Sayonara

A) They can't (well, not with any great accuracy), B) If the occupants of the house on either side of mine use my connection, that is two new contracts the ISP is missing out on, C) NTL.

How can your opinion of a game that has not yet been released - in production or in beta - be personal in any way whatsoever? Surely it can only be based on experience and reputation of past titles, which is not the best way to evaluate what is essentially a different game.

OMG! Not the dreaded dramatic device!

Is this circular non-comparison going to go on for much longer?

140 I would expect to slow the browser down, but most people only use 2-8 extensions (apparently).

No, but the wording is really funny. You have the same contract don't you... did you read that bit?

Programs like SpyBot will NOT protect you from things like DSO exploits (although Spybot can detect and remove these, it can't immunise against them and won't alert you as they occur), nor will it protect you from DCOM subversion or any of the arbitrary code attacks which are - by definition - unpredictable. Opera is the same but different. Try them both, as most people with strong opinions on this seem to eventually fall back to fairly anal things (like "Opera is 0.00000089 megs smaller than Firefox") or personal choice. Why would process B slow down process A? Yes, AdBlock is an extension. I can't describe in words how nice it is to have your daily faves open in their own tabs when you start up, with no banners or irritating flashing images, and no hover-over adverts. Bliss.

The contract we have with our ISP actually specifies that WAN owners must ensure they do not allow others to use their bandwidth.

Based on what we know, the eventual heat death of the universe is inevitable, so (as has already been said) it's a silly question. All good things... etc.

Right. You do have security issues, you just don't know about them. For instance, having a browser that allows several simple methods of running arbitrary code on your machine is what I like to call "a great big stonking mother beast of a hole". IE also allows registry changes to be silently committed without your knowledge, which cannot in any fashion be described as a "good thing" and occurs more often than you'd expect. The biggest reason why Firefox owns IE like the little bitch it is, is because it uses a correctly structured [acr=Document Object Model]DOM[/acr], and correctly interprets XHTML and CSS in a fashion that was intended to result from the W3C recommendations. That makes it, like Opera, not just a good browser, but a good example of a standard platform to code for. IE is just a really bad joke by comparison. IE is one of the slowest browsers because its rendering engine makes work for itself (afaik browser "speed" is a measure of how fast the browser can render the content after downloading it). This is related to the non-compliancy issue. IE allows all sorts of bad and sloppy code to display because it is non-compliant, which takes up extra rendering time for the end-user, encourages further sloppy coding, and makes having international standards fairly pointless. Opera is probably the fastest - unless you count the text browsers that ignore graphical content - and Firefox/Mozilla is just a touch slower than Opera. Google for browser speed benchmark tests. The main feature you will notice immediately is that Firefox has tabbed browsing. New windows are opened in pages within the parent page, instead of opening a whole new window. This saves desktop and task bar space. Each sub-window has a tab giving the name of the page - you can cycle through tabs using Ctrl+Tab (like you would with, say, different Excel spreadsheets), or click on the tabs to raise that page. With certain extensions installed you can also duplicate tab, restore closed tab, open bookmark folder to tabs, and so on. Having tabs also means you can have multiple homepages, which all open in their own tab on start-up. To do this you simply separate addresses with a pipe | character in the "homepage" option. The ability to install extensions and themes gives Firefox massive scope for customisation that IE simply does not have. There are over 140 extensions for Firefox, featuring handy plug-ins such as: All-in-One Mouse Gestures: Use your mouse to perform customisable browser functions, e.g. drag [acr=Right Mouse Button]RMB[/acr] left = "back". AdBlock: The best extension there is. Allows you to block images, banners, adverts etc. Use regular expressions for intelligent identification of potential banners. Share your block list with others. Etc. See more here: http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/ (IE5, by the way, does not display the FF extensions page correctly, even though it is a fully standards-compliant page.)

I missed that wordperfect bit before, so I shall reply now: "Good."

If you think blocking pop-ups is the only advantage of Firefox, then you obviously have not read any of the many many posts on the subject, nor bothered to look at Mozilla's specs for the browser, so I don't see why we should waste time posting the same information again.

We have already dealt with that in the thread. Read the whole thread. Will they starve if they don't get to eat deer? Do you need a gun to kill a deer?

We're not debating whether US citizens do have the right to own guns.

In the West we're actually in a period of dropping birth rates at the moment, for the record. There's a great deal of concern about it (for some reason).

No, you aren't listening*. The constant Pi represents the circumference/radius ratio in circles with euclidean geometry. * = reading.

That's not actually true. You need to re-read what was said earlier. Pi is defined as a part of plane geometry. When you reduce the circumference but not the radius, the circle is no longer Euclidean - the circumference-radius ratio does not need to be pi.

What I am trying to say is that just because someone knows about birds and their ability to fly (to borrow your example), it does not mean there is a logical path to them imagining themselves flying. Transferring inhuman abilities to a representation of yourself isn't even very logical to begin with.

No it won't. You can't do anything with it because (a) you don't own it, the guy who sells these plots is a con-man, and (b) international treaty pretty much prevents any chance of exploiting the moon.

I'm sorry I don't know what an awerage is. Is it a profanity?

Of course there is selection. You can't have a situation where there isn't selection, unless every member of the species is completely dead. There is no requirement for selective pressures to be dramatic and obvious, nor for them to work on huge swathes of a population simultaneously.

Actually we both gain and lose both mass and energy to space, so I don't see how you can call it a closed system. In any case, a species such as ours will at some point find it as able to spread beyond its home planet, so the logic of your post was still flawed.

Would you like to buy a plot of land on the moon?