wunderfool

no, this is major fail from all the financial people involved. you want your company going public when there are expectations of substantial growth. instead facebook is flattening...just what i'm looking for in an IPO, low growth

facebook should have been trading for a year already. and now the market is entering what could be a protracted decline. this reminds me of companies that went public in february of 2000. so obvious the train had already left the station...

it will be disastrous for facebook to go public if their network is seen as being in decline or even flat. investors care more about losing users in the US than they do gaining users in developing markets.

facebook needs to IPO yesterday. facebook fatigue is real and won't go away, and if it picks up momentum things could get ugly for a group of investors that have banked on massive potential gains

these lackluster IPOs can truly be put on the backs of their financial partners

timing matters. the investment banks are taking companies public in a new downturn in the markets that could last a while. they should have gone public a year ago, when markets still had plenty of easy upwards momentum

what happened to pandora? greece. sorry, macro still matters. people get scared by big stories, they put their money in treasuries

true, but also, these schools are more than adequate to equip a society to function

the top-tier universities of united states cater to the top 1% of the world, have incredible research records, nobels, etc... yet by almost any measure, the US itself as a nation is beginning to fall behind canada on per-capita measures of wealth, education, longevity, and happiness. this isn't that astonishing, the US is also falling behind many scandinavian nations with apparently unknown universities

remember last week's nba final? the "superstars" lost.

> Canadian universities don't really have entrance requirements, and they have a very low workload

i'm fascinated that all universities in the nation of canada have low workloads, regardless of program, and that you have been able to measure this against other institutions

but you already make it clear that you are extending this generalization from one anecdote about one chem class at two universities

agreed. i'd rather have a genuine conversation with a real human.

as an aside, i think the interior design motif of the stores has grown stale

> "Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the > visual interface"

that is only a "guideline" because it follows from their axiom that the UI must be driven by the mouse

if you remove that axiom, this no longer makes sense

yes, the mouse may indeed be faster in a mouse-centric UI like that of osx/os9

but i use xmonad and/or dwm. i can tell you that keyboards are faster in interfaces designed for keyboards

but most stuff i access is content...and the web is great for content

i mean....does anyone actually install pointless web-in-a-box apps like the rotten tomatoes app (for example because it bugs the hell out of me to decline it each time)?

my dsire to consume content is not going away, and having an app-per-url is a nonstarter

"Can Apple topple the web?"

well, then assuming a web page === a web "app"

the number of websites available to users is probably one million times the number of apps...

the number of new web sites that are started each day is probably one thousand times the number of new apps....

apple has a ways to go

and yes, i'll go there...you can't "kill" the real web if you do not allow users to access copious amounts of hardcore pornography

"URL discovery is still a major problem"

come on, google search is smarter than the app store search

it is important to note that half of the CO2 in our atmosphere is produced by our exhalations and those of our animals [source:gaia's final warning]...so indeed not only would ceasing all industrial activity be required to stop increasing CO2...we would also have to drastically reduce population. even then, there is enough CO2 already in the atmosphere to move the temperature to a new steady state which could take thousands of years to change

we are increasing population when we should be enforcing a global one-child policy

some interesting food for thought. in james lovelock's last book, he discusses how recent volcanos have indeed had a measurable cooling impact (abeit short term)...he suggests that it may indeed be the case that humanity, in a fit of desperation, may have to (try to) engineer a large scale introduction of such material into the atmosphere to create immediate cooling...even though such material itself poses many dangers

oddly enough some climate scientists (james lovelock, in this case) take it as a given that most animal life is already doomed, and that humans will have to engineer a food source in order to survive. green goo might be in your future

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

you don't need a study. most of the population of canada is situated far further south than most americans understand. the lowest point of ontario, for example, is south of the most northern point of california.

most of the inhabited areas of canada already have very hot summers. in southern ontario you can expect weather like washington DC in july

if most of the united states is set to be victimized by climate change (which everyone accepts) then it is a trivial deduction that most of the population of canada will also be

"notwithstanding the couple hundred extra ppm of CO2"

if you're saying that ppm will be in the 600-700 range then humanity will be on an irreversible express train to extinction, so not much else in your post matters

no one. we do not have the technology to rapidly alter the climate. our current climate change is the result of thousands of years of population growth and industrialization. concepts for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere in short course are just that, concepts

mother nature is still in charge, and needs only shrug slightly with a temperature change of 10 degrees on average in either direction to eliminate humans and our society

do people really believe that rapid climate change will reveal some new mass of desirable farm land? maybe in 5000 years as the soils adapt to new climates, but not fast enough to feed a hungry planet.

there are some lands on the periphery of existing arable zones that might become desirable in the short term, but certainly there will be a net loss worldwide...local economies have grown around existing arable zones, you have to transplant all that too

why do people throw these arguments around? i don't know of any nation whose scientists find any rapid climate change desirable. who are they? the notion of a polar thaw is tossed around as being desirable for canada as a shipping route....BUT this would decimate the living biosphere of 90% of canadians who live within 100 miles of the US border. i've never heard a serious canadian climate science talk about rapid climate change as desirable...nor any other

you raise a bunch of economic issues, but the poster to which i replied simply stated that there was "no where else to go", which is absurd

the rest of your points are dubious. your point B) has been proven false since the launch of the space station...this was one of its apparently initial goals, zero-g bioresearch...except that ended up being replaced with simulating everything in computers with bioinformatics on earth much more easily

C) also has no meaning as we could provide 100% of our solar needs by simply covering a part of any of our major deserts with solar thermal.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/surface-area-requ...

D) maybe, but, for a contrived example, if gold is $5000 an ounce, you have to bring it back from mars for less than $5000 an ounce or its a wash

E) completely bogus, no humans could survive long term with constant support from earth, this has been beaten to death

wrong. that bottle of organic shampoo from whole food commits about 98% of the sins as a bottle of a nonorganic varity from safeway. both are put in plastic which may or may not be recycled but was certainly made from oil (like all plastics), and was driven to the store in a vehicle that emits CO2, stored in a room kept warm or cool with a device that emits CO2, and then driven back to your house in another vehicle that emits CO2, where it is stored in your closet kept warm or cool by another CO2-emitting device.

and in the end its a toss-up if it even gets recycled, even after you put it in the blue bin. but that process also emits CO2

nowhere to go? really? last time i checked most of the earth's surface was uninhabited. why do people want to go to mars when the land can be had in the mojave desert for practically no cost? its just as dry but has an oxygen atmosphere, and there is virtually no demand for the land

or forget about the mojave. northern canada has a population per square km that is effectively zero. pretty mars-like, but you can hunt for dinner if you're smart. and once again, the land is basically free.

oh i'm not even mentioning a half dozen inhospitable places that no one occupies....why on earth would these people need to go to mars again??