Actually, we haven't sent a manned space mission much farther than the far side of our moon. I don't know if you're aware, but our magnetosphere can extend to much farther beyond that, so I'm not sure if man has ever been outside of the magnetosphere -- if anyone has, it certainly wasn't for very long. Mangetosphere The radiation outside of the magnetosphere would be lethal to anyone in current space vehicles and suits on a 2-3 month trip to Mars. It's also very costly to send up heavy metals like lead for shielding.

As a citizen of the United States of America, I don't take offense to your post. I do, however, disagree with you on your idea of what people from various countries and continents should be called... mostly based on common historical naming conventions.

For instance, you could refer to someone as either being a citizen from a country by referring to that country's name or abbreviated name OR you could refer to them as having come from a region or continent. As an example, you could refer to someone from The Federal Republic of Germany as a German or a European. You could refer to someone from The People's Republic of China as Chinese or Asian. Someone from The Commonwealth of Australia would simply be referred to as Australian (because its name includes the continent it is on).

The convention is to drop "the united states of" or "the people's republic of" or "the commonwealth of" and refer to the citizen as coming from whatever is left as the abbreviation. A citizen of the United States of America should either be referred to as American or North American by that same convention.

America is not a continent. North America and South America are. We do refer to citizens of the Federative Republic of Brazil as either Brazilian or South American.

Also, there is no other country on earth that I know of that includes America in its name, but there are others that include the words "united" and "states." When other countries refer to the citizenship of someone from The United States of America, a few do refer to the person as having come from The United States (l'Etats Unit as the French say), but by and large, the person is referred to as an American citizen. As in, they'd say you came from the United States, but you ARE an American.

I'm not sure why you have such a chip on your shoulder about this, but it's accepted worldwide as being correct to call us Americans. It's even in accordance with the accepted convention of referring to people by their citizenship. In short, you're wrong.

As an aside, I have no idea what you're referring to about our "attitude" about "America" because there is no such place... unless you're referring to the Americas (plural), but by and large, Americans honestly don't think about South America on a regular basis. We mostly hear about Canada and Mexico in the news... sometimes a bit about Cuba, Brazil and rarely Chile, Argentina, or Columbia. Our government may be "intervening", but I can tell you the average American (yes, I said it! ha!) doesn't even know or care about those interventions. They'd be lucky to be able to point out countries in S. America on the map.... it's sad, really. It's a bit unfair to refer to "our attitude" when there are 300 million of us and we all have differing opinions about most things. I honestly think you are talking about a false perception you have of Americans that whatever news you listen to has given you. I personally do not want the US involved in any foreign conflicts unless we're in a state of war or allied with the country we're keeping a presence in.

The moon would have had to have formed from a molten blob to be spherical. Almost any explosion on the Earth that ejected enough material into high orbit would do. It really could be in any direction -- or all directions simultaneously like you see in a nova. The material in orbit would coalesce into a ring around the Earth and eventually into our moon... or if enough were in any one direction, a blob that would collect the material under its own gravity while in orbit creating our moon without much of a ring-stage required.

Your post is rather smug, yet you fail to explain your reasoning. If the grandparent post is incorrect, why not explain why he or she is wrong rather than acting condescending without supporting your argument that the poster is incorrect? The core of the grandparent's post seems correct. Many diseases do not develop major symptoms or even show up at all until old age -- some because of the time they take to progress far enough for symptoms to be noticed, some because they are simply age-related diseases. It makes sense to me that as peoples' life spans increase, there would be a larger percentage of older people, thus a larger percentage of age-related diseases. The GP did say hundreds of years -- and life expectancy worldwide just a hundred years ago was only 40. Now it is 66.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm http://www.efmoody.com/estate/lifeexpectancy.html

That's not to say that I completely agree with the grandparent poster. Medical science has progressed a lot during the past 100 years as well and medical screenings and diagnosis have improved to the point where we may be seeing more cases because we are simply better at screening and diagnosing illnesses where as a hundred years ago, many people may have died from illnesses that went unnoticed and their deaths were decided to be because of old age. Also misdiagnosis was likely common because so many diseases have similar symptoms and without today's medical labs to do testing, it's quite possible many patients were misdiagnosed before modern analysis was prevalent.

FF3 has been out for 6 months... longer than that if you include the betas. I wouldn't call it "unproven." If plugins you use don't work under FF3, it's the plugin developer's fault and the plugins may be abandoned projects. I've had 4 plugins discontinue working under FF3 because they were abandoned. One works, but has some features that do not work because it hasn't been updated in years. I have 12 others that are still running just fine, though -- because their authors actually bothered to update them to work with the betas and the final FF3.

I've come across the exception thing you've mentioned maybe twice in the past 6+ months and in at least one case, it was because the site was impersonating another site... kind of a phishing thing, I guess.

Your mileage may vary, but I surf the web a lot with 50+ tabs open at any given time from pages from all over the world (USA, Japan, Russia, Germany, etc)... and I've only had FF3 crash less than a dozen times since its release (after the most recent flash and FF3 update within the past few weeks, it crashed 3 times while watching hours of streaming video from ABC and CBS, but I can't say whether that's FF3's fault or the plugins for the sites)

Firefox does update quite a lot. I like that. The updates are mostly to patch browser exploits. FF2 will no longer be getting those as it's at end-of-life.

You can continue using FF2 for as long as you like, but sooner or later, you'll need to switch to another browser for some feature you need -- whether that's FF3 or Opera or whatever is your choice. Your experience with FF3 is likely atypical... at least it's nothing like my own experience with FF3 or that of my family and friends that switched many months ago.

I think the idea is that since they aren't going to offer any more updates to the software, anyone using FF 2.0 is going to be vulnerable to future browser exploits and rendering issues which will not ever be patched (unless someone forks the code), so from a user-safety perspective and a public relations perspective, Mozilla needs to strongly persuade people to move away from the old version.

The reasons to upgrade are the same as for any software. Sooner or later, FF3 or higher will have features that FF2 does not have and that you will need or wish you had. Whether that's patches, plug-ins, or new features, I can't say... but it is coming. Maybe a new version of HTML or a new scripting language... maybe a plugin that only works with 3.0 or higher for web pages you need access to -- who knows.

As for why they choose to turn the anti-phishing off rather than move to the next version, I think it's fair to say that turning off something is easier than re-coding it to work with something new. Also, why code it to work with the new Google version when you're discontinuing support? At some point, Google's API will change and FF 2 users will be left without a working anti-phishing engine again -- only without any warning because Mozilla will have moved on to FF 4 or beyond by then.

You are, of course, welcome to continue to use FF 2 if you enjoy the product, but it is not Mozilla's responsibility to continue to support it once they've moved on to a newer version.

You are correct that Mozilla could wait until Google discontinues its service to turn off the feature, but that is only prolonging the inevitable. They likely want the upgrade in place before Google shuts down its service so that users have advanced warning. If I were Mozilla, I'd even put up a splash screen upon installing the update to warn people that the anti-phishing no longer works and to upgrade to FF 3 if they wish to continue using the feature.

I'm not exactly sure what you're arguing. It sounds as if you're upset that Mozilla is "pushing" people to FF3 by discontinuing a feature in FF2, but really it's Google that's changing and Mozilla is reacting to that change by turning off the feature in advance in an effort to control the situation. It's not as if Mozilla turned off FF2's ability to use tabs or plugins or other features to intentionally cripple FF2.

Honestly, your post sounds a bit like a rant that eventually you'll have to move to something other than FF2 and you're upset that the reasons to move have only just begun to pile up. I can understand that you like the software and believe it is still worth supporting and/or forking to continue updating, but apparently Mozilla isn't going to be the one to do that for you.