It might take a little wind out of the war on terror due to budget reshuffling.
No, it wouldn't. This administration has clearly demonstrated that it doesn't care about the size of the budget deficit it runs up. We'd simply see the deficit increase by the exact amount of funding being pumped into the "Star Wars v2.0" program you outlined in 1—3.
Of course there hasn't been an outcry that the models were too conservative: the GW deniers are using the inacuracy of the predictions as "proof" that GW is bunk. (I've seen comments in responce to this very article to that effect.) Never mind that the failure is on the side of things being even faster/worse than originally predicted, the models weren't dead-on accurate, so the whole thing must be a sham. The media has proven itself complicit with denying GW, creating the impression that there's no scientific concensus of such when there clearly is, serving as a mouthpiece for GW deniers' bogus arguments without presenting the scientists' rebuttals and evidence to the contrary, etc. They know where their advertising income comes from: car manufacturers and big oil, who have a vested interest in hindering acceptance of GW, since widespread acceptance would lead to widespread effort to amelorate the situation by exploring more fuel-efficient vehicles and manufacturing methods, alternative fuels, etc. which would wean us away from dependence on big oil.
Personally, I always find the reactions to the latest market share data funny. It seems like responses fall mainly in two categories: Apple fanboys shouting that a microscopic increase in market share is proof that Microsoft is a dinosaur well on its way to extinction, and Microsoft fanboys who say that, because Apple still doesn't have >50% market share, they're going to go out of business any day now, just as soon as the iPod stops being the "in" thing. The rest of us (Linux/other OS fans, people who use Apple and/or Microsoft OSes, but aren't fanboys about it, etc.) seem to just roll our eyes about how overblown market share data is.
Yeah, because it sure hurt Microsoft so release an operating system for the PC, and not come out with their own hardware [sarcasm].
That'd be because Microsoft sells their operating system to every hardware vendor who wants to save a buck by not developing their own OS in-house. MS-DOS didn't have a heavily entrenched incumbent OS to compete against, whereas Mac OS X would have to wage the uphill battle against Windows to become a profitable generic-PC OS, meanwhile Apple's hardware sales would suffer.
Very, very, very VERY few people buy Apple primarily because they like the hardware. People buy Apple because they like the software.
Very true. However, just because the software and OS are what are driving Apple's sales, that doesn't mean that that's where they make their money. They make the bulk of their profits on hardware sales, the OS and software are what motivates people to buy said hardware.
When it comes to computers, APPLE IS A SOFTWARE COMPANY. They are NOT a hardware company!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Within a year, Apple could potentially be the world dominant software supplier if they would just get a clue.
They wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the dominant software supplier in a million years by supporting Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware. They'd end up going through the same thing they went through 10—15 years ago, when they experimented with Mac clones: all the other companies (who wouldn't have to make up the cost of software R&D and support) would easily undercut the price of Apple's hardware, canniballizing their sales. Since hardware sales are Apple's bread-and-butter, they'd end up hemorrhaging money, and the only way to make up that with licensing fees would be to make those fees prohibitively expensive, making other hardware vendors reluctant to add Mac OS X to their offerings.
Would it be harder to support a lot of different hardware? Of course! So what? They need to stop being cowards and take the plunge.
They're not being cowards, they're being smart. Apple's business model is completely, fundamentally different from Microsoft's. To have a chance at being profitable off OS and software sales, Apple would have to completely change their fundamental business model, only to face an uphill battle against the ultra-entrenched Windows OS.
The entire point of advertising is to attract new customers (who bring in additional revenue). Pandering to the customers they already have wouldn't do that. What good is spending millions on commercials if the only people they motivate to buy your product are the ones buying it already?
Also, it's been established that Justin Long is not leaving, he and John Hodgeman both are still recording new commercials.
On a tangent: I'm noticing a lot of speculation that the reason for the younger demographic going with PCs is price. Although that age group is certainly (by necessity) more price-conscious, the Mac mini is cheap enough that they could go get a Mac if they actually wanted one. The fact that they're not suggests to me that they don't want a Mac, not that they can't afford one.
My personal theory is that they're buying what they're used to: ie what they were trained on in school. Apple started really losing market share in primary and secondary education about thirteen years ago (Windows 95 being the tipping point), when the current 18—25 crowd was in elementary or junior high school. This means that most (if not all) of their computer training was on Windows, so they're buying Windows machines now out of habit. It's like people buying a new car and tending to get whichever transmission type (standard/automatic) they were trained on. The people in the older demographic either used a computer for the first time in the days of Macintosh vs DOS, or they're using whatever their 25—35 year old kids (who were trained when the Macintosh still dominated the education market) recommend/provide free tech support for.
Apple's making a comeback in education, with double-digit growth rates in education sales in the last couple years, so I think we'll see the reverse result for the 18—25 demographic in a future survey, once the current grade schoolers, with equal-to-greater training time with Macs, start buying their first computer.
If you factor together all of Gotung's "1 in tens", you end up with 1 advanced civilation per 100 million stars. Using 63 stars within 5 parsecs as the model, 100 million stars would fill a sphere with radius of 580 parsecs (1,900 lightyears). Which means the closed advanced civilation is some 2,000 lightyears away.
That's a lot of generations, especially considering that they're probably not going to send a ship on a straight-shot to us, they're going to be expanding in all directions as fast as their colonization needs require. Considering that there'd be 1,000--100,000 colony worlds along the way (low number assuming they only colonize planets with at least simple life, high number assumes they have good terraforming technology and can change all of the planets in some star's HZ to suit their needs), and they're expanding at below the speed of light (I assume from them using generational ships, and there's no hard scientific evidence that superluminal travel is possible), they've got plenty of growing room, and wouldn't be in a hurry to sink the resources into starting a new colony unless it was necessary. In other words: slow expansion rate.
The problem with the Fermi Paradox is that even if you assume optimistic conditions that would allow for thousands of advanced civilizations, there's still an awfully big haystack to search in if you're specifically looking for an alien civilization, and you're probably not going to be putting that much energy into it, since you'll probably be putting all that technology to other uses. The sheer resources required just to build a powerful enough radio transmitter to reach every star within a couple thousand lightyears (the minimum distance to the nearest neighbor giving these optimistic conditions) is staggering, not to mention that the civilization would have to be willing to sink maintenance costs into that sucker for a good 4,000 years before a responce could be expected.
The Unreal Engine is merely a proof-of-concept device. It will be used to lay the R&D groundwork for the much more powerful Infinite Improbability Drive.
A few reasons. Europe is mainly 'full' -- its landmass is less than that of the US IIRC, or darn near close...they have 700+ million, the US just hit 300. Alot of central Europe is mountain region remember, they just don't have the wide open plains like north america.
Also, Europe is comprised of very old, mature set of societies. Less social and economic mobility; all the land is owned and in use. The US still has large amounts space and sparsely populated cities. The rustbelt has a negative population growth for example.
Europe has 10.4 M sq km and 710 M people, vs. the US 9.5 M sq. km and 300 M people, so the US has less than half the number of people per square km (or whatever unit of area one choses to use). You're dead on about the US still having large amounts of space. However, if you count Europe as "west of the Ural Mountains" you have some pretty extensive plains in western Russia, and the western US is pretty damn mountainous, speaking as someone who lives within two hours' drive of several ranges in the western US.
Finally, I think the social objectives are a bit different. Speaking in very broad terms, most European societies are not as materalistic. There's alot of negatives to materialism as a motivator, but it does give your economy a very powerful engine. This creates oppportunity, which in turn attracts immigrants.
I'm not sure that I buy this. I spent a month there visiting my wife's family last fall, and the societies I saw (mainly England and Sweden) didn't seem any less materialistic than the US. I think you might be mistaking free market, where government regulation of industry is lax, for materilistic. England and Sweden both seemed to have quite a few immigrants. (According to Wikipedia, 13.3% of Sweden's population is foreign.
I'm a bit surprised that they'd pick Errai, of all stars. It's only three billion years old, which puts it at the same age as the sun at the time that cells with nuclei first appeared: not the best candidate for decoding a radio message. On top of that, one of the two stars is a subgiant, which means its in the process of swelling into a red giant, so it's probably cooking any planets it might have that could support life.
Sorry, I just realized what you meant by that post (calling shotgun on the orbiter, not a fancy "first post"), so I'm replying to undo my "Offtopic" moderation.
While we're talking about semantics, what exactly qualifies as a "cleared neighborhood"? Wouldn't the Trojan Asteroids mean that Jupiter's orbit isn't cleared? If that does count as cleared, shouldn't the definition of "moon" then be (re-)defined to exclude Telesto and Calypso (which orbit Saturn in Tethys' Lagrange points) and Helene and Polydeuces (which orbit Saturn in Dione's Lagrange points)? What about Epimetheus and Janus, which are considered "co-orbital" and switch places every four years? It seems silly and unscientific to me to use one set of orbital characteristics for bodies orbitting the sun, and a different set for bodies orbitting a planet/dwarf planet/asteroid/whatever.
I suppose you could take the tact that the Trojan Asteroids got "swept" into their current positions in Jupiter's Lagrange points by Jupiter's gravity, thereby qualifying as being "cleared" out of an independent orbit. However, something tells me that if another Theia-like planet had formed, say in Earth's other Lagrange point, and with an orbit still stable today (only got to the size of Mercury, instead of Mars?) the proposed definition of "planet" would be a bit different, since such a body would be naked-eye visible, making it another of the "classic" planets.
...It's actually more like the asian culture, or the asian spirit that forges this sort of hard working mentality. However, it's probably true that the poverty, massive lower-class (farmer population) and the dire living conditions select for the dilligent. Then, that sort of mentality is drilled into descendants.
Sounds a lot like Europe and the United States in the mid-to-late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution rolled into those areas. I don't think that East Asian culture is inherently more hard-working than European* culture, just that the conditions require people to over-work themselves just to get by. I personally think that Japanese work practice will start to resemble Western work practices in the next generation or two, now that their economy has reached the point that it can't sustain the exponential growth it enjoyed while rebuilding from World War II, but IANA economist.
* - United States culture is European, regardless of how much we Americans like to pretend we're unique and fundamentally different from our forebears: nothing is created from a vacuum.
Couldn't there be a very low power engine of some kind, just enough to provide a minimal thrust for, lets say, a decade. You don't need a lot of thrust in vacuum. Even small but constant acceleration should be sufficient to eventually achieve very high speed and perhaps even outrun the older spacecraft.
That's actually the exact design philosophy behind ion thrusters.
Continental drift occurs much too slowly to have the effects indicated by the core samples in this study. Over the last 55 million years, the arctic has been about where it is now.
Probably very true, but: until about 55—40 million years ago Australia and Antarctica were joined together as the last piece of the supercontinent Gondwana (itself a piece of the former Pangea, which slowly broke up over the course of the Mesozoic). When Australia rifted off, the first Antarctic ice sheet started forming. Australia-Antarctica together had formed a longish, north-south oriented continent that deflected east-west ocean currents, forcing warm and cold water from the various latitudes to mix. (This is similar to how North America today deflects the Gulf Stream—a warm current—north, until it ends up wrapping around a little and points at Europe from the north-west, which contributes a lot of the moisture that the British Isles are so famous for.) As the two were separated, the currents were no longer deflected, and a cold current was allowed to form around Antarctica.
Of course, that means that Australia's moved as far as it has in 40—55 million years, but I vaguelly remember reading somewhere that that particular plate is a world-record holder as far as speed of drift goes.
A lot of people have tried to make this case about whether bloggers are journalists or not, but the judges have always sidestepped that. The first ruling, when the defendants tried to block the case under California's shield laws, was rejected on the grounds that revealing the existance of the Mac Mini and an audio break-out box wasn't whistleblowing, since they weren't reporting on a health risk coverup or bribery or the like, and that these items were trade secrets. The rulings since then have all been that Apple didn't do the appropriate footwork to find out for themselves who was leaking information before going to court. (Companies are supposed to make every effort to find out the source of trade secret leaks by internal means before subpoenaing people: the court system does not exist as a counter-idustrial-espianoge service for lazy companies.)
Actually, hard shelled eggs existed long before chickens came along, by a few hundred million years.
In land vertebrates—mammals, specifically—reproduction evolved in the reverse order of the scenario you outline: the distant ancestors of mammals layed hard-shelled eggs, which eventually became rubbery (as with modern, monotreme mammals like the platypus), and then became live birth early in the embryonic development followed by a long period of further development in a pouch (as in marsupials), followed by full development in the womb (as with placental mammals). For everything else descended from that first amniote (birds, turtles, crocodiles, tuataras, lizards and snakes, and many extinct groups like non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs) it's been hard-shelled eggs all along.
1985, Apple's offering is about $4000, the IBM offering is ONLY $3000... A few years later, Apple's offering remains about $3500, IBM compatibles are $2000...
I'm assuming you're talking about one of the non-US dollar currencies, as the two Mac models available in 1985 were both available for under $3000 USD ($2500 for the Mac 128K, $2800 for the Mac 512K).
For a while, the price differential was huge.
While there has always been a noticeable price difference between an entry-level Windows box and an entry-level Mac, but it's never been "huge": entry-level Macs hit the $2000 mark in 1986 with the Mac 512Ke, and $1000 in 1990 with the Classic, and continued working slowly down throuh the several-hundred-dollar range before the Mini came along.
Mossberg is no different than John Dvorac and Robert Cringely: he gets paid to make noise. At the end of the day he's a journalist and doesn't understand technology.
Not quite. Mossberg isn't a technologist, which is the point. He writes reviews that are meant to be purchasing advise for ordinary people, from an "I, like the reader, am not a geek, and here's my impression of Product ___" perspective. Dvorak and Cringley are paid to pontificate about technology, and pretend to be visionaries. Also, this article isn't about technology: it's about the differences in the business models, and the inherent advantages and disadvantages of each from the perspective of an ordinary person. This is even summed up in TFA:
In the component model, many companies make hardware and software that run on a standard platform, creating inexpensive commodity devices that don't always work perfectly together, but get the job done. In the end-to-end model, one company designs both the hardware and software, which work smoothly together, but the products cost more and limit choice.
His argument in the article is that the end-to-end model works better for music players because it produces devices that are really easy to use for ordinary people (which is a huge plus with something like a music player) because all the components interoperate better. The article's actually not a one-sided Apple fanboy piece, as the last paragraph shows:
Still, the end-to-end model isn't a lock. If Apple can't keep churning out cool products at reasonable prices, it could crash and burn. Unlike Microsoft, it doesn't have much help from other companies to succeed. But the iPod experience has shown that the PC model may not be best for all digital devices.
There's none of the "Apple is going to just switch to Windows" nonsense that Dvorak spews, nor the "Apple is going to kick Microsoft's butt guerilla-style." of Cringley. He makes no real predictions, just indications of what may or may not happen, and indicates what he thinks is the most likely. But, it's clear from how he words it that he's aware that that's just his opinion. So, no, Mossberg isn't like Dvorak or Cringley.
"PC Magazine's Editor-in-Chief says the whole Mac/Windows dual-boot thing is really nothing to get excited about.
Duh. If/when a fully virtualized version comes out, so you don't have to reboot to get from one set of apps to the other, then it'll be something to get excited about. Of course, PC Magazine's EiC is hardly the best place to get an objective opinion about something designed to help people wean themselves from Windows.
He writes that Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X. From the article: "Once you've laid out a few kilobucks on your BC system and been frustrated a few times with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? Jobs's bet: You'll start spending more and more time in OS X, until you--too--become one of the pod people.
I'm so glad that Jim Louderback, EiC of PCMag is here to TELL US THE FREAKING OBVIOUS. Although, he doesn't get some things right: the only way you would have to spend "a few kilobucks" is if you bought a MacBook Pro, pimped it out a bit, and bought Windows. For under a grand you could buy a Mini and a copy of Windows, assuming you already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse lying around (which is the point of the Mini). Even if you had to also buy those peripherals, you could still easily keep the price under $2000 US.
It's sad to see so many of my compatriots being turned into lemmings. Perhaps they'll wake up and smell the Apple pie in the sky--and realize they've been taken for a ride. But I doubt it."
While reading TFA, I couldn't tell if the whole "only a moron would ever even consider using a Mac" tone was meant to be satirical, or if Mr. Louderback is a blindly zealous Windows user and/or Microsoft shill, or if he's just a professional troll. Then I noticed the "John C. Dvorak" link to the right of the editorial, and was reminded that this is the same magazine that continues to waste money on Dvorak's paycheck, which means Louderback is Dvorak's boss. Which answers that question: another professional troll.
Those adverts are acctually quite funny. They joke about the current situation of the Windows PCs... But how long? Vista is peeping around the corner...
Advertising campaigns aren't designed at what's around the corner, they're designed around the current state. Besides, as others have pointed out, Vista's still several months to a year away (assuming they don't slip, again), so this ad campaign could run for a reasonable length of time before getting pulled or updated when Vista comes out.
And since I am a Debian Linux user I didn't understand why they attack the PC's so directly. Mac is also a Personal Computer aka PC, no matter how they will twist or put it to their ads.
Yes, Macs are also Personal Computers, but it's not like Apple was the one that started the usage of "PC = IBM Compatible", that was the IBM PC users. I got really annoyed with my high school classmates back in the days of Mac OS 7 vs DOS arguments because they'd talk about "PC" vs "Mac", as if the Mac wasn't a personal computer. I think it might have been an outgrowth or reinforcement of the old "Macs are toys, not 'real' computers" mentality.
Mac OSX with Intel platform is a hi-security risk because PPC was a platform no virus makers where even targetting. Now they have ability to attack macs too.
As a Linux user, you should know better. Worms and viruses, despite the fact that the most sophisticated are written in assembly, target flaws in the operating system, not the CPU. If they targetted the CPU then Linux on x86 wouldn't be any more secure than Windows on x86.
No wonder that mac has a one to five known viruses right now.. when previously there where none...
Maybe I'm behind the times, but I'm not aware of any "real" viruses and worms for Mac OS X. There has been a handful of trojans released over the years (Leap-A/Oompa-A is a trojan: the user has to agree to download the file, if it were a real worm it'd do its thing without user intervention). I'm not saying there will never be a Mac virus or worm. (Are there vulnerabilities being found in Mac OS X? All the time, therefore there's the potential for software to be made to exploit those vulnerabilities.) But, the OS itself is more secure than Windows, so I think it'll be a while, and it won't ever get to the sheer number volume of infectious programs as Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wouldn't. This administration has clearly demonstrated that it doesn't care about the size of the budget deficit it runs up. We'd simply see the deficit increase by the exact amount of funding being pumped into the "Star Wars v2.0" program you outlined in 1—3.
Wait, I thought you were talking about China, not the first six years of the Bush Administration.
Of course there hasn't been an outcry that the models were too conservative: the GW deniers are using the inacuracy of the predictions as "proof" that GW is bunk. (I've seen comments in responce to this very article to that effect.) Never mind that the failure is on the side of things being even faster/worse than originally predicted, the models weren't dead-on accurate, so the whole thing must be a sham. The media has proven itself complicit with denying GW, creating the impression that there's no scientific concensus of such when there clearly is, serving as a mouthpiece for GW deniers' bogus arguments without presenting the scientists' rebuttals and evidence to the contrary, etc. They know where their advertising income comes from: car manufacturers and big oil, who have a vested interest in hindering acceptance of GW, since widespread acceptance would lead to widespread effort to amelorate the situation by exploring more fuel-efficient vehicles and manufacturing methods, alternative fuels, etc. which would wean us away from dependence on big oil.
Personally, I always find the reactions to the latest market share data funny. It seems like responses fall mainly in two categories: Apple fanboys shouting that a microscopic increase in market share is proof that Microsoft is a dinosaur well on its way to extinction, and Microsoft fanboys who say that, because Apple still doesn't have >50% market share, they're going to go out of business any day now, just as soon as the iPod stops being the "in" thing. The rest of us (Linux/other OS fans, people who use Apple and/or Microsoft OSes, but aren't fanboys about it, etc.) seem to just roll our eyes about how overblown market share data is.
That'd be because Microsoft sells their operating system to every hardware vendor who wants to save a buck by not developing their own OS in-house. MS-DOS didn't have a heavily entrenched incumbent OS to compete against, whereas Mac OS X would have to wage the uphill battle against Windows to become a profitable generic-PC OS, meanwhile Apple's hardware sales would suffer.
Very true. However, just because the software and OS are what are driving Apple's sales, that doesn't mean that that's where they make their money. They make the bulk of their profits on hardware sales, the OS and software are what motivates people to buy said hardware.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
They wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the dominant software supplier in a million years by supporting Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware. They'd end up going through the same thing they went through 10—15 years ago, when they experimented with Mac clones: all the other companies (who wouldn't have to make up the cost of software R&D and support) would easily undercut the price of Apple's hardware, canniballizing their sales. Since hardware sales are Apple's bread-and-butter, they'd end up hemorrhaging money, and the only way to make up that with licensing fees would be to make those fees prohibitively expensive, making other hardware vendors reluctant to add Mac OS X to their offerings.
They're not being cowards, they're being smart. Apple's business model is completely, fundamentally different from Microsoft's. To have a chance at being profitable off OS and software sales, Apple would have to completely change their fundamental business model, only to face an uphill battle against the ultra-entrenched Windows OS.
Uh, no.
The entire point of advertising is to attract new customers (who bring in additional revenue). Pandering to the customers they already have wouldn't do that. What good is spending millions on commercials if the only people they motivate to buy your product are the ones buying it already?
Also, it's been established that Justin Long is not leaving, he and John Hodgeman both are still recording new commercials.
On a tangent: I'm noticing a lot of speculation that the reason for the younger demographic going with PCs is price. Although that age group is certainly (by necessity) more price-conscious, the Mac mini is cheap enough that they could go get a Mac if they actually wanted one. The fact that they're not suggests to me that they don't want a Mac, not that they can't afford one.
My personal theory is that they're buying what they're used to: ie what they were trained on in school. Apple started really losing market share in primary and secondary education about thirteen years ago (Windows 95 being the tipping point), when the current 18—25 crowd was in elementary or junior high school. This means that most (if not all) of their computer training was on Windows, so they're buying Windows machines now out of habit. It's like people buying a new car and tending to get whichever transmission type (standard/automatic) they were trained on. The people in the older demographic either used a computer for the first time in the days of Macintosh vs DOS, or they're using whatever their 25—35 year old kids (who were trained when the Macintosh still dominated the education market) recommend/provide free tech support for.
Apple's making a comeback in education, with double-digit growth rates in education sales in the last couple years, so I think we'll see the reverse result for the 18—25 demographic in a future survey, once the current grade schoolers, with equal-to-greater training time with Macs, start buying their first computer.
If you factor together all of Gotung's "1 in tens", you end up with 1 advanced civilation per 100 million stars. Using 63 stars within 5 parsecs as the model, 100 million stars would fill a sphere with radius of 580 parsecs (1,900 lightyears). Which means the closed advanced civilation is some 2,000 lightyears away.
That's a lot of generations, especially considering that they're probably not going to send a ship on a straight-shot to us, they're going to be expanding in all directions as fast as their colonization needs require. Considering that there'd be 1,000--100,000 colony worlds along the way (low number assuming they only colonize planets with at least simple life, high number assumes they have good terraforming technology and can change all of the planets in some star's HZ to suit their needs), and they're expanding at below the speed of light (I assume from them using generational ships, and there's no hard scientific evidence that superluminal travel is possible), they've got plenty of growing room, and wouldn't be in a hurry to sink the resources into starting a new colony unless it was necessary. In other words: slow expansion rate.
The problem with the Fermi Paradox is that even if you assume optimistic conditions that would allow for thousands of advanced civilizations, there's still an awfully big haystack to search in if you're specifically looking for an alien civilization, and you're probably not going to be putting that much energy into it, since you'll probably be putting all that technology to other uses. The sheer resources required just to build a powerful enough radio transmitter to reach every star within a couple thousand lightyears (the minimum distance to the nearest neighbor giving these optimistic conditions) is staggering, not to mention that the civilization would have to be willing to sink maintenance costs into that sucker for a good 4,000 years before a responce could be expected.
The Unreal Engine is merely a proof-of-concept device. It will be used to lay the R&D groundwork for the much more powerful Infinite Improbability Drive.
Because this is a US election year, so there's a disproportionate amount of noise being made about (illegal) immigration.
Europe has 10.4 M sq km and 710 M people, vs. the US 9.5 M sq. km and 300 M people, so the US has less than half the number of people per square km (or whatever unit of area one choses to use). You're dead on about the US still having large amounts of space. However, if you count Europe as "west of the Ural Mountains" you have some pretty extensive plains in western Russia, and the western US is pretty damn mountainous, speaking as someone who lives within two hours' drive of several ranges in the western US.
I'm not sure that I buy this. I spent a month there visiting my wife's family last fall, and the societies I saw (mainly England and Sweden) didn't seem any less materialistic than the US. I think you might be mistaking free market, where government regulation of industry is lax, for materilistic. England and Sweden both seemed to have quite a few immigrants. (According to Wikipedia, 13.3% of Sweden's population is foreign.
I'm a bit surprised that they'd pick Errai, of all stars. It's only three billion years old, which puts it at the same age as the sun at the time that cells with nuclei first appeared: not the best candidate for decoding a radio message. On top of that, one of the two stars is a subgiant, which means its in the process of swelling into a red giant, so it's probably cooking any planets it might have that could support life.
Sorry, I just realized what you meant by that post (calling shotgun on the orbiter, not a fancy "first post"), so I'm replying to undo my "Offtopic" moderation.
While we're talking about semantics, what exactly qualifies as a "cleared neighborhood"? Wouldn't the Trojan Asteroids mean that Jupiter's orbit isn't cleared? If that does count as cleared, shouldn't the definition of "moon" then be (re-)defined to exclude Telesto and Calypso (which orbit Saturn in Tethys' Lagrange points) and Helene and Polydeuces (which orbit Saturn in Dione's Lagrange points)? What about Epimetheus and Janus, which are considered "co-orbital" and switch places every four years? It seems silly and unscientific to me to use one set of orbital characteristics for bodies orbitting the sun, and a different set for bodies orbitting a planet/dwarf planet/asteroid/whatever.
I suppose you could take the tact that the Trojan Asteroids got "swept" into their current positions in Jupiter's Lagrange points by Jupiter's gravity, thereby qualifying as being "cleared" out of an independent orbit. However, something tells me that if another Theia-like planet had formed, say in Earth's other Lagrange point, and with an orbit still stable today (only got to the size of Mercury, instead of Mars?) the proposed definition of "planet" would be a bit different, since such a body would be naked-eye visible, making it another of the "classic" planets.
Sounds a lot like Europe and the United States in the mid-to-late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution rolled into those areas. I don't think that East Asian culture is inherently more hard-working than European* culture, just that the conditions require people to over-work themselves just to get by. I personally think that Japanese work practice will start to resemble Western work practices in the next generation or two, now that their economy has reached the point that it can't sustain the exponential growth it enjoyed while rebuilding from World War II, but IANA economist.
* - United States culture is European, regardless of how much we Americans like to pretend we're unique and fundamentally different from our forebears: nothing is created from a vacuum.
That's actually the exact design philosophy behind ion thrusters.
The whole embryo thing makes that funny on so many levels.
Not to mention that the caption for the first image mentions a "penis worm".
Continental drift occurs much too slowly to have the effects indicated by the core samples in this study. Over the last 55 million years, the arctic has been about where it is now.
Probably very true, but: until about 55—40 million years ago Australia and Antarctica were joined together as the last piece of the supercontinent Gondwana (itself a piece of the former Pangea, which slowly broke up over the course of the Mesozoic). When Australia rifted off, the first Antarctic ice sheet started forming. Australia-Antarctica together had formed a longish, north-south oriented continent that deflected east-west ocean currents, forcing warm and cold water from the various latitudes to mix. (This is similar to how North America today deflects the Gulf Stream—a warm current—north, until it ends up wrapping around a little and points at Europe from the north-west, which contributes a lot of the moisture that the British Isles are so famous for.) As the two were separated, the currents were no longer deflected, and a cold current was allowed to form around Antarctica.
Of course, that means that Australia's moved as far as it has in 40—55 million years, but I vaguelly remember reading somewhere that that particular plate is a world-record holder as far as speed of drift goes.
A lot of people have tried to make this case about whether bloggers are journalists or not, but the judges have always sidestepped that. The first ruling, when the defendants tried to block the case under California's shield laws, was rejected on the grounds that revealing the existance of the Mac Mini and an audio break-out box wasn't whistleblowing, since they weren't reporting on a health risk coverup or bribery or the like, and that these items were trade secrets. The rulings since then have all been that Apple didn't do the appropriate footwork to find out for themselves who was leaking information before going to court. (Companies are supposed to make every effort to find out the source of trade secret leaks by internal means before subpoenaing people: the court system does not exist as a counter-idustrial-espianoge service for lazy companies.)
Actually, hard shelled eggs existed long before chickens came along, by a few hundred million years.
In land vertebrates—mammals, specifically—reproduction evolved in the reverse order of the scenario you outline: the distant ancestors of mammals layed hard-shelled eggs, which eventually became rubbery (as with modern, monotreme mammals like the platypus), and then became live birth early in the embryonic development followed by a long period of further development in a pouch (as in marsupials), followed by full development in the womb (as with placental mammals). For everything else descended from that first amniote (birds, turtles, crocodiles, tuataras, lizards and snakes, and many extinct groups like non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs) it's been hard-shelled eggs all along.
1985, Apple's offering is about $4000, the IBM offering is ONLY $3000... A few years later, Apple's offering remains about $3500, IBM compatibles are $2000...
I'm assuming you're talking about one of the non-US dollar currencies, as the two Mac models available in 1985 were both available for under $3000 USD ($2500 for the Mac 128K, $2800 for the Mac 512K).
For a while, the price differential was huge.
While there has always been a noticeable price difference between an entry-level Windows box and an entry-level Mac, but it's never been "huge": entry-level Macs hit the $2000 mark in 1986 with the Mac 512Ke, and $1000 in 1990 with the Classic, and continued working slowly down throuh the several-hundred-dollar range before the Mini came along.
Mossberg is no different than John Dvorac and Robert Cringely: he gets paid to make noise. At the end of the day he's a journalist and doesn't understand technology.
Not quite. Mossberg isn't a technologist, which is the point. He writes reviews that are meant to be purchasing advise for ordinary people, from an "I, like the reader, am not a geek, and here's my impression of Product ___" perspective. Dvorak and Cringley are paid to pontificate about technology, and pretend to be visionaries. Also, this article isn't about technology: it's about the differences in the business models, and the inherent advantages and disadvantages of each from the perspective of an ordinary person. This is even summed up in TFA:
His argument in the article is that the end-to-end model works better for music players because it produces devices that are really easy to use for ordinary people (which is a huge plus with something like a music player) because all the components interoperate better. The article's actually not a one-sided Apple fanboy piece, as the last paragraph shows:
There's none of the "Apple is going to just switch to Windows" nonsense that Dvorak spews, nor the "Apple is going to kick Microsoft's butt guerilla-style." of Cringley. He makes no real predictions, just indications of what may or may not happen, and indicates what he thinks is the most likely. But, it's clear from how he words it that he's aware that that's just his opinion. So, no, Mossberg isn't like Dvorak or Cringley.
"PC Magazine's Editor-in-Chief says the whole Mac/Windows dual-boot thing is really nothing to get excited about.
Duh. If/when a fully virtualized version comes out, so you don't have to reboot to get from one set of apps to the other, then it'll be something to get excited about. Of course, PC Magazine's EiC is hardly the best place to get an objective opinion about something designed to help people wean themselves from Windows.
He writes that Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X. From the article: "Once you've laid out a few kilobucks on your BC system and been frustrated a few times with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? Jobs's bet: You'll start spending more and more time in OS X, until you--too--become one of the pod people.
I'm so glad that Jim Louderback, EiC of PCMag is here to TELL US THE FREAKING OBVIOUS. Although, he doesn't get some things right: the only way you would have to spend "a few kilobucks" is if you bought a MacBook Pro, pimped it out a bit, and bought Windows. For under a grand you could buy a Mini and a copy of Windows, assuming you already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse lying around (which is the point of the Mini). Even if you had to also buy those peripherals, you could still easily keep the price under $2000 US.
It's sad to see so many of my compatriots being turned into lemmings. Perhaps they'll wake up and smell the Apple pie in the sky--and realize they've been taken for a ride. But I doubt it."
While reading TFA, I couldn't tell if the whole "only a moron would ever even consider using a Mac" tone was meant to be satirical, or if Mr. Louderback is a blindly zealous Windows user and/or Microsoft shill, or if he's just a professional troll. Then I noticed the "John C. Dvorak" link to the right of the editorial, and was reminded that this is the same magazine that continues to waste money on Dvorak's paycheck, which means Louderback is Dvorak's boss. Which answers that question: another professional troll.
Those adverts are acctually quite funny. They joke about the current situation of the Windows PCs... But how long? Vista is peeping around the corner...
Advertising campaigns aren't designed at what's around the corner, they're designed around the current state. Besides, as others have pointed out, Vista's still several months to a year away (assuming they don't slip, again), so this ad campaign could run for a reasonable length of time before getting pulled or updated when Vista comes out.
And since I am a Debian Linux user I didn't understand why they attack the PC's so directly. Mac is also a Personal Computer aka PC, no matter how they will twist or put it to their ads.
Yes, Macs are also Personal Computers, but it's not like Apple was the one that started the usage of "PC = IBM Compatible", that was the IBM PC users. I got really annoyed with my high school classmates back in the days of Mac OS 7 vs DOS arguments because they'd talk about "PC" vs "Mac", as if the Mac wasn't a personal computer. I think it might have been an outgrowth or reinforcement of the old "Macs are toys, not 'real' computers" mentality.
Mac OSX with Intel platform is a hi-security risk because PPC was a platform no virus makers where even targetting. Now they have ability to attack macs too.
As a Linux user, you should know better. Worms and viruses, despite the fact that the most sophisticated are written in assembly, target flaws in the operating system, not the CPU. If they targetted the CPU then Linux on x86 wouldn't be any more secure than Windows on x86.
No wonder that mac has a one to five known viruses right now.. when previously there where none...
Maybe I'm behind the times, but I'm not aware of any "real" viruses and worms for Mac OS X. There has been a handful of trojans released over the years (Leap-A/Oompa-A is a trojan: the user has to agree to download the file, if it were a real worm it'd do its thing without user intervention). I'm not saying there will never be a Mac virus or worm. (Are there vulnerabilities being found in Mac OS X? All the time, therefore there's the potential for software to be made to exploit those vulnerabilities.) But, the OS itself is more secure than Windows, so I think it'll be a while, and it won't ever get to the sheer number volume of infectious programs as Windows.
I foresee some petty flame wars happening in tech rags though..
That'll be different than every other day, how?