There is still only speculation that this will be the last version. That said, it will most likely fit the bill for a lot of apps in it's current form. If SL5 can give you what you want, I don't see a real problem not to use it to develop your next app. It has the tools now and it's in production now.
If you don't think an app you start writing today will still be being used in 10 years time, you're being short-sighted in my opinion. That kind of attitude is the reason so many companies are still stuck on IE6 (which came out just over ten years ago) due to poorly written intranet apps.
You raise a point which is interesting if there was an official word from microsoft that this will be the last version. Right now this is still only speculation. Anyway, from a pragmatic view point SL5 is available today. A fresh release like this is a good reason to rejoice instead of speculating when the next release will be. Out of curiousity, what alternate are you suggesting that has the same unmatched tooling, documentation and support "today"? Specifically, if the mobile/tablet is not your target and your main audience is desktop on mac/windows and perhaps linux(note: with a small effort you can make your app work on moonlight too).
Edit: note also that with a small effort you can target the new windows 8 marketspace and release it as a metro style app as well.
5% would mean that for every 20 pages viewed on the Internet, advertising is leading someone to make a purchase. I can't imagine that ever happening no matter how fantastic the ads are. Don't think of it as a percentage hit rate; think about how that number fits into the way we use the Internet and live our lives.
But this is exactly his point. Only in mobile devices is 3 years considered old to the point of irrelevance, and Android is far worse, closer to 3 months.
It can be justified on technological or economic grounds, but either way, environmental sustainability considerations clearly don't enter into the equation.
3 months for an Android phone be irrelevant is absolutely not true. My girlfriend has a Galaxy S (released June 2010) that runs every single game in the Android Market perfectly and was updated to Gingerbread (and maybe will be updated to ICS). It is not the best device out there but is still very relevant and she doesn't see a single reason to buy a new device.
A general system expansion slot would make a lot more sense. Think the RAM expansion on the N64. It'd be silly for each new game to have to provide its own extra processors or RAM in its own (expensive) cartridge, and console piracy is close enough to dead already.
The dude thinks neutron stars and black holes are unfindable pseudoscience. You could legitimately claim that there are better ways to interpret the evidence for those phenomena, but claiming that there is no evidence only demonstrates how confused he is about the field.
This site doesn't get past a first-pass bullshit filter, which is why nobody's investing any more of their time on it.
Do you understand how many people come up with "theories" out of left field in exactly this fashion?
People like Galileo? Einstein? Maxwell? Crick? Pasteur?
I apologize for offending sensibilies here. For those that are actually intellectually curious, I ask you to read the data. Read the data. Read the data.
THEN make up your mind.
Every advance in science comes from people who challenge conventional wisdom, but the vast majority of people who challenge conventional wisdom end up being wrong.
I did read some of the page, but gave up after it was clear that he thought his "Electric Sky" hypothesis was an alternative to general relativity. It might very well be one could construct a credible argument in some areas, but look at the wikipedia page for tests of General Relativity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
A new theory can't just provide an alternative to one of those phenomenon or a handful. It must make the same prediction in every single case where General Relativity has been tested and proven right - and then it has to make new predictions where General Relativity will fail. That is the standard by which General Relativity replaced Newton, and by which we would test this if it had any hope of providing a replacement.
It is certainly true that cosmologists are accumulating puzzles and I expect that sooner or later we'll get a new theory that can resolve them. But this theory can't even explain the old puzzles that brought down Newton.
Look, I've been reading the same science you have been for 25 years. I have excitedly followed every development from Hawkings discovery of black holes to Feynmans physics work to all the various string theory, dark matter, red-shift big-bang, etc...
I've been reading the same things as you have. I believed them too, as far as one can without any hard evidence. Even the people in this line of work tell you they have ideas, but few facts. When I found this, it seemed to actually answer, in a lab, no less, some things that common astrophysics can not explain. And it does it coherently, in a methodology that can be observed in a lab.
I love science as much as you guys do, and I think you ought to at least acquaint yourself with the plasma sciences, as they are amazingly explanatory of observed interactions both here and in deep space.
I'm not playing zealot here. Take the info as you will. But when I see a scientific explanation that stands up to scientific-method scrutiny, I believe it deserves to be considered in relation to other hypotheses that claim to explain events in a conflicting way.
You mention that you think EU stands up to scientific-method scrutiny. I was looking through the site and I wasn't able to find any examples of a place where EU makes a correct quantitative prediction about some phenomenon where conventional cosmology is unable to?
Also, how would you use EU to quantitatively predict how the orbits of planets diverge from what Kepler's laws would predict, or how the time measurements aboard GPS satellites diverge from clocks on the ground? Or was the page you linked to wrong in claiming that EU disprove's Einstein's relativity?
Well of course it's the best selling phone. Apple bets the entire platform on a single phone; Android has a panoply of options competing against each other. If the iPhone were being consistently outsold by any one of the various Android models, that would be a sign that something was going seriously wrong for Apple.
That article merely demonstrates that statistics will tell you anything.
The fundamental point underlying science and basic research is that it's generally not possible to know the value of knowledge before you, well, know it. Your perspective is extremely shortsighted.
If humanity only invested in projects of "measurable value," there would be no computer programmers, because there would be no computers, because we would not understand physics, because physics requires esoteric mathematics, and what good did fiddling with numbers ever do for anyone? No measurable value whatsoever!
> The fundamental point underlying science and basic research is that it's generally not possible to know the value of knowledge before you, well, know it
Oh no, I wasn't arguing against science -- to the opposite, I wish that scientific achievement was better recognized by our society. I was making a claim that when science does achieve something, the value of those achievements is not "tracked." I fully understand that our whole technological economy depends on the achievements of science. The problem I was trying to solve is, basically, why is it then that scientists don't make a lot of money (a small fact, which, I believe, causes a "brain drain" to the financial industry, etc). I believe that if science correctly "tracked" its achievements (either by replacing the current journal citation rank by something more closely resembling a currency, or by implementing a better patent system, or both), more good science would have been made.
I think that the high-brow idealism you often find in science is a product -- not the origin -- of the current academic system. The reason there are many idealists in science is not because science requires idealism, but because the pragmatists end up somewhere else. As a result, the high-strung idealism devalues science in the eyes of the public.
That would be interesting if it were possible. I'm not sure how you would manage it, though. Scientists already have an implicit incentive not to throw their careers away on unimportant research, and one of the major problems leading to the whole "publish or perish" trend is that it's really just impossibly hard for anyone who isn't directly involved in a narrow slice of research to evaluate that slice effectively, while anyone who IS involved in that narrow slice of research probably can't evaluate it objectively.
But some kind of prediction market or 'kickstarter' type model might do a better job than the grant model in figuring out how to dispense limited funds...? I'm not sure how you'd get it up and running with credibility and authority, but it's interesting to think about.
"A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases."
I'd say this is also true in the broader sense of how a person chooses to live in an inherently muddled world. You can take obstacles and confusion as a call to action and vigilant reflection, or you can use them as an excuse for giving up and accepting mediocrity.
The point is that there are wonderful parts of life other than cottages on lakes, and while you're working harder for those 10 years you are to some extent missing out on those parts of life, because there are only 24 hours in a day.
While you're focusing on that one month at the cottage, those people on their death beds are reflecting on the other 11.
