One factor in that difference between Machines and Software might be that a machine often behaves as an extension of ourselves e.g. a car or a remote vehicle. But some software tries to act independently of us, therefore it can potentially be a friend or even an enemy if it appears to interfere with our intentions. If you are in your car and bump into another car while parking then you accept that although the car did the damage it was your fault, but if the car was under the control of software then you could clearly say it wasn't your fault.
Of course not all software tries to be too smart like that. Software tools are often well loved precisely because of this I believe.
One could surmise that perhaps when writing software if you want software to be loved, make it smart but make it appear that the user is smart not the software, too much independent thought on the part of the program probably wont work. Just rambling here I guess.
OK, I'm being picky but the article refers to work on the Harappan civilisation with only tangential reference to the Sumerians. But still the 5,500 years ago figure is still good, probably applies to Sumer as well.
Not where I live in Brisbane. A government got thrown out of office because they wanted to put a bypass that would have disturbed about 20 koalas. Whenever, I've seen them everyone is interested and keen to let it be undisturbed. Mind you I think the notion by people outside Oz that they are cuddly is crazy... wild animals are not cuddly... koalas have big powerful claws and aren't afraid to use them. Leave em be.
As for Kangaroo Island. Maybe they should just introduce dingos to wipe out the excess. Yeah that would probably impact other species there, but so are the koalas. There is no 'Disney' solution to the problem.
To show how murky all this stuff is, here is a website arguing for the Tartessians to be regarded as the inspiration for the Atlantis legend based on comments by Strabo. I've mentioned the legend but it is recorded as X says "Y mentions this legend in his book" but there is no way to tell if it is only the same name applied to a different story, incidentally there was as I recall a town in Greece called Atlante or Atlantis that suffered some port damage from a tidal wave shortly before the time of Plato, sorry cant remember a reference to it. Anyway as far as the Tartessians go the fit is actually reasonably good, and it is even in the right place. Do I believe it ? Its just a suggestion there are so many all you can do is rate them and say "hmmm, clever. Maybe."
I have to say the continent bit is totally bogus, I don't accept continents sinking etc. Though there are alternatives.
I've always been fascinated by the legend, especially after reading the work trying to identify Thera (Santorini) as the origin of the legend, for a recent analysis of Thera see this transcript from the BBC..
Recently I studied up on Atlantis quite a bit trying to sort it out once and for all to my own satisfaction.
Just about every location on the face of the Earth has been nominated as a candidate for 'good' reasons. After wading through all of them and comparing them to Plato's accounts (Timeus and Critias) your head starts to spin a bit. Goddam confusing.
I looked at exactly what Plato said in his story to try and find if there was a possible consistent story, and any inconsistencies. I wont bore you with most of what I found but basically, Plato was very insistent that it was based on a true story, unusually so. However, even if we accept that it does not mean he didn't take extensive liberties even if there was an element of truth (e.g. legends of the destruction of Santorini).
Plato said a civilisation existed just beyond the Pillars of Heracles 9,000 years before Solon (about 11,600 years ago), which coincidently matches the end of the last ice age. But I've seen weirder coincidences. But it turns out the Pillars we know as the Pillars of Heracles (Hercules) were not the only ones, there were lots of them. So it could have been anywhere. And there are inconsistencies in the description of the island that translate into 'Plato made that bit it up' as far as I can see. But other bits seem, subjectively, to be not part of such reworking.
The trouble is if you start cutting out parts of the story you end with such a vague story it could refer to almost anywhere... funnily enough one of the better suggested places for Atlantis is Indonesia.. heh heh. But I still think the story was influenced by real past events then dramatised for current political and social comment. The real influences could have been Thera and a more recent city, whose name I forget, that was destroyed by tidal wave and claimed ground liquefaction. I was starting to view the whole thing as just an invention of Plato using bits of stuff known from other cultures (try reading Herodotus sometime with an eye to look for bits you could use , there is a lot of source material for such a story) but then I saw that documentary on the BBC. Unfortunately, the website doesn't have one image I saw in the doco... they showed a mural found at Akrotiri showing the form of the island before the eruption and it was in the form of a broken ring with a central island , and the main city was on the central island. Which would mean that if that is Atlantis then it has been vapourised , its gone, kaput. Interestingly this idea of access from the sea through rings of water to the central city is the way Plato describes the layout of Atlantis and the reference to hot springs etc means he thought it was volcanic. So maybe some legend did survive to Plato's time and made it into the story. As for whether such a large, relatively advanced civilisation existed as in the story, well just re-read your copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and tell me where the crops are... zip. Only in the Middle East, no such continent as Atlantis would be big enough for the genetic diversity for major crops to arise. And the grains haven't shown up all over the place... therefore no Atlantean culture.
Well I've ranted longer than I expected. Must say investigating this stuff was just sooo interesting and I came across some of the most amazing things. I guess I was most impressed by reading Herodotus, when I read it at school I skipped most of the leadup to the war, but the leadup describes just how incredible the ancient world was, amazing.
As for Cyprus. Gees gimme a break. Well I must admit that one thing that is mentioned in the legend is a metal called Orichalcum that in the s
I always thought that the main reason DOS was so popular was that it was easy to do low level stuff but it was missing so much useful stuff.. so much it was crying out for the user to add his own stuff if he knew any programming, it was after all a kind of underachiever OS. This meant that since it was trivial to pirate, it ended up producing a lot of demand for amateur programmers to jump in and do their bit. True, compilers were not cheap, though turbo pascal was easy to swipe, but you could program things in MS Basic and then later Qbasic or get a free assembler (for the brave). There were ways of writing your app, and there was a pressing need. And no complicated GUI to interface to.
When windows came along the GUI got horribly complicated and you needed a real compiler (pre VB). But there were no alternatives. When you compare the range of free tools available on a standard linux distro it is totally astounding. I've lost track of the number of languages that are available much less through Freshmeat etc. And the code being available means that the newbie can look at the code see how something is done modify it see the effect and tweak it and play with it... this starts to become fun. No wonder Linux is popular. Still MS stuff pays bills, nuff said.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Though what you describe is essentially IBM's strategy.
Is it too late for Sun ? I think so, they seem way too inflexible to save themselves at the moment. They need to leverage the open source community as you suggest and also open up Java for the same reason (Java on Linux is a potent combo... on Sun hardware even better), or else adopt.NET... which I don't seem happening this side of hell freezing over.
I saw this movie first as a video because I wanted something that didn't make me have to think. I was on a very demanding contract away from home. Friends had said "Its just a superficial feel good movie". Geesus! What I got was a movie that sucked the audience into an obviously Nazi world as a Nazi supporter would feel. I found it absolutely creepy that intelligent people I knew didn't see it for what it was. On the other hand, it didn't resemble the original at all.
Vindication of James Lovelock ?
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
James Lovelock was the guy who invented the current notion of 'Gaia'. Whether you agree or disagree with that idea I think you'll find the origin of it interesting. He was hired by JPL to devise ways of finding life on Mars. So he asked the question: How could we tell there is life on Earth ? And being a chemist he concluded the atmosphere is a dead giveaway. The oxygen in the air indicates life, so with a powerful telescope (he actually wanted to build a 1,000 inch scope to find life on the planets via atmosphere chemistry) you could find if life existed. His argument was not to look just for oxygen but to find if the atmosphere was far from chemical equilibrium... that would be the telltale sign. Needless to say NASA was not impressed with the idea that they didn't really need to go to Mars to tell if life was there.
As another poster has said, sometimes LeGuin pushes a message just too hard. I liked "Left Hand of Darkness" very much indeed, and liked most of her stories. Whereas, I just couldn't finish "The Disposessed" even with 3 tries... ugh, how did that ever win an award ?
I thought it was a misprint in the article, so I went to Nature news. Sure enough at perihelion it is 13 billion km from the Sun an at aphelion it is 130 billion km. Wow, usually you only see orbits that eccentric with comets. Which makes it seem more like a captured object rather than one that formed in orbit. Wonder white kind of perturbing influence it has on comets in the Kuiper Belt, admittedly its small and in a very big volume... still...
Though... choline is a normal dietary component whereas ephedra, melatonin and shark cartilage aren't typical of most balanced diets. Granted people will, as a matter of principle, over do it.
As for 'too soon'. The current prediction for the peak is 2004. However, I believe oil production has been dropping slightly each year since 2000, but that might just be random crap. The thing is when it (production level) starts to drop the price of oil must necessarily rise fairly quickly (since you have rising demand coupled with decreasing supply) and even it if just stays level the price will rise because of increasing population and demand from booming countries like China. And the US would have higher demand if it wasn't for the current recession.
Here's what Cheney said in 2001, found here (I find this quote just totally surreal):
"The uh, I think basically that now, that peaking of oil will never be accurately predicted until after the fact. But the event will occur, and my analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, the unforeseen consequences are devastating.
But unfortunately the world has no Plan B if I'm right. The facts are too serious to ignore. Sadly the pessimist-optimist debate started too late. The Club of Rome humanists were right to raise the 'Limits to Growth' issues in the late 1960's. When they raised these issues they were actually talking about a time frame of 2050 to 2070. Then time was on the side of preparing Plan B. They like Dr. Hubbert got to be seen as Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf... "
Anyway, if the price of oil rises it feeds into every item in the economy. Its as if the interest rates were being continually jacked up. A sure fire way to slow an economy.
I kind of hoped that with all the advances in solar cells etc we would be soon moving to some kind of manufacturing of artificial fuels or replacements such as oil from coal, but really I must have been deluding myself. How long does it take to retool the world economy for this ? Measured in decades and the cost really requires cheap oil (that is it has to be done while oil is still cheap so the infrastructure is affordable). It has to be mandated by governments since oil companies wont see this as economical until the oil price dictates it... which would be too late for the lead times concerned.
Guess what I'm really saying is you haven't calmed my worries.:(
I don't mind a little bit of doom and gloom now and then... as long as its way off and unlikely. Can be entertaining and makes you forget about your current problems. But I've been reading up stuff lately on Hubbert's Peak, and I gotta say I'm praying its just a tinfoil job cos its scaring the crap out of me.
I came across the Hubbert's Peak a few years ago when I read a book review in American Scientist, but the implications didn't really sink in. Then recently I followed some google links. F*ck me. Just google for "Hubbert's Peak" or "peak oil". Basically, its based on analysis of the remaining cheap oil available to civilisation. Emphasis on cheap oil. Yeah yeah theres heaps of oil in the ground but if its 5 times more expensive then its no good cause the economies of the world will collapse. Here's the scary bit: according to predictions (by geologists) in the next few years (or by 2010) world production of oil will start to drop... and never recover, and the price will just go up and up. End of civilisation... yadda yadda. And no time to create alternatives. Funny thing is when you hear people like Dick Cheney saying the Club of Rome was correct, strange days.
Fortunately, on slashdot I can be sure that the majority wont believe this so I am looking forward to basking in some ignorance. I feel like I need it.
Is this the first tech info virus ? Follow instructions to destroy your own HD. Seems like just putting a hammer through it would be easier, but it would probably work with the clueless. Hmmm, yeah not a bad idea I guess in a very twisted way.
Only kills when 28 users are vulnerable. Soon to be featured in the documentary "When Software Attacks".
Come on/. editors, you've got to try harder this has to be the lamest headline ever. Of course software can kill, its just another failure mode for hardware.
No offense, but your post sounds just like the principle of peaceful coexistence that was espoused as a solution to the Cold War (can't remember which side pushed it). But it just meant the war didn't get hot, well not globally just in local spots.
MS vs Linux has some aspects of a Cold War in that at the moment it seems like it will be a long drawn out standoff between two different world views. Neither view is, I think, totally correct. Ideally, one would expect that Linux, Windows and OS X will coexist, each with significant market share, sniping at each other until one day something will come from nowhere like a Mongol invasion sweeping all before it.
Of course, if you added up all the opinions on this topic all you'd have is just a lot of wasted electrons... probably including this post.
Signature means nothing. It has to be PASSED into law by the Parliament / Senate (or whatever in the US). The Labor Party needs to be made aware what the DMCA implies and the Greens and the Democrats (if they can hold a rational thought for more than 30 seconds these days)... that will give a Senate majority to reject it. The parties are merely talking about the value in monetary terms at the moment (even there it doesn't look too good) and need to consider deeper issues. Did I say that ? Politicians considering deeper issues ? I must be nuts.
I may be wrong of course, but I mean if we're talking about Mars we've got an atmosphere of only 1% Earth pressure (and I am guessing, similar density). Seems if you are going to blow a balloon about on Mars its got to be carrying a very small instrument payload. And a payload that can send back something meaningful while its being tumbled about and has I guess comms problems with an orbiter seems a bit fanciful.
OK its a wild suggestion but perhaps the 'beads' are in fact small stromatolites. Hmm. Some of the beads are split so it shouldn't be too hard to get a very good close up image to see if this is the case, stromatolites have very distinct internal structures.
Agreed. Although, what usually happens is someone has this nasty experience early on in the piece and then tells all their friends who tell their friends, by email these days as well. Pretty soon the product in question is dying due to 'word of mouth'.
Slashdot Mirror
One factor in that difference between Machines and Software might be that a machine often behaves as an extension of ourselves e.g. a car or a remote vehicle. But some software tries to act independently of us, therefore it can potentially be a friend or even an enemy if it appears to interfere with our intentions. If you are in your car and bump into another car while parking then you accept that although the car did the damage it was your fault, but if the car was under the control of software then you could clearly say it wasn't your fault.
Of course not all software tries to be too smart like that. Software tools are often well loved precisely because of this I believe.
One could surmise that perhaps when writing software if you want software to be loved, make it smart but make it appear that the user is smart not the software, too much independent thought on the part of the program probably wont work. Just rambling here I guess.
OK, I'm being picky but the article refers to work on the Harappan civilisation with only tangential reference to the Sumerians. But still the 5,500 years ago figure is still good, probably applies to Sumer as well.
Most Australians do not like Koalas much
Not where I live in Brisbane. A government got thrown out of office because they wanted to put a bypass that would have disturbed about 20 koalas. Whenever, I've seen them everyone is interested and keen to let it be undisturbed. Mind you I think the notion by people outside Oz that they are cuddly is crazy ... wild animals are not cuddly ... koalas have big powerful claws and aren't afraid to use them. Leave em be.
As for Kangaroo Island. Maybe they should just introduce dingos to wipe out the excess. Yeah that would probably impact other species there, but so are the koalas. There is no 'Disney' solution to the problem.
Some of these things (like the interface) are not impossibly hard to fix.
Especially given that people have been complaining about the interface for so long. Do the Gimp people listen at all ?
To show how murky all this stuff is, here is a website arguing for the Tartessians to be regarded as the inspiration for the Atlantis legend based on comments by Strabo. I've mentioned the legend but it is recorded as X says "Y mentions this legend in his book" but there is no way to tell if it is only the same name applied to a different story, incidentally there was as I recall a town in Greece called Atlante or Atlantis that suffered some port damage from a tidal wave shortly before the time of Plato, sorry cant remember a reference to it. Anyway as far as the Tartessians go the fit is actually reasonably good, and it is even in the right place. Do I believe it ? Its just a suggestion there are so many all you can do is rate them and say "hmmm, clever. Maybe."
I have to say the continent bit is totally bogus, I don't accept continents sinking etc. Though there are alternatives.
I've always been fascinated by the legend, especially after reading the work trying to identify Thera (Santorini) as the origin of the legend, for a recent analysis of Thera see this transcript from the BBC..
Recently I studied up on Atlantis quite a bit trying to sort it out once and for all to my own satisfaction.
Just about every location on the face of the Earth has been nominated as a candidate for 'good' reasons. After wading through all of them and comparing them to Plato's accounts (Timeus and Critias) your head starts to spin a bit. Goddam confusing.
I looked at exactly what Plato said in his story to try and find if there was a possible consistent story, and any inconsistencies. I wont bore you with most of what I found but basically, Plato was very insistent that it was based on a true story, unusually so. However, even if we accept that it does not mean he didn't take extensive liberties even if there was an element of truth (e.g. legends of the destruction of Santorini).
Plato said a civilisation existed just beyond the Pillars of Heracles 9,000 years before Solon (about 11,600 years ago), which coincidently matches the end of the last ice age. But I've seen weirder coincidences. But it turns out the Pillars we know as the Pillars of Heracles (Hercules) were not the only ones, there were lots of them. So it could have been anywhere. And there are inconsistencies in the description of the island that translate into 'Plato made that bit it up' as far as I can see. But other bits seem, subjectively, to be not part of such reworking.
The trouble is if you start cutting out parts of the story you end with such a vague story it could refer to almost anywhere ... funnily enough one of the better suggested places for Atlantis is Indonesia .. heh heh. But I still think the story was influenced by real past events then dramatised for current political and social comment. The real influences could have been Thera and a more recent city, whose name I forget, that was destroyed by tidal wave and claimed ground liquefaction. I was starting to view the whole thing as just an invention of Plato using bits of stuff known from other cultures (try reading Herodotus sometime with an eye to look for bits you could use , there is a lot of source material for such a story) but then I saw that documentary on the BBC. Unfortunately, the website doesn't have one image I saw in the doco ... they showed a mural found at Akrotiri showing the form of the island before the eruption and it was in the form of a broken ring with a central island , and the main city was on the central island. Which would mean that if that is Atlantis then it has been vapourised , its gone, kaput. Interestingly this idea of access from the sea through rings of water to the central city is the way Plato describes the layout of Atlantis and the reference to hot springs etc means he thought it was volcanic. So maybe some legend did survive to Plato's time and made it into the story. As for whether such a large, relatively advanced civilisation existed as in the story, well just re-read your copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and tell me where the crops are ... zip. Only in the Middle East, no such continent as Atlantis would be big enough for the genetic diversity for major crops to arise. And the grains haven't shown up all over the place ... therefore no Atlantean culture.
Well I've ranted longer than I expected. Must say investigating this stuff was just sooo interesting and I came across some of the most amazing things. I guess I was most impressed by reading Herodotus, when I read it at school I skipped most of the leadup to the war, but the leadup describes just how incredible the ancient world was, amazing.
As for Cyprus. Gees gimme a break. Well I must admit that one thing that is mentioned in the legend is a metal called Orichalcum that in the s
... was
OK, so I'm posting a ref to Snow Crash on /. ... so yeah I'm a karma whore.
I always thought that the main reason DOS was so popular was that it was easy to do low level stuff but it was missing so much useful stuff .. so much it was crying out for the user to add his own stuff if he knew any programming, it was after all a kind of underachiever OS. This meant that since it was trivial to pirate, it ended up producing a lot of demand for amateur programmers to jump in and do their bit. True, compilers were not cheap, though turbo pascal was easy to swipe, but you could program things in MS Basic and then later Qbasic or get a free assembler (for the brave). There were ways of writing your app, and there was a pressing need. And no complicated GUI to interface to.
When windows came along the GUI got horribly complicated and you needed a real compiler (pre VB). But there were no alternatives. When you compare the range of free tools available on a standard linux distro it is totally astounding. I've lost track of the number of languages that are available much less through Freshmeat etc. And the code being available means that the newbie can look at the code see how something is done modify it see the effect and tweak it and play with it ... this starts to become fun. No wonder Linux is popular. Still MS stuff pays bills, nuff said.
Nothing like inside information to set all the wild theorising in slashdot to rest. Oh yeah. Slashdot. Sorry, continue the wild speculations!
I think you hit the nail on the head. Though what you describe is essentially IBM's strategy.
Is it too late for Sun ? I think so, they seem way too inflexible to save themselves at the moment. They need to leverage the open source community as you suggest and also open up Java for the same reason (Java on Linux is a potent combo ... on Sun hardware even better), or else adopt .NET ... which I don't seem happening this side of hell freezing over.
I saw this movie first as a video because I wanted something that didn't make me have to think. I was on a very demanding contract away from home. Friends had said "Its just a superficial feel good movie". Geesus! What I got was a movie that sucked the audience into an obviously Nazi world as a Nazi supporter would feel. I found it absolutely creepy that intelligent people I knew didn't see it for what it was. On the other hand, it didn't resemble the original at all.
James Lovelock was the guy who invented the current notion of 'Gaia'. Whether you agree or disagree with that idea I think you'll find the origin of it interesting. He was hired by JPL to devise ways of finding life on Mars. So he asked the question: How could we tell there is life on Earth ? And being a chemist he concluded the atmosphere is a dead giveaway. The oxygen in the air indicates life, so with a powerful telescope (he actually wanted to build a 1,000 inch scope to find life on the planets via atmosphere chemistry) you could find if life existed. His argument was not to look just for oxygen but to find if the atmosphere was far from chemical equilibrium ... that would be the telltale sign. Needless to say NASA was not impressed with the idea that they didn't really need to go to Mars to tell if life was there.
Here is one link. Doubtless there are others.
And I was thinking that in the spirit of Firebird and Firefox I'd rename it to Flamebait.
As another poster has said, sometimes LeGuin pushes a message just too hard. I liked "Left Hand of Darkness" very much indeed, and liked most of her stories. Whereas, I just couldn't finish "The Disposessed" even with 3 tries ... ugh, how did that ever win an award ?
I thought it was a misprint in the article, so I went to Nature news. Sure enough at perihelion it is 13 billion km from the Sun an at aphelion it is 130 billion km. Wow, usually you only see orbits that eccentric with comets. Which makes it seem more like a captured object rather than one that formed in orbit. Wonder white kind of perturbing influence it has on comets in the Kuiper Belt, admittedly its small and in a very big volume ... still ...
Though ... choline is a normal dietary component whereas ephedra, melatonin and shark cartilage aren't typical of most balanced diets. Granted people will, as a matter of principle, over do it.
As for 'too soon'. The current prediction for the peak is 2004. However, I believe oil production has been dropping slightly each year since 2000, but that might just be random crap. The thing is when it (production level) starts to drop the price of oil must necessarily rise fairly quickly (since you have rising demand coupled with decreasing supply) and even it if just stays level the price will rise because of increasing population and demand from booming countries like China. And the US would have higher demand if it wasn't for the current recession.
Here's what Cheney said in 2001, found here (I find this quote just totally surreal):
Anyway, if the price of oil rises it feeds into every item in the economy. Its as if the interest rates were being continually jacked up. A sure fire way to slow an economy.
I kind of hoped that with all the advances in solar cells etc we would be soon moving to some kind of manufacturing of artificial fuels or replacements such as oil from coal, but really I must have been deluding myself. How long does it take to retool the world economy for this ? Measured in decades and the cost really requires cheap oil (that is it has to be done while oil is still cheap so the infrastructure is affordable). It has to be mandated by governments since oil companies wont see this as economical until the oil price dictates it ... which would be too late for the lead times concerned.
Guess what I'm really saying is you haven't calmed my worries. :(
I don't mind a little bit of doom and gloom now and then ... as long as its way off and unlikely. Can be entertaining and makes you forget about your current problems. But I've been reading up stuff lately on Hubbert's Peak, and I gotta say I'm praying its just a tinfoil job cos its scaring the crap out of me.
I came across the Hubbert's Peak a few years ago when I read a book review in American Scientist, but the implications didn't really sink in. Then recently I followed some google links. F*ck me. Just google for "Hubbert's Peak" or "peak oil". Basically, its based on analysis of the remaining cheap oil available to civilisation. Emphasis on cheap oil. Yeah yeah theres heaps of oil in the ground but if its 5 times more expensive then its no good cause the economies of the world will collapse. Here's the scary bit: according to predictions (by geologists) in the next few years (or by 2010) world production of oil will start to drop ... and never recover, and the price will just go up and up. End of civilisation ... yadda yadda. And no time to create alternatives. Funny thing is when you hear people like Dick Cheney saying the Club of Rome was correct, strange days.
Fortunately, on slashdot I can be sure that the majority wont believe this so I am looking forward to basking in some ignorance. I feel like I need it.
Dammit where's that tin foil hat ?
Is this the first tech info virus ? Follow instructions to destroy your own HD. Seems like just putting a hammer through it would be easier, but it would probably work with the clueless. Hmmm, yeah not a bad idea I guess in a very twisted way.
Only kills when 28 users are vulnerable. Soon to be featured in the documentary "When Software Attacks".
Come on /. editors, you've got to try harder this has to be the lamest headline ever. Of course software can kill, its just another failure mode for hardware.
No offense, but your post sounds just like the principle of peaceful coexistence that was espoused as a solution to the Cold War (can't remember which side pushed it). But it just meant the war didn't get hot, well not globally just in local spots.
MS vs Linux has some aspects of a Cold War in that at the moment it seems like it will be a long drawn out standoff between two different world views. Neither view is, I think, totally correct. Ideally, one would expect that Linux, Windows and OS X will coexist, each with significant market share, sniping at each other until one day something will come from nowhere like a Mongol invasion sweeping all before it.
Of course, if you added up all the opinions on this topic all you'd have is just a lot of wasted electrons ... probably including this post.
Signature means nothing. It has to be PASSED into law by the Parliament / Senate (or whatever in the US). The Labor Party needs to be made aware what the DMCA implies and the Greens and the Democrats (if they can hold a rational thought for more than 30 seconds these days) ... that will give a Senate majority to reject it. The parties are merely talking about the value in monetary terms at the moment (even there it doesn't look too good) and need to consider deeper issues. Did I say that ? Politicians considering deeper issues ? I must be nuts.
I may be wrong of course, but I mean if we're talking about Mars we've got an atmosphere of only 1% Earth pressure (and I am guessing, similar density). Seems if you are going to blow a balloon about on Mars its got to be carrying a very small instrument payload. And a payload that can send back something meaningful while its being tumbled about and has I guess comms problems with an orbiter seems a bit fanciful.
OK its a wild suggestion but perhaps the 'beads' are in fact small stromatolites. Hmm. Some of the beads are split so it shouldn't be too hard to get a very good close up image to see if this is the case, stromatolites have very distinct internal structures.
Agreed. Although, what usually happens is someone has this nasty experience early on in the piece and then tells all their friends who tell their friends, by email these days as well. Pretty soon the product in question is dying due to 'word of mouth'.
Eh. But then I'm an optimist.