I guess that these days it's mostly out of a habit created back when iOS was, in fact, amazing when compared to other phone OSes at the time. These days, I think that anyone neutral will have to agree that it definitely can be improved upon. And I'm saying this as a iPhone user who has only briefly used Android phones.

How would that make it less mind-boggling? It just relocates the problem. Does it somehow make more sense to think that life had a few billion more years to evolve on some other planet than just 1.5 billion years here on earth? I'm not trying to be pedantic here, I'm genuinely curious as to how you'd think "space" is a better explanation...

Well, it's not as if spelling it with an 'h' is Ukrainian....

You are not a.... scholar of English grammar?

woosh...

Sorry, but... You can't checkmate with only a king and a bishop.

RE:myself: .. than the 1:300,000 times the probability of a Jupiter impact, of course.

See, and that's where I think you're wrong. The chance an object is going to hit a target isn't determined by its acceleration like you describe it is. You could say that its trajectory will be more affected by Jupiter than by Earth, which will mean that it'll probably pass by Jupiter closer (only a little, mind you) than by Earth, and will move away from Jupiter at a greater angle with the original trajectory than from Earth, all other circumstances being equal. But an object would have to be moving very slowly, or have a trajectory *very* close to it for the gravitational force to actually make it collide with the planet at all. Again, without doing the calculations (which I'd be hard-pressd to do correctly, by the way, although I do have a BSc in physics) I'd say the cross section is the major factor here, which would make an impact on Earth much more likely than the 1:300,000 you project.

I understand all that, but I don't see how these arguments warrant a *linear* relationship between the relative masses and the probability of impact. This is why I used the word "overwhelmingly" in my post, which I admit isn't backed up by calculations.

How do you figure the mass has anything to do with the probability of impact? The cross section, yes, that's obvious, but the mass? The trajectories of the colliding objects are overwhelmingly determined by the gravitational interaction between those objects and the sun, not between those objects.

How, in this context, is a bigger number not better?

Damn liberal commies, opposing flying cars....

A double-entendre involving the '$' sign. Nicely done!

whoosh....

You could also bypass the search bar by using shortcuts. I've set up my Firefox with 'g' as a keyword for the search bar on the Google homepage. So when I want to search something, I hit alt-d, g, , . No mouse or page load required, thus fast as hell.