Trademarks may stink, but they're the law. If you come up with an app you want to protect in a business segment, the ONLY way to protect your use of that app name in stores and (if you managed to acquire it) the domain name is to get yourself a REGISTERED trademark on it for that market segment. You can do it yourself for a few hundred dollars (US only). Without it, others can make a [poor] copy of your work, legally take your domain name away, have your app removed from stores, and cause all sorts of problems.

That's not true, at least in the United States (even for "famous trademarks"). If you are using a name in commerce and can document that you were using it prior to when the trademark was registered, your use of the trademark is considered to have priority, at least within the geographic region in which you were previously using it, and within the same category of products.

Most airlines load coach from back to front, though the ideal is probably back to front and outside to inside. And ideally, they would load people almost precisely in row order—basically use the whole Southwest numbered boarding thing, but with seat assignments. Otherwise, it is still pretty inefficient for the reasons you mention. I don't know why nobody does that.

As for why they load first-class first, that's easy. If they don't, there's a very good chance that first-class passengers would find themselves with insufficient overhead bin space for their stuff. If you paid three prices for a ticket and then they forced you to check your bag, you'd be seriously angry.

The reason some aircraft have a separate entrance for first-class is efficiency. When you have that many people boarding at once, you can't realistically load them all through one entrance. An ideal arrangement would put that second door in the middle of coach, so that half of them go forwards and the other half go backwards, rather than at the front of coach, but even just separating first/business from coach reduces the number of people using the coach door significantly. I realize that a center-boarding arrangement would be much harder to achieve (with the wing being in the way and all), but it would be nice if they could find a way.

I've been asking for compartmentalized planes for years, for two. Speed of boarding is one, but not the big one. Safety is the other. Imagine never having a single death from plane crashes except the ones that caused by sudden failures or pilot errors during takeoff and landing.

With a compartmentalized plane, if the airframe fails, the pilot could point it in the general direction of an uninhabited area, cut the engines, push the ejection button, calmly exit the cockpit into the front passenger compartment, strap into the jump seat, and wait. A few moments later, a series of explosive bolts would detonate, severing each compartment from the airframe a few seconds apart, and a parachute would deploy, thus bringing the compartment safely to the ground, with no lives lost.

You could even make deployment be automatic under certain circumstances, such as depressurization, descending below a present altitude without manually overriding it for landing, etc., thus saving lives in situations where the pilot becomes incapacitated. And you could put an emergency override on the outside of the cockpit to eliminate any possibility of mass-murder-suicide by airplane. (The suicide part might still happen, but at least an errant pilot couldn't take out everyone on the plane, too.)

In my experience, the first-class seat may or may not recline any farther than the coach seats do. You get more legroom, and more width, but you're often still basically sitting upright even with the seat fully reclined. Of course, it depends on the aircraft and how they've configured it.

For every plane used for overnight flights, they really need to take out about every second or third row, spread the seats proportionally, and make them recline. Crank up the ticket price proportionally. There's really no excuse for being unable to sleep on a redeye.

Even better, they could make it easier to change the configuration, like you can with a passenger van. The first time the plane is on the ground after 8:00 p.m., the ground crew could walk in, push a lever, slide the seat forward, lift it up, and carry it off the plane. The flight attendants could come along behind them and switch the lever that allows the remaining seats to recline further.

Alternatively, they could also make a section of the under-plane storage available to make the passenger compartment taller, then add Amtrak-style fold-down beds. At a particular time, you fold down the upper berths and the lower ones slide together in pairs, forming the bottom berths.

You mean in the aisles? Somehow, I don't think that will fly.... :-)

4chan is what happened. Who needs another shitty cesspool of Internet assholes?

Everyone does. The more cesspools where such behavior is tolerated, the less we'll have to deal with those people everywhere else.

Yes and no. Separation of sea and sky would be the final step if you interpret land forming to mean hardening. However, after the seas formed, there was a second period of dry land forming, in which it emerged from underneath the oceans. So depending on which dry land formation you're talking about, the order of those two could be correct.

The timing of the creation of day and night is, indeed, dubious, but... when did the moon actually collide with Earth and form what we know as the moon today, in terms of geological time?

Maybe those companies should try on-the-job training like every other industry....

The reality is that most science is determined by revelation as well. Although it is possible to prove various scientific constants, equations, etc., most people never do that. Most people learn what they were taught and then grow from there. Thus, scientific understanding is very much built upon the shoulders of giants just as religious beliefs are.

And when a scientist discovers something by experimentation and observation, is it any less truth if that scientist believes that God chose that moment to reveal that truth through his or her experiment?

IMO, the only conflict between those two philosophies lies in the minds and hearts of those who reject religion. The fact that scientists are only slightly less religious (statistically) than the general population is, IMO, strong empirical evidence that treatises on such conflicts are grounded more in atheists' need for self-jusitification than in actual facts.

All religions come with a package of beliefs concerning things such as how the world and humanity were created (things that are very much in the realm of science) ...

And curiously, the first of the two Genesis stories is a remarkably close approximation of the way an advanced, spacefaring race would explain the creation of the world to a primitive culture.

• Day 1: The big bang: God created light. The universe expanded and cooled into planets that orbited the sun: God separated the light from the darkness, creating night and day.
• Day 2: The earth cooled, and the seas receded as water froze near the ice caps in the first ice age, about 2.4 billion years ago, revealing significant amounts of dry land, and a viable atmosphere formed that protected earth from solar radiation: God made the firmament and separated the waters under the firmament (the oceans) from the waters (the early atmosphere contained a lot of water vapor, IIRC) above.
• Day 3: Plants formed—first single-celled organisms, then multicellular ones. (In reality, this began before the ice age part of day 2, but we're quibbling a little.)
• Day 4: The atmosphere evolved to be more conducive to live, with fewer clouds reflecting solar radiation, allowing more complex life to form. (God made the moon, sun, and stars.)
• Day 5: Fish formed, then the ancestors of modern birds (dinosaurs).
• Day 6: Land mammals and modern reptiles were formed, followed eventually by humans.

It isn't quite a detailed treatise on evolution, but I think that creation story is remarkably accurate for a science paper written 3,400 years ago, thousands of years before anyone knew what a dinosaur even was.

Parasitic worms in the gut don't usually change into microbes. :-)

But seriously, yeah, that bothered me when the original poster wrote it, as I'm assuming the original poster meant flora, but I decided to go with the term used in the post I was replying to, under the assumption that the poster really did mean tapeworms and similar....

Unless I'm missing something, assuming you have enough tissue samples from distinct individuals to avoid a monoculture that quickly goes extinct again because of inbreeding, the only real difference between creating two living clones and creating a thousand living clones is that you have to spend about 500 times as much time and money to do the latter, and even then, only if economies of scale don't start to kick in along the way.

Now whether the species will actually stay not extinct in the wild is another question—after all, it presumably became extinct for a reason—but even a species that exists only in captivity isn't truly extinct, just extinct in the wild.

And whether or not anybody cares enough to spend 500 times as much money to bring that species back is also another question, but I already covered that.

That's some pretty convoluted logic there, at least by my reckoning. If the user hasn't purchased the item in question, how exactly are you assuming he/she knows the product sufficiently that they're in a suitable position to review it, judging it's strengths and weaknesses?

I don't, but with the exception of books and movies, you also can't assume that people who bought the product know the product well enough to review it. The majority of reviews are posted within a couple of weeks after buying a product, for better or worse. For anything more complicated than a toaster, by the time people really know the product well enough to give it a thorough review, they've owned it for at least six months.

Worse, if you assume a typical one-year product cycle, that means half the purchasers won't understand the product well enough to give it a good review until after the next product is on the market and nobody cares about the one they bought.

The way I approach buying products consists of different approaches for different types of information:

• Product failures: Analyze first in aggregate based on the number of people reporting failures in the product, then historically based on the number of people reporting failures in previous similar products by that manufacturer, under the assumption that most failures will occur after the next model comes out.
• Product support by the manufacturer (e.g. firmware upgrades): Analyze historically based on similar products in previous years.
• Comparison of features and usability: Seek out people who mention other products in their reviews, either because they chose to buy those other products instead or because they chose to buy this product over the others. Ignore all other reviews, because they rarely contain enough objective data to be of value.

Now that last one isn't precisely true; sometimes other posts do contain objective data, though they are a lot less likely to do so. I usually skim a few 5/5 and 1/5 reviews to see if I spot patterns, and if so, I then decide whether those patterns are indicative of device malfunction or user malfunction... but that's the last step of analysis for products that I didn't rule out in the previous, easy steps. :-)

Also, if the product sucks, assuming the product isn't so bad that folks return it, people who own the product are more likely to feel the need to give it better reviews to justify the money they spent.

Wow... again. I'd bet that people who have purchased a product and are unhappy with it are actually *more* likely to review it harshly in an effort to punish the company for their poor product, and at least warn others against a crappy purchase. There are some old marketing saws that say similar things, I believe.

It's not my theory. We even have a term for people who do that frequently: fanboys. Worse, those rare people who understand a product well enough to give it a thorough review in the first few weeks of ownership are much more likely to be fanboys, because that usually only happens if they've already owned a similar product from that same manufacturer. So the least accurate reviews are likely to be the positive reviews that look the most accurate....

At the very least, that holds true for me. I've purchased a couple of stinkers, and I made damn sure to leave a one or two star review, and explain in detail *why* it was such a terrible product.

Me, too. I've also often posted reviews on products with obvious design flaws that I chose not to buy, in which I explained in detail why it was a terrible product. And invariably when I do, I get a bunch of whining idiots asking me how I can possibly know how well something will work without buying it. And my answer is something like "because I know what a fulcrum is". It is as though people magically think that a design flaw only exists if someone was foolish enough to pay for the product before discovering it, or that an obvious design flaw will magically go away if you wish hard enough, either of which just boggles my mind.

I'm not sure I'm getting your logic, now if this person bought and reviewed both then you might have a point, but just because they bought a different similar product doesn't mean they know anything about the product they didn't buy.

The logic is simple. People don't bother writing reviews about products unless they have a reason to do so. That reason is either because they bought it and liked it/didn't like it or because they chose not to buy it because they chose something else, but took the time to consider it. In the latter case, there's a 100% chance that they are at least somewhat familiar with multiple products. In the former case, there's a much less than 100% chance.

Therefore, you have better odds of learning actual facts that you don't know about the product (as opposed to pure opinions) by reading a review from someone who chose a competing product over the one you're considering than by reading a review from someone who bought the product.

Nonsense. Unique means that something is one of a kind. Suppose that you have a figurine, and there is exactly one other figurine in the world that is like it. If something happens to the other one, your figurine will become unique. Therefore, yours is almost unique, because you haven't found your hammer yet. After you do, it will be unique. :-D