Nah; they can't do that. The reason is simple: They're now big, established companies, and big, established companies never, ever innovate. To them, "innovation" means making a few superficial tweaks to the product's appearance, while loudly proclaiming "New! Improved!". Any true change is a threat to the product that provides their current income.

If you want something that actually works differently, you have to go with the experimental, upstart companies. Most of them will eventually fail, of course, or if they start to succeed, they'll be bought out by one of the big guys, who will quietly shut them down. Or maybe they'll be sued out of existence by all the big guys via their list of vague patents. But a few will become "the next Google" or whatever was the successful upstart 1was called 0 years ago in their field. Then they'll no longer innovate in any meaningful sense.

That's also hard to take seriously. Extrapolating a sample of one to a universe with billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, is just silly. Not that I'm saying you shouldn't do it, of course. I'd be tempted to answer by arguing that an Earth-size "moon" around a gas giant may be more likely to have life, but of course that would be extrapolating from a sample of zero. (Unless we discover life on one of Jupiter's moons, or on Titan. ;-)

Without a lot more evidence than we have, conjectures about the possibility of life in/on various astronomical objects are just conjectures. This is fun, and a lot of scientific work is based on such conjecture, but there's not a chance that we can accurately calculate the probabilities with what we know now.

Yeah, yeah; but any classification system that puts Mercury and Jupiter into a single class, while putting Earth and Titan into different classes, is just too silly to take seriously. Lots of astronomers take this sort of attitude, and either avoid using such terms at all, or have a bit of fun trolling the people who take them seriously. Some have also pointed out that it makes a lot more sense, scientifically, to consider the Earth's orbit to contain two planets that exchange positions on a monthly cycle. This might also be considered a sort of trolling, though it does have its serious side, as these two bodies do significantly influence each other through mechanisms like their mutual tides.

In any case, none of these heavenly bodies care at all what we call them, and nothing we say can influence their properties or behavior.

On the other hand, there are two planets in our solar system with less mass than Earth, but denser atmospheres: Venus and Titan. Venus is only slightly smaller and less massive than our planet, but has a much denser atmosphere. Titan is a lot smaller as well as less dense, but has an atmosphere roughly 50% denser than ours -- and full of organic molecules.

Our kind of life couldn't exist on either one of them, of course, mostly for temperature reasons. But we don't have many samples of the conditions in which life can exist and evolve, so it's sorta presumptuous to claim that we "know" anything about what's possible.

Whoever wrote this has obviously never read any science fiction. ;-) The term "conceivable" covers a very wide range of planets (and various environments not based on planets) in which intelligent creatures might evolve.

Some years back, I read Robert Forward's Camelot at 30K novel, about a human expedition to an inhabited Pluto-like planet out in the Oort Cloud; the title references the mean temperature of that world. Part of the story was a quite imaginative method that the world's inhabitants used to colonize other large rocks fbig enough to have useful gravity and far enough from any star that their sort of life was possible. That turns out to be most of the galaxy, of course.

Going back even further, to 1957, we find Sir Fred Hoyle's novel about a dense cloud of gas (similar to what's called a Bok Globule) approaches our Solar System, and instead of passing through, settles into a small, dark ring around the sun. As the catastrophic effects on Earth settle down, scientists discover that the cloud itself is an intelligent creature that just stopped by for a meal of photons and assorted small molecules emitted by the sun. It is, of course, surprised to find itself being contacted by intelligent creatures living in such an unlike spot as a planet, since you'd expect true intelligence to evolve only in the rich clouds of interstellar space.

I'm sure that many readers of this forum can list many other literary works that depict life in environments not the least bit like ours. Anyone who can only conceive of life on a planet similar to ours is seriously lacking in imagination. But there are thousands of writers who aren't so mentally crippled, and millions of readers to read their work. ;-)

Who are these "people"? Sure, there are some who will do this - and this being Slashdot, we've probably got a population enriched in them - but if you take a random person with a car or computer problem, they will just ask (respectively) their local mechanic or teenager--in exactly the same way that many people approach their doctors.

Yes, there exist people who will try to troubleshoot their cars, computers, or their own bodies. And there exist subsets within those groups who can are capable of doing so in a way that makes things better rather than worse. Most people aren't comfortable going beyond the most basic diagnostic steps in any of those three spheres, however. Putting gas in the car is their limit; checking the oil and topping up the washer fluid is something that happens at the dealership, and borrowing an OBD-II reader to interpret a Check Engine light is in the realm of black magic.

Worse, there are also people who spend good money on magic grounding straps for their cars, insist on clicking on VIRUS WARNING links in spam emails, and who actually believe stuff that homeopathic practitioners tell them.

And this is yet another good example of why the scientific naming system was developed. English and most other "natural" languages tend to have a lot of illogical, confusing terminology like this. The strawberry tree is called that for the dumb reason that it bears fruit that superficially resemble the common strawberry. This satisfies people who only look at outer appearance, but tends to lead to incorrect reasoning when things that aren't closely related have similar names.

Similarly, we have a "highbush cranberry" bush in our back yard. It's a species of Viburnum that bears fruit the same size, shape and color as true cranberries. Both are about equally tart, and require some sugar to be made edible. But they're not close relatives, either, so the name can confuse people who don't understand the many problems with "plain English" names. They don't substitute directly in recipes, since the Viburnum "cranberry" contains one large seed, plus a lot of water. It works best if you squeeze the juice out and use it as a substitute for lemons or limes, with a flavor that's rather different from any citrus fruit.

One of my favorite cases of such prohibitions was in a physics text for a physics course that I once took in college. One of the end-of-chapter exercises was of the form "Using the equations in this chapter, and tables X and Y at the end of the book, calculate the critical masses of the following isotopes ...". This has a reference to a footnote, which informed the reader that telling the answers to this question to an non-citizen was a felony under US federal law, punishable by N years in a federal prison. I've forgotten which textbook this was, unfortunately, or I'd include that info. I wonder if it's still in print?

The fact that you - automatically - hold the copyright for the works you create doesn't prevent you from doing either of those things. Indeed, copyright is necessary for you to be able to license the work.

The summary is flat wrong in its terminology. A key point about hypersonic weapons, from a tactical and strategic standpoint, is that they aren't ballistic. They're potentially faster and sneakier.

Aside from acceleration during boost and (generally limited) manoeuvering during descent, ballistic weapons are - by definition - coasting unpowered for most of their flight time. Ballistic missiles put their warheads into an elliptical orbit that happens to intersect the surface of the earth (typically somewhere around Moscow) and let gravity do most of the work.

Hypersonic weapons, in stark contrast, are in powered flight for most or all of their journey. Instead of being lobbed up and coming back down, they can go straight to their target (modulo the curvature of the earth). They can travel a path and a velocity that is limited by their own engineering rather than by orbital mechanics. From a strategic standpoint, they would allow delivery of warheads (particularly nuclear warheads) in shorter times by less-detectable and less-interceptable courses, with all the attendant consequences for the calculus of nuclear war, first strikes, and mutually assured destruction.

There's an old joke in academic circles, to the effect that stealing from one source is called "plagiarism", but stealing from multiple sources is called "research".

There's a fair amount of precedent for this sort of idiocy. One of the funniest example, which got a bit of news coverage at the time, was back in the 1970s. The US Defense Department funded a study by a couple of academics, and paid them several hundred thousand dollars to study what could be learned from public sources about US military deployment. After the study's report was submitted, it took only about 2 days for it to be classified as a US government "secret".

The press and the professional comedians had a good time mocking the US government for that one. But various people also pointed out that it wasn't the first time such idiocy had been enforced by law, in the US or in other countries. A long list of similar punishment for making publicly-available information public also appeared back then.

Maybe we can start a thread of other similar recent attempts to suppress public information. Do you know a good one in whatever country you live in?

Those might be grammatically similar, but the numbers differ by several orders of magnitude.

Humans really know mostly about multi-cellular critters, plus the tiny fraction of the single-celled species that interact with us somehow. Almost all single-celled species are yet to be discovered.

One of the more interesting bits of evidence is that all of the deep-drilling projects, which have sampled only a tiny chunk of the planet's crust, have reported single-celled living things "all the way down". It'll take a while for us to do a good study of everything living deep down there. Similarly, several deep-water sampling projects have turned up large numbers of unknown microscopic species throughout their water columns.

I guess this mostly goes to show how difficult it can be to do a good journalistic job of summarizing scientific work so that non-scientists can understand the actual results. "Ordinary English" (or French or Russian or any other human language) is sufficiently imprecise that it's very difficult to avoid misleading mistakes like the two summaries of this story.

Heh. Everyone except the folks who work with wood know that. There are some varieties of wood, e.g. ebony, boxwood, and ironwood, that are (usually) denser than water, and don't float. It depends on what percent of the wood is the little internal spaces filled with air. Similarly, there are some humans who don't float unless their lungs are completely filled with air. They're they folks without the fats that account for most people's buoyancy. (Here in the US, we have a lot fewer such dense people than we used to, so we had to repurpose the term "dense" to refer to mental capacity. ;-)

But your remark deserves its "funny" rating.

This. Exactly this. Inexperienced typists just don't get it.

To convey proper nuance in text, I don't always want exactly 1 letter "A" when I press the "A" key. Using uniform whole letters can seem jarring and mechanical, particularly when writing personal email. Sometimes a message composer only wants, say, 0.95 "A", just to soften the letter out. Other times, it's nice to smooth the letter out a bit, letting it fade out genty across the length of the word instead of being uncomfortably square.

These mechanical keyboards are usually tuned to be "warmer", as well--when you press that "A" key, it has overtones and harmonics from other vowels. A little bit of "E" goes a long way, but true "golden fingers" agree that plenty of "O" adds mellowness and roundness.

The adoption of these digital, non-mechanical keyboards is also one of the major reasons why emotion and subtext - especially related to humor - are so often lost in text-based messaging.