What is with the bright center spot? Is that just millions of stars packed way more densely than on the spiral arms?

So why the exception for code libraries? or applications?

In all my years of schooling, except one college class, I never really knew how the grades on my papers were determined, and I never really received any feedback other than a letter grade. I knew the teachers wanted correct spelling and grammar but that was about it. In college, I finally had a teacher point out that I had a tendency to jump around from past to present tense. She explained that usually one wants to keep the same tense. I had never noticed I did this. She also happened to mention that George Orwell's writing style was considered good, because he made his point with a minimum of superfluous words. She mentioned many students are so used to trying to pad essays with words to reach the word limit that everybody starts using lots of unnecessary text to make their point. I also had a teacher who occasionally read a student essay he liked. I noticed these usually used lots of big words. Whether that actually had anything to do with the grade I have no idea. I also once had an architectural drawing class. The teacher like to give penmanship assignments. For the half the class I never got a good grade on the penmanship assignments and I never knew why. I worked at them meticulously for hours. I had pen been using a regular #2 pencil. Then one day I used a .5mm mechanical pencil and I received a perfect score. Would it have killed the teacher to tell me to buy the right pencil. I much preferred math to english in school. When you had the right answer, you pretty much always knew you had the right answer.

"Oil isn't going away any time soon". You know I really hope you're right. However, according to wikipedia, the 17 largest reserves total 1.3 trillion barrels. If I divide that by world usage of 88 million barrels per day, I get 40 years. Plus population growth is still happening and the third world is becoming more advanced. Of course eventually this oil will become harder to get, driving up its price and possibly slowing consumption. I believe expensive oil is going to severly impact this world. So while there still might be oil, will it be cheap enough and plentiful enough to prevent the complete collapse of society within the next 100 years. I would really like it if somebody could point me to a decent resource that will alleviate my fears. Sure we might find more oil. Everytime I hear about a big new discovery though, I just divide it by 88 million barrels a day, and I quickly realize that it is a truly insignificant discovery. Sometimes I hear the Canada tar sands will save us, but those reserves are in the above wikipedia figure. Some of the reserve life figures on wikipedia have a longer life time, but that is because the production is low relative to the 88 million barrels per day. In the next 70 years we could have twice as many people on this planet. How much oil will we need then?

I have a Samsung TV with an internet browser. Unfortunately, the TV does not have a useable means of entering any input. The process is so painful it literally took me 20 minutes to enter a URL. I do mean entering it, not trying to learn how to enter it. I completely understood the input process before beginning. I have done it only 1 time, simply to see if it actually brought up the webpage I wanted. I am pretty shocked just how poorly this was thought out. The picture quality though is fantastic.

This was not the EULA that came with my Sony. There were two separate EULAs. One for the Sony software, and one for the Yahoo Widgets. A quick internet search did not turn up either of the exact EULAs presented by the TV.

Well, I did not set out to read EULAs. I ended up with a Samsung. It also has a EULA, but it was short and acceptable to me.

I returned a Sony TV partly because the EULA said I had to indemnify Sony if I violated the EULA or was even alleged to have violated the EULA. I didn't want to deal with possibly being on the hook for million dollar lawyer fees. I know that the chances of Sony getting sued because of my actions would probably be nil, and two it would be thrown out of court as unconscionable, but still, I thought the indemnify clause was crazy. This indemnify clause also said Sony would have to approve of any lawyers involved. Additionally the TV came with Yahoo widgets, and the EULA for Yahoo widgets said the license was non-transferable. I assumed this to mean that selling the TV would violate the EULA. The EULA required arbitration for any disputes. The entirety of the EULA gave Sony all the rights and the user none. Well, the TV that I exchanged it for looked better anyway, so it was a win win for me.

The article states: "The blacker the material, the more heat it radiates away." I always thought that since black materials don't reflect light that they absorb heat. I have always heard that black clothes and black cars are hotter. However, I once read that the Blackbird SR-71 was painted black for the cooling effect. Could someone make sense of this for me?

Why does the software permit repeated rapid login attempts? Why isn't there some sort of exponential back off time between retries?

I want to be able to set the permissions, and make it the apps responsibility to test for what it is allowed to do and then run in a diminished capacity.

I finally got an Android phone and I took an immediate disliking to the way applications and their permissions are handled. Before you install an application from the Android Market you are told what permissions the application wants. If you don't like it, all you can do is not install the application. For example, if I want TV Guide listings, but the TV Guide application wants access to my contacts, and I don't want to give up access to my contacts then I am stuck. There is no method for me to deny the TV Guide application access to my contacts, other than not installing it. With social media taking off, many applications now want access to my contacts. I just find this unacceptable. I also don't know of any means to currently filter the Android applications by their permission requests. I also notice that applications seem to just start up by themselves. I have an application called Advanced Task Killer that stops applications. However, before long a bunch of applications are running that I did not specifically start. I don't know if Linux is any better about this. Is there any means I have to protect against an application finding my email contacts and phoning home with them?

Allowing javascript to run is simply not safe. Websites get hacked all the time to serve up javascript code that takes advantage of all sorts of vulnerabilities in your browser and operating system. It is really sad the more sites don't degrade to being useful without javascript.

One thing I have wondered about with so many patents like this is that ideas are not supposed to be patentable. Forgetting for a moment the actual incomprehensible wording of this patent. Lets assume it simply said, the image changes when a mouse rolls over it. This is an idea. How you actually make the image change when the mouse rolls over it is the invention. However, the implementation is trivial.

In reality, the ideas are valuable, but should not be patentable. However, once you have the idea, the implementation is often trivial.

Now if you take an idea like wouldn't it be great to get the frequencies in this audio segment. Now this would be a hard problem(pre FFT discovery). However, what is hard is the math and math is not patentable. Once the math is known, the implementation is trivial. I suppose an FFT taking optimal advantage of specific hardware is not exactly trivial, but I don't think it is an invention either.

When I said ideas are valuable, I simply mean that since a great many sites use image rollovers they have value. Not that the idea should receive any monetary compensation.

What I have been wondering about lately is how long we will have sufficient oil to meet our needs. I have seen estimates for current world wide oil consumption at 88 million barrels a day. It is harder to figure out world reserves. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves) shows 1.2 trillion barrels from the top seventeen oil reserves. That is 37 years. At our current rate of progress, I think it is fair to assume our daily usage is headed upwards. I don't know what our current daily production capacity is capable of. I assume that is not much more than 88 million barrels a day or there wouldn't be so much talk about peak-oil. If we are at peak-oil, then it appears that in the very near future we will not be able to produce 88 million barrels a day anymore. Thus, we will start running into problems due to lack of sufficient oil. If oil production falls to say 60 million barrels a day, then 1.2 trillion barrels lasts 54 years. So oil will be around a little longer, but not in sufficient quantities. I realize there is more oil to be found in the deep oceans, but this oil will be hard to get. Is the human race totally screwed in the next 30 to 50 years do to lack of oil? Or am I missing something big here? I used to assume that as oil started to run low that its price would go up, perhaps dramatically. However, the last time gas hit $160 a barrel the economy crashed and consumed less oil, and oil fell to $30. It is therefore possible to imagine that oil prices will not actually increase as oil runs out, because the economy will be ruined. Another example of this is helium. I hear we are running out of helium. Helium is necessary for science and research and yet, it is still cheap enough to be used to fill birthday balloons. Will we run out of helium, while all the while the price is dirt cheap?