It wasn't my first language, but it was the first language that I used while writing structured programs and really understood what I was doing. I had done lots of BASIC and PILOT programming earlier, but it was always top-down and heavily laced with GOTO statements. I had done structured programming in CoBOL and RPG in high school, but my programs were always modifications of the programs in the textbooks that I somehow got to work, despite the fact that I didn't really get the concepts. By the time I started using TP 4.0, I was finally starting to understanding the algorithms I was using and was finally starting to use procedures, functions, and meaningful variable names to write readable, maintainable code. Consequently, I'll probably always have a soft spot in my heart for Turbo Pascal.
I still have nightmares of my three year old brother running into my bedroom while I was programming my dad's old TRS-80 and pushing the reset button because he thought it was funny.
If I need to bring a machine down hard, I can always yank the power cord, but for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE don't resurrect the stupid, fricking reset button!
I understood PP to be saying "That makes sense if you know the star's initial spin characteristics (i.e., velocity, etc.)." -- not "That makes sense if you know that the star was initially spinning."
I think, perhaps, you are missing my point. All I am trying to say is that there appears to be a huge difference between our perceived threat and the real threat of terrorism to Americans living in the U.S. Because we are perceiving a much greater threat than actually exists, we are vastly overreacting to the problem, and by doing so, we may very well be perpetuating the problem.
None of that justifies the billions and billions of dollars we've wasted to combat a threat that statistically isn't significant, or the liberties we've thrown away in the name of a phantom bogeyman. None of that justifies the enormous amount of ill will the U.S. has generated around the world in the last ten years.
You say that parents don't have to explain why 3000 people died in a swimming pool. But look at the news. Because of our irrational fear and paranoia in the wake of 9/11, parents *do* have to explain why the (frequently not-so-)nice person at the airport has to touch them in places they said no one is supposed to touch. Do you really think that's better than explaining that yes, Virginia, there are bad people in the world and sometimes those bad people do bad things?
Whether the 3443 deaths due to drowning in a swimming pool is due to foreign action or a simple accident is simply irrelevant. Does it matter to the dead person if they died due to malicious intent or due to an accident? Of course not -- they are still dead! Is the pain of being separated from someone you love any less because it was just an accident? Of course not! The only difference is that in an accidental drowning, you actually have to deal with the pain of loss because you don't have someone to take it out on -- which I would argue only compounds the problem.
As far as "damage to pride," a "target for rage," or a "target to make an example of" is concerned, well, that is really the root of the problem, isn't it? Someone hurt us, and now, to feel good about ourselves, we have to go hurt them back, right? Because we are scared, and therefore, we have to have a way to show ourselves -- and anyone else that we think might get the idea to do likewise -- that we are still in CONTROL. But what happens when we do that? What's going on in Pakistan right now, in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden? The Pakistani army is pissed at us (rightfully so, IMHO) because we invaded their sovereign territory and assassinated someone living in their country. We've publicly embarrassed and insulted them, and we've shown that we can take out anyone we want inside their country. Hmmm...so what happens when Pakistan decides that they need to hurt us back for the way we've embarrassed, insulted and scared them? Are they going to hit us back? And then we'll hit them back again, etc., etc., etc. That could get really ugly, really quickly. Pakistan IS a nuclear superpower, after all.
Ultimately, we've GOT to get over the fear that we allowed into the country on 9/11. We have become the bully on the playground, and we're pissing off our allies all over the world as a result. The way we are approaching the "War on Terror" by treating everyone as a suspect, rather than empowering the very people we are trying to "protect" through these onerous laws only serves to make the problem worse (there was a really good article at rightsidenews.com on this topic recently). If we can't regain some sanity and stop running around like Chicken Little, our country is going to become a shell of what it once was.
Just shows you why you shouldn't trust statistics. 3443 is in exactly the same ballpark as the number of people who died on 9/11 (which I believe was your point). How many other people died in the U.S. in 2001 of terrorism? You might include the Anthrax victims, but that was just a handful of people (I don't have the exact number, and I'm honestly too lazy to look it up), but that number is trivial compared to the 9/11 death toll, so for all intents and purposes, we can call the number of people that died in 2001 of terrorism in the U.S. to be roughly 4,000.
So, if you want to consider a yearly sample, that's 3443 deaths in swimming pools to 4000 deaths due to terrorism...pretty much equal...makes me think that maybe we should pay roughly the same amount of attention to deaths in swimming pools as we do to terrorism.
But you argue that the death toll on 9/11 happened in a few hours. Okay, that's true. So somewhere on the order of 1,000 deaths per hour, then? Yes, many died in the initial four plane crashes, but the WTC didn't fall for a while longer -- call it four hours from the first impact (again, I don't remember the exact number, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but this is close enough to make my point). In swimming pools, that's (3443 deaths / year) * (1 year / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours) = 0.39 deaths per hour. Whoa! That means that terrorism is roughly 2500 times more common than deaths in swimming pools!!! Obviously, we need to spend much more time combating terror than we do combating deaths in swimming pools!
But wait...we can look at it another way, too. Since 9/11, we've had the Ft. Hood shootings and a several other attempts, but the numbers are essentially unchanged since 9/11; there have been no other terrorist attacks in the United States that caused even one order of magnitude less deaths than 9/11. By that metric, then, it's roughly 4000 deaths due to terrorism in the U.S. in TEN YEARS, meanwhile, roughly 3000 people per year are dieing in swimming pools. That means you are approximately nine times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a terrorist act in the U.S., and by that standard, GPP is correct: when compared to any other mundane risk we accept without thinking about it, the time, effort, money and liberty that we are throwing away fighting terrorism is absolutely absurd.
Your post is so full of holes and dubious logic, I don't even know where to start, but here goes anyway.
We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect. I'm not saying correlation is causation...
We haven't had a Martian elected president since then either, but somehow I think the two are pretty well unrelated. However, even that counter-argument is giving you too much credit, because not only is your conclusion false, but your premise is false as well. Since the poorly-named PATRIOT Act went into effect, we have, in fact, had some well-known terrorist attempts (underwear bomber, the kid who wanted to blow up a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Portland, IIRC). The underwear bomber was thwarted because 1) his explosives didn't work and 2) the people on board the airplane beat the living crap out of him (which, I believe is a far, far better way to handle terrorist attacks than giving power to unchecked government bureaucracies). The Christmas Tree kid was just flat-out stupid.
...but I think claims that the law hasn't prevented at least one American death pretty dubious.
So what? I think that the FBI and local police forces are probably more than capable of detecting and catching would-be terrorists without subverting the Bill of Rights, and I think that I'd rather run the risk of the 1 in 20-30 million chance of dieing in a terrorist act than run the risk^Wcertainty that a government not bound by the law WILL eventually abuse its own populace. It's happened throughout history; it can happen here, too.
They don't need a new 'excuse' because it's not being used to monitor the porn you're downloading and I assure you the Government has bigger fish to fry.
I'll ignore the assumption that everyone on-line is downloading porn 24x7, since we all know what they say about assumptions. However, given that most people have things they would like kept private, even if it has nothing to do with sexual fetishes, and given that a Google search will turn easily turn up many, many news stories of LEO's using public records for personal gain (IIRC, there was a story here in Anchorage a few years back of LEO's using their access to criminal records databases to dig for dirt on political candidates), your "assurances" really aren't worth squat. The moment you become "interesting" for one of any number of reasons, you suddenly become that big fish that "government" wants to fry.
Sure they may be snooping your traffic but the law says they can so any claims you make about it being a violation of your constitutional rights are useless.
Even by/. standards, that's an incredibly inane position to take. You do realize that the "constitutional rights" you so easily dismiss ARE the law, don't you? Congress can pass whatever law it wants, and the President can sign the bill, but if it violates the Constitution, IT AIN'T LEGAL! Right now, we're basically just waiting for some of the laws to be challenged in court, and GWB did a pretty good job of making that a difficult proposition by dragging people who might have had a case to overthrow the PATRIOT Act off to Guantanamo and denying them their day in court. While I'm no fan of Obama either, he at least starting putting some of these alleged terrorists on trial.
If your post is any indication of how blase and naive the American public has become, it's no wonder our country is so effed-up.
Except that, to quote Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is..." Couple that with the fact that in galactic timescales, we've only been around to notice such things for a tiny blip of time, and we've only been able to understand what we see in the heavens for an even tinier fraction of that time, and I would think that odds of us seeing and recognizing such interstellar objects would be vanishingly small.
But, not being a professional (or even reasonably competent amateur) astronomer, I could be completely wrong here. <shrug>
Grishnak had a workable solution -- make the URL bar optional. Then people like him (and me) who would like to have a URL bar available are happy and people like you who are more worried about screen real estate are happy, too.
Another compromise would be how my Android devices handle the URL bar: when you scroll to the top of the web page, the URL bar is visible. As soon as you begin to scroll down the page, the URL bar disappears. You could even have a timeout on the URL bar so that it is visible for, say, 30 seconds when you first navigate to a page (to avoid phishing sites, as Grishnak mentioned), but after the timeout, the URL bar disappears. If you scroll to the top of the page again, the URL bar could reappear for another 30 seconds or so. Rinse, repeat as required.
My dad, who didn't drink coffee at all BTW, died five years ago of a massive aneurysm. My grandmother (mom's mom, not his mom, fortunately) was with him when it happened, and from her description, it probably wasn't a bad way to go. On the other hand, a friend of my family's died last year from cancer, after a long, protracted, struggle. Two examples do not constitute a rigorous study, but with the data available to me, I'll take cardiovascular over cancer every single time, thanks. Especially since a good exercise program and a healthy diet can go a long ways towards maintaining cardiovascular health, which I would expect to minimize the downside to "being jacked-up on caffeine" (any health experts care to chime in?).
Please don't lump all of us Americans into such a stereotype. Personally, I really enjoy a good espresso. The problem, however, is that it is pretty difficult to find a GOOD espresso stateside -- it's almost always burned and bitter.
Unless their drinking coffee pretty much always leads to the activity that is responsible for the reduction in cancer.
Non-coffee example: There's an apocryphal IT story about a man who called IT support because his keyboard worked fine while he was sitting, but when he stood up, the "G" and "H" keys would type the other letter (press "G", get an "H" and vice versa). Tech support tries to help the guy on the phone, but gets nowhere. Tech gets dispatched to the guy's work area, and has the guy demonstrate. Sure enough, when the man sits at his desk, everything works as expected. When he stands up to type, he gets an "H" when he presses the "G" key, and vice versa. The tech has the guy demonstrate several times, and finally figures it out: when the guy is sitting down, he's touch typing and knows where the keys are by feel. However, when he's standing, he's hunting and pecking...and the offending keys are swapped on his keyboard: the sequence is a-s-d-f-h-g-j, etc. on his keyboard, rather than a-s-d-f-g-h-j, etc. So when the guy is standing, he sees where the two keys are on the keyboard, and visually directs his finger to the incorrectly labeled key.
If you will *always* perform the action that leads to the cancer risk reduction when drinking coffee, then in practical terms, it doesn't really matter if coffee is really the cause as long as you like to drink coffee*. However, it might matter to people who don't like to drink coffee but could perform the action that causes the benefit sans coffee.
* except for technical accuracy and pedantic reasons.
I personally have exactly ZERO interest in using high addiction/high inebriation drugs whatsoever, because I completely understand and agree with you that such drugs are a huge detriment to my well being. However, I started getting edgy when you began arguing that it is good for government to try to outlaw such drugs. Initially, my reaction was philosophical. I categorically disagree that any attempt to create an external discipline upon a population for any reason other than to prevent a person or group of people from denying others their rights. My views on government are very libertarian, and my views on discipline are heavily influenced by a guy named Danny Silk ("Loving Your Kids On Purpose", which, IMHO, works equally well on adults)
However, after thinking through your arguments, I see two other big problems with your arguments. First, you state that addicts of high addiction/high inebriation drugs (I'll just say "addicts" when talking about such users, sacrificing some accuracy for simplicity and brevity) are a drain on the economy. However, that is only because we choose to allow them to be so. We have the option of saying that if you choose to become an addict -- and I understand that once you are addicted, it is extraordinarily difficult to stop using, but I counter that you always have the option to not start using in the first place -- then you are on your own, in which case the drain on the economy would be minimal. A more compassionate approach would be to offer assistance to those you are honestly trying to break the addiction, but to be hands-off on those who have no desire to clean up. That sounds harsh, but I believe that if we are trying to force people to sober up, we are facing a practically impossible task. As I already said, breaking such powerful addictions is difficult enough, even for someone who wants to clean up; breaking such a powerful addiction for someone who is hell-bent on staying hooked is an exercise in futility. Second, if "NO ONE wants these drugs to be used" as you state, then they wouldn't. Someone has to want to use the drugs for there to be a market, and someone has to want to sell the drugs for there to be a supply. As long as anyone values profit over the lives of others, there will be a supply, and as long as anyone wants to risk the addiction and inebriation, there will be a demand...unless, of course, people simply don't know what it's like to be an addict. If that's the case, then education, rather than a war on drugs, is the answer. I rather suspect, though, that very, very few people don't understand that meth or crack or heroin are very addictive and that becoming addicted to such drugs destroys lives. A friend of mine in high school tried cocaine only once, because it scared the crap out of him. He told me that the high was so good he knew he'd become addicted if he ever tried it again. So why would any rational being choose to use such drugs, or having sampled them, why would they choose to continue using them until they become addicted? If you can answer what is the draw to such drugs that people are willing to risk using them, knowing that using such drugs is all but guaranteed to destroy your life, you'll have a much better solution to the drug problem than SWAT teams and full prisons.
How is this a "OMG -- Linux is inherently insecure!!!" argument? The developer of software on a Linux platform is stupidly passing clear-text, confidential data across a WiFi connection. Guess what? If you set up a POP3 e-mail account on an Apple product with no encryption on your user name and password between you and the e-mail server, then try to connect to your POP3 e-mail on a shared network (for example, through an Ethernet hub), you'll be able to sniff those credentials, too. Did Apple fail to "protect you in terms of security" there? That's not an OS issue, that's an app issue.
What do you expect? If you release software and allow independent vendors to install your software on their hardware, you will get a wide range of products, from cheap and shoddy to pretty darned nice. If you only want to shell out $100 for a tablet, well, you get what you pay for. OTOH, I have a $450 Dell Streak 7 that I'm reasonably happy with. Fit and finish are pretty nice, the screen is sharp and clear, and the tablet works pretty well. There are a few apps that work fine on my HTC Hero but won't work on the Streak (Astro file manager, Google Sky); I assume that's because they were designed for the smaller screen of a phone and don't know how to scale to the larger tablet size. However, I have seen progress on that front even in the few weeks I've owned the Dell. ConnectBot wouldn't work when I first tried to install it. I tried it again last week, and the force-close on start-up on the tablet had been fixed -- now it works quite well (and the larger keyboard on the tablet makes it much nicer to use than on the Hero).
It seems to me that Apple provides a one-size-fits-all approach. They provide a premium product at a premium price. If you can afford the ${iDevice} you'll probably be happy with it. Android allows you to buy a product that fits your budget. You can get a cheap device, but you'll probably get a cheap experience. You can buy a higher-end device and get a higher-end experience. Or you can buy at the point in between where your budget and your needs intersect. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Have you ever held a three-month-old, or even seen one up close? How much explosive do you think you can pack on one of those rug rats without the bulges being all kinds of obvious? An M-80 firecracker isn't going to bring down an airliner, and you aren't going to pack a sizeable chunk of explosive on a baby without him looking like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man [:rolleyes:]
Of course, there AREN'T any because that information is "classified". So given the option of trusting DHS/TSA or assuming that since wanna-be terrorists have, in fact, managed to sneak past TSA (shoe bomber and underwear bomber, for starters) and DHS/TSA isn't releasing information on terrorists they have caught, I'm probably gonna be skeptical about "the real security improvements."
You know, I've noticed that if I I read/. before going outside, there are no polar bears in my front yard. I think I'll probably take a peek at/. before going outside, just to keep the polar bears away.
Well...Google Public Data says that our unemployment rate has doubled since 2001 (4.6% in 02/01 and 9.8%), the government had to bail out GM and Chrysler and also bailed out a number of banks. <shrug> We may not be completely sunk, but I think you could argue that the economy of the US has been critically damaged, at least.
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Turbo Pascal rocked!
It wasn't my first language, but it was the first language that I used while writing structured programs and really understood what I was doing. I had done lots of BASIC and PILOT programming earlier, but it was always top-down and heavily laced with GOTO statements. I had done structured programming in CoBOL and RPG in high school, but my programs were always modifications of the programs in the textbooks that I somehow got to work, despite the fact that I didn't really get the concepts. By the time I started using TP 4.0, I was finally starting to understanding the algorithms I was using and was finally starting to use procedures, functions, and meaningful variable names to write readable, maintainable code. Consequently, I'll probably always have a soft spot in my heart for Turbo Pascal.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I still have nightmares of my three year old brother running into my bedroom while I was programming my dad's old TRS-80 and pushing the reset button because he thought it was funny.
If I need to bring a machine down hard, I can always yank the power cord, but for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE don't resurrect the stupid, fricking reset button!
Now if we could only get Congress to grow a brain.
Yes, but the correlation is only valid for the eggs of swallows.
I understood PP to be saying "That makes sense if you know the star's initial spin characteristics (i.e., velocity, etc.)." -- not "That makes sense if you know that the star was initially spinning."
I think, perhaps, you are missing my point. All I am trying to say is that there appears to be a huge difference between our perceived threat and the real threat of terrorism to Americans living in the U.S. Because we are perceiving a much greater threat than actually exists, we are vastly overreacting to the problem, and by doing so, we may very well be perpetuating the problem.
None of that justifies the billions and billions of dollars we've wasted to combat a threat that statistically isn't significant, or the liberties we've thrown away in the name of a phantom bogeyman. None of that justifies the enormous amount of ill will the U.S. has generated around the world in the last ten years.
You say that parents don't have to explain why 3000 people died in a swimming pool. But look at the news. Because of our irrational fear and paranoia in the wake of 9/11, parents *do* have to explain why the (frequently not-so-)nice person at the airport has to touch them in places they said no one is supposed to touch. Do you really think that's better than explaining that yes, Virginia, there are bad people in the world and sometimes those bad people do bad things?
Whether the 3443 deaths due to drowning in a swimming pool is due to foreign action or a simple accident is simply irrelevant. Does it matter to the dead person if they died due to malicious intent or due to an accident? Of course not -- they are still dead! Is the pain of being separated from someone you love any less because it was just an accident? Of course not! The only difference is that in an accidental drowning, you actually have to deal with the pain of loss because you don't have someone to take it out on -- which I would argue only compounds the problem.
As far as "damage to pride," a "target for rage," or a "target to make an example of" is concerned, well, that is really the root of the problem, isn't it? Someone hurt us, and now, to feel good about ourselves, we have to go hurt them back, right? Because we are scared, and therefore, we have to have a way to show ourselves -- and anyone else that we think might get the idea to do likewise -- that we are still in CONTROL. But what happens when we do that? What's going on in Pakistan right now, in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden? The Pakistani army is pissed at us (rightfully so, IMHO) because we invaded their sovereign territory and assassinated someone living in their country. We've publicly embarrassed and insulted them, and we've shown that we can take out anyone we want inside their country. Hmmm...so what happens when Pakistan decides that they need to hurt us back for the way we've embarrassed, insulted and scared them? Are they going to hit us back? And then we'll hit them back again, etc., etc., etc. That could get really ugly, really quickly. Pakistan IS a nuclear superpower, after all.
Ultimately, we've GOT to get over the fear that we allowed into the country on 9/11. We have become the bully on the playground, and we're pissing off our allies all over the world as a result. The way we are approaching the "War on Terror" by treating everyone as a suspect, rather than empowering the very people we are trying to "protect" through these onerous laws only serves to make the problem worse (there was a really good article at rightsidenews.com on this topic recently). If we can't regain some sanity and stop running around like Chicken Little, our country is going to become a shell of what it once was.
Nice :)
Just shows you why you shouldn't trust statistics. 3443 is in exactly the same ballpark as the number of people who died on 9/11 (which I believe was your point). How many other people died in the U.S. in 2001 of terrorism? You might include the Anthrax victims, but that was just a handful of people (I don't have the exact number, and I'm honestly too lazy to look it up), but that number is trivial compared to the 9/11 death toll, so for all intents and purposes, we can call the number of people that died in 2001 of terrorism in the U.S. to be roughly 4,000.
So, if you want to consider a yearly sample, that's 3443 deaths in swimming pools to 4000 deaths due to terrorism...pretty much equal...makes me think that maybe we should pay roughly the same amount of attention to deaths in swimming pools as we do to terrorism.
But you argue that the death toll on 9/11 happened in a few hours. Okay, that's true. So somewhere on the order of 1,000 deaths per hour, then? Yes, many died in the initial four plane crashes, but the WTC didn't fall for a while longer -- call it four hours from the first impact (again, I don't remember the exact number, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but this is close enough to make my point). In swimming pools, that's (3443 deaths / year) * (1 year / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours) = 0.39 deaths per hour. Whoa! That means that terrorism is roughly 2500 times more common than deaths in swimming pools!!! Obviously, we need to spend much more time combating terror than we do combating deaths in swimming pools!
But wait...we can look at it another way, too. Since 9/11, we've had the Ft. Hood shootings and a several other attempts, but the numbers are essentially unchanged since 9/11; there have been no other terrorist attacks in the United States that caused even one order of magnitude less deaths than 9/11. By that metric, then, it's roughly 4000 deaths due to terrorism in the U.S. in TEN YEARS, meanwhile, roughly 3000 people per year are dieing in swimming pools. That means you are approximately nine times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a terrorist act in the U.S., and by that standard, GPP is correct: when compared to any other mundane risk we accept without thinking about it, the time, effort, money and liberty that we are throwing away fighting terrorism is absolutely absurd .
We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect. I'm not saying correlation is causation...
We haven't had a Martian elected president since then either, but somehow I think the two are pretty well unrelated. However, even that counter-argument is giving you too much credit, because not only is your conclusion false, but your premise is false as well. Since the poorly-named PATRIOT Act went into effect, we have, in fact, had some well-known terrorist attempts (underwear bomber, the kid who wanted to blow up a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Portland, IIRC). The underwear bomber was thwarted because 1) his explosives didn't work and 2) the people on board the airplane beat the living crap out of him (which, I believe is a far, far better way to handle terrorist attacks than giving power to unchecked government bureaucracies). The Christmas Tree kid was just flat-out stupid.
...but I think claims that the law hasn't prevented at least one American death pretty dubious.
So what? I think that the FBI and local police forces are probably more than capable of detecting and catching would-be terrorists without subverting the Bill of Rights, and I think that I'd rather run the risk of the 1 in 20-30 million chance of dieing in a terrorist act than run the risk^Wcertainty that a government not bound by the law WILL eventually abuse its own populace. It's happened throughout history; it can happen here, too.
They don't need a new 'excuse' because it's not being used to monitor the porn you're downloading and I assure you the Government has bigger fish to fry.
I'll ignore the assumption that everyone on-line is downloading porn 24x7, since we all know what they say about assumptions. However, given that most people have things they would like kept private, even if it has nothing to do with sexual fetishes, and given that a Google search will turn easily turn up many, many news stories of LEO's using public records for personal gain (IIRC, there was a story here in Anchorage a few years back of LEO's using their access to criminal records databases to dig for dirt on political candidates), your "assurances" really aren't worth squat. The moment you become "interesting" for one of any number of reasons, you suddenly become that big fish that "government" wants to fry.
Sure they may be snooping your traffic but the law says they can so any claims you make about it being a violation of your constitutional rights are useless.
Even by /. standards, that's an incredibly inane position to take. You do realize that the "constitutional rights" you so easily dismiss ARE the law, don't you? Congress can pass whatever law it wants, and the President can sign the bill, but if it violates the Constitution, IT AIN'T LEGAL! Right now, we're basically just waiting for some of the laws to be challenged in court, and GWB did a pretty good job of making that a difficult proposition by dragging people who might have had a case to overthrow the PATRIOT Act off to Guantanamo and denying them their day in court. While I'm no fan of Obama either, he at least starting putting some of these alleged terrorists on trial.
If your post is any indication of how blase and naive the American public has become, it's no wonder our country is so effed-up.
Except that, to quote Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is..." Couple that with the fact that in galactic timescales, we've only been around to notice such things for a tiny blip of time, and we've only been able to understand what we see in the heavens for an even tinier fraction of that time, and I would think that odds of us seeing and recognizing such interstellar objects would be vanishingly small.
But, not being a professional (or even reasonably competent amateur) astronomer, I could be completely wrong here. <shrug>
Grishnak had a workable solution -- make the URL bar optional. Then people like him (and me) who would like to have a URL bar available are happy and people like you who are more worried about screen real estate are happy, too.
Another compromise would be how my Android devices handle the URL bar: when you scroll to the top of the web page, the URL bar is visible. As soon as you begin to scroll down the page, the URL bar disappears. You could even have a timeout on the URL bar so that it is visible for, say, 30 seconds when you first navigate to a page (to avoid phishing sites, as Grishnak mentioned), but after the timeout, the URL bar disappears. If you scroll to the top of the page again, the URL bar could reappear for another 30 seconds or so. Rinse, repeat as required.
The answer: Florence, Italy...
You mean, the sworn enemy of Gildor?!?!
My dad, who didn't drink coffee at all BTW, died five years ago of a massive aneurysm. My grandmother (mom's mom, not his mom, fortunately) was with him when it happened, and from her description, it probably wasn't a bad way to go. On the other hand, a friend of my family's died last year from cancer, after a long, protracted, struggle. Two examples do not constitute a rigorous study, but with the data available to me, I'll take cardiovascular over cancer every single time, thanks. Especially since a good exercise program and a healthy diet can go a long ways towards maintaining cardiovascular health, which I would expect to minimize the downside to "being jacked-up on caffeine" (any health experts care to chime in?).
Personally, I try to avoid smelling the waste byproducts of digestion that my body produces as much as possible, but hey...whatever floats your boat.
Please don't lump all of us Americans into such a stereotype. Personally, I really enjoy a good espresso. The problem, however, is that it is pretty difficult to find a GOOD espresso stateside -- it's almost always burned and bitter.
Unless their drinking coffee pretty much always leads to the activity that is responsible for the reduction in cancer.
Non-coffee example: There's an apocryphal IT story about a man who called IT support because his keyboard worked fine while he was sitting, but when he stood up, the "G" and "H" keys would type the other letter (press "G", get an "H" and vice versa). Tech support tries to help the guy on the phone, but gets nowhere. Tech gets dispatched to the guy's work area, and has the guy demonstrate. Sure enough, when the man sits at his desk, everything works as expected. When he stands up to type, he gets an "H" when he presses the "G" key, and vice versa. The tech has the guy demonstrate several times, and finally figures it out: when the guy is sitting down, he's touch typing and knows where the keys are by feel. However, when he's standing, he's hunting and pecking...and the offending keys are swapped on his keyboard: the sequence is a-s-d-f-h-g-j, etc. on his keyboard, rather than a-s-d-f-g-h-j, etc. So when the guy is standing, he sees where the two keys are on the keyboard, and visually directs his finger to the incorrectly labeled key.
If you will *always* perform the action that leads to the cancer risk reduction when drinking coffee, then in practical terms, it doesn't really matter if coffee is really the cause as long as you like to drink coffee*. However, it might matter to people who don't like to drink coffee but could perform the action that causes the benefit sans coffee.
* except for technical accuracy and pedantic reasons.
I personally have exactly ZERO interest in using high addiction/high inebriation drugs whatsoever, because I completely understand and agree with you that such drugs are a huge detriment to my well being. However, I started getting edgy when you began arguing that it is good for government to try to outlaw such drugs. Initially, my reaction was philosophical. I categorically disagree that any attempt to create an external discipline upon a population for any reason other than to prevent a person or group of people from denying others their rights. My views on government are very libertarian, and my views on discipline are heavily influenced by a guy named Danny Silk ("Loving Your Kids On Purpose", which, IMHO, works equally well on adults)
However, after thinking through your arguments, I see two other big problems with your arguments. First, you state that addicts of high addiction/high inebriation drugs (I'll just say "addicts" when talking about such users, sacrificing some accuracy for simplicity and brevity) are a drain on the economy. However, that is only because we choose to allow them to be so. We have the option of saying that if you choose to become an addict -- and I understand that once you are addicted, it is extraordinarily difficult to stop using, but I counter that you always have the option to not start using in the first place -- then you are on your own, in which case the drain on the economy would be minimal. A more compassionate approach would be to offer assistance to those you are honestly trying to break the addiction, but to be hands-off on those who have no desire to clean up. That sounds harsh, but I believe that if we are trying to force people to sober up, we are facing a practically impossible task. As I already said, breaking such powerful addictions is difficult enough, even for someone who wants to clean up; breaking such a powerful addiction for someone who is hell-bent on staying hooked is an exercise in futility. Second, if "NO ONE wants these drugs to be used" as you state, then they wouldn't. Someone has to want to use the drugs for there to be a market, and someone has to want to sell the drugs for there to be a supply. As long as anyone values profit over the lives of others, there will be a supply, and as long as anyone wants to risk the addiction and inebriation, there will be a demand...unless, of course, people simply don't know what it's like to be an addict. If that's the case, then education, rather than a war on drugs, is the answer. I rather suspect, though, that very, very few people don't understand that meth or crack or heroin are very addictive and that becoming addicted to such drugs destroys lives. A friend of mine in high school tried cocaine only once, because it scared the crap out of him. He told me that the high was so good he knew he'd become addicted if he ever tried it again. So why would any rational being choose to use such drugs, or having sampled them, why would they choose to continue using them until they become addicted? If you can answer what is the draw to such drugs that people are willing to risk using them, knowing that using such drugs is all but guaranteed to destroy your life, you'll have a much better solution to the drug problem than SWAT teams and full prisons.
How is this a "OMG -- Linux is inherently insecure!!!" argument? The developer of software on a Linux platform is stupidly passing clear-text, confidential data across a WiFi connection. Guess what? If you set up a POP3 e-mail account on an Apple product with no encryption on your user name and password between you and the e-mail server, then try to connect to your POP3 e-mail on a shared network (for example, through an Ethernet hub), you'll be able to sniff those credentials, too. Did Apple fail to "protect you in terms of security" there? That's not an OS issue, that's an app issue.
What do you expect? If you release software and allow independent vendors to install your software on their hardware, you will get a wide range of products, from cheap and shoddy to pretty darned nice. If you only want to shell out $100 for a tablet, well, you get what you pay for. OTOH, I have a $450 Dell Streak 7 that I'm reasonably happy with. Fit and finish are pretty nice, the screen is sharp and clear, and the tablet works pretty well. There are a few apps that work fine on my HTC Hero but won't work on the Streak (Astro file manager, Google Sky); I assume that's because they were designed for the smaller screen of a phone and don't know how to scale to the larger tablet size. However, I have seen progress on that front even in the few weeks I've owned the Dell. ConnectBot wouldn't work when I first tried to install it. I tried it again last week, and the force-close on start-up on the tablet had been fixed -- now it works quite well (and the larger keyboard on the tablet makes it much nicer to use than on the Hero).
It seems to me that Apple provides a one-size-fits-all approach. They provide a premium product at a premium price. If you can afford the ${iDevice} you'll probably be happy with it. Android allows you to buy a product that fits your budget. You can get a cheap device, but you'll probably get a cheap experience. You can buy a higher-end device and get a higher-end experience. Or you can buy at the point in between where your budget and your needs intersect. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Have you ever held a three-month-old, or even seen one up close? How much explosive do you think you can pack on one of those rug rats without the bulges being all kinds of obvious? An M-80 firecracker isn't going to bring down an airliner, and you aren't going to pack a sizeable chunk of explosive on a baby without him looking like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man [:rolleyes:]
[Citation Needed]
Of course, there AREN'T any because that information is "classified". So given the option of trusting DHS/TSA or assuming that since wanna-be terrorists have, in fact, managed to sneak past TSA (shoe bomber and underwear bomber, for starters) and DHS/TSA isn't releasing information on terrorists they have caught, I'm probably gonna be skeptical about "the real security improvements."
Yeah, true.
/. before going outside, there are no polar bears in my front yard. I think I'll probably take a peek at /. before going outside, just to keep the polar bears away.
You know, I've noticed that if I I read
Well...Google Public Data says that our unemployment rate has doubled since 2001 (4.6% in 02/01 and 9.8%), the government had to bail out GM and Chrysler and also bailed out a number of banks. <shrug> We may not be completely sunk, but I think you could argue that the economy of the US has been critically damaged, at least.
Also, I sincerely hope all the androids part of this mission are non-smokers.
Unless they are bringing oxygen with them (which would be necessary for smoking, anyway) it won't really matter.