Month: August 2012

Why I Think Governments Still Hide UFOs

So, I’m watching some UFO documentaries on YouTube yesterday and today, and the one question which keeps coming up is why would governments (especially the US) keep UFOs a secret.

Here’s my take on it – it would cost too much to admit it now. Financially.

Follow me on this one – you have a “cold war ” between two super powers, each of which is trying to one-up the other. Okay, so it makes sense to keep anything a secret in the hopes of gaining an advantage over the other. However, in order to make sure you keep the secret, you have to deal with leaks. The best way of doing this is to destroy the reputation and careers (and ultimately lives) of individuals who may come forward with what they know. This not only discredits the reports of UFOs, but also strikes fear into anyone thinking of reporting an incident, for fear of having their lives destroyed, too.

In the run of time, the cold war ends – but now you have a problem. Even though you don’t have an enemy of that magnitude anymore, you’ve now unjustly destroyed the lives of hundred (thousands?) of people in your own country. Can anyone spell “class-action lawsuit?”

Imagine the field day lawyers would have in a situation where the government now completely admits that UFOs are real, they’ve always been real, and they (the government) has always known about it. This would mean the government intentionally lied outright, causing the wilful destruction of people’s lives. Yeah, the government would get sued into the group.

At this point, they simply cannot admit it, not because of any secret society pulling the strings, but simply because it would bankrupt them.

Just a thought.

Is It Time For More SVG?

I’ve always been a proponent of SVG, even back when everyone was gung-ho with using Flash for every little thing, whether it was a good idea even back then or not.

However, recently I’ve started thinking that perhaps it’s time to start taking it a lot more seriously. With the obvious demise of Flash as a main-stream RIA choice; greater support in all the major browsers; and with Apple pushing Retina displays on their laptops as well as tablets, I think it’s time to start moving away from pixel-defined websites and raster graphics to using “em”-defined websites and SVG graphics.

The combination makes perfect sense – it’s clear you cannot rely on website layouts which are strictly defined using “px” unit-of-measure – that would result in a website being 1000px wide (a good idea if you want to support 1024 x 768 screen resolutions) looking ridiculous on ultra-high resolution displays (such as retina). The obvious problem then becomes fitting graphics in PNG and other raster formats into this different unit-of-measure. Sure, you could scale the graphics image, or have several versions of it and try to detect the screen resolution, but all of that becomes moot if you use SVG, which by it’s very design will scale up and down without pixelation.

What I find interesting is that Sun saw the writing on the wall (even before they were taken over by Oracle) when it comes to greater resolutions, which is why the “Nimbus” look and feel for Swing was specifically designed using vector graphics and not bitmaps/raster images.

As with everything in web programming, however, you’re always stuck with users refusing to upgrade their version of IE to something even vaguely useful (I’m talking IE9 at least), or moving onto a better browser. I wonder if perhaps as an industry we (as programmers, business people, scientists) need to drag consumers along, kicking and screaming. Imagine, if you will, if 90% of all major websites dropped support for IE8 and below tomorrow morning. Users would have no room to complain, and would simply be forced into upgrading. No more “why can I use IE6 on my bank website, but not on your website?”

Bliss.