In short he had the volume control and it was in his power to change it to the correct level for him.
Yes, but this is America. Just because you're holding the coffee and in control of it doesn't mean it's your fault if you spill it on yourself. What it needs is a big fat Surgeon General's warning on the side saying, "This product WILL make you go deaf." Of course, then they'd get sued by people who didn't go deaf claiming the product didn't perform as advertised.
I'm not fond of upgrading software. Being a software developer, I often don't have a choice. I often have to make sure I'm using the latest of anything that might be work-related and that includes things like Office and other supporting software.
But with something like a web browser, I get a choice. I held off on switching to Firefox. I tried some earlier version and while they had nice features, there were too many issues, I wouldn't switch. Shortly before the 1.0 release, I finally made the switch. The two most compelling features for me were the tabbed browsing and the keyworded bookmarks (which I use ALL the time).
I don't know if IE 7 has the keyworded bookmarks and without it (or something similar), I wouldn't even consider it. But the fact remains that without some compelling new features, I doubt I will switch and from what I've seen so far, there's just nothing like that.
I suspect a lot of regular users are like that. Without a really compelling reason, they won't switch. I suspect IE 7.0 will fail to turn the tide of people switching to Firefox.
that this would help show to them how stupid the idea of software patents are. But I suspect this won't change the MS perspective on software patents.
I've never been to Guatemala, but I suspect the $8.9 million that Amado won will go far...
Virus or not, individuals can control it.
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
I hate crap like this because it gives Americans an excuse to be obese. In general, people who are obese in this country have had a tendency to blame it on genes. Now they have something else to blame it on.
The fact is, obesity is the result of an eating disorder. I don't care what virus you have, if you're consuming fewer calories than you're expending, you'll lose weight. It's that simple.
I moved back to my birth state of Arkansas recently and the obesity problem here is just stunning to me. You'll go into a grocery store and you see all these incredibly obese people riding carts around the store and you just want to scream, "Get out of the damn cart and walk."
Obesity is, largely, a disease in this country. It might be spreading, but only as the popularity of fast food spreads. If other countries start eating fast food in the volume that people do in this country, then they will have the same problem. There's not a doubt in my mind.
In many other countries, for example, McDonalds doesn't do super sizing. Why? Because people in other countries seem to realize that a super-sized meal is FAR too much food for one person.
Coca Cola used to come in little 6oz bottles. When was the last time you saw someone only drink 6oz of coke?
I eat fairly large portions myself, but I find weight maintenance pretty simple these days: I eat well rounded meals that I fix myself. I rarely eat fast food.
The U.S. Army has a program for overweight recruits. There is a very strict diet and excercise program. They're very careful to keep people from losing weight too quickly. I have NEVER heard of anyone who couldn't lose weight through this program, nor has anyone ever starved to death on it. That to me, is proof enough, that weight can be controlled by excercise and diet.
The problem is, most people who "diet" do it as a temporary thing, even though they've heard, over and over again, that "dieting" in that fashion doesn't fix anything permanently. You have to change the way you eat and keep it changed.
Why does everyone rag on companies trying to make money. Best Buy is a publicly trade company. By law, they have to keep the best interests of their investors in mind. This is, in almost all cases, to make as much profit as they can.
If you can get past that, Best Buy isn't all that bad. Personally, I shope there all the time. They started reducing the number of mail-in-rebates a while ago. I check every couple of weeks for their blank DVD prices. Every once in a while, they have sales and the blank DVDs are more than 50% off the regular price. 50 packs for $16 or $17.
Their customer service has, in my experience, been exceptional. Yeah, their sales people push the useless service agreements but, and again, in my experience, they don't push too hard. I've walked out of CompUSA without buying a computer because their salespeople kept on with the service contract and wouldn't shut up about it. Best Buy has never come close to annoying me that bad about them.
I'm glad they're continuing the push to get rid of the mail-in-rebates. They're a pain. But I certainly don't think there's anything particularly evil about them trying to capitalize on customers habits. That's just efficient business management. It's exactly what their stockholders expect.
I have a two-tuner TiVo with my DirecTV. I record TONS of movies. Most of it I capture and write DVD. I very rarely have a conflict where I'm trying to record more than 2 things at once, and even when it has happened, I've always been able to find at least one alternate time among the three movies to reschedule one. 3 tuners, and I'd NEVER run into the problem. 11 tuners? Who the fuck needs 11 tuners? Sorry, but this article goes into my "Waste of time and money" bin.
If Google ain't gonna pay, nobody is going to pay. I guess I was right in my response to the previous post on this topic entitled, "What if nobody pays?"
I had access to a few magazines growing up as well. But access to a few magazines and access to the kind of hardcore porn that's easily available on the net these days, is a very different thing.
I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this. I don't want my kids to have easy access to that kind of pornography. There's enough anecdotal evidence, in my mind, from kids that are growing up with this and it being a major problem, that it concerns me a great deal. Kids whose understanding of romantic relationships have become completely skewed because their role models are guys cumming on women's faces and saying, "take that bitch!"
I looked at Playboys, Oui (remember that?), Hustler, and others, when I was a kid. I even watch a handful of porn movies. But they weren't like the stuff out today. That's what I want to protect my kids from.
If you think it doesn't affect kids, you're just plain wrong. It may not affect all of them, but it is affecting a lot of of them and a hell of a lot more than were being affected when I was a kid.
My concern is, I'm not sure I can block my kids from watching this kind of stuff when they're old enough. I might be able to monitor the logs of where they've been, but I'm not sure I can keep them from getting there in the first place. The amount of hard core porn easily viewable from a google image query concerns me. Google is a fantastic tool, but I don't want my kids searching porn on Google images.
The only viable solution I've seen to date is for computers to be kept in a common area where parents can easily monitor what the children are browsing. That is likely the path I will take if nothing better comes up.
The skin around the ring became pink and remained pink for a couple months. A very thin, barely noticeable crusty film developped over the mole. Had I not been watching it, I probably wouldn't have noticed the crustiness.
For those of us that are at a high risk for skin cancer, this may be the beginning of something very good.
My father was diagnosed with non-melanoma skin cancer when I was 16 and had to have a fair bit of skin from his legs removed. I went to see a dermatologist shortly afterwards who told me, and I quote, "You'll get skin cancer, it's just a matter of when." When you're 16, this is a pretty scary thing to hear from a doctor, but it's the best thing she could have done. Because of her warning, I check myself regularly (and have others check where I can't from time to time). I go see a dermatologist once a year for a checkup.
At the age of 32, I noticed a mole that wasn't quite right. Turned out to be squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). I was living on the beach in Southern Mexico at the time which probably isn't the best place for a person of my skin type, but I'm generally pretty careful about sun exposure. Anyway, the doctor told me he had never had anyone catch one so early. Had it not been for the doctor warning me 16 years earlier, I may have waited long enough that a simple excision wouldn't have been possible.
I've known two people who have had melanoma. One died before his 20s and the other just barely caught it in time but has huge scars on his back from where it was removed. Early detection is crucial for those of us at risk. Melanoma is one of the most virulant and fatal forms of cancer. Caught early, it's very treatable, but the difference between early and too late can sometimes be a matter of just weeks.
If this technology can become widespread and people at risk are given access to it, I have little question that it could save a lot of lives.
The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months.
Doubling every 10 months? I think hard drives are doing that as well, or damn close to it. A few years ago, 22 terabytes sounded like a lot, but these days, not so much. I've got half a terabyte in my server and another half in the other two computers in my home and if I didn't regularly burn stuff to DVD, I would have run out of space a long time ago. Terabytes just aren't what they used to be. Well, they are and they aren't.
Okay, if I understand this correctly, they're going to charge content providers for priority packet delivery, basically. But what if nobody pays extra? Sure, some sites will get slower, but then what's going to happen? Are they going to intentionally degrade the performance of high traffic sites?
On top of which, everyone is already paying. I pay for my internet connection. My ISP pays for its internet connection. Content providers pay for their internet connections. The Content Provider's provider pays for its connection. They're already charging for every link in the connection. Now they want to charge one link twice?
I don't think anyone's going to do this. It just doesn't make sense to anyone except Bell South. Nobody is going to see the logic behind their argument. It's as simple as looking at the responses here on Slashdot. How many people here are saying, "Gee, this makes sense." Nobody. How many content providers, who are generally going to be technically saavy, are going to say, "Gee, this makes sense." The answer is none.
Personally, I think this is going to be a very short-lived experiment.
An easy way to get 12 volts? Connect six tree-cells in series.
Precisely what I was going to say, and I'm sure anyone with a basic knowledge of electricity would say the same thing.
Of course, the real problem probably isn't the voltage so much as the wattage. 12 volts is great, but if it's at about.01 milliamps, it's not going to power a whole lot. Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention amps or watts, and without at least 2 of the 3, there's not really much to say about the potential (pun sort of intended).
As Gregory Hines said in Running Scared about hitting the third rail on the subway, "it's not the volts that kill you, it's the amps". A taser hits with 50,000-150,000 volts. The reason you don't burn to a crisp when you get hit by one is the amps are so low.
You want to get the voltage to a usable level, but you also need enough amps to run whatever it is you want to run. Frankly, I doubt a tree can produce enough amps, at least without permanently damaging it, for any serious period of time. The act of being a battery will cause a chemical change in the tree which I have to think wouldn't be a healthy one. Since the tree is alive, it will probably repair the damage, but whether it can repair it fast enough to keep from dying is another question.
Needless to say, I have some serious doubts about this "technology".
"If we wait until things are totally tested and analyzed in animals, it will deny some people treatment"
We generally don't use humans as guinea pigs. Medical treatments need approval before they can be used. This guy clearly thinks the benefits outweigh the risk, but his opinion shouldn't be the one that decides.
If early testing shows no serious side effects and tremendous benefits, treatments can sometimes be fast-tracked testing phases. But if every time someone believed as this man, a treatment skipped testing, more people would die than be saved.
Testing and clinical trials exist for a reason. Because in many cases, they save lives. It's an imperfect system, to be sure, but it's better than the alternative.
Or our detection methods simply slant the results to systems like that.
Our detection methods slant towards larger planets, definitely. But the fact that most of those large planets are in highly eccentric orbits or close to their stars has nothing to do with the detection method. It appears to be the predominate result of solar system formation. Ours appears to be the exception, not the rule.
Our detection methods could find Jupiter like planets in Jupiter like orbits, and they do. They're just few and far between.
Keep in mind that while this stuff is in the habitable zone right now, that doesn't mean anything will be there in the future. As we've seen from the 100+ planets already found, many systems apparently develop with Jupter-sized and larger planets in either close orbits or wildly eccentric orbits that will result in smaller planets in the habitable zone being either thrown into their host star or, more likely, expelled from their solar system.
Factor into this that single cell "life" began on this planet almost as soon as the conditions were favorable, but it took another 2.5 billion for it to evolve into multi-cell life. That seems to indicate, to me at least, that multi-cell life is difficult and not necessarily a forgone conclusion when you have single-cell life. I suspect the number of planets with "life" as we know it, to be far fewer than a lot of people believe.
... for their own actions. I mean look, video games can, for some people, I suppose, be as addictive as drugs. Liquor companies are no more responsible for alcoholics than video game publishers are for video game addicts. That is to say, neither video game publishers nor liquor companies are responsible. In the U.S., we've been building this culture of "it's not my fault." Cigarette companies are sued for people dying from smoking, McDonalds is sued for people pouring hot coffee on themselves or getting obese from eating their food.
I'm a big believer in Darwinism and the "not my fault" culture goes completely against it. It's like those stupid warnings on hair dryers that warn you not to use them in the shower. If you protect idiots long enough, they'll breed. That's bad. If a guy is going to spend 20 days straight playing video games and eating noodles, then he should die. There's obviously something very wrong with his genes and that's not a trait you want to pass on to the next generation.
That might sound cold and heartless, but to some degree, you need to be able to follow a basic instinct to survive or you need to be pulled from the gene pool. Protecting all these people from themselves actually encourages bad genes to propagate and it actually hurts the race as a whole.
Oh well, guess I'll get off my soap box, but I just wish people would start taking responsibility for their own lives and stop blaming their bad habits on everyone else.
Just move to a semi-populated rural area where there is a lower crime rate with less prying police.
Maybe you missed the part about the 450 BILLION people in Europe. Obviously there are no semi-populated rural areas to be found. Europe is clearly a single huge Gigalopolis.
Can you provide examples of crappy documentation in v1.0 or v1.1 of the framework?
I don't know if the original poster can, but I sure can: BindingContext and CurrencyManager. Having written a data bound hierarchical grid in C#, I can tell you for a fact that the CurrencyManager documentation is horribly documented for control designers, the people who have the most need of good CurrencyManager documentation. As a single major flaw, take the "Note to inheritors" section of the documentation. This would be really helpful if the class didn't have protected abstract methods and properties which you therefore can't implement and thus meaning you can't inherit from the class.
The System.Window.Forms.DataGrid control is also horribly documented, hence the very extensive FAQ on it that George Shephard wrote. In fact, the extensiveness of his Windows Forms FAQ is necessary because of the poverty of good documentation from MS.
Next, the documentation for accessibility is horrendous. There are things that are completely nonsensical in the documentation. Without help from the developers that work for manufacturers of accessible hardware, we would have had a much harder time implementing the accessibility in our app.
True, CurrencyManager and accessibility aren't exactly part of the mainstream of coding, but they're both areas that any control developer will have to be familiar with and thus, important areas to be documented.
It is stupid and irresponsible not to warn consumers and I can't see any way it doesn't add to the liability of a company to fail to disclose this information.
My step-mother was the victim of ID theft, and this was about 20 years ago, before the internet. She spent over a decade dealing with it. The responsible party was never found and every year or two, a new thing would pop up on her credit history. It was an absolute nightmare. This, from a person who never carried a debt on her credit cards and had an otherwise flawless, and I mean, FLAWLESS credit history.
Companies that don't take every step to protect their customers from this nightmare are no better than the ID thieves themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
In short he had the volume control and it was in his power to change it to the correct level for him.
Yes, but this is America. Just because you're holding the coffee and in control of it doesn't mean it's your fault if you spill it on yourself. What it needs is a big fat Surgeon General's warning on the side saying, "This product WILL make you go deaf." Of course, then they'd get sued by people who didn't go deaf claiming the product didn't perform as advertised.
I'm not fond of upgrading software. Being a software developer, I often don't have a choice. I often have to make sure I'm using the latest of anything that might be work-related and that includes things like Office and other supporting software.
But with something like a web browser, I get a choice. I held off on switching to Firefox. I tried some earlier version and while they had nice features, there were too many issues, I wouldn't switch. Shortly before the 1.0 release, I finally made the switch. The two most compelling features for me were the tabbed browsing and the keyworded bookmarks (which I use ALL the time).
I don't know if IE 7 has the keyworded bookmarks and without it (or something similar), I wouldn't even consider it. But the fact remains that without some compelling new features, I doubt I will switch and from what I've seen so far, there's just nothing like that.
I suspect a lot of regular users are like that. Without a really compelling reason, they won't switch. I suspect IE 7.0 will fail to turn the tide of people switching to Firefox.
that this would help show to them how stupid the idea of software patents are. But I suspect this won't change the MS perspective on software patents.
I've never been to Guatemala, but I suspect the $8.9 million that Amado won will go far...
I hate crap like this because it gives Americans an excuse to be obese. In general, people who are obese in this country have had a tendency to blame it on genes. Now they have something else to blame it on.
The fact is, obesity is the result of an eating disorder. I don't care what virus you have, if you're consuming fewer calories than you're expending, you'll lose weight. It's that simple.
I moved back to my birth state of Arkansas recently and the obesity problem here is just stunning to me. You'll go into a grocery store and you see all these incredibly obese people riding carts around the store and you just want to scream, "Get out of the damn cart and walk."
Obesity is, largely, a disease in this country. It might be spreading, but only as the popularity of fast food spreads. If other countries start eating fast food in the volume that people do in this country, then they will have the same problem. There's not a doubt in my mind.
In many other countries, for example, McDonalds doesn't do super sizing. Why? Because people in other countries seem to realize that a super-sized meal is FAR too much food for one person.
Coca Cola used to come in little 6oz bottles. When was the last time you saw someone only drink 6oz of coke?
I eat fairly large portions myself, but I find weight maintenance pretty simple these days: I eat well rounded meals that I fix myself. I rarely eat fast food.
The U.S. Army has a program for overweight recruits. There is a very strict diet and excercise program. They're very careful to keep people from losing weight too quickly. I have NEVER heard of anyone who couldn't lose weight through this program, nor has anyone ever starved to death on it. That to me, is proof enough, that weight can be controlled by excercise and diet.
The problem is, most people who "diet" do it as a temporary thing, even though they've heard, over and over again, that "dieting" in that fashion doesn't fix anything permanently. You have to change the way you eat and keep it changed.
Why does everyone rag on companies trying to make money. Best Buy is a publicly trade company. By law, they have to keep the best interests of their investors in mind. This is, in almost all cases, to make as much profit as they can.
If you can get past that, Best Buy isn't all that bad. Personally, I shope there all the time. They started reducing the number of mail-in-rebates a while ago. I check every couple of weeks for their blank DVD prices. Every once in a while, they have sales and the blank DVDs are more than 50% off the regular price. 50 packs for $16 or $17.
Their customer service has, in my experience, been exceptional. Yeah, their sales people push the useless service agreements but, and again, in my experience, they don't push too hard. I've walked out of CompUSA without buying a computer because their salespeople kept on with the service contract and wouldn't shut up about it. Best Buy has never come close to annoying me that bad about them.
I'm glad they're continuing the push to get rid of the mail-in-rebates. They're a pain. But I certainly don't think there's anything particularly evil about them trying to capitalize on customers habits. That's just efficient business management. It's exactly what their stockholders expect.
I have a two-tuner TiVo with my DirecTV. I record TONS of movies. Most of it I capture and write DVD. I very rarely have a conflict where I'm trying to record more than 2 things at once, and even when it has happened, I've always been able to find at least one alternate time among the three movies to reschedule one. 3 tuners, and I'd NEVER run into the problem. 11 tuners? Who the fuck needs 11 tuners? Sorry, but this article goes into my "Waste of time and money" bin.
If Google ain't gonna pay, nobody is going to pay. I guess I was right in my response to the previous post on this topic entitled, "What if nobody pays?"
I had access to a few magazines growing up as well. But access to a few magazines and access to the kind of hardcore porn that's easily available on the net these days, is a very different thing.
I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this. I don't want my kids to have easy access to that kind of pornography. There's enough anecdotal evidence, in my mind, from kids that are growing up with this and it being a major problem, that it concerns me a great deal. Kids whose understanding of romantic relationships have become completely skewed because their role models are guys cumming on women's faces and saying, "take that bitch!"
I looked at Playboys, Oui (remember that?), Hustler, and others, when I was a kid. I even watch a handful of porn movies. But they weren't like the stuff out today. That's what I want to protect my kids from.
If you think it doesn't affect kids, you're just plain wrong. It may not affect all of them, but it is affecting a lot of of them and a hell of a lot more than were being affected when I was a kid.
My concern is, I'm not sure I can block my kids from watching this kind of stuff when they're old enough. I might be able to monitor the logs of where they've been, but I'm not sure I can keep them from getting there in the first place. The amount of hard core porn easily viewable from a google image query concerns me. Google is a fantastic tool, but I don't want my kids searching porn on Google images.
The only viable solution I've seen to date is for computers to be kept in a common area where parents can easily monitor what the children are browsing. That is likely the path I will take if nothing better comes up.
Sorry, I meant the skin around the mole became pink. It was a pinkish ring around the mole.
would you mind expanding on "wasn't quite right"?
The skin around the ring became pink and remained pink for a couple months. A very thin, barely noticeable crusty film developped over the mole. Had I not been watching it, I probably wouldn't have noticed the crustiness.
how much copper cable we can make out of the Statue of Liberty? I guess we ought to thank the French for sending us such a nice supply of copper.
For those of us that are at a high risk for skin cancer, this may be the beginning of something very good.
My father was diagnosed with non-melanoma skin cancer when I was 16 and had to have a fair bit of skin from his legs removed. I went to see a dermatologist shortly afterwards who told me, and I quote, "You'll get skin cancer, it's just a matter of when." When you're 16, this is a pretty scary thing to hear from a doctor, but it's the best thing she could have done. Because of her warning, I check myself regularly (and have others check where I can't from time to time). I go see a dermatologist once a year for a checkup.
At the age of 32, I noticed a mole that wasn't quite right. Turned out to be squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). I was living on the beach in Southern Mexico at the time which probably isn't the best place for a person of my skin type, but I'm generally pretty careful about sun exposure. Anyway, the doctor told me he had never had anyone catch one so early. Had it not been for the doctor warning me 16 years earlier, I may have waited long enough that a simple excision wouldn't have been possible.
I've known two people who have had melanoma. One died before his 20s and the other just barely caught it in time but has huge scars on his back from where it was removed. Early detection is crucial for those of us at risk. Melanoma is one of the most virulant and fatal forms of cancer. Caught early, it's very treatable, but the difference between early and too late can sometimes be a matter of just weeks.
If this technology can become widespread and people at risk are given access to it, I have little question that it could save a lot of lives.
The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months.
Doubling every 10 months? I think hard drives are doing that as well, or damn close to it. A few years ago, 22 terabytes sounded like a lot, but these days, not so much. I've got half a terabyte in my server and another half in the other two computers in my home and if I didn't regularly burn stuff to DVD, I would have run out of space a long time ago. Terabytes just aren't what they used to be. Well, they are and they aren't.
Okay, if I understand this correctly, they're going to charge content providers for priority packet delivery, basically. But what if nobody pays extra? Sure, some sites will get slower, but then what's going to happen? Are they going to intentionally degrade the performance of high traffic sites?
On top of which, everyone is already paying. I pay for my internet connection. My ISP pays for its internet connection. Content providers pay for their internet connections. The Content Provider's provider pays for its connection. They're already charging for every link in the connection. Now they want to charge one link twice?
I don't think anyone's going to do this. It just doesn't make sense to anyone except Bell South. Nobody is going to see the logic behind their argument. It's as simple as looking at the responses here on Slashdot. How many people here are saying, "Gee, this makes sense." Nobody. How many content providers, who are generally going to be technically saavy, are going to say, "Gee, this makes sense." The answer is none.
Personally, I think this is going to be a very short-lived experiment.
first we don't have it, then we have it, then we don't have it, then we have it again....
Indeed. Sometimes, late at night, I worry about legacy code
That's what you worry about at night? I tend to worry about whether or not I've held her long enough that I can get out of bed and leave.
An easy way to get 12 volts? Connect six tree-cells in series.
.01 milliamps, it's not going to power a whole lot. Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention amps or watts, and without at least 2 of the 3, there's not really much to say about the potential (pun sort of intended).
Precisely what I was going to say, and I'm sure anyone with a basic knowledge of electricity would say the same thing.
Of course, the real problem probably isn't the voltage so much as the wattage. 12 volts is great, but if it's at about
As Gregory Hines said in Running Scared about hitting the third rail on the subway, "it's not the volts that kill you, it's the amps". A taser hits with 50,000-150,000 volts. The reason you don't burn to a crisp when you get hit by one is the amps are so low.
You want to get the voltage to a usable level, but you also need enough amps to run whatever it is you want to run. Frankly, I doubt a tree can produce enough amps, at least without permanently damaging it, for any serious period of time. The act of being a battery will cause a chemical change in the tree which I have to think wouldn't be a healthy one. Since the tree is alive, it will probably repair the damage, but whether it can repair it fast enough to keep from dying is another question.
Needless to say, I have some serious doubts about this "technology".
"If we wait until things are totally tested and analyzed in animals, it will deny some people treatment"
We generally don't use humans as guinea pigs. Medical treatments need approval before they can be used. This guy clearly thinks the benefits outweigh the risk, but his opinion shouldn't be the one that decides.
If early testing shows no serious side effects and tremendous benefits, treatments can sometimes be fast-tracked testing phases. But if every time someone believed as this man, a treatment skipped testing, more people would die than be saved.
Testing and clinical trials exist for a reason. Because in many cases, they save lives. It's an imperfect system, to be sure, but it's better than the alternative.
Or our detection methods simply slant the results to systems like that.
Our detection methods slant towards larger planets, definitely. But the fact that most of those large planets are in highly eccentric orbits or close to their stars has nothing to do with the detection method. It appears to be the predominate result of solar system formation. Ours appears to be the exception, not the rule.
Our detection methods could find Jupiter like planets in Jupiter like orbits, and they do. They're just few and far between.
Keep in mind that while this stuff is in the habitable zone right now, that doesn't mean anything will be there in the future. As we've seen from the 100+ planets already found, many systems apparently develop with Jupter-sized and larger planets in either close orbits or wildly eccentric orbits that will result in smaller planets in the habitable zone being either thrown into their host star or, more likely, expelled from their solar system.
Factor into this that single cell "life" began on this planet almost as soon as the conditions were favorable, but it took another 2.5 billion for it to evolve into multi-cell life. That seems to indicate, to me at least, that multi-cell life is difficult and not necessarily a forgone conclusion when you have single-cell life. I suspect the number of planets with "life" as we know it, to be far fewer than a lot of people believe.
... for their own actions. I mean look, video games can, for some people, I suppose, be as addictive as drugs. Liquor companies are no more responsible for alcoholics than video game publishers are for video game addicts. That is to say, neither video game publishers nor liquor companies are responsible. In the U.S., we've been building this culture of "it's not my fault." Cigarette companies are sued for people dying from smoking, McDonalds is sued for people pouring hot coffee on themselves or getting obese from eating their food.
I'm a big believer in Darwinism and the "not my fault" culture goes completely against it. It's like those stupid warnings on hair dryers that warn you not to use them in the shower. If you protect idiots long enough, they'll breed. That's bad. If a guy is going to spend 20 days straight playing video games and eating noodles, then he should die. There's obviously something very wrong with his genes and that's not a trait you want to pass on to the next generation.
That might sound cold and heartless, but to some degree, you need to be able to follow a basic instinct to survive or you need to be pulled from the gene pool. Protecting all these people from themselves actually encourages bad genes to propagate and it actually hurts the race as a whole.
Oh well, guess I'll get off my soap box, but I just wish people would start taking responsibility for their own lives and stop blaming their bad habits on everyone else.
Just move to a semi-populated rural area where there is a lower crime rate with less prying police.
Maybe you missed the part about the 450 BILLION people in Europe. Obviously there are no semi-populated rural areas to be found. Europe is clearly a single huge Gigalopolis.
"...follows a nearly circular path. And it is too distant to have come into direct contact with Neptune..."
I suspect that any Kuiper Belt object that's come in direct contact with Neptune is now part of Neptune.
Can you provide examples of crappy documentation in v1.0 or v1.1 of the framework?
I don't know if the original poster can, but I sure can: BindingContext and CurrencyManager. Having written a data bound hierarchical grid in C#, I can tell you for a fact that the CurrencyManager documentation is horribly documented for control designers, the people who have the most need of good CurrencyManager documentation. As a single major flaw, take the "Note to inheritors" section of the documentation. This would be really helpful if the class didn't have protected abstract methods and properties which you therefore can't implement and thus meaning you can't inherit from the class.
The System.Window.Forms.DataGrid control is also horribly documented, hence the very extensive FAQ on it that George Shephard wrote. In fact, the extensiveness of his Windows Forms FAQ is necessary because of the poverty of good documentation from MS.
Next, the documentation for accessibility is horrendous. There are things that are completely nonsensical in the documentation. Without help from the developers that work for manufacturers of accessible hardware, we would have had a much harder time implementing the accessibility in our app.
True, CurrencyManager and accessibility aren't exactly part of the mainstream of coding, but they're both areas that any control developer will have to be familiar with and thus, important areas to be documented.
It is stupid and irresponsible not to warn consumers and I can't see any way it doesn't add to the liability of a company to fail to disclose this information.
My step-mother was the victim of ID theft, and this was about 20 years ago, before the internet. She spent over a decade dealing with it. The responsible party was never found and every year or two, a new thing would pop up on her credit history. It was an absolute nightmare. This, from a person who never carried a debt on her credit cards and had an otherwise flawless, and I mean, FLAWLESS credit history.
Companies that don't take every step to protect their customers from this nightmare are no better than the ID thieves themselves.