Posts by Seele 11 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2012
There is prior art concerning handheld electronic devices with rounded edges to make it easier to carry around in a pocket - Many brands of calculator from the 1980's onwards, and the personal organizers that proliferated in the 1990's. Hell, even the Rosetta stone has rounded edges. I am utterly incredulous that anyone can claim to have re-invented the round edge, and to have the sole right to use it.
Hey troll! Go back to reddit.
Voting system is working just fine here. The slight inconvenience where you are taken from the thread to a separate page, and then have to click back makes one have to think before one votes. It discourages the casual upvoting/downvoting depending on whether you agree or disagree, and makes it a more deliberate matter.
You earned those downvotes because of the insidious, manipulative and deceptive nature of your comments.
No, but they are the people downloading cracks and warez. If the show is to make any sense, the kids used stolen commercial software, not open-source. The screenwriter got the terms confused. For most computer users, if they hear that a package is free, they assume that it must be either illegal or crap. I have encountered people who simply switched off in disbelief, or became angry when I recommended free open-source solutions.
Finally, it makes sense - the kid should have asked if they had used krakz or warez - stolen software, but the screenwriter confused these terms with 'open source'. This is an ongoing problem with the public image of FOSS. It is hard to convince non-savvy people that open-source software can be better and more secure. From their point of view, if it is 'free' it must be either stolen or crap - you get what you pay for! So many machines I have been asked to fix are malware ridden tragedies, with their obligatory cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Photoshop, not to mention games. I know one individual who does not update his cracked copy of Windows - he just installs a krakz with the latest patches every few months.
The idea of a species is, as you note, a matter of definition. If two populations of living things cannot interbreed, then by definition, they belong to different species. But reality is not so clear cut - there can be considerable variety even within a species. The scenario you present where an individual of an entirely new species suddeny appears (and cannot find a viable mate to continue the line) is very unlikely.
Speciation is a gradual process. Populations diverge over time, accumulating differences through mutation or selection until a point is crossed where they cannot interbreed any more due to those differences. Even then there can be a fuzzy borderline where organisms from divergent populations can, in principle, mate and conceive and produce offspring, though this offspring may be unviable, or unable to produce further offspring itself.
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