If not, your ability to create is subject to the application acceptance policy of Amazon Appstore.

Historically, there's relatively little that Amazon has shown interest in refusing to sell. Anything short of child rape guides or state secrets that'll have a couple dozen SWAT teams breaking down the doors of the EC2 datacenters has been A-OK.

Obviously not a guarantee of future results, but I hardly think that any "content creation" program would fall anywhere close to that. The beauty of things that enable creation is that they're generic... it's what you create WITH them that can piss people off, but the tools themselves rarely cross that line, especially when you're talking about digital tools.

Hypothetical scenario time: Say the air force still had a rule that only people with natural 20/20 vision could fly fighter planes (I see from elsewhere in this thread that this used to be true, but no longer is... but for the sake of argument). A prospective pilot lies, and passes the tests while wearing contacts. He does his job as well as anyone else, flies hundreds of missions, and feels smug in having proved them wrong. Then during a critical mission, his contact slips, he can't see, becomes distracted and nose-dives into a building full of civilians.

Is that a freak accident? Sure. But it was possible because he lied about something that the people making the rules had tried to account for. The rules for jobs that involve extreme situations aren't about who can do the job the same on an average day. They're about trying to control a bunch of smaller variables as well, to make even unlikely scenarios manageable.

You can argue that some of the restrictions are arbitrary, or not worth controlling, but it seems naive to say "as long as you can pass the tests, it's fine to lie". The tests aren't going to recreate accidents that may happen in the field.

In this case, where there are literally tens of people who will actually get to go, it's egotistical as hell to demand that YOU be the one who gets to go, when if you hadn't lied they may have chosen someone more qualified. Who knows what past or future catastrophe could have been prevented if someone who was ACTUALLY as good as you think you are had been in the driver's seat? (I'm talking only about the NASA scenario, not your Marine story)

And yet, strangely enough, you can circumvent DRM just fine while running Windows...

They had absolutely no reason to "jump ship", since they had the perfect business model to smoothly transition without pissing people off. Netflix has, for the past 3 years, been a mediocre-at-best streaming library with a backup of every DVD on the planet which would be shipped to you in 2 days on request. Once they get every studio in the world to put their stuff on streaming, then fine, cancel the DVD branch. But if they're looking to avoid alienating customers, how much does it cost them to keep the DVD branch around to provide backup coverage on things that can't be streamed for contract reasons?

At the very least, they could be up front about it: say, "Look, rising costs on the DVD side require us to raise fees. We think our catalog is strong enough that most people can go streaming only, and we recommend that you do so if possible, but we're keeping the DVD service as an option for those who want access to more rare or more recent releases."

As more things become available on streaming, they could naturally spin down that side of the business. Repurpose staff, sell off inventory, close warehouses, etc. Presumably they've already been doing that if they had any sense. If there are parts they can't ditch because they're in use, then that should be a sign that streaming isn't good enough yet.

netflix is geared to real people not vapid idiots. my wife likes 90210 which is not on netflix last i saw

Fixed that for you.

You should watch Moon. They did a bunch of external shots with miniatures, and they're gorgeous.

and Amazon is only a competitor as far as providing ebooks goes...

... and streaming videos, music, mobile apps, and soon tablet hardware. These aren't as big a splash as the ebook market yet, but these things have a way of booming once they hit a certain point in the adoption curve. Especially when some of them come for free with a service that people are already more than willing to pay for on its own (Amazon Prime). And iTunes has been a direct competitor with Amazon for years in terms of pitting digital purchases against online shopping for physical media.

Aside from Mandarin, you're a bit off... English is 2nd after Mandarin for total speakers, and just about tied with Spanish (for 2nd still) if you count only native speakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

As far as India goes, English is basically the de-facto national language along with Hindi, since the native language is fragmented into something like hundreds of dialects. The rest you may be right about, although I'd guess it's relatively easy to adapt any input method that works well in English to Spanish, given the common ancestry and similarities in modern use.

I really like the standard Dvorak setup that comes with Windows and Linux for coding. It's actually more convenient for some common code symbols than QWERTY, and since I spend half my time typing emails or other non-code things it pays off on both sides.

Oh, and actually it DOES fall to earth, it just keeps missing. BAM!

Yeah... you might end up with some solution where you approach the ground at relatively low vertical velocity, but only with a mind-blowingly large horizontal velocity relative to the ground. Any way you slice it, you're converting a very, very large amount of potential energy into either kinetic energy or heat in the process of getting the thing to the bottom of Earth's gravity well.

If you're trying to do this without mechanical intervention, anyway. Maybe you could just strap some reaaaaaaaaally big parachutes to the thing.

I'd love to see the weather model following absorbing the orbital energy of a city-sized rock via atmospheric drag, by the way.

Read the OP. That's not even remotely what they were suggesting.

by your analysis every single satellite in geosynchronous orbit should fall to earth, and yet they do not

The OP was asking if it would be possible to land the comet on earth, intact and without damage to either body, by floating it down from orbit with some magic of relative velocities as both are orbiting the sun.

You could have saved your mod points by reading a little context ;-)

I'm no a physicist, but I'm fairly certain that no matter where you place the thing in terms of the Earth's orbit, the second the Earth becomes the dominant gravitational force on the comet (as opposed to the sun) it switches from "two objects gently orbiting near each other" to "dropping a big fucking rock on the planet from 50,000 miles up".

Put another way, at some point the relative speed of the two has to reach zero, and at some point shortly after they would have to start moving toward each other. Eventually the only sensible frame of reference is that of the planet, and from that frame of reference you've got a hell of a lot of energy that's got to go somewhere very quickly.