What do you make of this?

I was going to complain that seven is a prime number, but then I realised that the number in question was actually eight. Doh - carry on...

Time periods? Polar Bears? Smoke Monsters?

I disagree. The plane is hidden on a deserted volcanic island that's part of the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia.

The planes occupants (including Mik Kanrokitoff) are currently aboard a flying saucer. Most will reappear in due course suffering from amnesia.

Did you mean OpenSSH? I'm pretty sure OpenSSL isn't from the OpenBSD team.

Nice. I was expecting something like this though...

For example, how well would an automotive engine deal with being upside down for a while?

I'm not completely sure about this but from something I (mis)heard, wasn't that already a factor in the Battle of Britain with the Spitfire (carbs) vs the 109 (fuel injectors)? ie the Spitfire couldn't fly inverted for very long while the 109 could?

But yeah, an automotive engine might exacerbate that problem even further.

You mean on average right? Because it sure as hell is going to be a lot colder HERE in 4 months time.

Put differently, rather than creating a model from all of the old data (which, as you said, is trivial and not really that impressive), you put yourself in the shoes of a 1970s scientist and try to use the data from only up to that point to create a model that will work for the next 40 years. You then get to fast forward 40 years and see how you did. If you didn't get it right, you go back and try again.

Yeah. Creating a projection of the future involves both the model itself and a bunch of assumptions about the future state of the input variables. A projection will then have a range of certainty based on running it with different sets of likely inputs.

eg a future climate projection has to make a bunch of assumptions around variable things like big volcanic eruptions, the amounts of greenhouse gasses entering the atmosphere, what the sun actually output, what the southern oscillation index is going to do (ie swings between el ninos and la ninas which is a big factor) etc etc.

And to test the usefulness of an old model you keep it around and run it again in the future using actual data instead of assumed data to test whether discrepancies between it and reality are down to the model or the input assumptions or both. And then using these comparisons and new research on the physical processes to fine tune newer models.

What about an OS where everything is a potato?

Didn't Debian try that already? Then they got a woody.

So you're saying that readers of this writing should take account of the time and the cultural context of the writer(s) and not take it literally.

As a somewhat naive (of these kinds of arguments) observer, it seems to me that you are actually agreeing with those you are apparently disagreeing with.

Pouring hot grits over a petrified Natalie Portman. Dang you six digit kids.

Are you forgetting naked AND petrified. You five digit old timers are getting senile :)

This site is probably the reason I didn't finish my university degree in 2000.

No kidding - I don't thnk anyone else has posted anywhere near as much as you have.

I have spent ages here, and took part in some very intelligent discussions.

Yeah, but you also post a hell of a lot of crap too.

Hehe. Try googling that line....

The US hasn't formally declared a war since 1945. Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afganistan are all either police actions or joint military operations with active combat theaters. They are not wars.

And we didn't lose Vietnam. It was a tie!

The only surprise was the 82% in 2002... those IE 6-only sites back then didn't seem to designed with any open standards in mind.

I don't find that surprising at all. From the release of IE4 until sometime after 2002, IE was one of the best and most standards compliant browsers (Only Opera springs to mind as better). Back then being able to drop support for Netscape 4.x was a huge relief. Netscape 4s complete and utter suckiness along with the very long time it took to fix that handed everything to IE.

But as Mozilla 1.x's many bugs got fixed and as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox crept towards 1.0 things slowly changed. By 2003-2004 IE 6 was completely outclassed, and it was Microsoft's turn to suffocate progress.