For complex life to develop, you need conditions that do regularly provide evolutionary pressure, without completely wiping out all life.
Asteroid impacts are fine and even very useful for wiping out stagnant populations (like the dinosaurs) and giving room for new species to develop into, but they shouldn't be so big that they demolish the entire planet, or occur so often that no life is possible on the surface of the planet. Jupiter plays a huge role in that.
But there are also other factors. I'm pretty sure that our big moon and the tides it generates are a big factor in creating ever changing environments that provide a lot of opportunities and evolutionary pressure for populations, and that's all caused by a devastating Mars-sized impact. But another one like that would easily wipe out all life here.
Weather, seismic activity, it all plays a role. I definitely think our planet has a good chance of being reasonably unique.
I thought that too, once. But apparently many encryption algorithms produce data that's recognizably more structured than real random data. So hiding it in images may not help if the snooper knows he should be checking images for possible encrypted messages.
Ok, how many people do you know that have Android phones?
About half of my closest co-workers. At my previous job, it was only 20% of my co-workers, while 60% had iPhones (including me at the time). My impression is that among programmers, Android is really big, just like the iPhone was before it.
The 1st Amendment protects peoples freedom of speech from the Federal government, not from the consequences of private entities in society. You should be able to say whatever you want without the government penalizing you (without causing unjust harm), but that doesnt mean everyone should be forced by the government to have to listen to your stupidity, or be impartial towards you.
That last part is completely irrelevant to this case. Nobody is forcing anyone to listen to her. If you're annoyed by what she writes on Facebook, you could always unfriend her. In fact, with a humorless employer like that, it's probably wise to unfriend all your coworkers.
But the fact remains that she is being punished for something she said in her own time and in a completely unrelated venue. That's about as unfair as it gets.
Sales and marketing don't care about "power users." They want to know: what's popular? What's marketable? Where are the trends going?
But what they release is not just some average smartphone, it's a device that is especially appealing to power users.
I just about guarantee you all the assorted, branded bloat loaded onto your Milestone was spawned from the brain of someone in sales or marketing, not anyone in R&D or engineering.
There isn't really all that much branded bloat on it. There's Motonav, a sucky navigation app, but that's it. Below the surface are no doubt tons on proprietary Motorola drivers, but they're not branded. Not in the sense that the average user would experience them. (And are they even that closed? I believe the famous autofocus bug was fixed by someone from Google, not someone from Motorola.)
Do you really think millions of Android phones are being bought by power users? Power users like you and I are really a small niche of the market.
But they are the ones who know why they want Android instead of Symbian or WinMo. Or iPhone, for that matter. They are the ones who will pay $500 for a phone without subscription. Average users will get an iPhone or something else that comes with a subscription.
Installing custom ROMs, tweaking the OS out of its factory settings, doing upgrades on your own--the typical phone owner is *never* going to do this, and that's why the phones aren't touted on those capabilities, and why the power users and hackers aren't typically accommodated.
I don't need to be accommodated, I just don't want them to do extra work to stop me from doing something they don't care about anyway.
Whichever way you turn it, it's a nonsensical business decision. A big missed opportunity from Motorola.
I feel like Microsoft has never developed a key software innovation and is not that good at predictions.
Personally I'm amazed he actually got some hits. I've always seen Bill Gates as such an anti-visionary that I expected all his predictions to be rubbish or ridiculously obvious.
Motorola is seemingly betting that, if they do a good enough job branding the phone as a Motorola, your next phone will be one, too.
All they need to do for that is put their logo on the outside. If they do a good enough job at annoying me, my next phone will not be a Motorola.
It's not a cheap phone. Is it strange that such a powerhouse attracts power users? Is it strange that power users want to get as much as possible out of the phone?
Open up the phone and build a reputation for having created the ultimate Android device, and you're doing a lot more to draw customers to come back.
(Did you know that the Milestone doesn't even have their Motoblur UI? It's really just plain Android. How much do they expect to brand about that anyway?)
That would really suck. If that's true, it's time to ask my money back from Motorola.
I really love my Milestone. It's by far the best piece of smartphone hardware around. But I do want to be able to play with it.
I have read about people who were able to mod it quite a bit, including a kernel module to vary the clock speed. I hope that means it's also possible to load a completely new OS. Or at least replace significant parts of it. But any developments in this area have probably been set back for several months because of Motorola's restrictive policy.
That's what makes this so bizarre. Motorola is not a carrier. They sell hardware, and they're not going to get more money from me if they lock me down somehow. They sell a commodity, and it would be to their advantage to make it as attractive as possible.
Verizon, on the other hand, is a carrier. Yet the Droid is not locked down the way the Milestone is. It's completely backwards.
Your entire phonebook has to go into Google Contacts - or you don't get a phonebook. As this is a fancy smartphone, it's not just useful to have name and number, but also email addresses, social media login names and even postal address (e.g. for driving directions on Google Maps)
This is definitely by far the biggest downside for me. I don't want Google to know who I know. I do have a GMail account, but before I got an Android phone, the contact list was practically empty. I would much rather have it sync contacts with my private non-gmail email account, but that doesn't seem to be possible.
At least, by default. I can imagine that it would be possible, easy even, to make a phonebook app for Android that didn't sync with GMail or synced with some other service of my choice.
To not need a Google account at all, you need to make your own Android mod, but even that it within the realm of possibilities, I guess.
Not on Motorola Milestone (the european version of Droid). Motorola has locked its bootloader so you can't install a generic Android image, unless you sign it with Motorola's keys.
Really? The last time I said something like that, people pointed me to sites explaining in detail how to root a Milestone.
I still haven't done it, but apparently it's not all that hard to do.
(Still, it'd be much more sensible if it was really trivial to do. What use is it to hardware manufacturers to cripple their own devices?)
It's amazing to see how some Android hardware manufacturers are doing extra work on software to reduce the value of their products. And why? Is there seriously any way they think they can lock is into their ecosystem? They don't control the Android marketplace, so what the hell is the point of doing extra work to cripple their product?
Make it as open as possible, give me root access, allow me to mess with everything I want to mess with, and then charge me $50 extra for it. $100 even. Market it as the ultimate open Android phone, and I'll pay. And that's pure profit they could have gotten out of me.
You say this, and then you go on to explain that it's quite normal to play perfectly and still lose money. That means it's gambling, and that skill doesn't help you much when you're unlucky.
They're indicating that all the laws against Prohibition were a stupid waste of time and money,
Interestingly, a Dutch conservative politician wrote an article this week where he pointed out that we could save everybody a lot of time, money and health problems by legalizing all drugs (and not just soft drugs). And then of course taxing them, and regulating them in a manner similar to alcohol and tobacco. (Although the alcohol regulations aren't exactly effective either, with 12-year-olds drinking themselves comatose.)
I've always considered the stock market a mix of gambling and a pyramid scheme. Stock prices go up as long as enough people believe that in the future, more people will be putting money in the stock market. As soon as people lose that trust and start taking money out, the whole thing collapses.
Pyramid schemes are illegal, gambling is regulated. Why are stock markets allowed to be such a mess?
But when you pay money for an online good and the seller reneges on the deal to deliver, just don't come crying to the government-run courts or police, okay?
This is the post that needs to be modded up. Laws do apply to private transactions. You can expect legal protection, therefore it's not unreasonable to pay tax on those transactions.
Of course the turn side of this is: if I need to pay tax over transactions of virtual goods, I also expect legal protection for those transactions.
Yeh, but this patent is on doing that on a *limited resource* computer.
Code generation might be decades old, but do you really think anyone thought of doing code generation on a computer with less then 2Gb of RAM and less than a 1Ghz processor in the 70s or 80s?
Slashdot Mirror
Temperature range?
The "life" only needs to evolve a insulation / temperature control mechanism during the time when temperature was good for it.
Only? You'd still need to spend hundreds of thousands of years in a habitable zone while slowly pushing the limits.
For complex life to develop, you need conditions that do regularly provide evolutionary pressure, without completely wiping out all life.
Asteroid impacts are fine and even very useful for wiping out stagnant populations (like the dinosaurs) and giving room for new species to develop into, but they shouldn't be so big that they demolish the entire planet, or occur so often that no life is possible on the surface of the planet. Jupiter plays a huge role in that.
But there are also other factors. I'm pretty sure that our big moon and the tides it generates are a big factor in creating ever changing environments that provide a lot of opportunities and evolutionary pressure for populations, and that's all caused by a devastating Mars-sized impact. But another one like that would easily wipe out all life here.
Weather, seismic activity, it all plays a role. I definitely think our planet has a good chance of being reasonably unique.
I'd love to see a Nethack movie. Even just to see what kind of weird stuff they polymorph the dog into.
Thats true. Maybe something which hooks into a picture exchanging site like 4chan.
If I was the Iranian government, I'd probably burn people alive for even knowing about 4chan.
Are you the Iranian Government?
Alas, no.
Encrypted data looks like random binary data.
I thought that too, once. But apparently many encryption algorithms produce data that's recognizably more structured than real random data. So hiding it in images may not help if the snooper knows he should be checking images for possible encrypted messages.
Thats true. Maybe something which hooks into a picture exchanging site like 4chan.
If I was the Iranian government, I'd probably burn people alive for even knowing about 4chan.
Ok, how many people do you know that have Android phones?
About half of my closest co-workers. At my previous job, it was only 20% of my co-workers, while 60% had iPhones (including me at the time). My impression is that among programmers, Android is really big, just like the iPhone was before it.
The 1st Amendment protects peoples freedom of speech from the Federal government, not from the consequences of private entities in society. You should be able to say whatever you want without the government penalizing you (without causing unjust harm), but that doesnt mean everyone should be forced by the government to have to listen to your stupidity, or be impartial towards you.
That last part is completely irrelevant to this case. Nobody is forcing anyone to listen to her. If you're annoyed by what she writes on Facebook, you could always unfriend her. In fact, with a humorless employer like that, it's probably wise to unfriend all your coworkers.
But the fact remains that she is being punished for something she said in her own time and in a completely unrelated venue. That's about as unfair as it gets.
Information can't travel faster than light you moron
Then can you please explain what TFA is all about?
Sales and marketing don't care about "power users." They want to know: what's popular? What's marketable? Where are the trends going?
But what they release is not just some average smartphone, it's a device that is especially appealing to power users.
I just about guarantee you all the assorted, branded bloat loaded onto your Milestone was spawned from the brain of someone in sales or marketing, not anyone in R&D or engineering.
There isn't really all that much branded bloat on it. There's Motonav, a sucky navigation app, but that's it. Below the surface are no doubt tons on proprietary Motorola drivers, but they're not branded. Not in the sense that the average user would experience them. (And are they even that closed? I believe the famous autofocus bug was fixed by someone from Google, not someone from Motorola.)
Do you really think millions of Android phones are being bought by power users? Power users like you and I are really a small niche of the market.
But they are the ones who know why they want Android instead of Symbian or WinMo. Or iPhone, for that matter. They are the ones who will pay $500 for a phone without subscription. Average users will get an iPhone or something else that comes with a subscription.
Installing custom ROMs, tweaking the OS out of its factory settings, doing upgrades on your own--the typical phone owner is *never* going to do this, and that's why the phones aren't touted on those capabilities, and why the power users and hackers aren't typically accommodated.
I don't need to be accommodated, I just don't want them to do extra work to stop me from doing something they don't care about anyway.
Whichever way you turn it, it's a nonsensical business decision. A big missed opportunity from Motorola.
I feel like Microsoft has never developed a key software innovation and is not that good at predictions.
Personally I'm amazed he actually got some hits. I've always seen Bill Gates as such an anti-visionary that I expected all his predictions to be rubbish or ridiculously obvious.
Motorola is seemingly betting that, if they do a good enough job branding the phone as a Motorola, your next phone will be one, too.
All they need to do for that is put their logo on the outside. If they do a good enough job at annoying me, my next phone will not be a Motorola.
It's not a cheap phone. Is it strange that such a powerhouse attracts power users? Is it strange that power users want to get as much as possible out of the phone?
Open up the phone and build a reputation for having created the ultimate Android device, and you're doing a lot more to draw customers to come back.
(Did you know that the Milestone doesn't even have their Motoblur UI? It's really just plain Android. How much do they expect to brand about that anyway?)
That would really suck. If that's true, it's time to ask my money back from Motorola.
I really love my Milestone. It's by far the best piece of smartphone hardware around. But I do want to be able to play with it.
I have read about people who were able to mod it quite a bit, including a kernel module to vary the clock speed. I hope that means it's also possible to load a completely new OS. Or at least replace significant parts of it. But any developments in this area have probably been set back for several months because of Motorola's restrictive policy.
That's what makes this so bizarre. Motorola is not a carrier. They sell hardware, and they're not going to get more money from me if they lock me down somehow. They sell a commodity, and it would be to their advantage to make it as attractive as possible.
Verizon, on the other hand, is a carrier. Yet the Droid is not locked down the way the Milestone is. It's completely backwards.
This is definitely by far the biggest downside for me. I don't want Google to know who I know. I do have a GMail account, but before I got an Android phone, the contact list was practically empty. I would much rather have it sync contacts with my private non-gmail email account, but that doesn't seem to be possible.
At least, by default. I can imagine that it would be possible, easy even, to make a phonebook app for Android that didn't sync with GMail or synced with some other service of my choice.
To not need a Google account at all, you need to make your own Android mod, but even that it within the realm of possibilities, I guess.
There's an online petition about that issue:
http://www.petitiononline.com/freeblms/petition.html
The incredible number of typos make that petition nearly unreadable. I hope they fix the text before sending it to Motorola.
Not on Motorola Milestone (the european version of Droid). Motorola has locked its bootloader so you can't install a generic Android image, unless you sign it with Motorola's keys.
Really? The last time I said something like that, people pointed me to sites explaining in detail how to root a Milestone.
I still haven't done it, but apparently it's not all that hard to do.
(Still, it'd be much more sensible if it was really trivial to do. What use is it to hardware manufacturers to cripple their own devices?)
That might be why he said "interesting", rather than "useful".
It's amazing to see how some Android hardware manufacturers are doing extra work on software to reduce the value of their products. And why? Is there seriously any way they think they can lock is into their ecosystem? They don't control the Android marketplace, so what the hell is the point of doing extra work to cripple their product?
Make it as open as possible, give me root access, allow me to mess with everything I want to mess with, and then charge me $50 extra for it. $100 even. Market it as the ultimate open Android phone, and I'll pay. And that's pure profit they could have gotten out of me.
It's never gambling...It's always skill.
You say this, and then you go on to explain that it's quite normal to play perfectly and still lose money. That means it's gambling, and that skill doesn't help you much when you're unlucky.
They're indicating that all the laws against Prohibition were a stupid waste of time and money,
Interestingly, a Dutch conservative politician wrote an article this week where he pointed out that we could save everybody a lot of time, money and health problems by legalizing all drugs (and not just soft drugs). And then of course taxing them, and regulating them in a manner similar to alcohol and tobacco. (Although the alcohol regulations aren't exactly effective either, with 12-year-olds drinking themselves comatose.)
I've always considered the stock market a mix of gambling and a pyramid scheme. Stock prices go up as long as enough people believe that in the future, more people will be putting money in the stock market. As soon as people lose that trust and start taking money out, the whole thing collapses.
Pyramid schemes are illegal, gambling is regulated. Why are stock markets allowed to be such a mess?
I consider that quite a serious hole in sales tax laws. I also don't understand the tax-free shopping at airports.
But when you pay money for an online good and the seller reneges on the deal to deliver, just don't come crying to the government-run courts or police, okay?
This is the post that needs to be modded up. Laws do apply to private transactions. You can expect legal protection, therefore it's not unreasonable to pay tax on those transactions.
Of course the turn side of this is: if I need to pay tax over transactions of virtual goods, I also expect legal protection for those transactions.
Yeh, but this patent is on doing that on a *limited resource* computer.
Code generation might be decades old, but do you really think anyone thought of doing code generation on a computer with less then 2Gb of RAM and less than a 1Ghz processor in the 70s or 80s?
Nice way of putting that in perspective.