All it really takes are some minerals, water, and heat to form even primitive life. You can't possibly know if this is true. If we find microbial life on Mars it would certainly go some way to confirming that hypothesis, but it could be that other processes are required for life to start - maybe a gigantic dose of luck. Perhaps we'll find dozens of potentially life-forming worlds where nothing animate ever arose. And even if we do find evidence of life on Mars, that wouldn't confirm that life appears easily in the right environment, as there could have been transfer of material from one to the other.
What would be really exciting would be to find life of a substantially different kind to what we know on Earth - different genetic code, for example.
And to those who are poo-poohing the whole exercise - get a sense of wonder! We may soon know the answer to the question: "Are we alone in the universe?" Could science ever be any more exciting than that?
Last time there was a discussion about Airships on Slashdot, people were saying there's not enough helium left on Earth to make them a viable replacement for aeroplanes. I really hope this is not the case. Any new deposits been found recently?
I have used Dreamweaver in the past, but always in code mode. I never saw the WYSIWYG view as a benefit, as it didn't use a proper renderer and, inevitably, had many bugs of its own. If they'd integrated Gecko or Presto, *that* would have beeen a benefit. With the advent of Firebug, such things are no longer necessary.
Agreed. Plus, IIRC self-closing tags actually do have a meaning in HTML 4 (can't remember what) and would render differently from how the author probably intended if that part of the spec was actually followed.
These discussions seem academic because we are used to very forgiving user-agents, which follow certain spec-flouting conventions. That's no reason to write syntactically wrong code.
Interestingly, the quality of code on the www has improved quite a bit since the rise of Firefox, because it is a less forgiving browser than IE. When I first started using FF in 2004 many sites looked wonky, or just plain didn't work. This is a rare experience, nowadays. Maybe we need even stricter browser behaviour in future?
alt="captcha image"? Not very helpful.
How about:
alt="" longdesc="{{url of audio captcha}}"?
Yep, the alt attribute is compulsory, but there are legitimate cases where it should be left empty - eg on an image that plays a part in the visual presentation of the site but has no intrinsic meaning, such as a rounded corner.
An & sign in a link to a URL isn't a syntax error and treating it as such would nullify all GET parameters after the first one.
The above example alone debunks your entire argument so try again;) You only think this is the case because most browsers are kind enough to correct this coding error and return an ampersand character when they see a lone '&' in the markup, not obviously paired with an entity-closing ';'.
Yeah, I have a Microsoft Sound System 80 at home which produces good quality sound at astonishingly high volumes. (But all my HID devices are Logitech..)
Sounds like your ad-blocker is not very good if you're seeing all these ads and videos. My browsing experience is very serene:
http://adblockplus.org/ plus http://noscript.net/
I find it also fascinating that if you presented this in non-internet terms, the citizens would be up in arms.
"We want to film every major turnpike 7/24 so we will always have pictures of infractions when there is one that's commited." Would they, though? We basically have this in the UK, now - in the name of road safety, you understand - and very few see it as a problem.
Those who do (these guys, for instance) are only concerned about their right to run over small children in the locations of their choice. Very few seem to see surveillance as a problem *in itself*.
Indeed. It's not about left and right any more. (Look at the number of people who might otherwise be judged leftwing who support/ed Ron Paul.) It's about power and it always was. Whether or not you believe the conspiracy theorists, *someone* felt there was an opportunity to move against freedom and democracy; even if they didn't actually commit the 9/11 atrocities (and the WTC 7 thing is really disturbing), they certainly capitalized on the aftermath bigtime.
Gotta agree. And how often are you working on a script which acts in total isolation from any other? Me neither. Always useful to have related scripts open alongside the one I'm working on.
That said, the OP has a point. My laptop is a cumbersome beast. I'm going for something smaller when this dies, and those micro-widescreens simply don't have enough vertical space.
government-mandated monopolies. ... what, like the BBC? UK ISPs are now lovely free agents with lovely competition between them. BT used to be a state mandated monopoly, but that ended long before anyone heard the phrase "ISP".
This is not what the GP suggested. (S)he was suggesting daily or monthly caps on your bandwidth usage, not on maximum speed. Your package sounds very much like the 'unlimited' packages at different speeds we have in the UK that are causing the problem. You're probably just lucky that your neighbours aren't (yet) downloading en masse more total bandwidth than the ISP has bought.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. And sometimes the rhetorical ante needs to be upped.
What would be really exciting would be to find life of a substantially different kind to what we know on Earth - different genetic code, for example.
And to those who are poo-poohing the whole exercise - get a sense of wonder! We may soon know the answer to the question: "Are we alone in the universe?" Could science ever be any more exciting than that?
I think we're safe. Who actually *says* "grok" out loud?
I'm sure NTFS has resulted in some fatalities.
Or maybe not...
So much more civilised than rational debate.
And nearly everyone from Oceanic flight 815 survived, at first...
Last time there was a discussion about Airships on Slashdot, people were saying there's not enough helium left on Earth to make them a viable replacement for aeroplanes. I really hope this is not the case. Any new deposits been found recently?
I have used Dreamweaver in the past, but always in code mode. I never saw the WYSIWYG view as a benefit, as it didn't use a proper renderer and, inevitably, had many bugs of its own. If they'd integrated Gecko or Presto, *that* would have beeen a benefit. With the advent of Firebug, such things are no longer necessary.
If any typo is justified, it's 'mispellt'.
Agreed. Plus, IIRC self-closing tags actually do have a meaning in HTML 4 (can't remember what) and would render differently from how the author probably intended if that part of the spec was actually followed.
These discussions seem academic because we are used to very forgiving user-agents, which follow certain spec-flouting conventions. That's no reason to write syntactically wrong code.
Interestingly, the quality of code on the www has improved quite a bit since the rise of Firefox, because it is a less forgiving browser than IE. When I first started using FF in 2004 many sites looked wonky, or just plain didn't work. This is a rare experience, nowadays. Maybe we need even stricter browser behaviour in future?
alt="captcha image"? Not very helpful.
How about:
alt="" longdesc="{{url of audio captcha}}"?
Yep, the alt attribute is compulsory, but there are legitimate cases where it should be left empty - eg on an image that plays a part in the visual presentation of the site but has no intrinsic meaning, such as a rounded corner.
C'mon! Mod the guy up!
I honestly didn't know there used to be GIF music files. Were they scrolling sheet music or just the lyrics with a bouncing ball over top?
Yeah, I have a Microsoft Sound System 80 at home which produces good quality sound at astonishingly high volumes. (But all my HID devices are Logitech..)
Zooooo-ooom!!
Sounds like your ad-blocker is not very good if you're seeing all these ads and videos. My browsing experience is very serene:
http://adblockplus.org/ plus http://noscript.net/
I was quite startled on the weekend, when using my friend's laptop, to discover that Slashdot has ads.
Indeed. It's not about left and right any more. (Look at the number of people who might otherwise be judged leftwing who support/ed Ron Paul.) It's about power and it always was. Whether or not you believe the conspiracy theorists, *someone* felt there was an opportunity to move against freedom and democracy; even if they didn't actually commit the 9/11 atrocities (and the WTC 7 thing is really disturbing), they certainly capitalized on the aftermath bigtime.
Gotta agree. And how often are you working on a script which acts in total isolation from any other? Me neither. Always useful to have related scripts open alongside the one I'm working on.
That said, the OP has a point. My laptop is a cumbersome beast. I'm going for something smaller when this dies, and those micro-widescreens simply don't have enough vertical space.
Actually I don't think Benny Hill ever worked for the BBC.
This is not what the GP suggested. (S)he was suggesting daily or monthly caps on your bandwidth usage, not on maximum speed. Your package sounds very much like the 'unlimited' packages at different speeds we have in the UK that are causing the problem. You're probably just lucky that your neighbours aren't (yet) downloading en masse more total bandwidth than the ISP has bought.