best. frape. ever.

you're forgetting that there's only so close that you can pack spheres together. so you would only need about 3/4 the number (pi/18^.5 * 1.5*10^9) - 1.1*10^9 balls, and you'd be left with 1/4 the water still in the ship

worked for the mythbusters...

to be honest, a coffee table that destroys bears would be pretty awesome!

A lot of the modern world was invented by Scots. Maxwell's equations, animal cloning, telephones, trains, televisions, penicillin.

I guess when you're surrounded by fields and sheep, all you can do is drink or think.

if you know someone else has been breaking the law, /and you don't report it/, that makes you an obstruction to the law, as the guilty party may continue doing what they have been doing, making you partly guilty.

similarly, if you know that someone has been killing people, /and you don't report it/, and the person then goes on to kill more people, then you are partly guilty of letting some people get killed.

as long as you don't mind just wearing towels:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo

let's consider this a little further.

at the moment, yes, they do need to support IE, Firefox, etc., as that's what most people use.

but they're also releasing the Chromebook, which will cost only $20-$30 per month.

my post was a joke, but it is entirely possible that Google could end up with a huge chunk of the OS market.

and if history (of large corporations that end up with a huge market share) is any judge, then it is also possible that they may exploit this by gradually tightening the requirements until it is much easier to use just their products and no-one else's. It won't have to happen /tomorrow/ - but they could do it so gradually that you simply don't notice you depend on them until it's too late.

You might call all of this "abject stupidity". But to think that it cannot possible happen is utter naivety.

until there is only Chrome left?

> That would imply that all theories, regardless of any evidence or factual basis, should be taught.

no - read it again:

> "In 2009 the Texas Board of Education said that students should be taught "all sides" of current scientific theories."

creationism is not a current scientific theory.

SSL certs are not expensive - but they do cost money and also cost time to set up, and a slightly more complex server configuration. My guess is that most server managers don't know how to configure an SSL cert.

On the caching issue - yes, you /can/ have non-SSL-encrypted images embedded in an SSL-encrypted page, but that will raise alarm-bells within the browser. Browsers don't like to mix encrypted/non-encrypted sources.

Personally, I'd love it if browsers would let me embed non-SSL images, etc., within encrypted pages, but that's not the current state of things.

1. it costs money to get an SSL from a recognised signing company
2. SSL for virtual hosts is not supported by Internet Explorer (yet another problem with IE)

really? oh dear. I'm so sorry. maybe I should have waited.

turns out I wasn't the first either.

18 million per CD per month? those are quite expensive discs...

it's possible that they /did/ evolve just to eat the titanic. Maybe there were some microbes that ate some other iron-filled delicacy, and happened across this gluttonous feast. over the next thousands/millions of generations, the microbes then evolved to specifically eat the titanic - I mean, why bother struggling to find food elsewhere when you're right at the feast table?

and what happens when the titanic is gone? they die. maybe a few will survive, but any that have specialised to eat the hull will most likely not be able to eat anything else.