I do not live in France, but nevertheless in my own country, where there are supposed to be checks and balances, I believe there aren't enough of them. It is possible, if a single party gets more than 50% of the House and Senate, for that party to do almost anything with impunity. Sure, it takes effort to pass a bill into law since it must pass in both chambers of Congress and then get signed into law by the President. But because government is an entity that tends toward corruption and total control, I think the Constitution should have thrown a few additional monkey wrenches into the gears and added the following requirements to the mix:
1. A mandatory waiting period of one year from completion of the writing of a bill until it can be voted on by legislators. The bill must be made available to the public at the start of this waiting period. This forces a review and comment period. If the text of the bill changes, the waiting period restarts.
2. More eyes. After a bill passes both houses, it must be shelved until at least 50% of the members of both houses have changed. Once that happens, the bill must pass both houses a second time. Only then does it land on the President's desk. This means that the passage of bills into law requires the NEXT Congress to agree with the current one.
3. "One subject matter." In other words, you can't sneak a failed bill regulating commerce into the bowels of another bill regulating something else.
4. "Plain English," and "Reasonable length," meaning an eighth-grader should be able to read and understand the bill. As a bonus, instead of "Reasonable length," the Constitution should have defined a hard length limit of, say, 200 pages in a bill, where each page may only contain up to a maximum of a certain number of words. No more bills so long they need all of Google's storage capacity to store them and vote on them without reading them. Not to mention, if you can't explain it in 200 pages, it's probably too complicated to be understood by the public, which will be expected to abide by it.
5. A Constitution-defined ceiling on the total number of pages in law. Once that limit is reached, they can't add pages until other pages are repealed to make room. Repealing should be as complicated as enacting, by the way. Say, 100,000 pages total maximum number of pages in law. This is a HUGE number! To put things into perspective, the federal tax law takes up 70,000 pages. That's just ONE law. There must be millions of pages of complicated, convoluted law. This is ridiculous! You are somehow expected to know and abide by the law, but it is impossible for any person to actually know so much. Laws are misunderstood, and this allows lawyers and other corrupt people to take advantage of normal people. There should be a hard limit.
On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."
Encarta could never compete with Wikipedia due to the tremendous workforce updating Wikipedia every day. Once gain open source wins against proprietary.
As I understand if the destination of an international flight is the USA they cannot serve booze to under 21 for the duration of the flight, even if they're flying over the Atlantic for many hours. Is this correct?
Benchmarks are a good thing but we need to make sure that the FOSS community gets plenty of "real world use" data pertaining to the actual things people do with their software. With this data available the software can be streamlined and optimized to give the FOSS community software that is efficient with the use of resources, fast in terms of speed, and conservative with the use of battery power. This doesn't necessarily mean shaving cycles by coding in assembly or using different compiler switches. It does necessarily mean finding more efficient algorithms but it would be a waste of time to do this work in areas where the outcome won't be noticed. Here's the key: Software can be slow and it doesn't necessarily get noticed. Thanks to Microsoft's widespread install base and liberal use of processor and memory resources, people are accustomed to waiting for their computers. Better performance will be noticed when there is a basis for comparison.
True. But ear plugs won't provide the real life experience that working in a Real Job prior to college will. That experience provides not only quiet, money, and freedom during college, it provides what you need to make the most of college.
I used to help in hiring people where I work. Those fresh out of college who never worked before are always less capable than people the same age who finished high school and then worked in any job. The former are locked into the "follow directions" mentality and expect everything provided to them on a silver platter due to so many years of being in classrooms. They literally cannot think. The latter know how to think for themselves.
well.. the problem is, that as soon as you "want to develop for it" all other ANDs in your condition are not your choice.. it was apple's to lock you into those things.
Shit like this will fly only until there is some serious competition *cough* Android *cough*.
You're not thinking like an entrepreneur! If you can convince people that they should change their MAC addresses, and if you have a EPROM recorder with which you can perform that service for a nominal fee, then you're in business! It's as easy as: 1. Marketing 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!
Reminds me of a guy on the evening news one night who argued against something by using band-aids as an example in his argument. He said something to the effect that you live in a country where band-aids are sold in colors matching the skin tone of white people. This individual happened to have a dark complexion, so his example made a point. But if he would like a black band-aid, chances are that others want one, too. So instead of arguing that this country is crap because we don't have black band-aids, he should have: 1. Shut up so someone else wouldn't think of this idea. 2. Go into the black band-aid business. 3. Profit!!!
Bottom line: When you find a need that nobody fills, YOU should fill it!
Noisy dorm room? The solution to the excessively noisy roommate is very simple but requires a slight modification of the way we view the world with respect to education. The solution is to live in your own apartment while attending college. Impossible unless your parents have tons of money? Nope. You don't need your parent's money. I'll explain:
Today, it is common practice to finish high school and immediately go to college. Why?
I did things differently and I believe it was extremely beneficial. I went to college, but not until later. First, I got a Real Job. Contrary to public misconception, you do NOT need a college degree to get a Real Job!
Now mind you, in the beginning, it wasn't a particularly well-paying Real Job and it wasn't in the field I wanted to work in (software engineering). But I was out of high school so who cares? It was a job in a dirty machine shop where I started off sorting nuts and bolts, moved on to sorting expensive end mills and drills, moved on to cleaning dirty machine parts, and moved on to writing programs for their machines, setting up a company-wide network, and doing quite a few wonderful IT-related things for that company, all of which began one day when the boss found out that I knew quite a bit about computers and programming. By the way, the job started paying pretty well! Since I was living well below my means, not going out to bars nearly as much as my friends and not spending money on anything that wasn't absolutely necessary, I saved up quite a bit of dough during those years and learned a tremendous amount.
When I was 24, I decided it was time to attend college and get that degree. I noticed something very interesting. The students who were fresh out of high school had NO CLUE about living in the real world. They would cram for tests only to forget the stuff a day later. They didn't have the life experience to recognize which information was a solution to an important problem, and which information was interesting but unimportant. How many times have you heard a student ask, "When are we ever going to need this in real life?" I heard this quite a few times, and always in reference to EXTREMELY IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE!!! But you cannot possibly recognize what is important without the real life experience that you can ONLY get by working in a Real Job before going to college and getting into lifelong debt with student loans.
Remember, back in the day, children worked after school and during school vacations. Nowadays that is very uncommon, even in high school, due to "child protection" laws that place many limitations on how, when, and where children can work. Although these laws may protect children in one way, they harm them in another way by robbing them of important life experience during those years. Today, 30 is the new 20 because you need to gain, during your 20s, the life and work experience that your grandparents gained when they were in their teens. Today, people in their 20s are less mature than their counterparts in the 1950s were. You need that time, after high school but before college, to get that real life experience. Plus you earn Real Money, live in a Real Apartment, and if your job, like mine, isn't in the field you wanted to work in, you gain additional insights, knowledge, and experience by exposing yourself to something totally different. Much better than graduating from college and realizing that you have an infinitude of student loan debt and no clue what to do next. Not to mention that you do NOT have roommates (quiet or loud) during college, and you do NOT need your parent's money! When you want noise, you can go to a bar.
Good thing they figured out the swabs were contaminated. Had they not, some innocent woman might have spent years and years of her life in prison, for nothing.
But I have such a better idea than this. Simply, you create a special tool that make runs before executing the compiler or linker. This special tool reads in your source file and basically places each and every function in a separate translation unit. These are compiled into object files. Any given game will have thousands of different functions in it, so you'll get thousands of object files. Now you set up your linker to link these objects together a few hundred thousands of times (this will require a grid if you're in a hurry), each time giving you a unique executable that is a unique permutation of the order of the object files. Each permutation will have to be associated with a number in a database. The game is ONLY sold online. You have to download it. When you do, you receive a unique executable image that NOBODY ELSE HAS. Your name, billing address, and credit card information are then associated with the ID number of that executable in the database. The game producer monitors all the warez sites for images of their games. When they find them, they know exactly from which of their customers each copy originated. Knowledge that this is the case will prevent MOST people from copying the game. Only hard-core pirates will try. As an added benefit, the fact that each executable is unique will prevent (or make it extremely difficult) to distribute patches that modify the behavior of the game. Once purchased and downloaded, you NEVER have to activate, you NEVER have to be online, you NEVER have to do anything. Pay, download, back it up to a CD or something, and enjoy.
I have a way you can fix DRM. In a game executable, you will have thousands of functions. All you have to do is come up with a system where each person who buys a copy of the game receives a completely unique executable image where the functions come in a certain specific order. That order can be tied somewhat to your name and the credit card you use to buy the game. All of this gets compressed and stored in a database. Then the game developer monitors the w4rez sites and downloads every copy of the game that shows up on them. The executable will identify the culprit who allowed the game to be copied. Busted! An additional benefit is that patches for the executable cannot be distributed.
The issue, it transpires, is that although the full lossless/lossy hybrid MP3 file is transferred to players, only the lossy element can be played back.
This will be true only until players begin supporting the lossless format.
Agreed. This is not an adult suspected of illegal drug trafficking while crossing an international border. This is a 13 year old girl. THIRTEEN! And she was not suspected of trafficking in illegal drugs. Ibuprofen is a common medication in widespread use and is perfectly legal. The fact that something like this takes place in the United States of America is proof that this country is corrupt.
Of course, with the way multicore architecture has come to the forefront, I kind of wish Be OS had survived since it was designed to be multicore from day one. I have a feeling it's pervasively multithreaded nature would kick Apple and Microsoft's ass on modern hardware.
I feel the same way. I loved BeOS back in its heyday. Maybe you should check out Haiku. It is supposed to be an open-source re-implementation of BeOS in such a way that provides source and binary compatibility with the last commercial version of BeOS, and then to proceed from there with new research. It finally has GCC 4, as of January, which means that it's not stuck in the "classic" 2.95 days of GCC anymore. This will help speed along development considerably. I hope to see a great comeback!
Nono, it only finds exploits in open-source code. Microsoft code is safe from this evil tool. It's just another way they are attacking open source!
You know what's incredibly funny? If they did use an evil tool to uncover every exploit in open source code, to make the FOSS community look bad, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot because the bugs would get fixed at warp speed. Beyond the initial "bad" publicity they'd generate for FOSS (there's no such thing as bad publicity), the joke would be on them because they'd still be stuck with their bugs but we'd be free of ours.:-)
Or is that a senseless question anyway since it runs under Windows?
SVN runs under Windows. GCC runs under Windows. Gimp runs under Windows. Apache runs under Windows. Hell, just about any project with a configure script will either compile for Windows as-is, or will after slight modifications. FOSS has nothing to do with whether it runs under Windows or not.
I am not an astronomer, obviously, but it there any merit in this?
Yes, it has merit. That is, it has merit if you're the one who somehow convinced the government (or other rich organization) to give you millions of dollars in research grants. You get a nice house, a nice car, send your kids to a nice private school, take a glance at the sky, and tell us that you're getting closer by the day to finding a twin planet.:-)
Mod parent up. This is a very good description of the issues affecting the possibility of locating a twin Earth. I, too, believe that you won't find a planet to match the conditions here on Earth. Maybe you can find something with a similar gravity and a similar atmosphere, so you'll be able to walk around on it without wearing a space uniform and your body won't get all messed up from being too light or too heavy. But then again, I doubt you'll have a similar enough climate. Or 24-hour days. Or the right temperature. In short, there are so many issues that you need to take into consideration. I know someone will find fault with what I'm about to say, but the general order of things here on Earth suggests that the whole system was created by God to operate in this manner. There are just too many variables, where any one of them being off by 1% would screw up the whole system, that you can't just write it off as being pure luck. And the parent is totally right about the moon, now that I think of it. If it didn't "chase" the sun at just the right speed, and if the Earth didn't spin at the right speed, then the phase of the moon would change throughout the night, and we as a civilization would have no concept of a calendar, except to the extent that we have the concept of the day and the repeating cycle of seasons.
Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.
You're right that 7 is leaner because Vista was a market flop. However I disagree that it flopped because it tried to do things people aren't ready for. People are ready for everything it was supposed to do. No. It flopped because of two reasons. First, it did not work properly. Second, it was painfully slow even on bad ass hardware. Vista flopped for these two reasons so 7 is a big focus shift to making things actually work and making the OS as a whole make more efficient use of resources. Nobody wants to sit around and wait endlessly while their Core 9 Septuagint with 50 exabytes of RAM chugs away to repaint a window because you had the audacity to move the mouse while it was processing something. That is why Vista flopped. That is why 7 is being made leaner. Netbooks have something to do with it, but not a whole hell of a lot.
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I do not live in France, but nevertheless in my own country, where there are supposed to be checks and balances, I believe there aren't enough of them. It is possible, if a single party gets more than 50% of the House and Senate, for that party to do almost anything with impunity. Sure, it takes effort to pass a bill into law since it must pass in both chambers of Congress and then get signed into law by the President. But because government is an entity that tends toward corruption and total control, I think the Constitution should have thrown a few additional monkey wrenches into the gears and added the following requirements to the mix:
1. A mandatory waiting period of one year from completion of the writing of a bill until it can be voted on by legislators. The bill must be made available to the public at the start of this waiting period. This forces a review and comment period. If the text of the bill changes, the waiting period restarts.
2. More eyes. After a bill passes both houses, it must be shelved until at least 50% of the members of both houses have changed. Once that happens, the bill must pass both houses a second time. Only then does it land on the President's desk. This means that the passage of bills into law requires the NEXT Congress to agree with the current one.
3. "One subject matter." In other words, you can't sneak a failed bill regulating commerce into the bowels of another bill regulating something else.
4. "Plain English," and "Reasonable length," meaning an eighth-grader should be able to read and understand the bill. As a bonus, instead of "Reasonable length," the Constitution should have defined a hard length limit of, say, 200 pages in a bill, where each page may only contain up to a maximum of a certain number of words. No more bills so long they need all of Google's storage capacity to store them and vote on them without reading them. Not to mention, if you can't explain it in 200 pages, it's probably too complicated to be understood by the public, which will be expected to abide by it.
5. A Constitution-defined ceiling on the total number of pages in law. Once that limit is reached, they can't add pages until other pages are repealed to make room. Repealing should be as complicated as enacting, by the way. Say, 100,000 pages total maximum number of pages in law. This is a HUGE number! To put things into perspective, the federal tax law takes up 70,000 pages. That's just ONE law. There must be millions of pages of complicated, convoluted law. This is ridiculous! You are somehow expected to know and abide by the law, but it is impossible for any person to actually know so much. Laws are misunderstood, and this allows lawyers and other corrupt people to take advantage of normal people. There should be a hard limit.
On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."
Encarta could never compete with Wikipedia due to the tremendous workforce updating Wikipedia every day. Once gain open source wins against proprietary.
As I understand if the destination of an international flight is the USA they cannot serve booze to under 21 for the duration of the flight, even if they're flying over the Atlantic for many hours. Is this correct?
Why is it every time someone points out that maybe, just maybe, socialism actually has *shudder* disadvantages, they get modded --1 troll?
Oh I forgot... I'm new here.
Government. What do you expect?
The astronauts in the ISS should declare independence and form their own state in the ISS.
How many benchmarks do we need?
Benchmarks are a good thing but we need to make sure that the FOSS community gets plenty of "real world use" data pertaining to the actual things people do with their software. With this data available the software can be streamlined and optimized to give the FOSS community software that is efficient with the use of resources, fast in terms of speed, and conservative with the use of battery power. This doesn't necessarily mean shaving cycles by coding in assembly or using different compiler switches. It does necessarily mean finding more efficient algorithms but it would be a waste of time to do this work in areas where the outcome won't be noticed. Here's the key: Software can be slow and it doesn't necessarily get noticed. Thanks to Microsoft's widespread install base and liberal use of processor and memory resources, people are accustomed to waiting for their computers. Better performance will be noticed when there is a basis for comparison.
I used to help in hiring people where I work. Those fresh out of college who never worked before are always less capable than people the same age who finished high school and then worked in any job. The former are locked into the "follow directions" mentality and expect everything provided to them on a silver platter due to so many years of being in classrooms. They literally cannot think. The latter know how to think for themselves.
well.. the problem is, that as soon as you "want to develop for it" all other ANDs in your condition are not your choice.. it was apple's to lock you into those things.
Shit like this will fly only until there is some serious competition *cough* Android *cough*.
Of course, the printer was always broken, but it's the same idea...
Military. It doesn't need to be cheap. It only needs to look cheap.
You're not thinking like an entrepreneur! If you can convince people that they should change their MAC addresses, and if you have a EPROM recorder with which you can perform that service for a nominal fee, then you're in business! It's as easy as:
1. Marketing
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Reminds me of a guy on the evening news one night who argued against something by using band-aids as an example in his argument. He said something to the effect that you live in a country where band-aids are sold in colors matching the skin tone of white people. This individual happened to have a dark complexion, so his example made a point. But if he would like a black band-aid, chances are that others want one, too. So instead of arguing that this country is crap because we don't have black band-aids, he should have:
1. Shut up so someone else wouldn't think of this idea.
2. Go into the black band-aid business.
3. Profit!!!
Bottom line: When you find a need that nobody fills, YOU should fill it!
Noisy dorm room? The solution to the excessively noisy roommate is very simple but requires a slight modification of the way we view the world with respect to education. The solution is to live in your own apartment while attending college. Impossible unless your parents have tons of money? Nope. You don't need your parent's money. I'll explain:
Today, it is common practice to finish high school and immediately go to college. Why?
I did things differently and I believe it was extremely beneficial. I went to college, but not until later. First, I got a Real Job. Contrary to public misconception, you do NOT need a college degree to get a Real Job!
Now mind you, in the beginning, it wasn't a particularly well-paying Real Job and it wasn't in the field I wanted to work in (software engineering). But I was out of high school so who cares? It was a job in a dirty machine shop where I started off sorting nuts and bolts, moved on to sorting expensive end mills and drills, moved on to cleaning dirty machine parts, and moved on to writing programs for their machines, setting up a company-wide network, and doing quite a few wonderful IT-related things for that company, all of which began one day when the boss found out that I knew quite a bit about computers and programming. By the way, the job started paying pretty well! Since I was living well below my means, not going out to bars nearly as much as my friends and not spending money on anything that wasn't absolutely necessary, I saved up quite a bit of dough during those years and learned a tremendous amount.
When I was 24, I decided it was time to attend college and get that degree. I noticed something very interesting. The students who were fresh out of high school had NO CLUE about living in the real world. They would cram for tests only to forget the stuff a day later. They didn't have the life experience to recognize which information was a solution to an important problem, and which information was interesting but unimportant. How many times have you heard a student ask, "When are we ever going to need this in real life?" I heard this quite a few times, and always in reference to EXTREMELY IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE!!! But you cannot possibly recognize what is important without the real life experience that you can ONLY get by working in a Real Job before going to college and getting into lifelong debt with student loans.
Remember, back in the day, children worked after school and during school vacations. Nowadays that is very uncommon, even in high school, due to "child protection" laws that place many limitations on how, when, and where children can work. Although these laws may protect children in one way, they harm them in another way by robbing them of important life experience during those years. Today, 30 is the new 20 because you need to gain, during your 20s, the life and work experience that your grandparents gained when they were in their teens. Today, people in their 20s are less mature than their counterparts in the 1950s were. You need that time, after high school but before college, to get that real life experience. Plus you earn Real Money, live in a Real Apartment, and if your job, like mine, isn't in the field you wanted to work in, you gain additional insights, knowledge, and experience by exposing yourself to something totally different. Much better than graduating from college and realizing that you have an infinitude of student loan debt and no clue what to do next. Not to mention that you do NOT have roommates (quiet or loud) during college, and you do NOT need your parent's money! When you want noise, you can go to a bar.
Ah the good ol' operating systems of yesteryear.
Good thing they figured out the swabs were contaminated. Had they not, some innocent woman might have spent years and years of her life in prison, for nothing.
But I have such a better idea than this. Simply, you create a special tool that make runs before executing the compiler or linker. This special tool reads in your source file and basically places each and every function in a separate translation unit. These are compiled into object files. Any given game will have thousands of different functions in it, so you'll get thousands of object files. Now you set up your linker to link these objects together a few hundred thousands of times (this will require a grid if you're in a hurry), each time giving you a unique executable that is a unique permutation of the order of the object files. Each permutation will have to be associated with a number in a database. The game is ONLY sold online. You have to download it. When you do, you receive a unique executable image that NOBODY ELSE HAS. Your name, billing address, and credit card information are then associated with the ID number of that executable in the database. The game producer monitors all the warez sites for images of their games. When they find them, they know exactly from which of their customers each copy originated. Knowledge that this is the case will prevent MOST people from copying the game. Only hard-core pirates will try. As an added benefit, the fact that each executable is unique will prevent (or make it extremely difficult) to distribute patches that modify the behavior of the game. Once purchased and downloaded, you NEVER have to activate, you NEVER have to be online, you NEVER have to do anything. Pay, download, back it up to a CD or something, and enjoy.
I have a way you can fix DRM. In a game executable, you will have thousands of functions. All you have to do is come up with a system where each person who buys a copy of the game receives a completely unique executable image where the functions come in a certain specific order. That order can be tied somewhat to your name and the credit card you use to buy the game. All of this gets compressed and stored in a database. Then the game developer monitors the w4rez sites and downloads every copy of the game that shows up on them. The executable will identify the culprit who allowed the game to be copied. Busted! An additional benefit is that patches for the executable cannot be distributed.
The issue, it transpires, is that although the full lossless/lossy hybrid MP3 file is transferred to players, only the lossy element can be played back.
This will be true only until players begin supporting the lossless format.
Agreed. This is not an adult suspected of illegal drug trafficking while crossing an international border. This is a 13 year old girl. THIRTEEN! And she was not suspected of trafficking in illegal drugs. Ibuprofen is a common medication in widespread use and is perfectly legal. The fact that something like this takes place in the United States of America is proof that this country is corrupt.
This is the year of the netbook, the cheap car, and next thing you know, they'll be selling houses made out of cardboard for dirt cheap, too.
Of course, with the way multicore architecture has come to the forefront, I kind of wish Be OS had survived since it was designed to be multicore from day one. I have a feeling it's pervasively multithreaded nature would kick Apple and Microsoft's ass on modern hardware.
I feel the same way. I loved BeOS back in its heyday. Maybe you should check out Haiku. It is supposed to be an open-source re-implementation of BeOS in such a way that provides source and binary compatibility with the last commercial version of BeOS, and then to proceed from there with new research. It finally has GCC 4, as of January, which means that it's not stuck in the "classic" 2.95 days of GCC anymore. This will help speed along development considerably. I hope to see a great comeback!
Nono, it only finds exploits in open-source code. Microsoft code is safe from this evil tool. It's just another way they are attacking open source!
You know what's incredibly funny? If they did use an evil tool to uncover every exploit in open source code, to make the FOSS community look bad, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot because the bugs would get fixed at warp speed. Beyond the initial "bad" publicity they'd generate for FOSS (there's no such thing as bad publicity), the joke would be on them because they'd still be stuck with their bugs but we'd be free of ours. :-)
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in upgrading to Ubuntu.
Heh heh... my favorite Linux distro. :-)
Or is that a senseless question anyway since it runs under Windows?
SVN runs under Windows. GCC runs under Windows. Gimp runs under Windows. Apache runs under Windows. Hell, just about any project with a configure script will either compile for Windows as-is, or will after slight modifications. FOSS has nothing to do with whether it runs under Windows or not.
I am not an astronomer, obviously, but it there any merit in this?
Yes, it has merit. That is, it has merit if you're the one who somehow convinced the government (or other rich organization) to give you millions of dollars in research grants. You get a nice house, a nice car, send your kids to a nice private school, take a glance at the sky, and tell us that you're getting closer by the day to finding a twin planet. :-)
Mod parent up. This is a very good description of the issues affecting the possibility of locating a twin Earth. I, too, believe that you won't find a planet to match the conditions here on Earth. Maybe you can find something with a similar gravity and a similar atmosphere, so you'll be able to walk around on it without wearing a space uniform and your body won't get all messed up from being too light or too heavy. But then again, I doubt you'll have a similar enough climate. Or 24-hour days. Or the right temperature. In short, there are so many issues that you need to take into consideration. I know someone will find fault with what I'm about to say, but the general order of things here on Earth suggests that the whole system was created by God to operate in this manner. There are just too many variables, where any one of them being off by 1% would screw up the whole system, that you can't just write it off as being pure luck. And the parent is totally right about the moon, now that I think of it. If it didn't "chase" the sun at just the right speed, and if the Earth didn't spin at the right speed, then the phase of the moon would change throughout the night, and we as a civilization would have no concept of a calendar, except to the extent that we have the concept of the day and the repeating cycle of seasons.
Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.
You're right that 7 is leaner because Vista was a market flop. However I disagree that it flopped because it tried to do things people aren't ready for. People are ready for everything it was supposed to do. No. It flopped because of two reasons. First, it did not work properly. Second, it was painfully slow even on bad ass hardware. Vista flopped for these two reasons so 7 is a big focus shift to making things actually work and making the OS as a whole make more efficient use of resources. Nobody wants to sit around and wait endlessly while their Core 9 Septuagint with 50 exabytes of RAM chugs away to repaint a window because you had the audacity to move the mouse while it was processing something. That is why Vista flopped. That is why 7 is being made leaner. Netbooks have something to do with it, but not a whole hell of a lot.