As the Chinese already have a working man-rated launch vehicle, I suspect that the US will have to make the Areas work no matter what, or else you'll be seeing the Chinese on the moon first (and at this rate even the Russians and the Europeans too, since the Europeans are currently looking at man-rating the Ariane and launching astronauts with a modified ATV).
There, my contribution to the Slashdot US vs. the rest of the world slanging match.
You Americans have a habit of screaming "Communism" at anything vaguely related towards state aid/state control without really knowing what Communism is.
I have to say, that your post, to me, honestly resembles astroturfing. Silverlight client support is Windows and Mac, and development support is Windows only.
Based on Microsoft's past record of dropping support for any Mac software that didn't actively further Microsoft's aims, be it the WMV video player, or Internet Explorer, how long do you think that Mac users can actually count on Microsoft supporting them?
Judging from both WMV and IE, which they purposely neglected on the Mac when the Windows versions were enjoying an uncontested monopoly(ASF was never ported to the Mac Windows Media Player, and IE was left to languish at Version 5 for years after IE6 was available on Windows until Apple eeventually made their own browser after which MS simply dropped IE on the Mac), I suspect it will be the same all over again:
Initially Microsoft will put full support behind Silverlight on the Mac, but then will let it purposely lag behind the Windows version.
Jeezuz, you would think after the God-knows how many times Microsoft has tried to shaft the market, its customers and everyone else, you would have thought that people would have learned by now, and in fact it seems as if most people have, because, surprise, surprise, Active-X never took off because of its proprietary nature and Microsoft's numerous attempts to force web developers into developing for its unstandard web browser have gotten them exactly nowhere.
Once again, Microsoft tries the same old tired game that they've tried so often, and once again, it will almost certainly fail, because, even if you're a Windows developer, you're very likely to land up in the same place as VB developers did some time in the future, i.e. out-dated and once again forced to update to Microsoft's latest money grabbing scheme.
Or did you think that Microsoft actually gives a shit about you?
The more I read and hear about this liberal vs. conservative, left wing vs. right wing, the more I think you people are losing yourselves in the very agenda's you just spoke of. The polarisation of your country is doing your society more damage than any white house bail-out, mortgage crisis or foreign war will do.
What ever happened to reason and trying to listen to other people's positions and thinking about them before writing them off as liberals or conservatives?
Where I work we have 45 Macs. Of those 35 people have now switched to plain jane Logitech LX optical mice because the Apple mouse is so spectacularly bad. People get wrist cramps having permanently hold the left finger away when right clicking, the shape of the mouse is painful for many of them over time, and to top it all, the little scroll ball invariably gunks up with finger sweat and dirt after a while and you can only clean it so many times before the ball wears away and no longer maintains contact to the little slide wheels inside the mouse.
The Apple mouse is a terrible product, and its bluetooth pendant is even worse. the battery life is so bad that most people who have ehm and use them every day have to replace the batteries about once a month. I switched long ago to a Logitech LX-7 wireless which has used the same set of batteries for about 8 months.
I like Apple's products, and even own a Mac Pro tower myself, but I get really tired of people praising every thing Apple does simply because it's Apple.
The linked article simply discusses China's gradual but steadily improving manned space programme. It says nothing about what the Chinese call their Astronauts, Tibet, Iraq, or about NASA or the shuttle. Why on earth do you people have to diss any nation that does anything positive be it Chinese, Indian, Russian or European?
To me, it comes across as pure envy that someone else is doing things that you used to consider your own territory.
There is nothing wrong with the American space programme and it has a long and proud tradition, and folks like the ones making the Falcon rocket look to be making space reachable by private people in the future.
If there was any error in the measure of distance and the event happens again the next few months, then my money is on an interstellar ship decelerating from near light speed.
This same article by this same cretin at Microsoft was posted here about two months ago. I know that the slashdot editors only edit when they think it will raise the hitcount, but really. Stop this crap.
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From: xxxxx xxxxx Date: 26 August 2008 11:07:39 GMT+02:00 To: info@demconvention.com Cc: news-tips@nytimes.com, letters@washpost.com Subject: How much did Microsoft pay you?
Hi,
at http://www.demconvention.com/dncc-video/ clicking on the link asks me to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in in order to view the videos streamed there. Given that around 90% of the world's computers already have Adobe's Flash plug-in installed which is the basis behind sites such as youtube, etc (and, yes it does do HD video and streaming), and about 0.1% of the world's computers have Microsoft's Silverlight technology installed and that Flash works on all browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux (and most mobile phones), one really has to ask oneself what incentive Microsoft gave you to get you to use their technology, and how one can square that incentive with the claim that the Democratic Party is a party with a platform aiming to avoid the stain of lobbying and corruption?
One also has to ask oneself how and why a supposed convention interested in reaching out to as many people as it can is using technological means that almost guarantee a smaller audience than using existing ones.
I've already written to a number of newspapers, including the NYT and the WashingtonPost, alerting them to this.
I would truly love to hear what you have to say about it.
How much do you have to pay to get your almost unknown technology used on a site watched by almost the entire USA and a good deal of the rest of the world?
When I first read about Hellgate London, I saw the teaser trailers which had an interesting, dark, backs to the wall kind of story, and plenty of bad-ass sexy CGI girls shooting stuff.
The game, when I saw the youtube in-game shots, was just another shoot-em up, with nothing like the gritty details of the pre-rendered videos.
I don't know how many games I've seen that do this; use some trick to capture people's attention, but present nothing in the real game itself.
I contrast this with UT3, which, while having really good graphics, makes no pretences about being anything else than a shoot-em up, or with WoW (which I've never played) which has an open ended player controlled story, or with games like Warhammer, which has a massive background (if somewhat juvenile) backstory.
You need help. Your anger for having been so publicly humiliated after you made such a fool out of yourself with your outrageous statements is making you ill.
Seriously, leave the industry, go farm cattle or something. At least the cows will take you seriously.
I speak some Turkish, and can understand a fair amount of languages all the way to Kazakhstan, since the Turkic languages seem to be fairly close to one another. I don't understand any Finnish or Hungarian, but I did meet a Japanese woman in Turkey who claimed that learning Turkish was much easier for her than learning English as the structure (not the vocabulary, though) of Turkish was much closer to Japanese.
What I do know, and is also probably the reason why numerous linguists have tried to group Finno-Ugric languages in with Tungus and Mongolic (and occasionally Korean and Japanese as well) is that the grammatical structure and syntax of all these languages are very similar. Vowel harmony, the agglutanting way of adding suffixes instead of prepositions and the case systems are common to most of these languages, as well as the general SOV word order.
However, it may be more a case of an historical Sprachbund than real language relationships. Examples of these Sprachbunds (groups of otherwise unrelated languages sharing grammatical features through long time contact) would be Romanian, Albanian and Bulgarian. Bulgarian is a Slavic language, and although the Slavic languages generally have very complex case systems this is almost completely lost in Bulgarian and it also shares the curious feature of having a post-positional definite article with Romanian (Having the "the" after the noun instead of before it).
What I think one should be careful of is that linguistics is famous territory for nationalistic ideas. Linguistic theories have been proposed based on some very weird ideas in order to promote some agendas of racial or nationalistic superiority.
I support a company with 45 Macs. I have never,ever had a problem with Apple Care (or Adobe, or IBM/Lenovo support or Samsung or anything, for that matter). It's because I'm patient enough to wait for the technical support on the phone, and I do my homework before calling them up. "ZOMG, my Mac's like, not working, fix it!" will generally only waste their and your time. Find out as much as you can yourself, and zero out as many possible problems before calling and your experience will generally be a positive one.
I have one user who treats his Mac Book Pro like shit. It has a dented case and twisted lid. The guy wanted me to get it "fixed" with Apple Care. I gave a copy of his Apple Care booklet, and told him to read it.
Man, I don't really care for these Mac vs. PC flamefests, but I work in a company that is 90% Mac (even our Windows machines run on Macs). Why do we do it when Dell or HP or perhaps even Lenovo would have cost far less (This is definitely true, PCs are much cheaper than Macs)?
It is because you get what you pay for. The build quality and design quality on Macs is simply phenomenal, truly fantastic. Have you ever looked at litte things like the power button on a Mac Book Pro, or the total lack of wires and cables floating around inside a Mac Pro?
Your average Dell is a cheap, brittle piece of plastic crap, with palm rests that bend when you place your hand on them, hinges that break, and laptop lid latches that are made out of breakable plastic.
And that's not even comparing the OS. I support Mac, Linux and Windows at work, and I have by far the most problems with Windows and the three million little quirks that make up Windows.
The Dell is only cheaper because you have to buy two of them becuse they break so often.
That said: Dell seems to have finally gotten the idea that design counts and their new laptops and the little pluggable desktop look quite neat.
I'm a Mac user. I'm on a Mac right now (Mac Pro tower dual quad core, and I love this machine). I have a Lenovo T61 with Ubuntu 8.04 and XP next to me, and I dual boot on my Mac to play games in Windows. I also work all day on Windows.
Today at work, I was testing a CalDAV syncing software to sync Outlook with Apple's iCal server. The $45 application was written in VB by someone who thought that having things like 14 tabs in the interface and switching views form one tab to another by selecting a checkbox would be good ideas.
It is an example of many Windows shareware apps that simply don't follow any worthwhile guidelines. I have yet to see a Mac shareware as bad as this.
The reason Microsoft implemented Silverlight is the same reason Microsoft implmented the Zune, the same reason they implemented PocketPC, the same reason they implemented DirectX, the same reason they implemented Internet Explorer and the same reaosn they implemented the fucking nightmare known as ActiveX: Somebody else did something cool and Microsoft saw an oportunity to steal the other tech's user base by trying very hard to one up them.
I don't know Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer personally and I have zero knowledge therefore why they do this specific thing over and over and over again. I don't know if they are scared that some bright new technology might be their downfall, but I really suspect that isn't the case. I think that Microsoft, in all honesty, couldn't innovate themselves due to their enormous market position and the sheer inertia and inter-office political fighting that seems to cripple every large Microsoft project by bring inter-team comunication to a standstill, and they they simply find it easier to use their weight to steal and cripple others' attempts to do so.
So you think.Net is so great? You think that we should all be doing all our webwork in Silverlight and preferably XAML and WPF, because it's so much better than the craphouse which is HTML/CSS/Javascript and Flash? I think so too. I think it's better than Java. I also thought that Internet Explorer was lightyears ahead of Netscape back in the day.
The problem is that Microsoft, because they don't actually innovate, very much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is anything but democratic, simply couldn't actually give a fuck about you, and won't do a single thing if they can get away with it. Look at IE. They left it to stagnate for 6 whole years, so long that a fledgling competitor could go from crash-fest alpha to fast and stable, innovative serious threat. Then MS shat themselves and then finally started working on a new IE again, but still trying to hobble it just enough in the hope that it would once again kill open standards.
You want the world to run.Net??? You want the world to run Silverlight? You should realise that if this were the case you will have to seriously forget about any updates for years at a time.
You would sit with the same crashy, bug-ridden POS for years, cursing MS under your breath.
The ONLY reason Microsoft has survived so long is because of the huge head start they got in the early years of the PC. A smaller company as inept and totally unimaginative as Microsoft is would have gone out of business years ago.
You don't think a bit of organisation, such as finding a place to shower near or at work, keeping a set of clothes at work, or carrying a change of clothes to work, would overcome those problems? I live in Switzerland, which, surprise, surprise, has mountains, and hills, lots of 'em, and ride to work every day. Our work has a shower,so I can shower and change before work.
Really, I could understand the argument of cycles being dangerous in Texas, but that's no more true than anywhere else in the world.
The whole "USA invade SATuRn for OiL" thing gets tiring after a while. What are the real chances of a form of life on Titan?
According to TFA the lakes seem to be a mixture of ethane, methane and other hydrocarbons. From what I've read, he general consensus is that life requires a liquid solvent that can dissolve a vast amount of materials, such as water or ammonia. It seems that ammonia ices and water ices have been ruled out on the surface, leaving only the frozen and non frozen areas of hydrocarbons.
Given that the ethane is a byproduct of methane breakdown by sunlight on Titan, also producing the chemical haze of its atmostphere, would there be any chance of a life form developing in Titan's lakes? The chemistry seems to be low on energy for life to start, but the same chemistry is also highly reactive.
I think a number of people are mistaking the point of this article. The article is mainly based on the idea that the Chinese and Russians (strange how they're suddenly enemies again, isn't it?) will have lasers, too, and will be able to use them on American aircraft and weapons.
Aircraft would be very vulnerable to high powered lasers as their sensors and skin structure (and the pilot!) would all be single points of failure in a laser attack.
Obviously, if lasers ever do become small enough to be practical on a tactical level (Chinese tanks already have lasers on their turrets to blind enemy operators and optics), defence against them becomes very important.
On a realistic level, the only craft capable of carrying a battlefield laser at the moment would be a C-130, which might be very useful in counter-insurgency operations due to the low collateral damage.
But, in reality, in the wars that the USA and NATO are currently fighting, insurgencies like in Iraq and Afghanistan, heavy weapons will not win the day. Policing and politics will.
The only real technical achievement that would bring great relief to thousands of victims of suicide bombers would be a device that can detect explosives at a distance, something like a terrahertz xray machine, so that suicie bombers could be detected and stopped at a distance.
Why, for the love of christ, does any fucking post on slashdot that mentions some or difference between the USA and Europe descend into a hate filled slagging match by dolts who know almost nothing about the other region and touchy nationalististic dolts who take offense and go into denial on any subject?
Slashdot Mirror
As the Chinese already have a working man-rated launch vehicle, I suspect that the US will have to make the Areas work no matter what, or else you'll be seeing the Chinese on the moon first (and at this rate even the Russians and the Europeans too, since the Europeans are currently looking at man-rating the Ariane and launching astronauts with a modified ATV).
There, my contribution to the Slashdot US vs. the rest of the world slanging match.
You Americans have a habit of screaming "Communism" at anything vaguely related towards state aid/state control without really knowing what Communism is.
I have to say, that your post, to me, honestly resembles astroturfing. Silverlight client support is Windows and Mac, and development support is Windows only.
Based on Microsoft's past record of dropping support for any Mac software that didn't actively further Microsoft's aims, be it the WMV video player, or Internet Explorer, how long do you think that Mac users can actually count on Microsoft supporting them?
Judging from both WMV and IE, which they purposely neglected on the Mac when the Windows versions were enjoying an uncontested monopoly(ASF was never ported to the Mac Windows Media Player, and IE was left to languish at Version 5 for years after IE6 was available on Windows until Apple eeventually made their own browser after which MS simply dropped IE on the Mac), I suspect it will be the same all over again:
Initially Microsoft will put full support behind Silverlight on the Mac, but then will let it purposely lag behind the Windows version.
Jeezuz, you would think after the God-knows how many times Microsoft has tried to shaft the market, its customers and everyone else, you would have thought that people would have learned by now, and in fact it seems as if most people have, because, surprise, surprise, Active-X never took off because of its proprietary nature and Microsoft's numerous attempts to force web developers into developing for its unstandard web browser have gotten them exactly nowhere.
Once again, Microsoft tries the same old tired game that they've tried so often, and once again, it will almost certainly fail, because, even if you're a Windows developer, you're very likely to land up in the same place as VB developers did some time in the future, i.e. out-dated and once again forced to update to Microsoft's latest money grabbing scheme.
Or did you think that Microsoft actually gives a shit about you?
The more I read and hear about this liberal vs. conservative, left wing vs. right wing, the more I think you people are losing yourselves in the very agenda's you just spoke of. The polarisation of your country is doing your society more damage than any white house bail-out, mortgage crisis or foreign war will do.
What ever happened to reason and trying to listen to other people's positions and thinking about them before writing them off as liberals or conservatives?
Where I work we have 45 Macs. Of those 35 people have now switched to plain jane Logitech LX optical mice because the Apple mouse is so spectacularly bad. People get wrist cramps having permanently hold the left finger away when right clicking, the shape of the mouse is painful for many of them over time, and to top it all, the little scroll ball invariably gunks up with finger sweat and dirt after a while and you can only clean it so many times before the ball wears away and no longer maintains contact to the little slide wheels inside the mouse.
The Apple mouse is a terrible product, and its bluetooth pendant is even worse. the battery life is so bad that most people who have ehm and use them every day have to replace the batteries about once a month. I switched long ago to a Logitech LX-7 wireless which has used the same set of batteries for about 8 months.
I like Apple's products, and even own a Mac Pro tower myself, but I get really tired of people praising every thing Apple does simply because it's Apple.
I don't think you realise the impact your wonderfully spellt post made.
There seems to be a massive increase in trolling recently.
I think these students have a golden future awaiting them on Wall Street.
As street and office cleaners.
The linked article simply discusses China's gradual but steadily improving manned space programme. It says nothing about what the Chinese call their Astronauts, Tibet, Iraq, or about NASA or the shuttle. Why on earth do you people have to diss any nation that does anything positive be it Chinese, Indian, Russian or European?
To me, it comes across as pure envy that someone else is doing things that you used to consider your own territory.
There is nothing wrong with the American space programme and it has a long and proud tradition, and folks like the ones making the Falcon rocket look to be making space reachable by private people in the future.
So why the pressing need to insult the Chinese?
If there was any error in the measure of distance and the event happens again the next few months, then my money is on an interstellar ship decelerating from near light speed.
This same article by this same cretin at Microsoft was posted here about two months ago. I know that the slashdot editors only edit when they think it will raise the hitcount, but really. Stop this crap.
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From: xxxxx xxxxx
Date: 26 August 2008 11:07:39 GMT+02:00
To: info@demconvention.com
Cc: news-tips@nytimes.com, letters@washpost.com
Subject: How much did Microsoft pay you?
Hi,
at http://www.demconvention.com/dncc-video/ clicking on the link asks me to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in in order to view the videos streamed there. Given that around 90% of the world's computers already have Adobe's Flash plug-in installed which is the basis behind sites such as youtube, etc (and, yes it does do HD video and streaming), and about 0.1% of the world's computers have Microsoft's Silverlight technology installed and that Flash works on all browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux (and most mobile phones), one really has to ask oneself what incentive Microsoft gave you to get you to use their technology, and how one can square that incentive with the claim that the Democratic Party is a party with a platform aiming to avoid the stain of lobbying and corruption?
One also has to ask oneself how and why a supposed convention interested in reaching out to as many people as it can is using technological means that almost guarantee a smaller audience than using existing ones.
I've already written to a number of newspapers, including the NYT and the WashingtonPost, alerting them to this.
I would truly love to hear what you have to say about it.
Regards
xxxx
xxxx
xxx
How much do you have to pay to get your almost unknown technology used on a site watched by almost the entire USA and a good deal of the rest of the world?
When I first read about Hellgate London, I saw the teaser trailers which had an interesting, dark, backs to the wall kind of story, and plenty of bad-ass sexy CGI girls shooting stuff.
The game, when I saw the youtube in-game shots, was just another shoot-em up, with nothing like the gritty details of the pre-rendered videos.
I don't know how many games I've seen that do this; use some trick to capture people's attention, but present nothing in the real game itself.
I contrast this with UT3, which, while having really good graphics, makes no pretences about being anything else than a shoot-em up, or with WoW (which I've never played) which has an open ended player controlled story, or with games like Warhammer, which has a massive background (if somewhat juvenile) backstory.
You need help. Your anger for having been so publicly humiliated after you made such a fool out of yourself with your outrageous statements is making you ill.
Seriously, leave the industry, go farm cattle or something. At least the cows will take you seriously.
I speak some Turkish, and can understand a fair amount of languages all the way to Kazakhstan, since the Turkic languages seem to be fairly close to one another. I don't understand any Finnish or Hungarian, but I did meet a Japanese woman in Turkey who claimed that learning Turkish was much easier for her than learning English as the structure (not the vocabulary, though) of Turkish was much closer to Japanese.
What I do know, and is also probably the reason why numerous linguists have tried to group Finno-Ugric languages in with Tungus and Mongolic (and occasionally Korean and Japanese as well) is that the grammatical structure and syntax of all these languages are very similar. Vowel harmony, the agglutanting way of adding suffixes instead of prepositions and the case systems are common to most of these languages, as well as the general SOV word order.
However, it may be more a case of an historical Sprachbund than real language relationships. Examples of these Sprachbunds (groups of otherwise unrelated languages sharing grammatical features through long time contact) would be Romanian, Albanian and Bulgarian. Bulgarian is a Slavic language, and although the Slavic languages generally have very complex case systems this is almost completely lost in Bulgarian and it also shares the curious feature of having a post-positional definite article with Romanian (Having the "the" after the noun instead of before it).
What I think one should be careful of is that linguistics is famous territory for nationalistic ideas. Linguistic theories have been proposed based on some very weird ideas in order to promote some agendas of racial or nationalistic superiority.
I support a company with 45 Macs. I have never,ever had a problem with Apple Care (or Adobe, or IBM/Lenovo support or Samsung or anything, for that matter). It's because I'm patient enough to wait for the technical support on the phone, and I do my homework before calling them up. "ZOMG, my Mac's like, not working, fix it!" will generally only waste their and your time. Find out as much as you can yourself, and zero out as many possible problems before calling and your experience will generally be a positive one.
I have one user who treats his Mac Book Pro like shit. It has a dented case and twisted lid. The guy wanted me to get it "fixed" with Apple Care. I gave a copy of his Apple Care booklet, and told him to read it.
Man, I don't really care for these Mac vs. PC flamefests, but I work in a company that is 90% Mac (even our Windows machines run on Macs). Why do we do it when Dell or HP or perhaps even Lenovo would have cost far less (This is definitely true, PCs are much cheaper than Macs)?
It is because you get what you pay for. The build quality and design quality on Macs is simply phenomenal, truly fantastic. Have you ever looked at litte things like the power button on a Mac Book Pro, or the total lack of wires and cables floating around inside a Mac Pro?
Your average Dell is a cheap, brittle piece of plastic crap, with palm rests that bend when you place your hand on them, hinges that break, and laptop lid latches that are made out of breakable plastic.
And that's not even comparing the OS. I support Mac, Linux and Windows at work, and I have by far the most problems with Windows and the three million little quirks that make up Windows.
The Dell is only cheaper because you have to buy two of them becuse they break so often.
That said: Dell seems to have finally gotten the idea that design counts and their new laptops and the little pluggable desktop look quite neat.
I'm a Mac user. I'm on a Mac right now (Mac Pro tower dual quad core, and I love this machine). I have a Lenovo T61 with Ubuntu 8.04 and XP next to me, and I dual boot on my Mac to play games in Windows. I also work all day on Windows.
Today at work, I was testing a CalDAV syncing software to sync Outlook with Apple's iCal server. The $45 application was written in VB by someone who thought that having things like 14 tabs in the interface and switching views form one tab to another by selecting a checkbox would be good ideas.
It is an example of many Windows shareware apps that simply don't follow any worthwhile guidelines. I have yet to see a Mac shareware as bad as this.
The reason Microsoft implemented Silverlight is the same reason Microsoft implmented the Zune, the same reason they implemented PocketPC, the same reason they implemented DirectX, the same reason they implemented Internet Explorer and the same reaosn they implemented the fucking nightmare known as ActiveX: Somebody else did something cool and Microsoft saw an oportunity to steal the other tech's user base by trying very hard to one up them.
I don't know Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer personally and I have zero knowledge therefore why they do this specific thing over and over and over again. I don't know if they are scared that some bright new technology might be their downfall, but I really suspect that isn't the case. I think that Microsoft, in all honesty, couldn't innovate themselves due to their enormous market position and the sheer inertia and inter-office political fighting that seems to cripple every large Microsoft project by bring inter-team comunication to a standstill, and they they simply find it easier to use their weight to steal and cripple others' attempts to do so.
So you think .Net is so great? You think that we should all be doing all our webwork in Silverlight and preferably XAML and WPF, because it's so much better than the craphouse which is HTML/CSS/Javascript and Flash? I think so too. I think it's better than Java. I also thought that Internet Explorer was lightyears ahead of Netscape back in the day.
The problem is that Microsoft, because they don't actually innovate, very much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is anything but democratic, simply couldn't actually give a fuck about you, and won't do a single thing if they can get away with it. Look at IE. They left it to stagnate for 6 whole years, so long that a fledgling competitor could go from crash-fest alpha to fast and stable, innovative serious threat. Then MS shat themselves and then finally started working on a new IE again, but still trying to hobble it just enough in the hope that it would once again kill open standards.
You want the world to run .Net??? You want the world to run Silverlight? You should realise that if this were the case you will have to seriously forget about any updates for years at a time.
You would sit with the same crashy, bug-ridden POS for years, cursing MS under your breath.
The ONLY reason Microsoft has survived so long is because of the huge head start they got in the early years of the PC. A smaller company as inept and totally unimaginative as Microsoft is would have gone out of business years ago.
You don't think a bit of organisation, such as finding a place to shower near or at work, keeping a set of clothes at work, or carrying a change of clothes to work, would overcome those problems? I live in Switzerland, which, surprise, surprise, has mountains, and hills, lots of 'em, and ride to work every day. Our work has a shower,so I can shower and change before work.
Really, I could understand the argument of cycles being dangerous in Texas, but that's no more true than anywhere else in the world.
So you were oppressed in Israel?
The whole "USA invade SATuRn for OiL" thing gets tiring after a while. What are the real chances of a form of life on Titan?
According to TFA the lakes seem to be a mixture of ethane, methane and other hydrocarbons. From what I've read, he general consensus is that life requires a liquid solvent that can dissolve a vast amount of materials, such as water or ammonia. It seems that ammonia ices and water ices have been ruled out on the surface, leaving only the frozen and non frozen areas of hydrocarbons.
Given that the ethane is a byproduct of methane breakdown by sunlight on Titan, also producing the chemical haze of its atmostphere, would there be any chance of a life form developing in Titan's lakes? The chemistry seems to be low on energy for life to start, but the same chemistry is also highly reactive.
Anyone?
I think a number of people are mistaking the point of this article. The article is mainly based on the idea that the Chinese and Russians (strange how they're suddenly enemies again, isn't it?) will have lasers, too, and will be able to use them on American aircraft and weapons.
Aircraft would be very vulnerable to high powered lasers as their sensors and skin structure (and the pilot!) would all be single points of failure in a laser attack.
Obviously, if lasers ever do become small enough to be practical on a tactical level (Chinese tanks already have lasers on their turrets to blind enemy operators and optics), defence against them becomes very important.
On a realistic level, the only craft capable of carrying a battlefield laser at the moment would be a C-130, which might be very useful in counter-insurgency operations due to the low collateral damage.
But, in reality, in the wars that the USA and NATO are currently fighting, insurgencies like in Iraq and Afghanistan, heavy weapons will not win the day. Policing and politics will.
The only real technical achievement that would bring great relief to thousands of victims of suicide bombers would be a device that can detect explosives at a distance, something like a terrahertz xray machine, so that suicie bombers could be detected and stopped at a distance.
Why, for the love of christ, does any fucking post on slashdot that mentions some or difference between the USA and Europe descend into a hate filled slagging match by dolts who know almost nothing about the other region and touchy nationalististic dolts who take offense and go into denial on any subject?