Easy way to subdue a plane-load of passengers - strap on oxygen and depressurize the aircraft, then climb it to 45,000 ft (as MH 370 has been reported to have reached that altitude) and then fly at high altitude for several hours. Depressurization requires just a few switch throws on a 777. If that doesn't out and out kill the passengers it would certainly take the fight out of them, assuming that they even realized that they are being hijacked. It was early morning, so maybe everybody just drifted off to sleep after take-off without thinking much of it...No one awake to answer their cell phones either.
Look up Helios Airways Flight 522. This was an accident where cabin pressurization was accidentally disabled by switching pressurization to manual during at leak test on the ground. As they climbed to altitude the cabin pressure decreased with altitude. They flew for hours on autopilot before running out of fuel and crashing into a mountain.
It is possible that the cabin pressurization on MH370 could have been disabled on the ground, but the ensuing alarms would have meant that at least one of the cockpit crew was in on a hijacking. If someone was smart enough about 777 systems to shut off the several transponders, some below deck, depressurizing the aircraft would have been trivial to accomplish.
Billions will have to end their lives shorter than their natural spans.
Not necessarily, but it depends on how quickly the resource depletion occurs. If the current generation decided to not have children, world population would go to zero in less than 100 years, so we do have a degree of control over this. But, at best, it means a whole lot of people should not be having children right now. But everyone is certain that the issue of their golden wombs will save the world, and many others think that a bearded man in the clouds said that they must go forth and multiply, so they will leave it to someone else to not procreate. Unless we're going to do a Chinese-style One Child policy, the world population decrease won't happen in a controlled, non-catastrophic fashion.
On top of that, we're actively trying NOT to have disease pandemics and world wars. In the face of resource depletion, maybe this isn't the best thing to be doing?
<quote><p>The timeframe of "petroleum starvation" is much shorter than a Human lifespan.</p></quote>
Probably. And the influence of major cost spikes (i.e. a monthly gasoline bill the order of your mortgage payment each month) will likely hit us much sooner than that.
True, but the model describes unsustainable processes like this.
You can have unsustainable resource depletion in two ways:
You consume renewables faster than they can replenish. That is not sustainable long-term, but can lead to periodic boom-bust cycles. Civilization has to grind to a halt until the resource replenishes, and then you can do it all over again ad infinitum.
Or, you could consume a non-renewable resource. Also not sustainable long term, but you only get 1 boom-bust cycle out of that. After that you flatline at zero.
Very true. The problem is that it will take some time to develop renewables and their related infrustructure for our civilization to be able to completely operate without fossil fuels. But right now it is still more economically sensible to continue utilizing fossil fuels. My concern is that we're going to wait until deep scarcity ensues and the prices skyrocket before we start to make the transition in earnest. But by then it will be too late as the infrastructure development might take decades. By the time we collectively have determined that we're at a resource crisis, it will take too long to make the transition in order to avoid social upheaval.
I don't know about you, but I'd like for us to avoid the Mad Max fight-with-melee-weapons-for-a-jerry-can-full-of-gasoline future if at all possible. If we were smart (and some of us are), we should be pushing for building the necessary renewable infrastructure now, so in 10-20-50 years from now it will be in place when we need it and so avoid the upheaval. Some people are pushing for that, but others are pointing to the output of new extraction methods and current costs and are saying that everything is fine. The required time for this transition is unfortunately longer than the quarterly profit reporting cycle, and possibly longer than most people's careers, so no one has the incentive to push for this.
The model is nice in that it seems to catch the trends for a agrarian or hunter-gather dependence on natural resources that can be replenished (animal and plant species). Probably a decent model for human history prior to the 1850s.
The problem is that the natural resources that we are consuming now are NOT renewable (fossil fuels, minerals, metals). Once they are gone, they are gone, and there will be no recovery. And there is no incentive to conserve as as these resources become more rare, they become more valuable. Who can afford to stockpile them? The elite, of course.
In the end we're all screwed, but the elite will be insulated from the consequences for a while and will be wondering why the commoners are raising such a ruckus at the gates with their torches and pitchforks.
Whoever survives this crash will be back living on an Earth with a carrying capacity limited by renewable resources (hint: think of world populations of (maybe) a few hundred million, not 7-10 billion).
Yet you still stand by your unsupported hypothesis and refuse to produce facts. Twenty two years in the Chair Force doesn't magically change supposition into facts.
Don't bother to answer, as your replies tell the truth of the matter - you've been caught slinging bullshit and can't stand being called on it.
My friend, you need a psychiatric intervention. Good luck and have a nice life.
I walked away from a $120,000/year engineering position to teach college for $59,000/year. Thankfully all of my degrees are long since paid off, and I had 10 years of industry experience with good salary and retirements and was able to save some money before making the leap. The savings went to a big downpayment on our house, which allows mortgage payments that I can cover on my teaching salary. My wife and I also don't have kids; if we did there is no way I could have made this career change. My wife teaches as well, for considerably less than what I am taking in.
If I didn't have tenure and a pension to look forward to, this would have been fiscal suicide on my part.
My teaching evaluations are outstanding and I love being in the classroom with my students. My classes are always filled to capacity (while some of my colleagues sections of the same class are underenrolled). I go up for tenure next year and I am confident that I will attain it. So I can breathe easy and focus at the task at hand, teaching the material to my students.
Yes, in a perfect world with unicorns and rainbows, the faculty would be able to review tenure and revoke it with no fear of retribution.
In reality, it will never happen as in many places, most of the voting majority of the unions are...wait for it...tenured faculty. Asking the majority to vote to amend the contract such that it provides a means of them being fired? Not gonna happen.
Also, even if this contract amendment actually could pass a union vote, guess who would be sitting on the faculty tenure committee? Yep...you guessed it, tenured faculty. Keeping the membership of that committee anonymous would be impossible in small departments. As it stands now, most if not all faculty tenure committees can only recommend tenure, the principal or dean is usually the one that makes the ultimate decision and they can ignore the committee recommendation.
So if you were to try to oust a bad egg, but they happen to be on the good side of the dean, they won't get booted. After that, YOUR ass is going to be the next up for tenure review in very short order. And guess how that's going to go?
This is called politics, and it sucks.
There is a lot of conflict in this situation. In a perfect world, there would be no tenure system, but the pay and benefits would be high enough to attract professional talent from their field. Such a position would be no more or less safe than an industry job, and would attract the people who really want to teach. And they would keep their job based on merit.
But the administration doesn't like this idea, because their payroll will have to explode in size. The dollars win. So short of a faculty member raping and shooting their students, there is a lot of pressure to maintain the status quo, on both sides of the union contract.
Remains have been found of the first known lactose-intolerant celiac! Research is continuing, but he may have died of starvation as he had to send all his restaurant dishes back to the kitchen for including allergens. A compounding factor was all of his friends wouldn't eat out with him anymore because it was such a picky eater.
Certain air force bases had a garage with tools where airmen could bring their beater cars and fix them up. There was generally some volunteer car mechanic there from the motor pool pitching in to help.
Now I don't think they have this anymore, mostly due to liability.
It is a shame that communities can't have things like this anymore. It was a great place to meet new people and learn from fellow tinkerers. Now our "communities" are anything but - in the U.S. we're a nation of individuals behind their 6 ft. fence, never interacting with our neighbors, precisely because there are vanishing few places where we can meet on common ground.
And adding to this, the 90% of the teachers that are competent and conscientious really would LOVE to have the remaining 10% shown to the door. They really would, as those 10% are a drag on the rest of the faculty.
The problem is the double-edged sword of tenure. Remove the tenure protections and yeah, you get to fire those 10%. But in the meantime you've put those good 90% in the position where they have no job security and get watch their already low salaries stagnate relative to the rest of the economy, and they also need to worry about being fired for personal politics. A lot of those 90% are going to throw in the towel and walk out the door at some point.
So who will be left teaching your kids? Any recently graduated kid with a bachelor's degree who can pass the mirror test. And they'll stick around just long enough to A) get fired for complete and gross incompetence or B) get some experience and quickly move on to something else far more rewarding and lucrative. Oh sure, you might get a handful of golden souls who really give a damn and can suck up these crappy conditions because they are already retired from another profession or have a spouse who is making good money, but these folks are one in a million.
Tenure is a flawed system for sure. Bad people will look good just long enough to get tenure, then they will drag their feet until retirement, not caring a whit about anything. But that same tenure is a huge perk that the good 90% enjoy and desperately need for them to do what they do for the pay that they get.
Full disclosure - I am a tenure-track college professor and a member of my state teacher's union.
I don't think it is so much bad PR from JPL - they do pretty well with their limited PR budget, but more that these explorations rapidly exhaust the short attention spans of most of the public. Sojourner landed in 1997, Spirit & Opportunity in 2004 (with Opportunity still operational today) and Curiosity in 2012. Kids have grown up for over 10 years with pictures from rovers on Mars. There are teenagers and young adults today who can't remember a time when we didn't have a rover on Mars. It's old news.
And the missions themselves - launch day (big fiery fast moving things!) is pretty cool, but then you have a long, quiet coast phase. Then maybe you have a complicated and dramatic re-entry / touchdown that gets attention up (Pathfinder, the MER rovers, and the Curiosity skycrane ftw). But after that, it's a long slow roll across something that looks like the Arizona desert. The science is immensely interesting, but there isn't much gee whiz factor for the average person. And some of those average people are the ones that decide what gets aired on the news, so if they don't care to see it, few others will.
I actually don't think that many people give a damn about Bieber's shenanigans, but somebody in the media thinks that is the noise that will attract the eyeballs to their ads.
Agreed, one should research these publicly-available facts about the company. And at some point in the interview you should indicate that you do know these facts. But you may want to reserve that information and see how they answer that question. My intent on asking these questions is to see whether they have a good handle on the state of affairs of their own organization. Asking a question where you know the answer is a great way to detect BS. The interviewer does this, so should the interviewee.
If you do your homework and see that the company stock has been bumping along at the delist price for a long while, and you notice some departments have lots of empty cubicles, and yet the interviewer tells me "Everything is fine! We have no place to go except up!, Just sign on the dotted line", I would certainly wonder about the long term prospects of a position with that company.
Remember that a job interview is a 2-way transaction - you should be checking out the company and staff as carefully as they are checking you out. Put them on the ropes, ask them questions that make *them* uncomfortable, see how they handle it. "How has the company stock been doing?" Whatever the answer (Good/Poor), ask "Why?". Maintain eye contact and look for shifty glances. Keep your bullshit detector on high sensitivity. "What things does your competitor do better than your organization, and what is your plan to change them?"
It's one thing to be new to the profession and just want to steer your way to a first job. But later, after you've worked through a couple crappy companies, you'll see that it is important to be on the offensive during the interviews. Walk in like a boss and probe their weaknesses. Any organization worth their salt should be impressed at your command of the situation. And if they really were looking for a meek wallflower that would spout the most PC response - do you really want to work there? And if the responses from the interviewer are stilted and confused, do you really want them as a co-worker?
We really liked Windows XP. Windows 7 is OK too, but please stop churning your OS versions for planned obsolescence and give us what we really want: a stable, updated, secure OS that will last as long as our hardware.
We would be pleased to consider a reasonable subscription fee for such updates as it would afford us significant peace of mind and stability.
Here I am, on Windows XP on a netbook that I purchased just 4 years ago and I use just for web and email. I was fuming about being forced to purchase a new OS for XP's EOL in April. I have no wish to touch the steaming pile that is Windows 8, and any flavor of Linux puts my stomach in a knot as the last time I took Debian for a test ride dual boot it took me a better part of a week to figure out how to get my wireless and printers working again.
After taken this soul-searching journey through the viable alternatives, I concluded just a few days ago that the least painful option would be to go to Windows 7. I use that at work and it is fine, close enough to the feel of XP to not be too much of a learning curve, not bloated, does what it is supposed to do.
I almost pulled the trigger and bought Windows 7. But now they are floating hints of Windows 9? So now I have to wonder if I'll have another EOL jammed up my ass shortly if I go with either Windows 7 OR 8.
MS just fucked themselves out of another upgrade sale. I'll ride XP until I actually see another OS that will be around for the lifetime of my hardware.
Amen. The next earthshaking advance in physics will be explaining it to a high schooler in such a way that they'll understand it, and want to pursue university work to advance the field. This stuff is so out there that no one knows what its importance is or whether it is something interesting enough to make a career of it.
How many high-schoolers have been exposed to General Relativity? How many of those exposed to it actually *get* General Relativity?
Oh, by the way, General Relativity was posited almost 100 years ago. It's probably wrong, or at least incomplete. The field has advanced since then. If a plane inadvertantly crashes at a large physics conference today it could set us back as a civilization about 100 years, as the knowledge of what is happening right now is probably not that widespread.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy way to subdue a plane-load of passengers - strap on oxygen and depressurize the aircraft, then climb it to 45,000 ft (as MH 370 has been reported to have reached that altitude) and then fly at high altitude for several hours. Depressurization requires just a few switch throws on a 777. If that doesn't out and out kill the passengers it would certainly take the fight out of them, assuming that they even realized that they are being hijacked. It was early morning, so maybe everybody just drifted off to sleep after take-off without thinking much of it...No one awake to answer their cell phones either.
Look up Helios Airways Flight 522. This was an accident where cabin pressurization was accidentally disabled by switching pressurization to manual during at leak test on the ground. As they climbed to altitude the cabin pressure decreased with altitude.
They flew for hours on autopilot before running out of fuel and crashing into a mountain.
It is possible that the cabin pressurization on MH370 could have been disabled on the ground, but the ensuing alarms would have meant that at least one of the cockpit crew was in on a hijacking. If someone was smart enough about 777 systems to shut off the several transponders, some below deck, depressurizing the aircraft would have been trivial to accomplish.
Billions will have to end their lives shorter than their natural spans.
Not necessarily, but it depends on how quickly the resource depletion occurs. If the current generation decided to not have children, world population would go to zero in less than 100 years, so we do have a degree of control over this. But, at best, it means a whole lot of people should not be having children right now. But everyone is certain that the issue of their golden wombs will save the world, and many others think that a bearded man in the clouds said that they must go forth and multiply, so they will leave it to someone else to not procreate. Unless we're going to do a Chinese-style One Child policy, the world population decrease won't happen in a controlled, non-catastrophic fashion.
On top of that, we're actively trying NOT to have disease pandemics and world wars. In the face of resource depletion, maybe this isn't the best thing to be doing?
<quote><p>The timeframe of "petroleum starvation" is much shorter than a Human lifespan.</p></quote>
Probably. And the influence of major cost spikes (i.e. a monthly gasoline bill the order of your mortgage payment each month) will likely hit us much sooner than that.
True, but the model describes unsustainable processes like this.
You can have unsustainable resource depletion in two ways:
You consume renewables faster than they can replenish. That is not sustainable long-term, but can lead to periodic boom-bust cycles. Civilization has to grind to a halt until the resource replenishes, and then you can do it all over again ad infinitum.
Or, you could consume a non-renewable resource. Also not sustainable long term, but you only get 1 boom-bust cycle out of that. After that you flatline at zero.
Very true. The problem is that it will take some time to develop renewables and their related infrustructure for our civilization to be able to completely operate without fossil fuels. But right now it is still more economically sensible to continue utilizing fossil fuels. My concern is that we're going to wait until deep scarcity ensues and the prices skyrocket before we start to make the transition in earnest. But by then it will be too late as the infrastructure development might take decades. By the time we collectively have determined that we're at a resource crisis, it will take too long to make the transition in order to avoid social upheaval.
I don't know about you, but I'd like for us to avoid the Mad Max fight-with-melee-weapons-for-a-jerry-can-full-of-gasoline future if at all possible. If we were smart (and some of us are), we should be pushing for building the necessary renewable infrastructure now, so in 10-20-50 years from now it will be in place when we need it and so avoid the upheaval. Some people are pushing for that, but others are pointing to the output of new extraction methods and current costs and are saying that everything is fine. The required time for this transition is unfortunately longer than the quarterly profit reporting cycle, and possibly longer than most people's careers, so no one has the incentive to push for this.
See the world population pre-Industrial Revolution. Call it 1,000 million for laughs.
We're over 7 times that population now and will be 9-10 billion in a few short years.
The model is nice in that it seems to catch the trends for a agrarian or hunter-gather dependence on natural resources that can be replenished (animal and plant species). Probably a decent model for human history prior to the 1850s.
The problem is that the natural resources that we are consuming now are NOT renewable (fossil fuels, minerals, metals). Once they are gone, they are gone, and there will be no recovery. And there is no incentive to conserve as as these resources become more rare, they become more valuable. Who can afford to stockpile them? The elite, of course.
In the end we're all screwed, but the elite will be insulated from the consequences for a while and will be wondering why the commoners are raising such a ruckus at the gates with their torches and pitchforks.
Whoever survives this crash will be back living on an Earth with a carrying capacity limited by renewable resources (hint: think of world populations of (maybe) a few hundred million, not 7-10 billion).
Yet you still stand by your unsupported hypothesis and refuse to produce facts. Twenty two years in the Chair Force doesn't magically change supposition into facts.
Don't bother to answer, as your replies tell the truth of the matter - you've been caught slinging bullshit and can't stand being called on it.
My friend, you need a psychiatric intervention. Good luck and have a nice life.
I'll raise your "living in a military town" and throw down my 22 years in the Air Force.
I win.
Fuck you.
"You think they don't have them anyone... but even though you don't know whether they do or not, you're certain about the reason they don't. Typical."
Thanks for writing my reply to your dumb post. Your post is no less hypothetical than mine.
In the long run, we're all dead anyway.
I walked away from a $120,000/year engineering position to teach college for $59,000/year. Thankfully all of my degrees are long since paid off, and I had 10 years of industry experience with good salary and retirements and was able to save some money before making the leap. The savings went to a big downpayment on our house, which allows mortgage payments that I can cover on my teaching salary. My wife and I also don't have kids; if we did there is no way I could have made this career change. My wife teaches as well, for considerably less than what I am taking in.
If I didn't have tenure and a pension to look forward to, this would have been fiscal suicide on my part.
My teaching evaluations are outstanding and I love being in the classroom with my students. My classes are always filled to capacity (while some of my colleagues sections of the same class are underenrolled). I go up for tenure next year and I am confident that I will attain it. So I can breathe easy and focus at the task at hand, teaching the material to my students.
Yes, in a perfect world with unicorns and rainbows, the faculty would be able to review tenure and revoke it with no fear of retribution.
In reality, it will never happen as in many places, most of the voting majority of the unions are...wait for it...tenured faculty. Asking the majority to vote to amend the contract such that it provides a means of them being fired? Not gonna happen.
Also, even if this contract amendment actually could pass a union vote, guess who would be sitting on the faculty tenure committee? Yep...you guessed it, tenured faculty. Keeping the membership of that committee anonymous would be impossible in small departments. As it stands now, most if not all faculty tenure committees can only recommend tenure, the principal or dean is usually the one that makes the ultimate decision and they can ignore the committee recommendation.
So if you were to try to oust a bad egg, but they happen to be on the good side of the dean, they won't get booted. After that, YOUR ass is going to be the next up for tenure review in very short order. And guess how that's going to go?
This is called politics, and it sucks.
There is a lot of conflict in this situation. In a perfect world, there would be no tenure system, but the pay and benefits would be high enough to attract professional talent from their field. Such a position would be no more or less safe than an industry job, and would attract the people who really want to teach. And they would keep their job based on merit.
But the administration doesn't like this idea, because their payroll will have to explode in size. The dollars win. So short of a faculty member raping and shooting their students, there is a lot of pressure to maintain the status quo, on both sides of the union contract.
Remains have been found of the first known lactose-intolerant celiac! Research is continuing, but he may have died of starvation as he had to send all his restaurant dishes back to the kitchen for including allergens. A compounding factor was all of his friends wouldn't eat out with him anymore because it was such a picky eater.
Certain air force bases had a garage with tools where airmen could bring their beater cars and fix them up. There was generally some volunteer car mechanic there from the motor pool pitching in to help.
Now I don't think they have this anymore, mostly due to liability.
It is a shame that communities can't have things like this anymore. It was a great place to meet new people and learn from fellow tinkerers. Now our "communities" are anything but - in the U.S. we're a nation of individuals behind their 6 ft. fence, never interacting with our neighbors, precisely because there are vanishing few places where we can meet on common ground.
And adding to this, the 90% of the teachers that are competent and conscientious really would LOVE to have the remaining 10% shown to the door. They really would, as those 10% are a drag on the rest of the faculty.
The problem is the double-edged sword of tenure. Remove the tenure protections and yeah, you get to fire those 10%. But in the meantime you've put those good 90% in the position where they have no job security and get watch their already low salaries stagnate relative to the rest of the economy, and they also need to worry about being fired for personal politics. A lot of those 90% are going to throw in the towel and walk out the door at some point.
So who will be left teaching your kids? Any recently graduated kid with a bachelor's degree who can pass the mirror test. And they'll stick around just long enough to A) get fired for complete and gross incompetence or B) get some experience and quickly move on to something else far more rewarding and lucrative. Oh sure, you might get a handful of golden souls who really give a damn and can suck up these crappy conditions because they are already retired from another profession or have a spouse who is making good money, but these folks are one in a million.
Tenure is a flawed system for sure. Bad people will look good just long enough to get tenure, then they will drag their feet until retirement, not caring a whit about anything. But that same tenure is a huge perk that the good 90% enjoy and desperately need for them to do what they do for the pay that they get.
Full disclosure - I am a tenure-track college professor and a member of my state teacher's union.
Wish my mod points hadn't expired.
I don't think it is so much bad PR from JPL - they do pretty well with their limited PR budget, but more that these explorations rapidly exhaust the short attention spans of most of the public. Sojourner landed in 1997, Spirit & Opportunity in 2004 (with Opportunity still operational today) and Curiosity in 2012. Kids have grown up for over 10 years with pictures from rovers on Mars. There are teenagers and young adults today who can't remember a time when we didn't have a rover on Mars. It's old news.
And the missions themselves - launch day (big fiery fast moving things!) is pretty cool, but then you have a long, quiet coast phase. Then maybe you have a complicated and dramatic re-entry / touchdown that gets attention up (Pathfinder, the MER rovers, and the Curiosity skycrane ftw). But after that, it's a long slow roll across something that looks like the Arizona desert. The science is immensely interesting, but there isn't much gee whiz factor for the average person. And some of those average people are the ones that decide what gets aired on the news, so if they don't care to see it, few others will.
I actually don't think that many people give a damn about Bieber's shenanigans, but somebody in the media thinks that is the noise that will attract the eyeballs to their ads.
Agreed, one should research these publicly-available facts about the company. And at some point in the interview you should indicate that you do know these facts. But you may want to reserve that information and see how they answer that question. My intent on asking these questions is to see whether they have a good handle on the state of affairs of their own organization. Asking a question where you know the answer is a great way to detect BS. The interviewer does this, so should the interviewee.
If you do your homework and see that the company stock has been bumping along at the delist price for a long while, and you notice some departments have lots of empty cubicles, and yet the interviewer tells me "Everything is fine! We have no place to go except up!, Just sign on the dotted line", I would certainly wonder about the long term prospects of a position with that company.
God, somebody please mod this one up +5; they get it!
Remember that a job interview is a 2-way transaction - you should be checking out the company and staff as carefully as they are checking you out. Put them on the ropes, ask them questions that make *them* uncomfortable, see how they handle it. "How has the company stock been doing?" Whatever the answer (Good/Poor), ask "Why?". Maintain eye contact and look for shifty glances. Keep your bullshit detector on high sensitivity. "What things does your competitor do better than your organization, and what is your plan to change them?"
It's one thing to be new to the profession and just want to steer your way to a first job. But later, after you've worked through a couple crappy companies, you'll see that it is important to be on the offensive during the interviews. Walk in like a boss and probe their weaknesses. Any organization worth their salt should be impressed at your command of the situation. And if they really were looking for a meek wallflower that would spout the most PC response - do you really want to work there? And if the responses from the interviewer are stilted and confused, do you really want them as a co-worker?
Yes this. Wish I could cash in my mod points on this.
Rich entitled-feeling woman with new shiny toy feels she is above the law, news at 11.
We really liked Windows XP. Windows 7 is OK too, but please stop churning your OS versions for planned obsolescence and give us what we really want: a stable, updated, secure OS that will last as long as our hardware.
We would be pleased to consider a reasonable subscription fee for such updates as it would afford us significant peace of mind and stability.
Signed,
Many Customers
People cause shitstorms.
Here I am, on Windows XP on a netbook that I purchased just 4 years ago and I use just for web and email. I was fuming about being forced to purchase a new OS for XP's EOL in April. I have no wish to touch the steaming pile that is Windows 8, and any flavor of Linux puts my stomach in a knot as the last time I took Debian for a test ride dual boot it took me a better part of a week to figure out how to get my wireless and printers working again.
After taken this soul-searching journey through the viable alternatives, I concluded just a few days ago that the least painful option would be to go to Windows 7. I use that at work and it is fine, close enough to the feel of XP to not be too much of a learning curve, not bloated, does what it is supposed to do.
I almost pulled the trigger and bought Windows 7. But now they are floating hints of Windows 9? So now I have to wonder if I'll have another EOL jammed up my ass shortly if I go with either Windows 7 OR 8.
MS just fucked themselves out of another upgrade sale. I'll ride XP until I actually see another OS that will be around for the lifetime of my hardware.
Amen. The next earthshaking advance in physics will be explaining it to a high schooler in such a way that they'll understand it, and want to pursue university work to advance the field. This stuff is so out there that no one knows what its importance is or whether it is something interesting enough to make a career of it.
How many high-schoolers have been exposed to General Relativity? How many of those exposed to it actually *get* General Relativity?
Oh, by the way, General Relativity was posited almost 100 years ago. It's probably wrong, or at least incomplete. The field has advanced since then. If a plane inadvertantly crashes at a large physics conference today it could set us back as a civilization about 100 years, as the knowledge of what is happening right now is probably not that widespread.