Thus proving you're free to say anything you like! ... as long as they agree with it. Otherwise you're a dissenter, and nuisance, and in breach of disturbing the peace online. Well, I'd make sure my website was hosted in a "free" country, and argue that EU has no jurisdiction there. So naff off! Way to encourage IT in the EU! People should be able to say what they want. Freedom of speech should be an unalienable right if you ask me.

George Orwell's 1984 in action. Any discussion to the contrary, is "counter-think".

hey, I'm famous!

But seriously, I've done a fair bit of reading regarding the arguments for and against the mathematics of black holes. Which always comes back to Einstein. Which proponents point to the sky and declare GPS as proof that the equations work, and call for anyone questioning the equation(s) in question, to provide a better one.

That's not the point, the point is, there's enough reason to question it's accuracy on much larger scales, such as galactic. Even our notions of calculating distance. Science seems very confident that they're right, and continue to stand on the standard theory, when the guy that first spoke it to the world was actually a creationist, and Einstein loved every word of it!

So I sit on the fence, looking both ways, and see only two options. The standard model, and the Electric Universe model, which really is worthy of interest. I think most people stumble because of the multi-disciplinary view of the universe it requires. An Electrical Engineer meets physicist, meets astronomer. A decent mathematician wouldn't go a miss either, when trying to make sense of it all.

So if you're interesting in peering over the fence, I find this article quite amusing to read, and hard to refute. http://www.thunderbolts.info/t... Us mere mortals are often asked to choose a side, and yet, as much as I love science, the Electric Universe seems to refresh the parts other beers cannot reach.

Sadly, friends tell me what's going on in the pacific, and so news we don't want to hear, comes along, and the mainstream media doesn't seem to want to cover it - it's old news, I suppose.

http://thewatchers.adorraeli.c...

Might not be the most reputable site, but the article isn't spewing lies, and does link many more reputable sources. So my comment is considered flame-bait, or troll, but actually, I'm being informative.

Let's just say I wouldn't eat any fish coming out of the pacific. Yum! Strontium 90 sandwich anyone?

As happy as I am to see such amazing photos and time-lapse video, I immediately noticed a crater at the south pole which NASA are going to be surprised about. With a raised centre. Curious, but nothing we haven't seen on other moons and planets on the inner solar system.

What's clear to me, is we've not no idea how planets or moons are formed, and the standard model doesn't really cut the mustard, hence, why we're still exploring, and still surprised at every turn.

If Pluto had been whacked soo many times by asteroids (south pole, 90 degree impact?) wouldn't you expect its rotation to be tumbling all over the 3 axis? The time lapse looks like a regular rotation to me.

You've got to be foolish to believe this. Because we're going to need batteries the size of mountains to stabilise the supply / demand of power from solar and wind alone. We require a more stable solution we can fire up or shut down at any given moment. You can't ask the national grid to hang on for the next breath of wind, or the sun to poke out from behind the cloud, especially at night!

As much as I agree that Nukes are not a good solution, and the risks far out-weigh the benefits, I also accept that we have to look for much better solutions that work with tidal power perhaps, or a safer reaction (if it's ever developed) such as Thorium. I suspect the energy companies already have much better solutions available, but have no interest in bringing them online until they're forced to. That, or the military are forced to shake their tree, and see what falls out. I'm sure their black budget billions have turned up some awesome alternatives and advancements.

The problem is Nuclear! Although we've had plants up and running for many years now, we all still fail to recognise that even to this day, Fukushima is pumping nuclear waste into the ocean, and basically we collectively as humanity have allowed the entire Pacific ocean to die. I don't think nuclear is worth that risk, and we need to think about safe alternatives in the short term, (coal / oil / gas) while we develop safer alternatives such as a thorium reactor. That, or demand the military give up some of their secret stash of alternatives! They must have some! We've put trillions into their black-budgets for a reason, and it's not for them to smoke pot!

Install Yahoo Messenger. (of the era?) which picked up the hardware such as microphone and webcam (yeah, that needed a driver disk, but what's the big deal, it's the 90's!)

Login, see someone online. Click on the Video-chat button (or what ever it was called). Problem solved. Low bandwidth, worked a dream on anything higher spec from a telephone modem! At the time, I was downloading at about 50k a second. Guess my upload wasn't much more than 10k a second? So yeah, jerky, juddery, but stay still, and I could see you!

Point is, it was possible even back then. Don't care about configuration issues people had, that was a long time ago, and if I could talk to one person across an ocean in this way, then my point is made clear. It was possible a long time before the priesthood of Apple made it so.

Certainly, I agree with you, that zero configuration is a nice feature, but to be honest, since the days of Vista onwards, I can't remember really needing a driver disk, as everything was USB, and Windows was good enough at finding a driver for you that worked. But this gets away from the central point. Skype was out there before facetime, and is just as easy, but better still, crosses platforms. Well supported, even before Microsoft came along to buy it. Got no arguments, and I think Millions of their users don't really have issue with it either.

As for data usage, I'm more impressed that Netflix came to the UK, and got our biggest provider (BT) to allow streaming of hours and hours of high quality content, without hitting your 20GB a month usage limit to be a lot more impressive. Personally, I stick with a provider that gives me truly unlimited usage, so I don't have those kinds of concerns, and I could stream what ever I like, from whom ever I want, and who doesn't love youTube?

But I digressed once again. The original discussion was about open sourcing Swift! So this has nothing to do with that, so to re-iterate, I've little interest in Swift personally. but watch to see what happens. I just see Microsoft all over again, as do others, as they made C# a standard, and open-sourced everything but the compiler (at the time). But now, the compiler, the source for .NET, the whole works - all opened up. That's what .NET Core has been about. But this is still central to some kind of sandbox, which gives it the safety features low level developers seemed to be getting hammered over.

I think it's very hard to heal the wounds in a language like C, C++, or even objective C. There's only one common ground for all of them, and that's assembly language! But to re-invent abstraction from that level, to encompass safety first, means we'd be looking at very slow operating systems and services, which people complain about enough as it is.

I'm sure game developers would die if we pushed checking on everything as a pre-requisite for development. They'd laugh at the idea, because from their perspective, the critical time gains of just a couple of cycles in certain routines is more than just important to them, it's what makes game performance what it is. But they'd not argue with yet more compile time checks. But even developing certain routines with unit testing in mind would be counter to performance, so again, the same argument from their perspective, and another reason why C/C++ will remain king of development for them.

Holy moly! You're Turkish? You're putting most English speaking people's written ability to shame! That being said, wouldn't you have your head cut off for talking like this about someone else in Turkey? I'm sure Apply could have it arranged. ( Make sure you lock your door tonight :-) )

I have been reading through all these comments to date, with amusement. But also with a little de-ja-vu.

You see, I know someone who got an iPad when they first came out, along with their iPhone, and they were telling all about how wonderful "face time" is, and how you can see and talk to people all over the world! But the point here, is they talk about these ideas like it's something new, and more importantly, Apple gave it to the world, and now we're all better for it. Hoorah!

So when I politely explain that I've been using microphones and talking with "team members" since the late 1990's, and even had web cams in the days where you stuck them on top of your CRT based monitor! Oh, and it was all for free. To which the look of puzzlement and surprise went across their face. Because in their mind, and that of so many of the public, Apple brings these things to the world, and not just their own flavour of it.

My point here, is that all the same promises are made by Java, and C#, where your code is running in a safe sand-box, and the languages encourage better more reliable code by use of well tested frameworks. So I'm really not jumping up and down with excitement here. Those languages are still heavily in demand, and have massive support. I realise we're talking about machine-level code, here, which is fine. But you don't get the benefits of a sandbox, without having a sandbox. A compiler can only do so much checking. Most needs to happen at runtime, as I'm sure you already know - and if your code isn't performing those checks explicitly, then you might want to think again. I'm sure that with Java, as you can with C#, you don't have to use any proprietary frameworks, and your code can compile down to an executable. (I don't mean MSIL /IL or Java byte codes!) But then, who wants all the hassle of writing re-usable objects that sit between OS level objects, and your code? Even calling system libraries doesn't always yield the results you're after - and you start writing what I call code-gymnastics to get at what you're really after, in a form that's most easily consumable (tasty!). To that degree, you can see my point about needing to use well tested frameworks to take the donkey work out of that. I believe this is why Java has been so ubiquitous - because it successfully divorces concerns of the operating system in which it's hosting, from the code you want to execute, and thus, the write once, run anywhere approach seems to be tangibly real. But to that end, as we now want to scale across an ever greater range of devices, there are concerns about display orientation, size, aspect ratios, etc, and so along with web development, we now have the likes of Xamarin, and their Forms technology. Claims of 90% code re-usability etc.

I'm sure this has been a boring recap of the state of things, but I'm going to have to side with the C / C++ guys here, simply because many of the arguments raised that I see so far could be successfully unit tested (code allowing!) and so I think we could see more robust code, it's just that the code base of so many libraries are so old, but equally so well tested, that we're not likely to see a re-write to enable unit testing, in an effort to find bugs in code that has long past been accepted as fit for purpose. I seriously doubt anything is going to remove the OS development crown from C and C++, simply because the future will only ever hold nightmares of a need to know the flavour of the month language, as well as C / C++ in order to either migrate or maintain that code base.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe there are more elegant languages that could be adopted for OS development, such as Java and C# in their raw forms, but if it hasn't happened for those languages, I can't see why Apple would succeed in this space, where the same frustrations surface from time to time, and still the world goes on. Good luck with that one, Apple!

I guess you missed the Thorium suggestion above? It's the western world that's ignored nuclear development, simply because it was considered "good enough", where as the Russians at some point thought it might be a good idea to try theorize and see what other options are open, and hence, the're the world leader in nuclear power technologies. Not that I like nuclear one little bit, but Thorium sounds like a dream come true! That's probably why we don't see thorium reactors everywhere though - maybe it's just a pipe-dream?

On the false data, I accept that when research is independently verified, that regardless of the best practices in following the protocols of the original test, that test results may turn out differently.

But repeat it enough times, and you should see a range of acceptable values, and to this I think we call "tollerances". But the point is, why is it that especially with regards to pharmaceutical testing, big pharma always finds their results far more effective and positive than the independent results? Could it be, that big pharma are cooking the books a little in their own favour? Or is it, that no one can follow their protocols to the T? Perhaps both?? But I would be reluctant to suggest that of the independents, for they're the only party that has no vested interest in the results in the same way that big pharma would.

I can't pick any specific drug, but I'm sure there are drugs that got onto the market that have a very low success rate in the independent testing.

We'd call all this empirical testing, and look at the controversy! So imagine that, with just numbers! For instance, where fundamentally accepted mathematical phenomena such as Black Holes, which we all totally believe are real, and observed, are proven mathematically to not be possible! What's the immediate human response? well, one man has to be an army, but worse, for being an army, they're discredited on a persona level, and their arguments, no matter how genuine they may be, are lost in the noise. So on we go with believing something held as true, such as Relativity and Special Relativity, survives another onslaught, and continues, even to this day. But arguments are still not settled, just buried. I don't call this science either, and this is just the mathematics, not even anything empirical On relativity, I've heard that GPS mathematics are used as a form of "proof", but given the speed of light / radio, the distance from a satellite to earth is so small, there's not a lot of room for relativity to take effect, if you see what I mean.

I got it! It was GOD! He did it, it's HIS FAULT.
End of science. All questions answered.
Prove me wrong! :-) The point is, if you won't blindly accept by faith alone, that this is the answer, then you're looking for empirical knowledge.

Unfortunately, that's in far shorter supply than the myriad of people who claim to have the answers using all sorts of theoretical exotic materials, methods, and energies, as well as dimensions - some of which use a combination of them, For instance, worm-holes are theoretically possible according to some, and postulate the energy requirements be fed by a black hole. Take a look at films like Interstellar that popularize such thinking. That doesn't make it any more real, but in the public's perception, give it enough years, and it will be taught as fact, even if we've never seen one, can't prove their existence, and can't point to any empirical research suggest it's possible.

Sadly, I'd suggest my God idea (which is a joke, by the way) is just as plausible, and if not, more so, as no one has yet either proven or disproven God's existence empirically.

The question should turn to how can we weed of the most likely from not, and to give weight to those that are empirical. So taking this a step further to really drive this home, no one has yet given a satisfactory explanation of how gravity arises from matter. We just know it does, and simply playing with beautiful mathematical equations isn't going to explain how. When Einstein gave us his model, if merely predicts behaviour, but does nothing to point to how it is generated. Yet, we use it because it seem accurate enough, and allows for predictions. That isn't to say it's right - and therefore nothing in science no matter how empirical can truly be fact, - that word should have it's meaning changed to something like "generally accepted" to give room to facts that turn out to be false.

I agree! I know that mobile phones are based on old model technology when connecting, and have heard they the old codes that could be sent over a model to estabilsh connections are still there, and can still be abused, to a point where they can turn your phone into a listening device for "them" to hear what ever the phone can pick up, and the OS of the phone won't pick up on this activity either.

But more to the point of this article, I think Microsoft has made massive changes in the way they're dealing with the outside world, and if this is their way of saying they've got nothing to hide, then I'm all for it. If you knew of a load of security vulnerabilities in software you created, would you be so willing to let a customer read through your source? So thumbs up for Microsoft! I'm impressed!

I agree, there's a lot of focus on language features, but that doesn't mean you write good code.

Javascript was never conceived to be what it is used for today, but here we are. So now we need to drink in gallons of good programming practices to take the beast of bad code. Funny how that doesn't appear on the list. Yet interestingly, it's these very ideas that many people seem to be resisting. It seems to me that structure requires a discipline that can so easily be broken, and so often is.