Fuck you, moron.... Don't give me that "on demand" shit... Are you really that stupid?
You know, I've been reading your comments for a little while now. I even took the time to respond to one of them.
I won't be making that mistake again.
I'm going to cut-and-paste some of your best lines and send them off to all my friends over in the desktop group. Frankly, if you're the kind of person we're pissing off, then we must be doing something right.
Wow. It's been a long time since I saw such a strongly worded comment that's so...well... wrong.
Dashboard widgets don't sit on the desktop. They occupy a separate layer that can be invoked by (by default) hitting F12. (It can be mapped to another key, mouse button or mouse gesture in the prefs pane.)
There are two obvious advantages to this. First, none of your widgets are visible until you invoke the Dashboard layer, keeping them out of your way. But beyond that, none of your widgets actually run if the Dashboard layer isn't visible. They are completely suspended until you invoke Dashboard.
So that whole "Start+R, calc, Enter" thing? Kinda silly compared to just hitting F12 and getting all your widgets at once. Don't you think?
I'd suggest you look closer at... well, everything. Launch Bar and Quicksilver are not even superficially similar to Spotlight. They don't even do similar things. And while Konfabulator is superficially similar to Dashboard, it's only very superficially similar. Beneath the screen shots, they work completely differently in every way.
It's worth pointing out, as well, that Dashboard clients only run when Dashboard is visible. They get suspended when Dashboard is not actually on the screen staring at you.
First of all, you're talking about two completely different television shows. Secondly, you're referencing a Web site about a completely different television show.
Bottom line: This show is not for you. This show is for grown-ups. Go back to watching Japanese cartoons, or whatever the hell makes you happy.
Wait... you're claiming that a ship that handles all sorts of volatiles
Beg pardon? Where did you get that idea, exactly? What volatiles does it handle, exactly?
There was strong evidence in original galactica that the ship had fusion power, for YHVH's sake.
I think you might be confused or something. The nature of the power plant aboard the Galactica has never been discussed. There's no reason for it to have been; it doesn't have any impact on the story. Besides, what if it were a hypothetical fusion reactor? So what? Are we back to the "We can put a man on the moon" fallacy again? They have a fusion reactor but they can't blah blah fudge cake?
it's silly to think that they can't handle having a hydrogen torch inside a tank with cool walls
Actually, it's far more silly to assume that they can. If we don't know how to do it, why should they know how to do it? The only reason to invoke magic in science fiction is to advance the setting to the point where an interesting story can be told. That's why spaceships travel from star to star via magic. If they didn't, it'd be basically impossible to tell an interesting story.
As for the rest... sigh. I'm not a scientist, but I got my bachelor's in physics. I know enough about science to know the difference between a hypothesis and a fact.
You, on the other hand, seem completely incapable of drawing the distinction.
What's worse, you take spectrographic data of distant galaxies and extrapolate to the conclusion that accessible water ice is scattered every few feet throughout the universe.
I'm tired of reading these completely hypothetical assertions repeated as if they were cold, hard fact. That's not science. If you knew the first thing about science, you'd know that.
First off, containing and burning hydrogen and oxygen is nothing for a ship that can *bloody well travel through interstellar space*.
Ah, yes. The ever-popular "We can put a man on the moon" fallacy. As in, "We can put a man on the moon, so why can't we create a non-fat fudge cake that doesn't disappoint in the flavor department?"
The characters on the TV show are not omnipotent. It's flat-out dumb to assume that they should be able to do X, particularly when we don't know how to do X, and even more particularly when doing X would torpedo the dramatic tension of the story.
And, as I mentioned before, most of the solid matter in the outer reaches of stellar systems *Is Already Water* (ice).
And as I mentioned, (1) that's just a theory, and (2) there's so little solid matter in the Oort Cloud that you'd be better off recycling spit.
The upper atmosphere of any gas giant is... wait for it... you guessed it... *mostly hydrogen*.
Assume for the moment that it's true. (It's just a theory. We don't know that it's true.) How do you plan to collect it? Just open the window and breathe in?
These people can *travel faster than the speed of light*, and you're saying that they can't strip the oxygen from a couple tons of ore?
We can put a man on the moon, but we can't blah blah fudge cake.
Not that they need to, as ice is readily available in space.
Why do you keep repeating that? It isn't true. First, we've never found ice in space, not once, not ever. Second, even if it is there, do you have the foggiest conception of how big interstellar space really is? Seriously, we're talking about milligrams of matter in volumes the size of Earth's orbit here.
False.
You think we've discovered ice somewhere off the Earth? I'd love to know where you think we've found it. Considering, as I said, it's the holy grail of solar system exploration and all.
And just ignoring planets, it's what almost all of the Kupier belt, Oort cloud, Saturn's moons, Saturn's rings, and a good chunk of Jupiter's moons' mass is made of.
The Kuiper Belt is believed to be composed of rocky objects. You're thinking of the Oort Cloud. And while comets are, indeed, believed to be composed in part of water ice, it's just a theory, and not even a particularly well-founded one. They could just as easily be composed of other volatile ices like methane or carbon disulfide. Saturn's rings are thought to be composed of silicates. It's suspected because of electromagnetic evidence that Europa might have a briny subsurface sea, but again, it's just a theory, and it's considered to be a very big deal because it's the only evidence of actual water, or even water ice, that we've ever found.
Ice Is Everywhere In Our Solar System.
I'm going to ask you again: Why do you keep repeating this as if it were a fact? It's not. It's not even a theory. It might be a hypothesis, but it's not a particularly well-supported one.
It's not a cliche; it's a fundamental part of astronomy: Ice Is Everywhere.
Actually, the fundamental part of astronomy is that space is big and that things are far apart. Even if ice were everywhere, it would still be practically nowhere. See my point?
But even more fundamental than that is the idea that nothing is true until proven true. You keep saying ice is everywhere, but we've never observed it. You're advancing a hypothesis, and a fairly wild one, as fact. That's not science. That's science fiction.
I think maybe you've been reading too much science fiction and not enough, you know, actual science.
I've already answered all these questions. I'm going to answer them again just for you because you were oh so friendly.
1. If you want to exchange by mail, you have to pay shipping.
2. I'm really not all that interested in whether you got the memo about in-store exchanges or not.
3. We're not putting CDs in separate packages because the cost associated with manufacturing and stocking a separate SKU is amazing.
4. We're not putting CDs in with the DVDs because something like 19 out of 20 of the people who buy Tiger will not use the CDs, meaning those CDs would be a complete waste.
Basically, yeah. The reason people buy things rather than making them themselves is so they can trade money for convenience. Here at Apple, we've established a reputation -- mostly, but not entirely, deserved -- for making the right decisions. If you buy an Apple product, be it a thing or a piece of software, you can be pretty darned confident that it will have been done right.
According to last quarter's financials, we're doing pretty well in the marketplace. Our year-over-year sales went up by something like 40%.
Anybody who doesn't have a DVD drive -- which is something like three out of four Mac owners, believe it or not -- can get CDs from their local Apple store or from the Web site.
It's not like it's hard to keep track. All you have to do is scroll up a bit.
Because for something like 19 out of 20 buyers, those CDs would have been a complete waste.
We just got criticized, unjustly, in the press by an environmental group because we don't pay to recycle our customers' computers. Imagine the field day they would have had if we'd shipped out 50 million unneeded CDs.
No, they're branding guidelines. They're all branding guidelines. "Make your application look like our application so that when the user uses your application, he thinks of us." That's all any of it is.
And as for QuickTime Pro... you clearly don't know what it is. The only reason you'd buy it is if you needed it. And if you needed it, you wouldn't give a damn whether the player is Microsoft-branded or Apple-branded.
I'm no fan of "Enterprise," but even I know the answer to that one. They explained it in pedantic detail in the pilot episode. In that movie where the Next Generation crew comes back to Earth and meets that Cochrane guy, they alter history. "Enterprise" takes place in that altered history. That's why they got whashisname to come back and reprise his role as Cochrane in the pilot episode.
I really never understood all the complaining about continuity. The writers explained it on day one. It's like everybody heard that, ignored or didn't understand it, and just kept bitching.
Sigh. You took a perfectly valid observation, utterly misinterpreted it, then mocked it mercilessly. Net result? You look like an uninformed ass.
Look, friend, let me explain this to you in terms that might sink in. Good and evil are real. The term you want to look up is psychomachia. It literally means "the war for the soul," but it's used to describe the internal struggle in every person between choosing to do good and choosing to do evil. This is, like, modern storytelling 101.
It's also some pretty fundamental philosophy.
To deny that good and evil exist is to succumb to the worst kind of moral relativism. It's that kind of moral relativism that lets terrorists blow up buildings or a president kill 100,000 Iraqis. Denying that evil exists is a horrible, horrible error, and a big part of what's wrong with this world today.
Never mind the fact that "Arrested Development" took a massive quality hit in the second season, either, evidently. The first season, with a few small exceptions, was top-shelf good. The second season has been almost uniformly lame. Hence the massive tuning out of the audience.
For the record, "The Ben Stiller Show" was physically painful to watch, and "Greg the Bunny" had exactly one funny moment in its entire run and now I've forgotten what it was.
That's not a ringing endorsement. While I do know that there are people out there who, bafflingly, thought "Babylon 5" was the greatest thing since 64 slices of American cheese, it seems that my personal demographic (mid-30s, Silicon Valley, modestly well-off) is composed entirely of people who've either never heard of it, or saw it and found it to be dreadful.
Strangely enough, there seems to be a strong correlation between people who think that "Babylon 5" was good TV and people who think that The Lord of the Rings was good fiction. Virtually everybody I know -- and we talked about this at length one night when the last movie came out --couldn't get through the books, and found the movies to be really good except for all the crap about wizards and elves. Fortunately, Pete Jackson put in just enough wizard-and-elf silliness to keep the hard-core fans happy, then let it drop and told the story without all the unicorns-and-rainbows crap.
You must have only seen the first couple of episodes. "Lost" started strong, but completely spun out in mid-season.
Rule of storytelling: You can't start out strong with a fantastic premise and then not go anywhere. You can't tell a story entirely in flashback, and you can't expect your audience to accept weird-for-the-sake-of-weird.
Let's say for example that you have a big tank of gaseous hydrogen and a big tank of gaseous oxygen. How do you make water out of it?
Well, you burn it. You take a WHOLE SHITLOAD of both ingredients --that's a volumetric shitload, not a shitload of mass -- and you burn them.
And you get a teeny, tiny droplet of water.
Okay, but let's set that aside for the moment. Let's assume, just for sake of argument, that Our Beloved Heroes had the facilities to store a WHOLE SHITLOAD of both H2 and O2 and a safe way to burn them together.
Where, exactly, are they supposed to get a WHOLE SHITLOAD of H2 and O2?
Yes, hydrogen is believed to be the most abundant element in the universe. But do you know where it's all stored? Suns. It's all in use, you see.
Sure, if you measure very carefully, you could find some just floating out between the stars in deep space. But you'd be talking about one atom per cubic meter or something. And the vast majority of it wouldn't be just floating there at relative rest. No, being ionized and highly charged, it'd be moving fast.
So the idea of trying to just round up some hydrogen from the vacuum of interstellar space is pretty fucking far-fetched, my friend.
Let's not even talk about oxygen. Yes, it exists in rocky bodies in the form of oxides, but do you have any idea what it takes to get it out? Seriously, how do you get the oxygen out of iron oxide, or silicon dioxide, or sulfur dioxide? With a whole hell of a lot of heat. And how do you plan to produce that heat? Microwave oven?
Finally, let's talk about water ice. Okay? Let's discuss that. First things first: We have never discovered water ice on another planet. It's one of the holy grails of NASA's missions to other planets, and so far we've found nothing like it, not even any sign of anything like it. Ice? Sure. There's a hell of a lot of ice out there. But it's not water. It's stuff like methane, like carbon dioxide, like carbon disulfide.
And what if comets did contain water ice? What then? Wanna go out and find one? Fantastic. But keep in mind that the density of even the densest part of the Oort Cloud is thought to be on the order of one milligram per million cubic meters.
Talk about a needle in a haystack.
If you tuned out of "Battlestar Galactica" because you didn't like the science, maybe it's for the best. Because the show doesn't give in to the typical dumbass sci-fi clichés like "hydrogen makes up 90% of the universe, so we'll just open the window and grab some." If that's the kind of nonsense you were hoping for, you'd have been disappointed.
No, he's basically right. I mean, if you ignore the fact that he seems not to have actually read my comment. There are forty million Macs out there in active use, according to our market-research guys. Something like three out of four of those sold without DVD-reading drives in them.
Now, something like three out of four OF THOSE can't even run Tiger anyway. It's not like somebody's going to go running Tiger on a Power Mac 9600. So it's not like we're saying that three out of four Tiger buyers will have to do the media exchange thing. Corporate tells us that they estimate it'll be closer to one in twenty. Which is fine.
But it all boils down to this: We put Tiger on a DVD instead of four CDs because we wanted to. That's all there is to it.
Oh, I read it. It's just that it's wrong. Anti-property advocates have been trying to tie property to atoms forever. Didn't work then, won't work now.
And I've tried explaining time and again that ideas as property dates back 40,000 years or more. Why do you keeping coming back to this 18th-century aberration called "copy right" to explain it?
And no, I don't think I'll be looking for well-known anti-property lobbyist Larry Lessig for anything. If I want somebody to try to sell me something, I'll go to church.
That's part of it, but you really want to know the real reason? Swapping CDs sucks. Seriously. That's the real reason we put Tiger on a DVD.
Here's the one and only thing you need to know to understand Apple: Our goal is to make using your Mac a pleasant experience. Anything that takes away from that is our enemy. That's why we've historically even had an iffy relationship with some of our biggest software vendors. When Word 6 came out, I'm told that the level of anger around campus almost reached the point of violence. (That was before my time here.)
Bottom line: When you're installing your new OS, having to swap CDs sucks. So we're shipping DVDs. Anybody who doesn't have a DVD drive -- which is something like three out of four Mac owners, believe it or not -- can get CDs from their local Apple store or from the Web site.
(And don't think we didn't have long and heated conversations about whether it sucks more to have to swap CDs or to have to mail-order CDs. That one went back and forth a lot.)
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Fuck you, moron. ... Don't give me that "on demand" shit ... Are you really that stupid?
You know, I've been reading your comments for a little while now. I even took the time to respond to one of them.
I won't be making that mistake again.
I'm going to cut-and-paste some of your best lines and send them off to all my friends over in the desktop group. Frankly, if you're the kind of person we're pissing off, then we must be doing something right.
Wow. It's been a long time since I saw such a strongly worded comment that's so...well ... wrong.
Dashboard widgets don't sit on the desktop. They occupy a separate layer that can be invoked by (by default) hitting F12. (It can be mapped to another key, mouse button or mouse gesture in the prefs pane.)
There are two obvious advantages to this. First, none of your widgets are visible until you invoke the Dashboard layer, keeping them out of your way. But beyond that, none of your widgets actually run if the Dashboard layer isn't visible. They are completely suspended until you invoke Dashboard.
So that whole "Start+R, calc, Enter" thing? Kinda silly compared to just hitting F12 and getting all your widgets at once. Don't you think?
I'd suggest you look closer at ... well, everything. Launch Bar and Quicksilver are not even superficially similar to Spotlight. They don't even do similar things. And while Konfabulator is superficially similar to Dashboard, it's only very superficially similar. Beneath the screen shots, they work completely differently in every way.
It's worth pointing out, as well, that Dashboard clients only run when Dashboard is visible. They get suspended when Dashboard is not actually on the screen staring at you.
First of all, you're talking about two completely different television shows. Secondly, you're referencing a Web site about a completely different television show.
Bottom line: This show is not for you. This show is for grown-ups. Go back to watching Japanese cartoons, or whatever the hell makes you happy.
Wait... you're claiming that a ship that handles all sorts of volatiles
... sigh. I'm not a scientist, but I got my bachelor's in physics. I know enough about science to know the difference between a hypothesis and a fact.
Beg pardon? Where did you get that idea, exactly? What volatiles does it handle, exactly?
There was strong evidence in original galactica that the ship had fusion power, for YHVH's sake.
I think you might be confused or something. The nature of the power plant aboard the Galactica has never been discussed. There's no reason for it to have been; it doesn't have any impact on the story. Besides, what if it were a hypothetical fusion reactor? So what? Are we back to the "We can put a man on the moon" fallacy again? They have a fusion reactor but they can't blah blah fudge cake?
it's silly to think that they can't handle having a hydrogen torch inside a tank with cool walls
Actually, it's far more silly to assume that they can. If we don't know how to do it, why should they know how to do it? The only reason to invoke magic in science fiction is to advance the setting to the point where an interesting story can be told. That's why spaceships travel from star to star via magic. If they didn't, it'd be basically impossible to tell an interesting story.
As for the rest
You, on the other hand, seem completely incapable of drawing the distinction.
What's worse, you take spectrographic data of distant galaxies and extrapolate to the conclusion that accessible water ice is scattered every few feet throughout the universe.
I'm tired of reading these completely hypothetical assertions repeated as if they were cold, hard fact. That's not science. If you knew the first thing about science, you'd know that.
First off, containing and burning hydrogen and oxygen is nothing for a ship that can *bloody well travel through interstellar space*.
Ah, yes. The ever-popular "We can put a man on the moon" fallacy. As in, "We can put a man on the moon, so why can't we create a non-fat fudge cake that doesn't disappoint in the flavor department?"
The characters on the TV show are not omnipotent. It's flat-out dumb to assume that they should be able to do X, particularly when we don't know how to do X, and even more particularly when doing X would torpedo the dramatic tension of the story.
And, as I mentioned before, most of the solid matter in the outer reaches of stellar systems *Is Already Water* (ice).
And as I mentioned, (1) that's just a theory, and (2) there's so little solid matter in the Oort Cloud that you'd be better off recycling spit.
The upper atmosphere of any gas giant is... wait for it... you guessed it... *mostly hydrogen*.
Assume for the moment that it's true. (It's just a theory. We don't know that it's true.) How do you plan to collect it? Just open the window and breathe in?
These people can *travel faster than the speed of light*, and you're saying that they can't strip the oxygen from a couple tons of ore?
We can put a man on the moon, but we can't blah blah fudge cake.
Not that they need to, as ice is readily available in space.
Why do you keep repeating that? It isn't true. First, we've never found ice in space, not once, not ever. Second, even if it is there, do you have the foggiest conception of how big interstellar space really is? Seriously, we're talking about milligrams of matter in volumes the size of Earth's orbit here.
False.
You think we've discovered ice somewhere off the Earth? I'd love to know where you think we've found it. Considering, as I said, it's the holy grail of solar system exploration and all.
And just ignoring planets, it's what almost all of the Kupier belt, Oort cloud, Saturn's moons, Saturn's rings, and a good chunk of Jupiter's moons' mass is made of.
The Kuiper Belt is believed to be composed of rocky objects. You're thinking of the Oort Cloud. And while comets are, indeed, believed to be composed in part of water ice, it's just a theory, and not even a particularly well-founded one. They could just as easily be composed of other volatile ices like methane or carbon disulfide. Saturn's rings are thought to be composed of silicates. It's suspected because of electromagnetic evidence that Europa might have a briny subsurface sea, but again, it's just a theory, and it's considered to be a very big deal because it's the only evidence of actual water, or even water ice, that we've ever found.
Ice Is Everywhere In Our Solar System.
I'm going to ask you again: Why do you keep repeating this as if it were a fact? It's not. It's not even a theory. It might be a hypothesis, but it's not a particularly well-supported one.
It's not a cliche; it's a fundamental part of astronomy: Ice Is Everywhere.
Actually, the fundamental part of astronomy is that space is big and that things are far apart. Even if ice were everywhere, it would still be practically nowhere. See my point?
But even more fundamental than that is the idea that nothing is true until proven true. You keep saying ice is everywhere, but we've never observed it. You're advancing a hypothesis, and a fairly wild one, as fact. That's not science. That's science fiction.
I think maybe you've been reading too much science fiction and not enough, you know, actual science.
We will happily exchange your DVD for a set of CDs. You can swap them out at an Apple store, or you can mail 'em back and pay for the shipping costs.
I've already answered all these questions. I'm going to answer them again just for you because you were oh so friendly.
1. If you want to exchange by mail, you have to pay shipping.
2. I'm really not all that interested in whether you got the memo about in-store exchanges or not.
3. We're not putting CDs in separate packages because the cost associated with manufacturing and stocking a separate SKU is amazing.
4. We're not putting CDs in with the DVDs because something like 19 out of 20 of the people who buy Tiger will not use the CDs, meaning those CDs would be a complete waste.
Basically, yeah. The reason people buy things rather than making them themselves is so they can trade money for convenience. Here at Apple, we've established a reputation -- mostly, but not entirely, deserved -- for making the right decisions. If you buy an Apple product, be it a thing or a piece of software, you can be pretty darned confident that it will have been done right.
According to last quarter's financials, we're doing pretty well in the marketplace. Our year-over-year sales went up by something like 40%.
You draw your own conclusions.
I would like to point out that I said:
Anybody who doesn't have a DVD drive -- which is something like three out of four Mac owners, believe it or not -- can get CDs from their local Apple store or from the Web site.
It's not like it's hard to keep track. All you have to do is scroll up a bit.
Because for something like 19 out of 20 buyers, those CDs would have been a complete waste.
We just got criticized, unjustly, in the press by an environmental group because we don't pay to recycle our customers' computers. Imagine the field day they would have had if we'd shipped out 50 million unneeded CDs.
We are giving it away under the same license under which we release Darwin 8.
As I understand it, this means the Linux guys can't use it.
If true, this is not even remotely accidental.
That is exactly what we do.
No, they're branding guidelines. They're all branding guidelines. "Make your application look like our application so that when the user uses your application, he thinks of us." That's all any of it is.
... you clearly don't know what it is. The only reason you'd buy it is if you needed it. And if you needed it, you wouldn't give a damn whether the player is Microsoft-branded or Apple-branded.
And as for QuickTime Pro
I'm no fan of "Enterprise," but even I know the answer to that one. They explained it in pedantic detail in the pilot episode. In that movie where the Next Generation crew comes back to Earth and meets that Cochrane guy, they alter history. "Enterprise" takes place in that altered history. That's why they got whashisname to come back and reprise his role as Cochrane in the pilot episode.
I really never understood all the complaining about continuity. The writers explained it on day one. It's like everybody heard that, ignored or didn't understand it, and just kept bitching.
Sigh. You took a perfectly valid observation, utterly misinterpreted it, then mocked it mercilessly. Net result? You look like an uninformed ass.
Look, friend, let me explain this to you in terms that might sink in. Good and evil are real. The term you want to look up is psychomachia. It literally means "the war for the soul," but it's used to describe the internal struggle in every person between choosing to do good and choosing to do evil. This is, like, modern storytelling 101.
It's also some pretty fundamental philosophy.
To deny that good and evil exist is to succumb to the worst kind of moral relativism. It's that kind of moral relativism that lets terrorists blow up buildings or a president kill 100,000 Iraqis. Denying that evil exists is a horrible, horrible error, and a big part of what's wrong with this world today.
Never mind the fact that "Arrested Development" took a massive quality hit in the second season, either, evidently. The first season, with a few small exceptions, was top-shelf good. The second season has been almost uniformly lame. Hence the massive tuning out of the audience.
For the record, "The Ben Stiller Show" was physically painful to watch, and "Greg the Bunny" had exactly one funny moment in its entire run and now I've forgotten what it was.
That's not a ringing endorsement. While I do know that there are people out there who, bafflingly, thought "Babylon 5" was the greatest thing since 64 slices of American cheese, it seems that my personal demographic (mid-30s, Silicon Valley, modestly well-off) is composed entirely of people who've either never heard of it, or saw it and found it to be dreadful.
Strangely enough, there seems to be a strong correlation between people who think that "Babylon 5" was good TV and people who think that The Lord of the Rings was good fiction. Virtually everybody I know -- and we talked about this at length one night when the last movie came out --couldn't get through the books, and found the movies to be really good except for all the crap about wizards and elves. Fortunately, Pete Jackson put in just enough wizard-and-elf silliness to keep the hard-core fans happy, then let it drop and told the story without all the unicorns-and-rainbows crap.
You must have only seen the first couple of episodes. "Lost" started strong, but completely spun out in mid-season.
Rule of storytelling: You can't start out strong with a fantastic premise and then not go anywhere. You can't tell a story entirely in flashback, and you can't expect your audience to accept weird-for-the-sake-of-weird.
I'm scratching my head right now.
Let's say for example that you have a big tank of gaseous hydrogen and a big tank of gaseous oxygen. How do you make water out of it?
Well, you burn it. You take a WHOLE SHITLOAD of both ingredients --that's a volumetric shitload, not a shitload of mass -- and you burn them.
And you get a teeny, tiny droplet of water.
Okay, but let's set that aside for the moment. Let's assume, just for sake of argument, that Our Beloved Heroes had the facilities to store a WHOLE SHITLOAD of both H2 and O2 and a safe way to burn them together.
Where, exactly, are they supposed to get a WHOLE SHITLOAD of H2 and O2?
Yes, hydrogen is believed to be the most abundant element in the universe. But do you know where it's all stored? Suns. It's all in use, you see.
Sure, if you measure very carefully, you could find some just floating out between the stars in deep space. But you'd be talking about one atom per cubic meter or something. And the vast majority of it wouldn't be just floating there at relative rest. No, being ionized and highly charged, it'd be moving fast.
So the idea of trying to just round up some hydrogen from the vacuum of interstellar space is pretty fucking far-fetched, my friend.
Let's not even talk about oxygen. Yes, it exists in rocky bodies in the form of oxides, but do you have any idea what it takes to get it out? Seriously, how do you get the oxygen out of iron oxide, or silicon dioxide, or sulfur dioxide? With a whole hell of a lot of heat. And how do you plan to produce that heat? Microwave oven?
Finally, let's talk about water ice. Okay? Let's discuss that. First things first: We have never discovered water ice on another planet. It's one of the holy grails of NASA's missions to other planets, and so far we've found nothing like it, not even any sign of anything like it. Ice? Sure. There's a hell of a lot of ice out there. But it's not water. It's stuff like methane, like carbon dioxide, like carbon disulfide.
And what if comets did contain water ice? What then? Wanna go out and find one? Fantastic. But keep in mind that the density of even the densest part of the Oort Cloud is thought to be on the order of one milligram per million cubic meters.
Talk about a needle in a haystack.
If you tuned out of "Battlestar Galactica" because you didn't like the science, maybe it's for the best. Because the show doesn't give in to the typical dumbass sci-fi clichés like "hydrogen makes up 90% of the universe, so we'll just open the window and grab some." If that's the kind of nonsense you were hoping for, you'd have been disappointed.
No, he's basically right. I mean, if you ignore the fact that he seems not to have actually read my comment. There are forty million Macs out there in active use, according to our market-research guys. Something like three out of four of those sold without DVD-reading drives in them.
Now, something like three out of four OF THOSE can't even run Tiger anyway. It's not like somebody's going to go running Tiger on a Power Mac 9600. So it's not like we're saying that three out of four Tiger buyers will have to do the media exchange thing. Corporate tells us that they estimate it'll be closer to one in twenty. Which is fine.
But it all boils down to this: We put Tiger on a DVD instead of four CDs because we wanted to. That's all there is to it.
Oh, I read it. It's just that it's wrong. Anti-property advocates have been trying to tie property to atoms forever. Didn't work then, won't work now.
And I've tried explaining time and again that ideas as property dates back 40,000 years or more. Why do you keeping coming back to this 18th-century aberration called "copy right" to explain it?
And no, I don't think I'll be looking for well-known anti-property lobbyist Larry Lessig for anything. If I want somebody to try to sell me something, I'll go to church.
It boots very quickly-- you barely get to see the splash screen with the progress bar before the desktop appears.
That's launchd at work. Getting rid of init and all those separate boot scripts really sped things up.
That's part of it, but you really want to know the real reason? Swapping CDs sucks. Seriously. That's the real reason we put Tiger on a DVD.
Here's the one and only thing you need to know to understand Apple: Our goal is to make using your Mac a pleasant experience. Anything that takes away from that is our enemy. That's why we've historically even had an iffy relationship with some of our biggest software vendors. When Word 6 came out, I'm told that the level of anger around campus almost reached the point of violence. (That was before my time here.)
Bottom line: When you're installing your new OS, having to swap CDs sucks. So we're shipping DVDs. Anybody who doesn't have a DVD drive -- which is something like three out of four Mac owners, believe it or not -- can get CDs from their local Apple store or from the Web site.
(And don't think we didn't have long and heated conversations about whether it sucks more to have to swap CDs or to have to mail-order CDs. That one went back and forth a lot.)