivery, but that could be fully fulfilled with delivery from one postal station to another. Technically, the existence of the post office box service would fully qualify, even if there were *no* residential delivery at all. Now, nobody (so far as I am aware) is arguing in favor of doing away with residential delivery. We're just saying it's okay for the postal service to save a little money by maybe delivering only a few days a week, which is still FAR more often than anyone expected they would do when the constitution was written.
Five-day-a-week delivery to every household from coast to coast, including remote rural ones? Ben Franklin's jaw would be on the floor. That wasn't even remotely *possible* when the Constitution was written. Arguing that the Constitution requires six days a week is just silly.
The postal service delivered six days a week in the twentieth century because there was a real demand for it. Today, more than 80% of that demand has shifted over to other services (most of which involve the internet in some way). The only way you can conclude that it is still necessary to do six-day-a-week delivery to every house is if you believe deep in your heart that the government must never ever ever discontinue any service that has ever been offered, no matter what.
> If your vehicle is off the ground and in the air > it is going to move at the speed of the air until > terrain gets in the way, regardless of how thin
If your vehicle were freely floating in the air, like a soap bubble, that would be true. If your vehicle has any significant propulsion mechanism, however, then no. (Then again, nothing with any really significant propulsion could be made lighter than the "air" on Mars, so perhaps you're right.)
Actually, I would like to watch that video. It sounds like it would've been more amusing than anything I've seen all week. I'm disappointed that I didn't hear about it until it was taken down, and I think it's a shame that the video game producer couldn't be a better sport about the thing, given that this video was very obviously not competing with them in any meaningful way.
I don't think soap bubbles would provide enough lift for meaningful anti-gravity applications. They float because they are not significantly more dense than air. Weigh them down with any kind of payload, and they're going to land on the floor.
> McDonalds is the top PC vendor, if you include Big Macs.
I was going to say something like that, except with Kraft Foods.
Actually, though, I think it might really be Bayer. They make a ton of PC, under the "Makrolon" brand. There's also Nintendo, they put a lot of PCs in some of their games.
> So, tell us, what aspects of a phone or tablet make > it not a computer in your mind? They'll both run rings > around an old 486.
Traditionally, a PC is a _general purpose_ computer. So you could use it for a wide variety of tasks, anything from basic end-user tasks like typing up a research paper right on through to technical stuff like CAD. Indeed, people used 486s for both of those things, back in the day. So why don't you set your camera up on a tripod and make a YouTube video of yourself attempting to perform those tasks on your touchscreen-only phone? I'd like to see that. It would be highly amusing to watch.
> happily took 60 guilders of some poor Dutch traders anyway
Well, yes, but only after the Dutch offered. It's not like the locals deliberately set out to *exploit* the hapless Dutch tourists. They were just the people who happened to be there at the time. If the Dutch were determined to give away their fortune in exchange for the cultural equivalent of a phony title deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, the natives could either accept their offer, or they could tell the Dutch to go find someone else to give their money to. Obviously, if these European "traders" were loony enough to want to buy a worthless deed to something that was obviously public property, they would've found *somebody* to buy one from -- or else they would've turned violet, which would be worse.
So while the locals were not as noble as they could have been, they weren't malicious and out to get anybody either. They were just making the best of a poor situation. And to their credit, they didn't run off and hide afterward. They stuck around and continued to be friendly for a while. (That all went to pot later, but that was later.)
If the European immigrants had continued to negotiate with the locals to purchase whatever land they needed throughout the remainder of our history, relations would have gone better. If the locals had caught on to what was happening a lot sooner and quickly drafted up some title deeds and offered to sell land by the acre for a reasonable price (reserving some for each of their own families and also some "public land" for each village and tribe, but selling individual farm-sized plots to the Europeans), relations probably would have gone better.
(Admittedly, there would still have been some problems. There always are. There was a substantial technology differential, plus language barriers and the usual levels of cultural misunderstanding, all of which would have caused issues.)
Honestly, whether Opera works with it or not will only matter to Opera users.
There are some things I like about Opera, and I personally use it for several things (though Slashdot is not one of those things), but realistically its market share is not enough to be compelling when it comes to deciding whether a given new web technology works in enough browsers to be worth adopting. If it works with the big four (Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Mobile Safari -- and Mobile Safari only joined this list within the last couple of years), that'll be good enough to drive widespread adoption (supposing that the new technology provides some meaningful benefit; I don't happen to know enough about WebRTC to comment on that). If it works in every single other browser there is including Opera, that isn't enough to make up for its not working in one of the big four.
If there were a fifth "major" browser, it would currently be the desktop version of Safari (assuming you consider desktop and mobile browsers distinct; IMO that's a more important distinction than the UI differences between e.g. Chrome and Safari), but desktop Safari's market share is already less than half that of the mobile version and is on the decline; whereas, the mobile version is actively proliferating. Opera's market share is stable, but it's measured in tenths of a percent.
Mobile Safari appears to be the only _mobile_ browser with a market share worth talking about so far, as near as I can tell. Silk is gaining ground but for now is still in the tenth-of-a-percent grouping. The mobile versions of Firefox, IE, and Chrome all appear to be complete non-starters, unless they are consistently disguising their mobile nature and being mistaken for the desktop versions.
> Mars is quite windy so your vehicle will get blown around
I don't think the atmosphere on Mars has enough molecules in it to blow around anything of substance. Atmospheric density on Mars at ground level is lower than anything a basic physics-classroom vacuum pump can produce.
> And of course signing for something is > acknowledgement that you are expecting > it and accept that it is yours.
As near as I can tell, signing for something is generally just an acknowledgment that a box with a shipping label on it was dropped off at your location. I sign for things all the time at work. Rarely do I know what's inside the box before I sign for it. Frequently I haven't even been close enough to the boxes to read the shipping labels.
With that said, it would be relatively easy to prosecute the recipients, but it's usually only worth law enforcement's time to do so if the quantity involved is sufficient to warrant "intent to distribute" charges. The courts tend to treat smaller-quantity possession charges with contempt.
I admit, it is a bit odd to see it capitalized like that.
> (wait, I typed File:/// and it did not crash Firefox).
It probably has to be at the very beginning of a text-entry field.
(I'm just guessing, based on what "file:///" means. I can't test this one myself, as I don't have a Mac here, and the Mac I have access to at work is running Snow Leopard.)
> An obscure library bug triggered by a magic string.
The thing is, the magic string in question is not particularly obscure. Any app that normally handles URLs is fairly likely to get that typed into it at some point. Okay, granted, protocols are usually not capitalized, and File:/// is no more common than Http:// or Mailto:, but nonetheless, this is something people are definitely going to run into occasionally.
(Yes, file protocol terminates the protocol with just two slashes; but, importantly, the next segment of the URL is an absolute path. So while the third slash would be a typo on a multi-rooted system like Windows or VMS, it's pretty much mandatory on a single-rooted system that uses slash as a directory separator -- like, say, anything with Unix underpinnings.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is, however, possible to flood the market for particular commodities. A few centuries ago, for example, Spain mishandled their newfound wealth from Central America and flooded the European gold market. OPEC has repeatedly been held together because the country with the largest production has consistently and deliberately reduced their production to compensate whenever other member nations produce too much in a given year. If they had not done so, the market would have been saturated and the commodity price of crude oil would have dropped significantly.
An asteroid made of mostly iron, to have any impact on the commodity market for iron or steel, would have to be worth a good deal more than $139 billion. An asteroid containing significant amounts of some less common material (e.g., rare earth metals) could potentially have an impact on the commodity prices of those -- if it were economic to capture and mine the thing, which of course it's not, at our current level of technology.
In fact, however, this asteroid probably doesn't contain anywhere near $139 billion worth of metals at commodity prices. (It's only about the size of a football field, and they don't yet know precisely what it's made of.) The article talks about how much its materials would be worth in orbit, which is mostly a function of how expensive it is to get things up there from the surface. For example, they're imagining it might contain water, which could be used as reaction mass for spacecraft. On the surface, water is one of the cheapest materials there is. (Air is even cheaper.) But it costs money to lift it out of Earth's gravity well.
They're dreaming, though. Without sci-fi technology (e.g., a tractor beam), capturing (let alone mining) a passing asteroid would be a ridiculously expensive (and also dangerous) operation, and all the equipment and personnel needed to do it would have to be lifted to orbit from the surface.
> Generally, might as well show a rotating propeller
> or a cylon helmet moving dot, neither of which
> has a beginning or an end.
The problem with that is, the user can't necessarily tell if the whole thing hangs and altogether stops making any actual progress. Which is the whole point of a progress bar in the first place. This is one reason some progress-bar dialogs have a "show details" button that (if clicked) provides a breakdown of what specific subtask is being performed at any given moment.
For that much money, I'd think these rich customers could hire a team of engineers to design a custom phone just for them, with their name spelled out in the actual circuitry as well as embossed on the case, which could be custom-ergonomized to fit perfectly in their personal hand.
Oh, I think putting your syllabus on the web is worth doing.
Then again, all the syllabi for all the classes and all the professors in all the departments in the entire school could be easily put on the web (assuming you can get the professors to allow it) using one three-year-old midrange consumer-grade computer and a copy of Debian, and if you can't get an IT major to set it all up for free as a class project you need to seriously re-evaluate the quality of your IT program, so yeah, the "course management" software may well be unnecessary.
$500 in mid-seventies money for an appliance? (That's, what, a couple thousand in today's money?) You're making my point for me. Normal people can't afford things like that.
That's a shame. It's preposterously expensive for "just a phone". If only it were capable of playing music and videos and browsing the web and a whole bunch of other things, in addition to making phone calls, there might potentially be some market for it.
Can jew nazi that holocaust jokes aren't funny? Nobody in their reich mind would laugh at these, anne frankly the people who tell them are a little off.
(Oh, wait, did I just... I'm very sorry. I must have taken Lief off my census.)
The map shows northeastern Ohio getting about the same amount of sun as western Michigan. I don't know what they based that on, but I've lived in both those places, and nothing could be further from the truth. Western Michigan gets more sunshine per week in its darkest month than northeastern Ohio gets cumulatively from September through May.
When my family moved from Canal Fulton to Hastings, we arrived at night, and the next morning I got my camera out and took pictures of the sky, because I didn't think anyone would believe me or understand that what I was saying was literal when I said that the sky was *blue*. It was a much, MUCH brighter blue than I had seen living in NEO. The second day, the sky was blue again, and I got out my camera again. It took me a while to become accustomed to regular blue skies. I'd grown up assuming that the sky being depicted as "blue" was a cultural thing (kind of like the sun being drawn with a couple dozen evenly spaced yellow lines going out from it in all directions). The sky in northeastern Ohio is actually gray perpetually -- medium gray in the winter, darker in the spring and fall, lighter in the summer, but pretty much always gray.
Now I live in north central Ohio, and we're somewhere in between. We have blue skies for most of the summer and occasionally on isolated days during the rest of the year. The map shows this area as getting *more* sun than western Michigan. The people who compiled the map are clearly missing something. Maybe they are ignoring cloud cover entirely? I don't know, but whatever it is, the map is wrong.
In 1958? Are you serious?
Yes, they theoretically existed, but they weighed more than refrigerators and were more expensive than houses and pretty much nobody actually had one. (Ham radios for example were MUCH more common.) Yuppies started getting household microwave ovens in the early-to-mid eighties, and they didn't really penetrate to lower middle class until the early nineties.
Cellphones weren't common yet either. Many households didn't have a camera, most rural households didn't have an electric clothes dryer, and many didn't have an electric washer either. The number of cars per household was less than 1. (On the other hand, most teenagers didn't talk back to adults, because they knew if it got back to their parents they'd be in trouble. The "good old days" weren't _all_ bad.)
> Use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and install
> appropriate software. Maybe even hook it up to a
> larger screen via whatever video output is available.
If it has a keyboard and mouse and full-sized display, then it arguably might qualify as a PC (albeit with a slightly unusual form factor). What percentage of the tablets and phones that Apple has manufactured have these things? Enough to make them the number one PC vendor?
I guess she did OK with the copy/paste part, but she appears to have omitted too many citations. Maybe her doctoral supervisor should have gone through the thing and helpfully added {citation_needed} to the end of every sentence and passed it back to her.
The fact that it is an enumerated power means that the Federal Government constitutionally _can_ do it. That does not, in itself, mean that they are _required_ to do so. (If you have questions about this, see the tenth amendment.)
Furthermore, the word "establish" does not necessarily imply "subsidize". I don't know of anyone who is saying that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to enact legislation to subsidize the postal service, but it definitely _would_ require an act of Congress to do so; i.e., the constitution does not in any way require it.
Additionally, plain common sense will tell you that the postal service lost a great deal of its importance with the introduction of pervasive residential phone lines then lost most of what was left of its relevance with the advent of the internet and pervasive cellphone coverage. Nobody (so far as I am aware) is advocating tearing it down the post offices and getting rid of them. They're still going to be there, for the forseeable future. Nobody is denying that having post offices around is good.
Even if you take the postal clause as a mandate, however, there's absolutely no wording in it to indicate that delivery routes must reach every home. The establishment of "postal roads" implies delivery, but that could be fully fulfilled with delivery from one postal station to another. Technically, the existence of the post office box service would fully qualify, even if there were *no* residential delivery at all. Now, nobody (so far as I am aware) is arguing in favor of doing away with residential delivery. We're just saying it's okay for the postal service to save a little money by maybe delivering only a few days a week, which is still FAR more often than anyone expected they would do when the constitution was written.
Five-day-a-week delivery to every household from coast to coast, including remote rural ones? Ben Franklin's jaw would be on the floor. That wasn't even remotely *possible* when the Constitution was written. Arguing that the Constitution requires six days a week is just silly.
The postal service delivered six days a week in the twentieth century because there was a real demand for it. Today, more than 80% of that demand has shifted over to other services (most of which involve the internet in some way). The only way you can conclude that it is still necessary to do six-day-a-week delivery to every house is if you believe deep in your heart that the government must never ever ever discontinue any service that has ever been offered, no matter what.
> If your vehicle is off the ground and in the air
> it is going to move at the speed of the air until
> terrain gets in the way, regardless of how thin
If your vehicle were freely floating in the air, like a soap bubble, that would be true. If your vehicle has any significant propulsion mechanism, however, then no. (Then again, nothing with any really significant propulsion could be made lighter than the "air" on Mars, so perhaps you're right.)
Actually, I would like to watch that video. It sounds like it would've been more amusing than anything I've seen all week. I'm disappointed that I didn't hear about it until it was taken down, and I think it's a shame that the video game producer couldn't be a better sport about the thing, given that this video was very obviously not competing with them in any meaningful way.
I don't think soap bubbles would provide enough lift for meaningful anti-gravity applications. They float because they are not significantly more dense than air. Weigh them down with any kind of payload, and they're going to land on the floor.
> McDonalds is the top PC vendor, if you include Big Macs.
I was going to say something like that, except with Kraft Foods.
Actually, though, I think it might really be Bayer. They make a ton of PC, under the "Makrolon" brand. There's also Nintendo, they put a lot of PCs in some of their games.
> So, tell us, what aspects of a phone or tablet make
> it not a computer in your mind? They'll both run rings
> around an old 486.
Traditionally, a PC is a _general purpose_ computer. So you could use it for a wide variety of tasks, anything from basic end-user tasks like typing up a research paper right on through to technical stuff like CAD. Indeed, people used 486s for both of those things, back in the day. So why don't you set your camera up on a tripod and make a YouTube video of yourself attempting to perform those tasks on your touchscreen-only phone? I'd like to see that. It would be highly amusing to watch.
> happily took 60 guilders of some poor Dutch traders anyway
Well, yes, but only after the Dutch offered. It's not like the locals deliberately set out to *exploit* the hapless Dutch tourists. They were just the people who happened to be there at the time. If the Dutch were determined to give away their fortune in exchange for the cultural equivalent of a phony title deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, the natives could either accept their offer, or they could tell the Dutch to go find someone else to give their money to. Obviously, if these European "traders" were loony enough to want to buy a worthless deed to something that was obviously public property, they would've found *somebody* to buy one from -- or else they would've turned violet, which would be worse.
So while the locals were not as noble as they could have been, they weren't malicious and out to get anybody either. They were just making the best of a poor situation. And to their credit, they didn't run off and hide afterward. They stuck around and continued to be friendly for a while. (That all went to pot later, but that was later.)
If the European immigrants had continued to negotiate with the locals to purchase whatever land they needed throughout the remainder of our history, relations would have gone better. If the locals had caught on to what was happening a lot sooner and quickly drafted up some title deeds and offered to sell land by the acre for a reasonable price (reserving some for each of their own families and also some "public land" for each village and tribe, but selling individual farm-sized plots to the Europeans), relations probably would have gone better.
(Admittedly, there would still have been some problems. There always are. There was a substantial technology differential, plus language barriers and the usual levels of cultural misunderstanding, all of which would have caused issues.)
> Because some countries have more than a couple of hundred years of history.
Now, if only they had more than a couple hundred miles of geography...
(Yeah, yeah, I know it's an old joke. So was yours, though.)
Honestly, whether Opera works with it or not will only matter to Opera users.
There are some things I like about Opera, and I personally use it for several things (though Slashdot is not one of those things), but realistically its market share is not enough to be compelling when it comes to deciding whether a given new web technology works in enough browsers to be worth adopting. If it works with the big four (Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Mobile Safari -- and Mobile Safari only joined this list within the last couple of years), that'll be good enough to drive widespread adoption (supposing that the new technology provides some meaningful benefit; I don't happen to know enough about WebRTC to comment on that). If it works in every single other browser there is including Opera, that isn't enough to make up for its not working in one of the big four.
If there were a fifth "major" browser, it would currently be the desktop version of Safari (assuming you consider desktop and mobile browsers distinct; IMO that's a more important distinction than the UI differences between e.g. Chrome and Safari), but desktop Safari's market share is already less than half that of the mobile version and is on the decline; whereas, the mobile version is actively proliferating. Opera's market share is stable, but it's measured in tenths of a percent.
Mobile Safari appears to be the only _mobile_ browser with a market share worth talking about so far, as near as I can tell. Silk is gaining ground but for now is still in the tenth-of-a-percent grouping. The mobile versions of Firefox, IE, and Chrome all appear to be complete non-starters, unless they are consistently disguising their mobile nature and being mistaken for the desktop versions.
> Actually, the third slash means "this computer"
> and is required on Windows too.
If the third slash meant "this computer", single-rooted systems would require a fourth one to indicate the filesystem root. Such is not the case.
> Mars is quite windy so your vehicle will get blown around
I don't think the atmosphere on Mars has enough molecules in it to blow around anything of substance. Atmospheric density on Mars at ground level is lower than anything a basic physics-classroom vacuum pump can produce.
> And of course signing for something is
> acknowledgement that you are expecting
> it and accept that it is yours.
As near as I can tell, signing for something is generally just an acknowledgment that a box with a shipping label on it was dropped off at your location. I sign for things all the time at work. Rarely do I know what's inside the box before I sign for it. Frequently I haven't even been close enough to the boxes to read the shipping labels.
With that said, it would be relatively easy to prosecute the recipients, but it's usually only worth law enforcement's time to do so if the quantity involved is sufficient to warrant "intent to distribute" charges. The courts tend to treat smaller-quantity possession charges with contempt.
> rarely would a Mac user have to type File:///
I admit, it is a bit odd to see it capitalized like that.
> (wait, I typed File:/// and it did not crash Firefox).
It probably has to be at the very beginning of a text-entry field.
(I'm just guessing, based on what "file:///" means. I can't test this one myself, as I don't have a Mac here, and the Mac I have access to at work is running Snow Leopard.)
> An obscure library bug triggered by a magic string.
The thing is, the magic string in question is not particularly obscure. Any app that normally handles URLs is fairly likely to get that typed into it at some point. Okay, granted, protocols are usually not capitalized, and File:/// is no more common than Http:// or Mailto:, but nonetheless, this is something people are definitely going to run into occasionally.
(Yes, file protocol terminates the protocol with just two slashes; but, importantly, the next segment of the URL is an absolute path. So while the third slash would be a typo on a multi-rooted system like Windows or VMS, it's pretty much mandatory on a single-rooted system that uses slash as a directory separator -- like, say, anything with Unix underpinnings.)