> if this turns out to be true, it could mean everything from curing cancer
IANA oncologist, but I do not see how it could mean that. I suppose it could mean preventing certain kinds of cancers that are caused by radiation, but that's not the same thing as curing cancer.
> to making manned interplanetary space expeditions feasible...
And I *definitely* don't see that. When it comes to planning a manned trip to, say, Mars, radiation is one of the smaller worries. The big problems there are more logistical in nature, especially the ones having to do with not being able to send the travellers anything they might suddenly have a need for in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. This problem is bad enough at the south pole, where during the winter it can take several *weeks* to airdrop emergency supplies in if the weather doesn't cooperate. On an interplanetary mission it would be months at minimum, possibly years, and would cost so much money that there's a real possibility it would not be forthcoming at all. They'd be on their own in much the same way as the Plymouth Colony, only without the tremendous boon of going to a naturally hospitable area capable of supporting life. Protection from radiation doesn't magically solve that kind of thing.
> not to mention treatment for radiation exposures in nuclear/radiological accidents/attacks.
Well, yes, there is that.
> If this drug works, it would mean a true breakthrough as past experiments > with radioprotectants were not particularly promising in any respect."
> Guess they'll be in big trouble when global warming strikes Belgium!
If global warming ever did what the alarmists keep saying it's going to do, chillers would probably become completely irrelevant, since about two thirds of Belgium would be continuously surface-mounted with a very large water-cooling rig and heatsink, sometimes known as the North Sea.
> due to a deep-seated fixation with test-avoidance
Either that, or due to having read enough about psychology to realize that 99.875% of it is bunk.
I don't avoid tests. I kind of like them, actually. I've always done well on tests.
But I consider psychoanalysis as it is generally practiced to be completely worthless. If somebody gave me the house-tree-person test, I'd be sorely tempted to draw the person down in a corner of the paper wearing anime-style armor with big black spikes, a leafless tree filling up the whole page with apples in it and big black thorns on the branches, and a medium-sized windowless house with the door on the third floor surrounded by an iron-spike fence and fighting ninja squirrels, just to mess with the dude.
Thing is, cats *aren't* domesticated. They only pretend to be when it suits their purposes.
If you want to see what domesticated looks like, look at dogs, or horses. Domesticated dogs and horses take their instructions from human masters. Cats, as a rule, don't.
Cats live *among* humans and coexist more or less peacefully with them, but so do squirrels and houseflies. Cats accept food from humans and even depend on it as their main food source, but so do wild birds that eat at feeders. Cats will even occasionally approach a human and allow themselves to be petted, but only when it's their idea.
There's a continual argument between people who prefer dogs and people who prefer cats, over which kind of animal is smarter. Of course, there's a great deal of variation in intelligence from one dog to another, and one supposes there may also be from one cat to another, but fundamentally the main reason this argument has never been resolved is because nobody can really demonstrate exactly how smart cats are, because the cats don't cooperate with the study. If you've got a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, based on what you can teach him. A monumentally stupid dog can learn about one trick, and then when you try to teach him another, he either can't figure it out or forgets the first one. On the other end of the scale, the most intelligent dog I've ever known recognized an English vocabulary of several hundred words and understood SVO sentence order. With a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, because he'll cooperate with the whole exercise. A dog is a social animal. His whole life is focused around *you*. A cat is altogether a different beast. A cat does what it wants, when it wants. You can try to teach it stuff, but as a rule the cat doesn't cooperate, so you can never really be sure what it's learned and what it hasn't.
> You'll get 10% more security by not using Internet Exploiter.
Make that IE or OE.
Outlook Express (err, Windows Mail, whatever they're calling it these days) makes Internet Explorer look like something written by Dan Bernstein. IE only catches malware if you visit a site that's infected. Since most sites aren't infected, you can potentially browse the web for weeks, even months, perhaps even years if you mostly browse the same sites all the time, before you run into any problem. With OE, you have a problem if someone else who uses OE gets your email address. Like, if you happen to send email to anyone who uses OE, for instance.
There hasn't been an Outlook virus in the news for a few months now, so we're overdue for the next one.
Give me the 13' monitor, and I'll hook you up with whatever 360K floppy disks you want. I've got PC-DOS 3.3 (two disks), GWBASIC, WordWriter, Lotus 123, UED, PC Tools, XTetris, and Caddiehack Golf CGA Tour. Oh, and I've got a 5.25" floppy drive that'll work with your modern PC, so you can create your own disks from downloaded images using dd or rawrite or whatever. You can have it all in exchange for the thirteen-foot monitor.
> you'll find that a significant number of your web sites' > visitors are still running Explorer or Netscape versions > 3 or 4. At least that's what I find for my sites
I don't find that for our website at work (public library). I see a lot of browsers, but I don't see those.
> Some people cannot afford the new hardware
People who can't afford three-year-old used hardware typically also don't have internet access at home.
> for single dedicated apps OS 9 was a robust operating system
For single dedicated apps, PC-DOS 3.3 was a robust operating system. But, except maybe for the occasional kiosk, who uses single dedicated apps these days?
I've not used Quark myself, but I have a friend who claims two rocks and a piece of string would be a reasonable substitute for it. Yes, he's a Mac user, and yes, he works in the publication industry (for a publisher that specializes in the ancient near east -- so among other job duties he gets to typeset ancient languages, e.g., Akkadian). I think the biggest complaint he has about Quark is that it appears to have been designed to make you go through all the steps you'd have to go through if you were working directly on paper, which apparently creates a lot of extra unnecessary work compared to a modern, computer-oriented way of doing things. Like I said, I've not used it myself, so I don't know the details. (Also, I haven't seen a Mac for several years. A former boss was a mac fan, but she retired several years ago. The three people who have held the position since are all Windows users, so the Macs have all been phased out. Not my choice: I'd have preferred to keep at least a couple of them around, for the diversity.)
> and consider true P2P stuff where programs are both clients and servers
In that case you just call them peers.
> replace them with alternatives like "listener" > and "caller" for the programs
Okay, I could go along with that.
> "big machine" and "little machine" for the computers?
That could get confusing if the big machine is actually smaller than the little machine (e.g., a 1U rackmount big machine and a full tower little machine). Size isn't really the issue, so much as location.
> Why don't we force everyone who is already calling > this big enterprise hardware device a server to > also call it a client?
I don't think that was the thought process that went into it.
The problem is that the people working on X, including the people managing the project, were all programmers, and they were all thinking from the perspective of the code, rather than from the perspective of the user. So when they asked themselves which system is providing services, and what services are being provided, they came up with answers like: the system with the display hardware (something not all computers had back then) is providing a service, the service of displaying a window.
I agree that the X client/server terminology is backwards, from the perspective of the user. But they didn't do it deliberately to be weird, obtuse, or annoying. They just failed to stop and think about the end user who doesn't know or want to know anything about the internal design of the system.
Most of the people using X and the computers it ran on *were* programmers, so it's kind of understandable. End users with no programming experience back then were mostly using eight-bit microcomputers with no networking stack (think: DOS 3.0), so such users didn't enter into the thinking too much. It was another era. X is a bit of a dinosaur, one of the oldest client/server things still in widespread use.
> What exactly is backwards about this? X > is the server, and the apps are clients.
It seems backwards because we usually think from a user's perspective.
The X terminology can be viewed as correct and forward, because the server is a system that provides services of some kind, and the client as the system where they are used. With X, the terminology is set up the way it us based on the understanding that the server provides services not to the user, but to applications: services like "show your UI to the user" and "get input from the user".
But we usually think not from the perspective of the application code, but from the perspective of the user, and so we usually think of a system that provides services to the *user* as the server, and the system where the user sits and uses them as the client. Viewed that way, the remote system that provides applications that do stuff would seem to be the server, and the system where the user uses the services would seem to be the client. That's how it works for an application server, for instance: the apps run on the server, but you use them on the client, with the client's keyboard, mouse, and monitor. A print server or file server is similar: the printer driver or filesystem runs on the server, and it's used from the client when the user prints something or saves a file or whatever. MS Terminal Server works this way also: the apps run on the server, and the user connects from the client (via rdp).
With most client-server things, then, the terminology is user centric. With X11, the terminology is application-centric.
So the reason X terminology feels backwards is because most people have an easier time identifying with the user than with the computer program that the user is using.
> Actually they were comparing [NN4] to IE4, which > destroyed it in pretty much every measurable way
That's the stupidest thing I've heard all week. IE wasn't better than Netscape until at least version 5.5. It had more market share, but that was mostly because it came bundled with Windows. Nobody used IE4 on *purpose*.
> The collective suck of Navigator 4.x basically cost Netscape the "Browser wars".
The inability to produce an updated version on a reasonable timescale cost them the First Browser War (or else it was the fact that IE was pre-installed at the factory, or both). Netscape 4 was a good deal better than IE4, the first thing you downloaded when you got a new computer. But then IE5 came out, it Netscape was still at version 4 and only a little better than IE5. Then IE 5.5 came out, and Netscape was still at version 4, and it wasn't better at all any more.
> I've heard a lot of words used with Netscape 4. > I can confidently say "loved" was never one of them.
Whippersnapper. You say "never" because you're too young to remember.
When Navigator 4.0 was first out, and people were comparing it to version 3, the new version was a huge improvement. It wasn't until it'd been out for several years and the most significant update was the Communicator suite (which used more memory and didn't improve the browsing experience at all) that the cheers started to turn into groans, and then when version 5 didn't come out, and didn't come out, and didn't come out, the groans eventually turned to outright boos and hisses. But that was years later.
Heck, I remember when people loved Netscape 2. Of course, back then the other main option was NCSA Mosaic. Or gopher.
Do I want to use any of that stuff *now*? Not on your life. But I loved Navigator 4.08 well enough in its day.
> I'd bet most will pick bacteria over carpet fuzz > any day... after all, if it doesn't look fuzzy...
More to the point, bacteria don't *taste* fuzzy.
(After all, I'm about to drop it into a vat of gastric acid, so how much trouble can a couple of floor bacteria cause under those conditions? I suppose it's a bad idea if you're immunocompromised and have cuts in your mouth...)
> Do people in the US really believe that you can eat food > that's fallen on the floor if you pick it up fast enough?
Short answer: no, but yes.
Long answer: There are two kinds of people. Some people won't eat food that has fallen off the plate onto the table, their lap, the chair, the floor, wherever. If it fell, it's "dirty", and they throw it away.
There are also people who think this is silly. If there's no visible dirt on it, or if you can brush it off, hey, it's still food. Unless it fell into pig excrement or something, a little surface contact with a potentially dirty surface is fundamentally unimportant. Nothing the old stomach acid can't handle in short order.
The "thirty-second rule" arises from a clash between these two ways of thinking. Somebody drops a piece of food, picks it up, and eats it, but there's one problem: someone from the other school of thought is present, and shrieks out "Ewwwwwwww! That fell on the floooooor!" The other guy shrugs. "Yeah, so? It was only on the ground for, like, five seconds. What's your problem?"
In practice, the number of seconds doesn't matter. Most people who have a piece of food in their hand or on their plate with the intention of eating it have put more thought into wanting to eat the food than they have into being grossed out by the floor, so if they drop the thing, they pick it up and eat it without a second thought. If it takes them thirty-two seconds to pick it up instead of thirty, or six instead of five, or whatever the local variant of the "rule" is, they won't say, "Oh, it's been a couple of seconds too long, better throw it out." The thought process is more along the lines of "Hey, I wanted that; I didn't mean to drop that; I was going to eat that; give me that. Nom nom nom."
And going the other way, with a few exceptions, people who are grossed out by dropped food usually won't eat it if it only fell on the table or the kitchen counter. The table is "dirty", even if it was just bleached half an hour ago. The counter is "dirty" as far as the food off the plate is concerned, even if you set an apple there a moment ago (then picked it up and took a bite). The food fell, therefore it's contaminated, therefore you don't eat it.
Personally, I consider the whole "dropped food is gross" thing to be a minor neurosis, but not one that causes any significant trouble in a society with a long-term food surplus, such as the US for instance. If it makes you feel better to throw the food away, hey, toss it in the nearest waste receptacle. No skin off my nose.
> explain the chemistry behind the ones that make the big bangs
As a general rule, I think the main active chemical ingredient in those is plain old smokeless powder (which you can easily look up on Wikipedia if you're curious, so I won't duplicate all the details here).
What's more interesting to me is the physics behind the boom. It's very similar to the physics behind thunder. Sudden temperature changes cause a rapid change in volume (Charles' Law in action). The resulting movement creates a sound wave.
> I am fairly sure that fireworks were invented in China
Maybe so, but showing more fireworks on July 4th (and the adjoining days, especially if it's a weekend) than the rest of the year combined is definitely an American concept. The story was flagged with a US flag because it directly pertained to a US holiday.
In China, they probably do fireworks in wintertime for Chinese New Year or somesuch, but I'm pretty sure they don't celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
HTML 5 takes entirely too many steps in the wrong directions. I'm not interested in going there. I'm *definitely* never going back to non-wellformed SGML-oriented markup, and that's just for starters.
Though, to be honest, I wasn't real excited about XHTML2 either. Not so many steps in *wrong* directions, but plenty of *unnecessary* changes. Meh. I'm not really going to mourn its loss.
What I really want is XHTML 1.0.1, the only difference from 1.0 being that you can put block-level elements within a paragraph. That's the only change I really wanted.
So hey, I can live with 1.0. I'll just keep using <div class="p"> like I have been. It's a kludge, but it works.
Or maybe I'll just study up a bit and end up going to straight XML with a custom namespace. Then I can have my block-level elements inside of paragraphs:-)
On the one hand, it's true that Emacs is lacking several important features, without which it really cannot be considered a proper, complete text editor ready for production use.
On the other hand, nothing else is even playing in the right ballpark.
The only reason it's not been solved until now is because no serious cryptanalyst was working on it. As soon as I read the description of how it's done, I knew it would be highly vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. (The guy who cracked it used frequency analysis of letter pairs, because there was no known plaintext available. But if someone were using the cipher on a regular basis, there would be.)
Slashdot Mirror
> if this turns out to be true, it could mean everything from curing cancer
IANA oncologist, but I do not see how it could mean that. I suppose it could mean preventing certain kinds of cancers that are caused by radiation, but that's not the same thing as curing cancer.
> to making manned interplanetary space expeditions feasible...
And I *definitely* don't see that. When it comes to planning a manned trip to, say, Mars, radiation is one of the smaller worries. The big problems there are more logistical in nature, especially the ones having to do with not being able to send the travellers anything they might suddenly have a need for in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. This problem is bad enough at the south pole, where during the winter it can take several *weeks* to airdrop emergency supplies in if the weather doesn't cooperate. On an interplanetary mission it would be months at minimum, possibly years, and would cost so much money that there's a real possibility it would not be forthcoming at all. They'd be on their own in much the same way as the Plymouth Colony, only without the tremendous boon of going to a naturally hospitable area capable of supporting life. Protection from radiation doesn't magically solve that kind of thing.
> not to mention treatment for radiation exposures in nuclear/radiological accidents/attacks.
Well, yes, there is that.
> If this drug works, it would mean a true breakthrough as past experiments
> with radioprotectants were not particularly promising in any respect."
Indeed.
> Guess they'll be in big trouble when global warming strikes Belgium!
If global warming ever did what the alarmists keep saying it's going to do, chillers would probably become completely irrelevant, since about two thirds of Belgium would be continuously surface-mounted with a very large water-cooling rig and heatsink, sometimes known as the North Sea.
[Answering "inkblot" to all ten.]
> No, you'd be showing contempt for the test
Okay, I'll buy that.
> due to a deep-seated fixation with test-avoidance
Either that, or due to having read enough about psychology to realize that 99.875% of it is bunk.
I don't avoid tests. I kind of like them, actually. I've always done well on tests.
But I consider psychoanalysis as it is generally practiced to be completely worthless. If somebody gave me the house-tree-person test, I'd be sorely tempted to draw the person down in a corner of the paper wearing anime-style armor with big black spikes, a leafless tree filling up the whole page with apples in it and big black thorns on the branches, and a medium-sized windowless house with the door on the third floor surrounded by an iron-spike fence and fighting ninja squirrels, just to mess with the dude.
Meh. To me it just looks like some nerd dribbled a bit of thin ink onto the paper and then folded it to create a symmetrical pattern.
> Don't forget that cats self-domesticated
Thing is, cats *aren't* domesticated. They only pretend to be when it suits their purposes.
If you want to see what domesticated looks like, look at dogs, or horses. Domesticated dogs and horses take their instructions from human masters. Cats, as a rule, don't.
Cats live *among* humans and coexist more or less peacefully with them, but so do squirrels and houseflies. Cats accept food from humans and even depend on it as their main food source, but so do wild birds that eat at feeders. Cats will even occasionally approach a human and allow themselves to be petted, but only when it's their idea.
There's a continual argument between people who prefer dogs and people who prefer cats, over which kind of animal is smarter. Of course, there's a great deal of variation in intelligence from one dog to another, and one supposes there may also be from one cat to another, but fundamentally the main reason this argument has never been resolved is because nobody can really demonstrate exactly how smart cats are, because the cats don't cooperate with the study. If you've got a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, based on what you can teach him. A monumentally stupid dog can learn about one trick, and then when you try to teach him another, he either can't figure it out or forgets the first one. On the other end of the scale, the most intelligent dog I've ever known recognized an English vocabulary of several hundred words and understood SVO sentence order. With a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, because he'll cooperate with the whole exercise. A dog is a social animal. His whole life is focused around *you*. A cat is altogether a different beast. A cat does what it wants, when it wants. You can try to teach it stuff, but as a rule the cat doesn't cooperate, so you can never really be sure what it's learned and what it hasn't.
> You'll get 10% more security by not using Internet Exploiter.
Make that IE or OE.
Outlook Express (err, Windows Mail, whatever they're calling it these days) makes Internet Explorer look like something written by Dan Bernstein. IE only catches malware if you visit a site that's infected. Since most sites aren't infected, you can potentially browse the web for weeks, even months, perhaps even years if you mostly browse the same sites all the time, before you run into any problem. With OE, you have a problem if someone else who uses OE gets your email address. Like, if you happen to send email to anyone who uses OE, for instance.
There hasn't been an Outlook virus in the news for a few months now, so we're overdue for the next one.
Give me the 13' monitor, and I'll hook you up with whatever 360K floppy disks you want. I've got PC-DOS 3.3 (two disks), GWBASIC, WordWriter, Lotus 123, UED, PC Tools, XTetris, and Caddiehack Golf CGA Tour. Oh, and I've got a 5.25" floppy drive that'll work with your modern PC, so you can create your own disks from downloaded images using dd or rawrite or whatever. You can have it all in exchange for the thirteen-foot monitor.
> you'll find that a significant number of your web sites'
> visitors are still running Explorer or Netscape versions
> 3 or 4. At least that's what I find for my sites
I don't find that for our website at work (public library). I see a lot of browsers, but I don't see those.
> Some people cannot afford the new hardware
People who can't afford three-year-old used hardware typically also don't have internet access at home.
> for single dedicated apps OS 9 was a robust operating system
For single dedicated apps, PC-DOS 3.3 was a robust operating system. But, except maybe for the occasional kiosk, who uses single dedicated apps these days?
I've not used Quark myself, but I have a friend who claims two rocks and a piece of string would be a reasonable substitute for it. Yes, he's a Mac user, and yes, he works in the publication industry (for a publisher that specializes in the ancient near east -- so among other job duties he gets to typeset ancient languages, e.g., Akkadian). I think the biggest complaint he has about Quark is that it appears to have been designed to make you go through all the steps you'd have to go through if you were working directly on paper, which apparently creates a lot of extra unnecessary work compared to a modern, computer-oriented way of doing things. Like I said, I've not used it myself, so I don't know the details. (Also, I haven't seen a Mac for several years. A former boss was a mac fan, but she retired several years ago. The three people who have held the position since are all Windows users, so the Macs have all been phased out. Not my choice: I'd have preferred to keep at least a couple of them around, for the diversity.)
> and consider true P2P stuff where programs are both clients and servers
In that case you just call them peers.
> replace them with alternatives like "listener"
> and "caller" for the programs
Okay, I could go along with that.
> "big machine" and "little machine" for the computers?
That could get confusing if the big machine is actually smaller than the little machine (e.g., a 1U rackmount big machine and a full tower little machine). Size isn't really the issue, so much as location.
> Why don't we force everyone who is already calling
> this big enterprise hardware device a server to
> also call it a client?
I don't think that was the thought process that went into it.
The problem is that the people working on X, including the people managing the project, were all programmers, and they were all thinking from the perspective of the code, rather than from the perspective of the user. So when they asked themselves which system is providing services, and what services are being provided, they came up with answers like: the system with the display hardware (something not all computers had back then) is providing a service, the service of displaying a window.
I agree that the X client/server terminology is backwards, from the perspective of the user. But they didn't do it deliberately to be weird, obtuse, or annoying. They just failed to stop and think about the end user who doesn't know or want to know anything about the internal design of the system.
Most of the people using X and the computers it ran on *were* programmers, so it's kind of understandable. End users with no programming experience back then were mostly using eight-bit microcomputers with no networking stack (think: DOS 3.0), so such users didn't enter into the thinking too much. It was another era. X is a bit of a dinosaur, one of the oldest client/server things still in widespread use.
> What exactly is backwards about this? X
> is the server, and the apps are clients.
It seems backwards because we usually think from a user's perspective.
The X terminology can be viewed as correct and forward, because the server is a system that provides services of some kind, and the client as the system where they are used. With X, the terminology is set up the way it us based on the understanding that the server provides services not to the user, but to applications: services like "show your UI to the user" and "get input from the user".
But we usually think not from the perspective of the application code, but from the perspective of the user, and so we usually think of a system that provides services to the *user* as the server, and the system where the user sits and uses them as the client. Viewed that way, the remote system that provides applications that do stuff would seem to be the server, and the system where the user uses the services would seem to be the client. That's how it works for an application server, for instance: the apps run on the server, but you use them on the client, with the client's keyboard, mouse, and monitor. A print server or file server is similar: the printer driver or filesystem runs on the server, and it's used from the client when the user prints something or saves a file or whatever. MS Terminal Server works this way also: the apps run on the server, and the user connects from the client (via rdp).
With most client-server things, then, the terminology is user centric. With X11, the terminology is application-centric.
So the reason X terminology feels backwards is because most people have an easier time identifying with the user than with the computer program that the user is using.
> Actually they were comparing [NN4] to IE4, which
> destroyed it in pretty much every measurable way
That's the stupidest thing I've heard all week. IE wasn't better than Netscape until at least version 5.5. It had more market share, but that was mostly because it came bundled with Windows. Nobody used IE4 on *purpose*.
> The collective suck of Navigator 4.x basically cost Netscape the "Browser wars".
The inability to produce an updated version on a reasonable timescale cost them the First Browser War (or else it was the fact that IE was pre-installed at the factory, or both). Netscape 4 was a good deal better than IE4, the first thing you downloaded when you got a new computer. But then IE5 came out, it Netscape was still at version 4 and only a little better than IE5. Then IE 5.5 came out, and Netscape was still at version 4, and it wasn't better at all any more.
> I've heard a lot of words used with Netscape 4.
> I can confidently say "loved" was never one of them.
Whippersnapper. You say "never" because you're too young to remember.
When Navigator 4.0 was first out, and people were comparing it to version 3, the new version was a huge improvement. It wasn't until it'd been out for several years and the most significant update was the Communicator suite (which used more memory and didn't improve the browsing experience at all) that the cheers started to turn into groans, and then when version 5 didn't come out, and didn't come out, and didn't come out, the groans eventually turned to outright boos and hisses. But that was years later.
Heck, I remember when people loved Netscape 2. Of course, back then the other main option was NCSA Mosaic. Or gopher.
Do I want to use any of that stuff *now*? Not on your life. But I loved Navigator 4.08 well enough in its day.
> I'd bet most will pick bacteria over carpet fuzz ... after all, if it doesn't look fuzzy ...
> any day
More to the point, bacteria don't *taste* fuzzy.
(After all, I'm about to drop it into a vat of gastric acid, so how much trouble can a couple of floor bacteria cause under those conditions? I suppose it's a bad idea if you're immunocompromised and have cuts in your mouth...)
> Do people in the US really believe that you can eat food
> that's fallen on the floor if you pick it up fast enough?
Short answer: no, but yes.
Long answer: There are two kinds of people. Some people won't eat food that has fallen off the plate onto the table, their lap, the chair, the floor, wherever. If it fell, it's "dirty", and they throw it away.
There are also people who think this is silly. If there's no visible dirt on it, or if you can brush it off, hey, it's still food. Unless it fell into pig excrement or something, a little surface contact with a potentially dirty surface is fundamentally unimportant. Nothing the old stomach acid can't handle in short order.
The "thirty-second rule" arises from a clash between these two ways of thinking. Somebody drops a piece of food, picks it up, and eats it, but there's one problem: someone from the other school of thought is present, and shrieks out "Ewwwwwwww! That fell on the floooooor!" The other guy shrugs. "Yeah, so? It was only on the ground for, like, five seconds. What's your problem?"
In practice, the number of seconds doesn't matter. Most people who have a piece of food in their hand or on their plate with the intention of eating it have put more thought into wanting to eat the food than they have into being grossed out by the floor, so if they drop the thing, they pick it up and eat it without a second thought. If it takes them thirty-two seconds to pick it up instead of thirty, or six instead of five, or whatever the local variant of the "rule" is, they won't say, "Oh, it's been a couple of seconds too long, better throw it out." The thought process is more along the lines of "Hey, I wanted that; I didn't mean to drop that; I was going to eat that; give me that. Nom nom nom."
And going the other way, with a few exceptions, people who are grossed out by dropped food usually won't eat it if it only fell on the table or the kitchen counter. The table is "dirty", even if it was just bleached half an hour ago. The counter is "dirty" as far as the food off the plate is concerned, even if you set an apple there a moment ago (then picked it up and took a bite). The food fell, therefore it's contaminated, therefore you don't eat it.
Personally, I consider the whole "dropped food is gross" thing to be a minor neurosis, but not one that causes any significant trouble in a society with a long-term food surplus, such as the US for instance. If it makes you feel better to throw the food away, hey, toss it in the nearest waste receptacle. No skin off my nose.
> explain the chemistry behind the ones that make the big bangs
As a general rule, I think the main active chemical ingredient in those is plain old smokeless powder (which you can easily look up on Wikipedia if you're curious, so I won't duplicate all the details here).
What's more interesting to me is the physics behind the boom. It's very similar to the physics behind thunder. Sudden temperature changes cause a rapid change in volume (Charles' Law in action). The resulting movement creates a sound wave.
> > nothing more boring than a long fireworks display to Sousa marching music.
> Maybe you should try the 1812 Overture.
If you want more boring, try something by Johannes Brahms, or Barry Manilow.
HTH.HAND.
> I am fairly sure that fireworks were invented in China
Maybe so, but showing more fireworks on July 4th (and the adjoining days, especially if it's a weekend) than the rest of the year combined is definitely an American concept. The story was flagged with a US flag because it directly pertained to a US holiday.
In China, they probably do fireworks in wintertime for Chinese New Year or somesuch, but I'm pretty sure they don't celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
> so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now.
:-)
Not gonna happen, fanboy.
HTML 5 takes entirely too many steps in the wrong directions. I'm not interested in going there. I'm *definitely* never going back to non-wellformed SGML-oriented markup, and that's just for starters.
Though, to be honest, I wasn't real excited about XHTML2 either. Not so many steps in *wrong* directions, but plenty of *unnecessary* changes. Meh. I'm not really going to mourn its loss.
What I really want is XHTML 1.0.1, the only difference from 1.0 being that you can put block-level elements within a paragraph. That's the only change I really wanted.
So hey, I can live with 1.0. I'll just keep using <div class="p"> like I have been. It's a kludge, but it works.
Or maybe I'll just study up a bit and end up going to straight XML with a custom namespace. Then I can have my block-level elements inside of paragraphs
> to this very day there are still people running browsers that can't show these images
There are people running browsers that can't display images at *all*. What's your point?
> First, have you been to YouTube lately?
I have.
> Have you noticed how they've added high(er) quality versions of many videos?
No. No, I haven't.
The ultimate example is Emacs.
On the one hand, it's true that Emacs is lacking several important features, without which it really cannot be considered a proper, complete text editor ready for production use.
On the other hand, nothing else is even playing in the right ballpark.
The only reason it's not been solved until now is because no serious cryptanalyst was working on it. As soon as I read the description of how it's done, I knew it would be highly vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. (The guy who cracked it used frequency analysis of letter pairs, because there was no known plaintext available. But if someone were using the cipher on a regular basis, there would be.)