A tablet that's just like the iPad but better seems unlikely for now. Better in every way and a lower price? That does happen sometimes in the tech world - but more likely competitors will prosper with a different form factor, or with different input methods, or focus on a killer app.
The Playbook is a nice litte device and is differently shaped to the iPad - no reason it can't coexist. People ought to resist the temptation to cheer on Apple like a favourite team, and be glad of variety instead.
You seem to be under the impression that the H2G2 site is the work of Douglas Adams or a site about his work.
Instead it is a big community-wiki sort of thing inspired by the eponymous Guide itself, about Life, the Universe and Everything.
It's not really clear that shipping the server to Adams' family would achieve anything. In a sense the H2G2 site belongs to its many contributors, who presumably will be happy with it being sold off so long as their site stays live and their community can persist.
Please note, the hydrogen seedstock is the alternative to taking a hundred tonnes of rocket fuel to fuel the whole trip back (and hence having a vastly bigger ship out, hence having to assemble the ship piecewise in orbit instead of launching it from Earth. Sooo many more problems). Landing hydrogen on Mars is really not the sticking point with this plan.
In 1996 Robert Zubrin and others proposed a $55 billion programme for a series of Mars missions, Mars Direct. You can read about it in a very interesting book called 'The Case for Mars'.
The key points of the mission were
staying on Mars for 6 months between launch windows rather than a few days (digging in for radiation protection).
taking a seed stock of 12 tonnes of hydrogen and using a series of chemical reactions with various elements found on Mars to produce rocket fuel for the way back.
sending repeat missions including an initial unmanned mission, so that each mission makes the return fuel for the next one, giving a margin of safety. There would be multiple missions and a colony established.
This still seems to me to be the most sensible and effective way to put people on Mars. Preliminary back-and-forth trips to the moon not needed. Establishes a genuine human presence instead of just planting a flag. And at a cost which in the light of numbers being thrown around during the financial crisis which looks like a bargain.
A prediction: there will be some settlement, where the "victims" can claim $10 in coupons for discounted games, but the lawyers will make a few hundred thousand or a million.
That's a shame, but it's about the only way we have to hit Sony in the pocket for their bizarre anti-customer actions.
Instead of moderating, I'd like to ask you politely to stop using the term 'intellectual property', unless you genuinely need a quick way to refer to all three of copyrights, trademarks and patents in one go.
Enough confusion abounds already without mixing together the different rights and obligations of three different legal rights.
In this case, some included trademarks might arguably need defending, but the same doesn't apply to copyrights. (With patents, I understand there is the issue of 'sleeping on your rights', laches, but that's another matter).
One of the main problems (I'm sure there's more) is that unless your "vehicle" is huge, then making it spin causes both a "gravity gradient (gravity on your head will be smaller than on your feet) and strong Coriolis forces (people and objects cannot follow a straight line).
Sure, you wouldn't want your tiny space station spinning around at a huge rate to create 1G at the circumference.
But it's easier for spacecraft, and we're not talking Babylon 5's gigantic ships with rotating segments either. You can use a counterweight on a tether, creating a much larger orbit, to reduce these effects.
For example, Robert Zubrin'sMars Direct plan, the plan to establish multiple Mars visits using currently-available rocketry, suggested retaining part of the final rocket stage to use as a counterweight. The manned module would spin about the combined centre of gravity for the months-long journey to Mars, then the counterweight would be discarded.
Using a tether has problems of its own, but it might be a good solution if we're to go out and explore the solar system without radical new methods of propulsion.
The Slashdot summary of this story is spectacularly bad, particularly the 'should have ended over 500 years ago'.
Five hundred years is completely negligible on an evolutionary timescale. If trees - TREES - you know, big woody things that grow really slowly - had evolved significant changes in that time it would be headline news.
The research that led to this story wasn't remotely aimed at calling evolution into question, quite the contrary. Scientists are interested in the causes of the changes that these trees go during their lifetimes - and they have shown that these metamorphoses are probably due to the moa bird. Which is quite interesting, if probably not Slashdot-worthy.
The PS2 is graphically less capable than a GameCube. Any developer who is lazy enough to only dress up a PS2 game (considering the Xbox360 and the Wii both use DVDs - alleviating any storage space considerations) is not using the console to anywhere near it's full potential.
You're almost certainly right - but I put it to you that developers don't always exploit consoles' full potential. Take some multi-platform franchise, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, maybe the Wall-E game or something like that, and you'll see a divide between the PS3 and 360 versions and those for the Wii and PS2. Perhaps we should forget this, after all any mediocre developer can make an ugly game, but it does contribute to the general impression. Gamecube ports don't help either, I enjoyed Zelda: Twilight Princess but it didn't wow me graphically.
Look, I love my Wii, but I watch Playr on Sunday mornings and the best Wii games don't look as good as the beautiful next-gen and PC games that are coming out. Wii graphics at the moment look a lot like the graphics of the later, and best-looking PS2 games. I'm talking about a console that has been around for donkeys' years, with software houses releasing their third or fourth title for the machine - all the tricks are known.
Now, the PS2 has a DVD drive as well. The issue isn't so much storage, so much as technical limitations to the numbers of textures and polygons that can be drawn on the screen, the amount of computation available to be devoted to nice lighting algorithms, physics simulation and so forth. Power will show in the end - I dare say the Wii games coming out in two years' time will look great and make my assertions about comparability with the PS2 look ridiculous.
Still, to get back on-topic, the PS2 is 'good enough', and has some games that really deserve to be played. I'm not surprised people are still using them.
I'm not really surprised - the PS2 has a huge software library, plus most owners have several peripherals that still prove useful. This weekend I played some Singstar and Guitar Hero III with friends, and I'd be more likely to buy more PS2 games that use the guitar and mikes, than to buy new peripherals (extra functionality and downloadable content notwithstanding).
In fact the Singstar game we played was a brand-new copy of the recently-released Singstar ABBA, and everyone loved it.
You can pick up used PS2 games for a pittance. I remember chatting to a store assistant in a games store, saying he was still always seeing parents come in and picking up PS2s with a bunch of games for the holidays. Console and a load of games well under 100 UK pounds, for which you can't really get another console (perhaps a DS or PSP with one game).
They're still releasing new games for the PS2, a pretty clear indication that it's still alive. No-one sane would advocate playing a cut-down and graphically poor PS2 Force Unleashed, but it's clearly still economically viable to release it. Though some would say the same for the Wii version. And, I don't want to arouse any fanboy ire, but I have a sneaking suspicion that similarities in graphical capabilities between the Wii and PS2 might help the economics of releasing a PS2 port... Anyway, there are a ton of PS2 games that are well worth playing - a brilliant last-generation game beats a mediocre current-gen one.
Everyone commenting on gaming stories should disclose their console preferences to discourage fanboy-ism. My TV is currently hooked up to a Wii, a PS2 and a Sega Master System.
If there was a trade, then by definition the stock was worth precisely the value at which it was traded.
While that is in many cases a vital truth, it becomes a pointless truism when one party is poorly-informed.
A handful of beans aren't worth as much as a cow just because you manage to persuade one hick that they're 'magic' beans. And an instantaneous stock-market price would only really mark the consensus agreement on the worth of a stock if markets were perfectly efficient.
P/E of 31.77 is not outrageous in the tech industry, but it would be in other market sectors.
The reason investors accept high P/E (and no dividends) in tech is the possibility of enormous growth. If a company ends up with limited potential for growth, it would then be over-valued.
I'm not sure the game's quite up for Google though.
What is so fulfilling to you about performing your correspondence out in public over one of the many, more private and less exploited methods?
A service that (almost) everyone uses is highly useful. My old friends have got on with their lives - changed phone numbers, moved abroad, stopped using old e-mail addresses. Facebook is a convenient way to stay in touch with the friend who's teaching English in Japan; for locating an old friend, it's an alternative to calling their parents; if you attend some kind of (family, social, or sporting) event and take photos, it's a way to make photos available to everyone who was there without actively sending them out.
One thing often overlooked by the slashdot crowd is, it's especially good for the relatively non-technical. People who aren't in the same (or any) IRC channels, people who don't have a blog for you to drop comments on, people who've changed their pay-as-you-go phone number three times, neglected to update their alumni forwarding address from university. You can find them online, by their real names, and communicate. (I don't know quite what you mean by "out in public" - I suppose the sysadmins have access to everything (like they do everywhere!) but there are facilities for messages between users to be private or public).
As I noted previously, I have some serious privacy concerns with Facebook, and I wish they'd just stop adding terrible features. I hope the site owners don't step over the brink and abuse their membership. But I think the original service was a great idea.
Of course it also amazes me how popular these social networking sites are with adults. It's understandable that kids and teenagers want to climb a social ladder of sorts, since it is human nature to attempt to achieve more than your peers, and there is little available in the environments we provide to kids other than social hierarchy to climb... But when you grow up, generally people move on to trying to get ahead in other types of accomplishments. It seems things like MySpace and Facebook have extended High School into adulthood.
Where are you getting this crap?
Facebook is a convenient way to stay in touch with people. Almost everyone there goes by their real name, and most people put actual true and useful information on their profiles (with controls over who sees it). There's negligible spam, scams and drama, and it has a useful photo app. I guess you don't use it, and think everyone on it is just trying to get a large number of "friends".
Well, Facebook was every good, though its owners seem to be doing everything they can to destroy it. I think the problem is, despite their keen user base (some large proportion of which check Facebook every day) and young-and-affluent demographics, they haven't found a way to turn all the hits into money. Selling a few ads and $1 'gifts' isn't going to pay their hardware and hosting costs. So they're selling out, biit by bit.
The situation is now no better than if they had sold out for millions a year or two ago.
How do they indicate successful termination of their C programs?
The EXIT_SUCCESS macro was placed in <stdlib.h> after lobbying from the largest Piraha software companies.
The C Standard Committee have denied that this is further evidence of corruption within ISO, but claim that this was a suitable compromise to avoid being shot with "many" arrows.
A basic familiarity with C syntax and simple code examples.
(In general, the beard-and-suspenders set's insistence upon K&R specifically as an introductory programming text does students a disservice. It's a beloved historical artifact, but it's hardly the best current text for new programmers to start with. I doubt if K&R themselves would argue otherwise.)
If you think K&R only exposes you to simple code examples, you haven't really read it.
It's beloved because of its thoroughness despite its brevity, and the excellent exercises. I would venture to say that anyone who had worked through and thought all the exercises in K&R would be thoroughly versed in C and ready to take on fairly advanced projects without the language being a hindrance.
There are modern texts which provide a better introduction to programming in general, and of course most beginners nowadays will be exposed to OO languages, but some of the classic books are great at teaching you to write short, self-contained programs that do exactly what they should and handle errors in the correct fashion.
Do you honestly think that if Windows were to vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow all these virus authors and botnet operators would suddenly throw their hands up and say "oh well, guess we'll have to find something else to do?"
Well done, you've managed to switch the argument from the factual to the hypothetical.
This is the standard debate tactic in this situation. Get everyone tangled in debating the possibility of potential but non-existant Mac and Linux malware, judging its likelihood against factual and vastly damaging Windows viruses, worms and botnets.
Just acquit Microsoft of all culpability for poor and short-sighted decisions, incurring costs in the billions, for millions of users, by saying, "eh, it was inevitable."
Re:Any Aerodynamics Testing?
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 1
It appears that the suits are just trading vertical speed for horizontal speed.
That's fine, in principle. You can always convert your horizontal speed to (positive) vertical speed in time for landing. The same way hang gliders and paragliders flare on landing.
The rest of your post is correct, of course, you simply won't get enough lift from the area of your body. But bear in mind that parachutists already tolerate a much greater rate of descent than (soaring) paraglider pilots - after all, they're there for the falling, not the gliding. With advanced design and lightweight materials, it might be possible to create a body suit that unfurls to give some kind of non-lethal descent to the ground (and would be a LOT of fun to fly).
If you consider the lift that, say, kitesurfers get, it seems possible that someone might be able to achieve the up, up and away Junior Birdman effect with something only slightly larger than the human armspan.
Sounds fishy to me. As established in many places and times, the poor compensate for infant mortality be fecundity and as things get a little better, they outnumber the rich. I'd need more proof of solid numbers that the absolute numbers of children born to poor is less than the number of children born to the not-poor.
This type of response is all too common - refuting statistics by anecdote. The article cites Dr Clark's work in which he uses various means to conclude that the richer had more surviving children than the poor. Saying "I'd need more proof of solid numbers" just isn't good enough - you need to either hit the source and refute Dr Clark's methods, or produce some contrary statistics from another source.
This saddens me. I'm convinced that this is essentially because Thunderbird is not the cash cow that Firefox is, and the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation have lost interest.
Firefox is cool, and exciting - and it generates millions of dollars in kickbacks from Google from the default search bar. Thunderbid enjoys no such advantage. What's more, there are several good alternatives to Thunderbird, and a smaller development community. I can't help thinking this mainly comes down to politics within Mozilla, despite things such as this quote, from one of Baker's comments to her own article:
I do not believe that hiring more people will solve the Thunderbird issues. Assume an additional 5 (or 10, or 100) people to work on Thunderbird. Is that enough to compete with other players for a consumer based product? No. Firefox is succeeding because of a massive community of people who build the product and drive adoption.
Thunderbird does not have this community. It never has. We can speculate on the reasons. But whatever the reason, Thunderbird does not have the community development that has driven other projects. I do not see Thunderbird changing. And I do not see Thunderbird developing further within the current structure without such a change. I do not see Mozilla hiring enough people to make up for this difference.
Mitchell
Sure, there is a smaller community. But I put it to you that that is because e-mail is a mature application. E-mail clients are all much alike, and most of their functionality is pretty much giving you the properties of e-mail as described in the RFC's. But it doesn't have to be that way!
Nowadays a majority of people use webmail rather than a standard mail client. Obviously webmail is perfect for when roaming about, but surely a local client can have enough useful functionality to entice people to use it on their usual own machine. With tight integration with popular webmail services, lots of improved searching and display functionality, new ideas for spam-prevention and better extensions, Thunderbird could be a proud member of the Mozilla stable of programs. Thunderbird: reclaim your e-mail.
Instead, it's going to be passed about, lose Mozilla's powerful support, and become just another e-mail program. Maybe Evolution will become the mail-client of the future instead.
Unfortunately, some of the files I need to work on come out in unreadable purple-on-black under vim, so when I "view" them to open them read-only they become unreadable-only. B-(
That seems a... slightly odd reason to use vi instead. Vim is probably just set in light-background mode.
Type:set background=dark, or better yet, add set background=dark
to your ~/.vimrc
(That's also the place you would put syntax off if you really didn't want syntax highlighting. But vim's syntax highlighting (of just about everything, including some surprising formats) is a great feature IMO).
I have removed the download i was offering before, since i am working on a new stable version which i will post shortly... and you have a very great attitude:P
Hey, the guy took a cheap shot at you, but you were wide open to it by not having any files available to download.
By the way, good luck with your project, but you *may* wish to consider the benefits of the 'release early, release often' philosophy. Once you have a working version, get it online so interested folks can hack on it - there are lots of hardly-started-then-abandoned projects out there, you don't want to be ignored as one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
A tablet that's just like the iPad but better seems unlikely for now. Better in every way and a lower price? That does happen sometimes in the tech world - but more likely competitors will prosper with a different form factor, or with different input methods, or focus on a killer app.
The Playbook is a nice litte device and is differently shaped to the iPad - no reason it can't coexist. People ought to resist the temptation to cheer on Apple like a favourite team, and be glad of variety instead.
Then... where do you think the used games come from?
You seem to be under the impression that the H2G2 site is the work of Douglas Adams or a site about his work.
Instead it is a big community-wiki sort of thing inspired by the eponymous Guide itself, about Life, the Universe and Everything.
It's not really clear that shipping the server to Adams' family would achieve anything. In a sense the H2G2 site belongs to its many contributors, who presumably will be happy with it being sold off so long as their site stays live and their community can persist.
Please note, the hydrogen seedstock is the alternative to taking a hundred tonnes of rocket fuel to fuel the whole trip back (and hence having a vastly bigger ship out, hence having to assemble the ship piecewise in orbit instead of launching it from Earth. Sooo many more problems). Landing hydrogen on Mars is really not the sticking point with this plan.
The key points of the mission were
This still seems to me to be the most sensible and effective way to put people on Mars. Preliminary back-and-forth trips to the moon not needed. Establishes a genuine human presence instead of just planting a flag. And at a cost which in the light of numbers being thrown around during the financial crisis which looks like a bargain.
That's a shame, but it's about the only way we have to hit Sony in the pocket for their bizarre anti-customer actions.
Instead of moderating, I'd like to ask you politely to stop using the term 'intellectual property', unless you genuinely need a quick way to refer to all three of copyrights, trademarks and patents in one go.
Enough confusion abounds already without mixing together the different rights and obligations of three different legal rights.
In this case, some included trademarks might arguably need defending, but the same doesn't apply to copyrights. (With patents, I understand there is the issue of 'sleeping on your rights', laches, but that's another matter).
Sure, you wouldn't want your tiny space station spinning around at a huge rate to create 1G at the circumference.
But it's easier for spacecraft, and we're not talking Babylon 5's gigantic ships with rotating segments either. You can use a counterweight on a tether, creating a much larger orbit, to reduce these effects.
For example, Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan, the plan to establish multiple Mars visits using currently-available rocketry, suggested retaining part of the final rocket stage to use as a counterweight. The manned module would spin about the combined centre of gravity for the months-long journey to Mars, then the counterweight would be discarded.
Using a tether has problems of its own, but it might be a good solution if we're to go out and explore the solar system without radical new methods of propulsion.
The Slashdot summary of this story is spectacularly bad, particularly the 'should have ended over 500 years ago'.
Five hundred years is completely negligible on an evolutionary timescale. If trees - TREES - you know, big woody things that grow really slowly - had evolved significant changes in that time it would be headline news.
The research that led to this story wasn't remotely aimed at calling evolution into question, quite the contrary. Scientists are interested in the causes of the changes that these trees go during their lifetimes - and they have shown that these metamorphoses are probably due to the moa bird. Which is quite interesting, if probably not Slashdot-worthy.
You're almost certainly right - but I put it to you that developers don't always exploit consoles' full potential. Take some multi-platform franchise, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, maybe the Wall-E game or something like that, and you'll see a divide between the PS3 and 360 versions and those for the Wii and PS2. Perhaps we should forget this, after all any mediocre developer can make an ugly game, but it does contribute to the general impression. Gamecube ports don't help either, I enjoyed Zelda: Twilight Princess but it didn't wow me graphically.
Look, I love my Wii, but I watch Playr on Sunday mornings and the best Wii games don't look as good as the beautiful next-gen and PC games that are coming out. Wii graphics at the moment look a lot like the graphics of the later, and best-looking PS2 games. I'm talking about a console that has been around for donkeys' years, with software houses releasing their third or fourth title for the machine - all the tricks are known.
Now, the PS2 has a DVD drive as well. The issue isn't so much storage, so much as technical limitations to the numbers of textures and polygons that can be drawn on the screen, the amount of computation available to be devoted to nice lighting algorithms, physics simulation and so forth. Power will show in the end - I dare say the Wii games coming out in two years' time will look great and make my assertions about comparability with the PS2 look ridiculous.
Still, to get back on-topic, the PS2 is 'good enough', and has some games that really deserve to be played. I'm not surprised people are still using them.
I'm not really surprised - the PS2 has a huge software library, plus most owners have several peripherals that still prove useful. This weekend I played some Singstar and Guitar Hero III with friends, and I'd be more likely to buy more PS2 games that use the guitar and mikes, than to buy new peripherals (extra functionality and downloadable content notwithstanding).
In fact the Singstar game we played was a brand-new copy of the recently-released Singstar ABBA, and everyone loved it.
You can pick up used PS2 games for a pittance. I remember chatting to a store assistant in a games store, saying he was still always seeing parents come in and picking up PS2s with a bunch of games for the holidays. Console and a load of games well under 100 UK pounds, for which you can't really get another console (perhaps a DS or PSP with one game).
They're still releasing new games for the PS2, a pretty clear indication that it's still alive. No-one sane would advocate playing a cut-down and graphically poor PS2 Force Unleashed, but it's clearly still economically viable to release it. Though some would say the same for the Wii version. And, I don't want to arouse any fanboy ire, but I have a sneaking suspicion that similarities in graphical capabilities between the Wii and PS2 might help the economics of releasing a PS2 port... Anyway, there are a ton of PS2 games that are well worth playing - a brilliant last-generation game beats a mediocre current-gen one.
Everyone commenting on gaming stories should disclose their console preferences to discourage fanboy-ism. My TV is currently hooked up to a Wii, a PS2 and a Sega Master System.
While that is in many cases a vital truth, it becomes a pointless truism when one party is poorly-informed.
A handful of beans aren't worth as much as a cow just because you manage to persuade one hick that they're 'magic' beans. And an instantaneous stock-market price would only really mark the consensus agreement on the worth of a stock if markets were perfectly efficient.
P/E of 31.77 is not outrageous in the tech industry, but it would be in other market sectors.
The reason investors accept high P/E (and no dividends) in tech is the possibility of enormous growth. If a company ends up with limited potential for growth, it would then be over-valued.
I'm not sure the game's quite up for Google though.
A service that (almost) everyone uses is highly useful. My old friends have got on with their lives - changed phone numbers, moved abroad, stopped using old e-mail addresses. Facebook is a convenient way to stay in touch with the friend who's teaching English in Japan; for locating an old friend, it's an alternative to calling their parents; if you attend some kind of (family, social, or sporting) event and take photos, it's a way to make photos available to everyone who was there without actively sending them out.
One thing often overlooked by the slashdot crowd is, it's especially good for the relatively non-technical. People who aren't in the same (or any) IRC channels, people who don't have a blog for you to drop comments on, people who've changed their pay-as-you-go phone number three times, neglected to update their alumni forwarding address from university. You can find them online, by their real names, and communicate. (I don't know quite what you mean by "out in public" - I suppose the sysadmins have access to everything (like they do everywhere!) but there are facilities for messages between users to be private or public).
As I noted previously, I have some serious privacy concerns with Facebook, and I wish they'd just stop adding terrible features. I hope the site owners don't step over the brink and abuse their membership. But I think the original service was a great idea.
Where are you getting this crap?
Facebook is a convenient way to stay in touch with people. Almost everyone there goes by their real name, and most people put actual true and useful information on their profiles (with controls over who sees it). There's negligible spam, scams and drama, and it has a useful photo app. I guess you don't use it, and think everyone on it is just trying to get a large number of "friends".
Well, Facebook was every good, though its owners seem to be doing everything they can to destroy it. I think the problem is, despite their keen user base (some large proportion of which check Facebook every day) and young-and-affluent demographics, they haven't found a way to turn all the hits into money. Selling a few ads and $1 'gifts' isn't going to pay their hardware and hosting costs. So they're selling out, biit by bit.
The situation is now no better than if they had sold out for millions a year or two ago.
How do they indicate successful termination of their C programs?
The EXIT_SUCCESS macro was placed in <stdlib.h> after lobbying from the largest Piraha software companies.
The C Standard Committee have denied that this is further evidence of corruption within ISO, but claim that this was a suitable compromise to avoid being shot with "many" arrows.
If you're going to spend that kind of money wouldn't an iPhone/iPod Touch be better (and smaller)?
Not really, the N810 is a comparably good device. I've played with one and they're very shiny.
It has a better screen than the Touch, and a hardware QWERTY keyboard. And built-in GPS. And it runs Linux.
So pick the one that suits you best - it's nice to have a choice between such cool devices.
A basic familiarity with C syntax and simple code examples.
(In general, the beard-and-suspenders set's insistence upon K&R specifically as an introductory programming text does students a disservice. It's a beloved historical artifact, but it's hardly the best current text for new programmers to start with. I doubt if K&R themselves would argue otherwise.)
If you think K&R only exposes you to simple code examples, you haven't really read it.
It's beloved because of its thoroughness despite its brevity, and the excellent exercises. I would venture to say that anyone who had worked through and thought all the exercises in K&R would be thoroughly versed in C and ready to take on fairly advanced projects without the language being a hindrance.
There are modern texts which provide a better introduction to programming in general, and of course most beginners nowadays will be exposed to OO languages, but some of the classic books are great at teaching you to write short, self-contained programs that do exactly what they should and handle errors in the correct fashion.
Do you honestly think that if Windows were to vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow all these virus authors and botnet operators would suddenly throw their hands up and say "oh well, guess we'll have to find something else to do?"
Well done, you've managed to switch the argument from the factual to the hypothetical.
This is the standard debate tactic in this situation. Get everyone tangled in debating the possibility of potential but non-existant Mac and Linux malware, judging its likelihood against factual and vastly damaging Windows viruses, worms and botnets.
Just acquit Microsoft of all culpability for poor and short-sighted decisions, incurring costs in the billions, for millions of users, by saying, "eh, it was inevitable."
It appears that the suits are just trading vertical speed for horizontal speed.
That's fine, in principle. You can always convert your horizontal speed to (positive) vertical speed in time for landing. The same way hang gliders and paragliders flare on landing.
The rest of your post is correct, of course, you simply won't get enough lift from the area of your body. But bear in mind that parachutists already tolerate a much greater rate of descent than (soaring) paraglider pilots - after all, they're there for the falling, not the gliding. With advanced design and lightweight materials, it might be possible to create a body suit that unfurls to give some kind of non-lethal descent to the ground (and would be a LOT of fun to fly).
If you consider the lift that, say, kitesurfers get, it seems possible that someone might be able to achieve the up, up and away Junior Birdman effect with something only slightly larger than the human armspan.
Sounds fishy to me. As established in many places and times, the poor compensate for infant mortality be fecundity and as things get a little better, they outnumber the rich. I'd need more proof of solid numbers that the absolute numbers of children born to poor is less than the number of children born to the not-poor.
This type of response is all too common - refuting statistics by anecdote. The article cites Dr Clark's work in which he uses various means to conclude that the richer had more surviving children than the poor. Saying "I'd need more proof of solid numbers" just isn't good enough - you need to either hit the source and refute Dr Clark's methods, or produce some contrary statistics from another source.
Firefox is cool, and exciting - and it generates millions of dollars in kickbacks from Google from the default search bar. Thunderbid enjoys no such advantage. What's more, there are several good alternatives to Thunderbird, and a smaller development community. I can't help thinking this mainly comes down to politics within Mozilla, despite things such as this quote, from one of Baker's comments to her own article:
Sure, there is a smaller community. But I put it to you that that is because e-mail is a mature application. E-mail clients are all much alike, and most of their functionality is pretty much giving you the properties of e-mail as described in the RFC's. But it doesn't have to be that way!
Nowadays a majority of people use webmail rather than a standard mail client. Obviously webmail is perfect for when roaming about, but surely a local client can have enough useful functionality to entice people to use it on their usual own machine. With tight integration with popular webmail services, lots of improved searching and display functionality, new ideas for spam-prevention and better extensions, Thunderbird could be a proud member of the Mozilla stable of programs. Thunderbird: reclaim your e-mail.
Instead, it's going to be passed about, lose Mozilla's powerful support, and become just another e-mail program. Maybe Evolution will become the mail-client of the future instead.
Unfortunately, some of the files I need to work on come out in unreadable purple-on-black under vim, so when I "view" them to open them read-only they become unreadable-only. B-(
:set background=dark, or better yet, add
That seems a... slightly odd reason to use vi instead. Vim is probably just set in light-background mode. Type
set background=dark
to your ~/.vimrc
(That's also the place you would put syntax off if you really didn't want syntax highlighting. But vim's syntax highlighting (of just about everything, including some surprising formats) is a great feature IMO).
A handy phrase to remember there are about 31 million seconds in a year:
pi seconds is a nanocentury.
(I read this in Programming Pearls, in which it was attributed to Tom Duff).
I have removed the download i was offering before, since i am working on a new stable version which i will post shortly... and you have a very great attitude :P
Hey, the guy took a cheap shot at you, but you were wide open to it by not having any files available to download.
By the way, good luck with your project, but you *may* wish to consider the benefits of the 'release early, release often' philosophy. Once you have a working version, get it online so interested folks can hack on it - there are lots of hardly-started-then-abandoned projects out there, you don't want to be ignored as one of those.