Posts by C

Jobs: one more thing... a browser war

Safari? No thanks

Just tried it. No, it's not faster than FireFox. If anything, Firefox is twice as fast. And not only that, Safari doesn't give anywhere near the choices and flexibility FireFox does - and that's not even looking at all the extensions that are so easy to get for FireFox.

Downloads: in Firefox, you can choose to either have them downloaded automatically to your folder of choice, OR you can choose to have it ask you every time you download a new file. That's always been my preference - I want to put it where I want it when I download it, not have to go browse to some arbitrary downloads folder and then move it where I actually want it. In Safari, you just get to choose which folder is your downloads folder. No thanks.

Tab bar: In FireFox you can choose to have your tab bar shown all the time, or hidden when you don't have more than one tab open. No such option in Safari. No thanks.

And there's many more such things. Unfortunately for you Mr. Jobs, if I really wanted a browser that dumbed-down I'd just use IE7 and done with it. But I want a browser that lets me choose what I want, not stick me with what some clueless moron in a suit thinks I want. No thanks.

Scotland ranked 'worst small country'

one small problem

There's just one problem with a "study" like this. It's comparing 10 countries... against each other. There's ALWAYS going to be a country that's "worst". It doesn't matter how good they're all doing. They could all have average life expectancies over 100 and 75%+ of their population be genius level... and there's STILL going to be a "worst" country. So Scotland is "worse" than 9 other small countries in Western Europe in a few things - big deal. They're ALL significantly ahead of where the "best" country was in all these categories just 200 short years ago.

Ethanol cars unhealthier than petrol ones?

The problem with Ethanol

The real problem with using Ethanol as a fuel is the resources required to produce it. There isn't nearly enough farmland to grow the corn needed if we were to depend solely on ethanol for fuel. Taking the US as an example - even if all the US farmland were used to grow corn, the US could not provide enough ethanol for its own use. Most technologically advanced countries have an even smaller percentage of farmland than the US does, and most countries will continue to become more advanced and developed not less, further reducing available farmland. At best, ethanol is only a short reprieve to help stave off the inevitable demise of fossil fuels; at worst (if countries continue clearing rain-forests to create more farmland) it could cause global climate change on a scale much worse than most people could imagine. And to top it all off, the energy returned on energy invested in producing ethanol is 1. Yes, it costs as much energy to produce it as you get in the end product.

My personal opinion is that if the world is to continue to develop as it currently is, we ultimately will need to depend primarily on solar power. And we've a long way to go to make the use of solar power efficient enough to be anything more than a small boost to main power sources.