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. ;-)

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?

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.

A fun part of this is that the government employees at ARPA back in the 1960s explained it all to us. They firmly rejected building any sort of encryption into the network itself, on the grounds that such software would always be controlled by the "middlemen" who supplied the physical connectivity, and they would always build what we now call backdoors into the encryption. They concluded that secure communication between two parties could only be done via encryption that they alone controlled. Any encryption at a lower level was a pure waste of computer time, and shouldn't even be attempted, because it will always be compromised.

This doesn't seem to have gotten through to many people today, though. We hear a lot about how "the Internet" should supply secure, encrypted connections. Sorry; that's never feasible, unless you own and control access to every piece of hardware along the data's route. And the ARPA guys didn't consider that, because that first 'A' stands for "Army", and they wanted a maximally-redundant, "mesh" type network that would be usable in battle conditions. They went with the approach that you use any kind of data equipment that's available, including the enemy's, and you build in sufficient error detection to ensure that the bits get through undamaged,. Then you use encryption that your team knows how to install on their machines and use. And you probably change the encryption software at irregular intervals.

Anyway, the real people to direct your anger at are the PR folks in both industry and government, who keep trying to convince you that they can supply encryption that's secure. Yeah, maybe they can do that, but they never have and they never will. And the odd chance that they've actually done so in some specific case doesn't change this. The next (silent, automatic;-) upgrade will introduce the backdoor.

Unless you have all the code, compile it yourself, and have people who can understand its inner workings, you don't have secure encryption; you have encryption that delivers your text to some unknown third parties. It's the US government's own security folks who explained this to us nearly half a century ago.

So you think tourists shouldn't be protected by US law?

There are a lot of people and companies in the tourism industry who would strongly disagree with you. Not to mention the shipping industry, whose employees often make short visits to places where they aren't citizens, as part of their jobs.

If your suggestion were put into effect, it would be a disaster for a lot of valuable businesses. For that reason, it's not how the law works in the US or in any other country.

Because they didn't have any evidence against the guy.

Remember this when you hear (or use) the argument "If I'm doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear."

Well, I'd disagree. It certainly is a digraph, since all that means is that it's two letters that together represent a sound or sounds different from the usual sounds represented by each letter. Since 'c' rarely represents /t/ in English, and 'h' rarely represents what we usually write as 'sh', the sequence 'ch' represents a sound different from "tsh", and thus satisfies the definition of "digraph".

As for diphthong, I can see how one might stretch the term to cover it, but it's a real stretch. The term "diphthong" normally means a sequence of two sounds, typically a sequence that acts like a phoneme in the language. "ch" sorta does this, but the stretchiness comes from the fact that neither of those two sounds are usually represented by 'c' or 'h'. We accept "i" as a diphthong in words like "I" or "time", but it's partly because the phoneme /i/ is one of its two sounds; the initial /a/ is simply not written. Similarly, a "long O" in English typically means an /ou/ or /ow/ sequence, and again the main use of 'o' is included (but the second sound isn't written). The spelling "tsh" would qualify as a trigraph for the main "ch" sound in English, and with that spelling, it would represent a diphthong. But for "ch", it doesn't quite work. It's really an example of the other use of the letter 'h', meaning "a sound sorta like the previous letter's sound, but somewhat different. But this doesn't work, either, because what's the normal sound of 'c'? It's usual either /s/ or /k/, not /t/.

But my main objection is that, in a sense, we're both wrong. English spelling is insane and perverse, and no attempts to apply precise meanings to any written sequence can really be correct. If English had had spelling reforms like all the other European languages have had over the past couple of centuries, we could make meaningful statements about spelling. But this never happened, and any attempt to tie spelling to pronunciation in English is bound to merely make one look foolish. We're not only OT in this thread, but we're arguing about something that can never be analyzed sensibly in English.

My favorite suggestion re this situation (and I've forgotten who first suggested it) is that, since English has become much of the world's de facto international language, the roughly 95% who aren't native speakers should gang up on the English-speaking minority. An international conference for revising English spelling should be formed, or perhaps now it should be an organization built around a web site. That organization should work out a reasonable phonetic writing system for English. The supporting nations should declare that writing system to be their standard for English, with software to transliterate between it and the various "standard" English spellings used by native speakers in different countries. With time, they could overpower the insanity of current English spelling.

But it's clear that this ain't gonna happen any time soon.

(As a native speaker of English, I'd support such an effort. So if some victims of their English-as-a-second-language class want to organize it, I'd be willing to lend at least my moral support. But as a native speaker of English, I'm probably not qualified to organize it. ;-)