And even learned the language and can still speak it a bit now, ten years later. You obviously know very little about Turkey if you claim that Turkish prisons weren't that bad. I knew from quite a few turks who had landed up in them (and it isn't that hard to land up in a Turkish prison, just piss someone with money or influence off and bob's your uncle) that they were and are very harsh places.
I also had some Kurdish friends who ran a restaurant, and they were regularly rounded up and stuffed into prison whenever the PKK had done something again. In fact the only local Kurd who wasn't regularly rounded up was the local mafia boss who had, wait for it, money and influence.
There are very nice and friendly Turks, but there's one hell of a lot of fascist bigotted corrupt arseholes as well.
While the USSR was already on the way out due to the failings of numerous things (It wasn't just the Soviet economy, mainly it was that the people were simply tired of the Soviet loonies. The Soviet economy could have lasted a lot longer given that it was based on an active imagination and not an actual market), they certainly managed a number of fascinating things technically, such as the Energia rocket and Buran and the Venera venus landers.
Mainly though, this Polyus battle station shows what a waste the SDI initiative was in the first place, and more importantly, for today's world of Texas cowboys, what a waste the missile defense shield is. The huge amount of money wasted on lunatic plans to conquer space is easily countered with comparitively cheap countermeasure, be they a space based laser battlestation (why does the US think that China could not build one itself, with the same lack of hoo haa that the Russians had?) or a manouvering warhead.
But those big defense companies need to justify their existences, employees salaries, and profits, don't they?
No matter how bad a piece of his company's technology is - I'm refering to the desaster that was the original passport which was hacked with remarkable speed and spurned by the industry almost unanimoulsy - the man just does not give up. Every time he launches yet another piece of drivel guaranteed to fail, he simply puts it back in the marketing department which is tasked with bringing it back at some later date under another name with one or two improvements, which they will keep on doing in an endless loop until, even if its ten years later, it finally gains traction.
I sit here using my Mac, open the MS page listing all the protocols that MS wants you to sign a licence agreement for, and lo and behold I see that Apple File Protocol is the first on that list. I think Apple might have some fun with it's lawyers on this one.
I also wonder just how arrogant, dumb and just plainly disconnected from reality you have to be to start licencing protocols that Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with, such as DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP etc.
And the microsofties on this board wonder why people refer to MS as M$ or slam the company constantly.
MS is a bunch of criminal bastards. Fuck them and may they burn in fucking hell.
hit you in the ass on the way out, and I wish you lots of success competing with the dozens of well established Windows GUi enhancement applications such as Stardock, Window Blinds etc etc etc, not to mention Active Desktop.
You may be bitter that Apple is not kissing your ass and buying your memory hungry resource intensive application instead of using it's own small footprint application that works as well as Expose, but you definitely will be extra bitter when you discover that the competition in the Windows software world is much larger than it will be even under OSX Tiger.
Bad attitudes never produced good sales, Arlo, only good software does that. Well, that and a tiny bit of innovation.
And sue every single motherfucker from George Bush across to Bill Gates through to Chairman Mao.
Jesus fucking Christ, where will this fucking bullshit end? When some dickwad patents methods of political manipulation and then sues whichever party is in power as owing him money?
I think I'm going to test the fucking patent system. I'm going to patent taking a dump and see if it goes through. Given the current level of crap, it might very well do so.
I've noticed this SCO litigation story not even making major news headlines anymore, and even here on slashdot the interest is tailing off. SCO is not going to win their case. That is fairly certain by now unless certain, uhm, vested interests *cough*new reelected friends of microsoft*cough* bring their weight to bare on the legal system. But I don't think that's going to happen, and if it does happen, expect many tech companies to simply pull up stakes and move outside the US.
In the time being, Linux is continuing to gain corporate and government mindshare all over the world. I don't think that all that many people really listen to MS paid for FUD tactics. The rate of Linux uptake speaks for itself.
You just voted in a government that is the one government singularly unwilling to do anything about this problem. If you think Bush and Cheney and co will do one single thing to change the patent system that gives them huge kickbacks, you are dreaming. Expect nothing, absolutely nothing to be done about this for the next 4 years.
I've had two Swedish girlfriends (and I've never even lived in Sweden), both of whom were not in any way fat, neither of whom dressed weirdly and neither of whom had any of the attitude that you describe.
I hate to say this, and I haven't seen an image of you, but my guess is that the key to your problems stares at you in the mirror every morning when you wake up. The crap you just regurgitated is an old cliche that's been bounding around since the 80's in Scandinavia. I live in Switzerland and have met many an expat American who complains about crap just like you do.
Generally, women like a guy who knows what he wants in life (i.e. will not leave the family in times of need), is happy with himself, has a little more than vapid crap between his ears, and a sense of humour. Do you?
I can understand the NHS going for an MS solution due to the costs and difficulty of switching to OSS solution, but paying Microsoft out of one's own free will for 9 years sounds to me like either: MS bribed numerous officials (paranoid speculation, but not unknown at all in big business deals) or the NHS MIS is supremely incompetent and/or stupid.
I personally think it's the latter, a case of yet another group of IT bosses who barely know how to find the start button in Windows, being screwed over by very good MS marketing and sales people. I seriously doubt a competent sales manager would agree to a 9 year contract with a company as well known for its crooked business practices as MS is.
During the election, someone should have set himself up in a public phone booth somewhere (in oreder to be untraceable later), hacked the Windows server (god knows it's easy enough), and hacked some of the votes to produce wild results such as Nader winning Florida and Ohio, so that fraud would have been obvious....
Or maybe that is in fact what happened, except that the hackers were sitting in Diebold's offices, with a hack to the servers on the one side and a line to karl Rove on the other. Would it really have been so difficult to "tweak" the results so that , for example, for every 1 Democratic vote, 0.05 votes, or even 0.005 votes were given to the Republicans, but only counted when it reached a whole number? Since this would produce the off chance that there would be more votes than registered voters, maybe it would have simply been easier to subtract 0.0005 Democratic votes for every Republican vote but only make it count once it reached a whole number.
Any beginning programmer could do this, and a good one could hide the code, say in the firmware or hardware of the Diebold voting machines.
"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.
That paragraph is so ominous it is just not funny at all. Apart from the obvious things like, uhm, sending a fucking lawyer around with the cops if there is a specific charge about violating Trademark/Copyright/Patent, which nobody seems to be clear about at all in this this case, there are numerous other agencies, like the US customs etc which normally deal with this kind of charge.
But here we have a fucking quoted paragraph that sounds for all the world like some NSDAP (Nazi Party) official sounding off on "threats against the state" incluidng anything, literaly anything, which displeases the FRIENDS OF THE RULING PARTY.
SIEG HEIL, Mr Bush, mein Führer. Gott Sei Mit Uns. ("God be with us" -Official slogan of the SS)
The US has a lot of ominous undertones these days, where the conflicts of interest are so blindingly obvious that it hurts that Republicans, who supposedly support small government, simply ignore it because their Führer is a "God fearing man"
Is there a written contract somewhere that says Slashdot is obliged to provide you with the drivel that you want because other issues are more important to you?
No, I didn't think so.
If you're a paying subscriber, is there anything in the terms of the contract that says Rob has to provide you 1337 Shadow, with the crap that you want, or that you are forced to continue the subscription?
Disclaimer - I live in Europe and am a South African
1. Americans on this board seem to be overreacting to the US not being in position 1. That's the only reason I see for them being so on the defensive.
2. The US is not doing so badly. There are a lot of places that are worse.
American cliche's redux
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't fully understand this american hatred of Switzerland, since it mostly seems to fall in one of two categories: The Banks hiding illegal money and Switzerland's neutrality.
As regards the banks, they are Switzerland's biggest employers and so do get more priviliges than they should, and they definitely did take anyone's money in the past. They don't, however, do this any longer. Saddam Hussein's money has been frozen for years and the Swiss authorities do give information on account holders to judicial enquiries from countries with which Switzerland has legal agreements. That is why criminals prefer to keep their money in the Cayman islands these days.
But I never hear any such moral preaching against the Cayman Islands.
Secondly, Switzerland is a tiny country that was surrounded by hostile nations for most of its history. For that reason the Swiss decided to become neutral, as it kept them from having to go through the ravages of the first and second world wars. Switzerland takes its neutrality seriously and doesn't support bullshit wars like the fucking stunt you yanks pulled in Iraq, or the fucking stunt that Saddam pulled in Kuwait.
Switzerland is by no means perfect, (I live here and don't really like it or the people) but it minds its own business and would like other countries to do the same.
I think you people who constantly preach about how morally corrupt Switzerland is are just ashamed of all the crap that your own country does.
It would make perfect sense and it would kill IE
on
Google-branded Firefox?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I can believe this, and I can perfectly understand Google wanting to hide the fact that their employees are working on this. For one a Google Mozilla based Browser with GMail, GoogleGroups, Blogger, GoogleIM, Google search for the web and your desktop all integrated would rush up the marketshare of Mozilla in huge numbers because Google is known far beyond the tech world. It would be a direct competitor to MSN, and a much better one at that.
It would make IE unused and unwanted by the masses and it would run on any and every platform that Google runs on.
The fact that Google has to time this right should be obvious: If it becomes public knowledge too soon, Microsoft will do it's usual embrace and extend routine to make IE the most modern, full featured browser out there.
But I think Google is absolutely right to do this. Microsoft has already acknowledged Google as a competitor, especially in search services with MSN, and to Microsoft nothing is holy in chasing and killing a competitor. This means that it would not be beneath MS to do it's utmost in both FUD and technical underhandedness to stop Google working on PCs with Windows.
Google's best chance is to attack by moving forward with a platform that integrates many popular web features in order to get the public to move over to Mozilla. Once and if their marketshare is high enough it will prove very very difficult for MS to unseat them, especially if they don't have the majority borwser anymore. This is not 1995 and Microsoft couldn't threaten PC manufacturers with withholding Windows OEM.
Timothy, you're really the only editor on Slashdot who manages such an amazing amount of dupes. And you're also the only one that manges to post dupes of articles that are still on the front page.
Hi Mark, I'm a South African living in Europe and am both proud and pleased that a distro started by a South African is getting such good press and that you care about the progress of our country.
While others have asked about the problems in SA related to the Telekom monopoly and the astronomical rates which directly inhibit internet growth in SA, I am interested in your thoughts on the general developing country problem of the abundance of pirated Microsoft software giving Microsoft a cheaply gained monopoly in those countries which it can exploit when the countries' wealth grows. How do you propose to get people, schools and businesses interested in using Linux over Microsoft?
I've read Raskin's bitter monologues on his site as to how he was neglected by everyone from Steve Jobs to Robert Cringley. I am utterly surprised at how bitter the man is 23 years after he left Apple. I've read the human interface and his obsession with the Canon Cat (He still publishes the Canon Cat manuals on his website, as if anyone is really interested in a product that was dropped from the market 6 months after it was released, which was no wonder because the days of specialised dedicated word processors etc were almost gone by then).
His pet project, THE, a text editor has not garnered any popularity, on any platform. On CLI's, vi, joe, pico, emacs etc still are more popular.
I personally think that Jef would be better off to realise that the way things were cannot be changed and the way things are will only change for the better if the majority of the millions of computer users accept the changes. Slagging off the user interfaces mainly paints him as that which he is: an embittered old man whose only claim to fame is that he was on the Macintosh team for a while in the early 80's.
From the article: The mag-beam concept grew out of an earlier effort Winglee led to develop a system called mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion. In that system, a plasma bubble would be created around a spacecraft and sail on the solar wind.
I'm not sure at all just how practical this technology would be for propulsion in practice, since it involves having to transport the breaking beam generator to the other end of the journey before regular trips can beginn, and, as a collollory, it would mean that huge power generators would have to be moved to the outer solar system to enable trips there.
The dangers from a stations balancing beam shoud also not be ruled out.
Given that there are already means, and a planned mission to Jupiter, of using nuclear power reactors with ion electric engines, I think that it would be both safer and more practical to equip the spacecraft with a small nuclear power station and use ion engines, at least until the infrastructure is better thought out.
BUT, there is one very good idea, taken from the above quoted paragraph, and that is that by enveloping a spacecraft in a plasma bubble, you can provide it with a shield against charged particles, something that is today, still a major headache when planning long distance human spaceflight. Solar storms send out huge bursts of very deadly chared particle clouds into space and up until now the idea to have heavy and somewhat ineffective metal shielded areas has been the way to go. With a plasma bubble around a spacecraft, one would be giving it a minature magnetic field, so to speak, and the spacecraft could go to places which, have, until now, been decidedly unhealthy for humans, such as the radiation belts around Jupiter and Saturn.
Slashdot Mirror
And even learned the language and can still speak it a bit now, ten years later. You obviously know very little about Turkey if you claim that Turkish prisons weren't that bad. I knew from quite a few turks who had landed up in them (and it isn't that hard to land up in a Turkish prison, just piss someone with money or influence off and bob's your uncle) that they were and are very harsh places.
I also had some Kurdish friends who ran a restaurant, and they were regularly rounded up and stuffed into prison whenever the PKK had done something again. In fact the only local Kurd who wasn't regularly rounded up was the local mafia boss who had, wait for it, money and influence.
There are very nice and friendly Turks, but there's one hell of a lot of fascist bigotted corrupt arseholes as well.
While the USSR was already on the way out due to the failings of numerous things (It wasn't just the Soviet economy, mainly it was that the people were simply tired of the Soviet loonies. The Soviet economy could have lasted a lot longer given that it was based on an active imagination and not an actual market), they certainly managed a number of fascinating things technically, such as the Energia rocket and Buran and the Venera venus landers.
Mainly though, this Polyus battle station shows what a waste the SDI initiative was in the first place, and more importantly, for today's world of Texas cowboys, what a waste the missile defense shield is. The huge amount of money wasted on lunatic plans to conquer space is easily countered with comparitively cheap countermeasure, be they a space based laser battlestation (why does the US think that China could not build one itself, with the same lack of hoo haa that the Russians had?) or a manouvering warhead.
But those big defense companies need to justify their existences, employees salaries, and profits, don't they?
Bit by bit, the Photoshop fortress falls.
No matter how bad a piece of his company's technology is - I'm refering to the desaster that was the original passport which was hacked with remarkable speed and spurned by the industry almost unanimoulsy - the man just does not give up. Every time he launches yet another piece of drivel guaranteed to fail, he simply puts it back in the marketing department which is tasked with bringing it back at some later date under another name with one or two improvements, which they will keep on doing in an endless loop until, even if its ten years later, it finally gains traction.
I sit here using my Mac, open the MS page listing all the protocols that MS wants you to sign a licence agreement for, and lo and behold I see that Apple File Protocol is the first on that list. I think Apple might have some fun with it's lawyers on this one.
I also wonder just how arrogant, dumb and just plainly disconnected from reality you have to be to start licencing protocols that Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with, such as DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP etc.
And the microsofties on this board wonder why people refer to MS as M$ or slam the company constantly.
MS is a bunch of criminal bastards. Fuck them and may they burn in fucking hell.
hit you in the ass on the way out, and I wish you lots of success competing with the dozens of well established Windows GUi enhancement applications such as Stardock, Window Blinds etc etc etc, not to mention Active Desktop.
You may be bitter that Apple is not kissing your ass and buying your memory hungry resource intensive application instead of using it's own small footprint application that works as well as Expose, but you definitely will be extra bitter when you discover that the competition in the Windows software world is much larger than it will be even under OSX Tiger.
Bad attitudes never produced good sales, Arlo, only good software does that. Well, that and a tiny bit of innovation.
And sue every single motherfucker from George Bush across to Bill Gates through to Chairman Mao.
Jesus fucking Christ, where will this fucking bullshit end? When some dickwad patents methods of political manipulation and then sues whichever party is in power as owing him money?
I think I'm going to test the fucking patent system. I'm going to patent taking a dump and see if it goes through. Given the current level of crap, it might very well do so.
I've noticed this SCO litigation story not even making major news headlines anymore, and even here on slashdot the interest is tailing off. SCO is not going to win their case. That is fairly certain by now unless certain, uhm, vested interests *cough*new reelected friends of microsoft*cough* bring their weight to bare on the legal system. But I don't think that's going to happen, and if it does happen, expect many tech companies to simply pull up stakes and move outside the US.
In the time being, Linux is continuing to gain corporate and government mindshare all over the world. I don't think that all that many people really listen to MS paid for FUD tactics. The rate of Linux uptake speaks for itself.
You just voted in a government that is the one government singularly unwilling to do anything about this problem. If you think Bush and Cheney and co will do one single thing to change the patent system that gives them huge kickbacks, you are dreaming. Expect nothing, absolutely nothing to be done about this for the next 4 years.
I've had two Swedish girlfriends (and I've never even lived in Sweden), both of whom were not in any way fat, neither of whom dressed weirdly and neither of whom had any of the attitude that you describe.
I hate to say this, and I haven't seen an image of you, but my guess is that the key to your problems stares at you in the mirror every morning when you wake up. The crap you just regurgitated is an old cliche that's been bounding around since the 80's in Scandinavia. I live in Switzerland and have met many an expat American who complains about crap just like you do.
Generally, women like a guy who knows what he wants in life (i.e. will not leave the family in times of need), is happy with himself, has a little more than vapid crap between his ears, and a sense of humour. Do you?
I can understand the NHS going for an MS solution due to the costs and difficulty of switching to OSS solution, but paying Microsoft out of one's own free will for 9 years sounds to me like either: MS bribed numerous officials (paranoid speculation, but not unknown at all in big business deals) or the NHS MIS is supremely incompetent and/or stupid.
I personally think it's the latter, a case of yet another group of IT bosses who barely know how to find the start button in Windows, being screwed over by very good MS marketing and sales people. I seriously doubt a competent sales manager would agree to a 9 year contract with a company as well known for its crooked business practices as MS is.
During the election, someone should have set himself up in a public phone booth somewhere (in oreder to be untraceable later), hacked the Windows server (god knows it's easy enough), and hacked some of the votes to produce wild results such as Nader winning Florida and Ohio, so that fraud would have been obvious....
Or maybe that is in fact what happened, except that the hackers were sitting in Diebold's offices, with a hack to the servers on the one side and a line to karl Rove on the other. Would it really have been so difficult to "tweak" the results so that , for example, for every 1 Democratic vote, 0.05 votes, or even 0.005 votes were given to the Republicans, but only counted when it reached a whole number? Since this would produce the off chance that there would be more votes than registered voters, maybe it would have simply been easier to subtract 0.0005 Democratic votes for every Republican vote but only make it count once it reached a whole number.
Any beginning programmer could do this, and a good one could hide the code, say in the firmware or hardware of the Diebold voting machines.
"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.
That paragraph is so ominous it is just not funny at all. Apart from the obvious things like, uhm, sending a fucking lawyer around with the cops if there is a specific charge about violating Trademark/Copyright/Patent, which nobody seems to be clear about at all in this this case, there are numerous other agencies, like the US customs etc which normally deal with this kind of charge.
But here we have a fucking quoted paragraph that sounds for all the world like some NSDAP (Nazi Party) official sounding off on "threats against the state" incluidng anything, literaly anything, which displeases the FRIENDS OF THE RULING PARTY.
SIEG HEIL, Mr Bush, mein Führer. Gott Sei Mit Uns. ("God be with us" -Official slogan of the SS)
The US has a lot of ominous undertones these days, where the conflicts of interest are so blindingly obvious that it hurts that Republicans, who supposedly support small government, simply ignore it because their Führer is a "God fearing man"
Is there a written contract somewhere that says Slashdot is obliged to provide you with the drivel that you want because other issues are more important to you?
No, I didn't think so.
If you're a paying subscriber, is there anything in the terms of the contract that says Rob has to provide you 1337 Shadow, with the crap that you want, or that you are forced to continue the subscription?
No, I didn't think so.
Don't like it, go somewhere else.
Bye.
Disclaimer - I live in Europe and am a South African
1. Americans on this board seem to be overreacting to the US not being in position 1. That's the only reason I see for them being so on the defensive.
2. The US is not doing so badly. There are a lot of places that are worse.
I don't fully understand this american hatred of Switzerland, since it mostly seems to fall in one of two categories: The Banks hiding illegal money and Switzerland's neutrality.
As regards the banks, they are Switzerland's biggest employers and so do get more priviliges than they should, and they definitely did take anyone's money in the past. They don't, however, do this any longer. Saddam Hussein's money has been frozen for years and the Swiss authorities do give information on account holders to judicial enquiries from countries with which Switzerland has legal agreements. That is why criminals prefer to keep their money in the Cayman islands these days.
But I never hear any such moral preaching against the Cayman Islands.
Secondly, Switzerland is a tiny country that was surrounded by hostile nations for most of its history. For that reason the Swiss decided to become neutral, as it kept them from having to go through the ravages of the first and second world wars. Switzerland takes its neutrality seriously and doesn't support bullshit wars like the fucking stunt you yanks pulled in Iraq, or the fucking stunt that Saddam pulled in Kuwait.
Switzerland is by no means perfect, (I live here and don't really like it or the people) but it minds its own business and would like other countries to do the same.
I think you people who constantly preach about how morally corrupt Switzerland is are just ashamed of all the crap that your own country does.
I can believe this, and I can perfectly understand Google wanting to hide the fact that their employees are working on this. For one a Google Mozilla based Browser with GMail, GoogleGroups, Blogger, GoogleIM, Google search for the web and your desktop all integrated would rush up the marketshare of Mozilla in huge numbers because Google is known far beyond the tech world. It would be a direct competitor to MSN, and a much better one at that.
It would make IE unused and unwanted by the masses and it would run on any and every platform that Google runs on.
The fact that Google has to time this right should be obvious: If it becomes public knowledge too soon, Microsoft will do it's usual embrace and extend routine to make IE the most modern, full featured browser out there.
But I think Google is absolutely right to do this. Microsoft has already acknowledged Google as a competitor, especially in search services with MSN, and to Microsoft nothing is holy in chasing and killing a competitor. This means that it would not be beneath MS to do it's utmost in both FUD and technical underhandedness to stop Google working on PCs with Windows.
Google's best chance is to attack by moving forward with a platform that integrates many popular web features in order to get the public to move over to Mozilla. Once and if their marketshare is high enough it will prove very very difficult for MS to unseat them, especially if they don't have the majority borwser anymore. This is not 1995 and Microsoft couldn't threaten PC manufacturers with withholding Windows OEM.
Timothy, you're really the only editor on Slashdot who manages such an amazing amount of dupes. And you're also the only one that manges to post dupes of articles that are still on the front page.
:D
I heard the Guiness Book of Records called.
Hi Mark, I'm a South African living in Europe and am both proud and pleased that a distro started by a South African is getting such good press and that you care about the progress of our country.
While others have asked about the problems in SA related to the Telekom monopoly and the astronomical rates which directly inhibit internet growth in SA, I am interested in your thoughts on the general developing country problem of the abundance of pirated Microsoft software giving Microsoft a cheaply gained monopoly in those countries which it can exploit when the countries' wealth grows. How do you propose to get people, schools and businesses interested in using Linux over Microsoft?
I've read Raskin's bitter monologues on his site as to how he was neglected by everyone from Steve Jobs to Robert Cringley. I am utterly surprised at how bitter the man is 23 years after he left Apple. I've read the human interface and his obsession with the Canon Cat (He still publishes the Canon Cat manuals on his website, as if anyone is really interested in a product that was dropped from the market 6 months after it was released, which was no wonder because the days of specialised dedicated word processors etc were almost gone by then).
His pet project, THE, a text editor has not garnered any popularity, on any platform. On CLI's, vi, joe, pico, emacs etc still are more popular.
I personally think that Jef would be better off to realise that the way things were cannot be changed and the way things are will only change for the better if the majority of the millions of computer users accept the changes. Slagging off the user interfaces mainly paints him as that which he is: an embittered old man whose only claim to fame is that he was on the Macintosh team for a while in the early 80's.
I wrote my first computer programme in UCSD Pascal on punch cards for the compiler on a IBM 360 in 1982.
I came from the countryside and had never touched a computer before. At the time I found Pascal painful, full of grammatical overhead and confusing.
Later I learned C and other languages based on the C syntax.
Now I miss those Pascal days.
While I'm sure us apple fans appreciate your cheerleading, it's people like you the Mac userbase a bad name in professional circles.
And people wonder why poor South American youth form gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha and sell drugs. No one is going to outsource them.
From the article: The mag-beam concept grew out of an earlier effort Winglee led to develop a system called mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion. In that system, a plasma bubble would be created around a spacecraft and sail on the solar wind.
I'm not sure at all just how practical this technology would be for propulsion in practice, since it involves having to transport the breaking beam generator to the other end of the journey before regular trips can beginn, and, as a collollory, it would mean that huge power generators would have to be moved to the outer solar system to enable trips there.
The dangers from a stations balancing beam shoud also not be ruled out.
Given that there are already means, and a planned mission to Jupiter, of using nuclear power reactors with ion electric engines, I think that it would be both safer and more practical to equip the spacecraft with a small nuclear power station and use ion engines, at least until the infrastructure is better thought out.
BUT, there is one very good idea, taken from the above quoted paragraph, and that is that by enveloping a spacecraft in a plasma bubble, you can provide it with a shield against charged particles, something that is today, still a major headache when planning long distance human spaceflight. Solar storms send out huge bursts of very deadly chared particle clouds into space and up until now the idea to have heavy and somewhat ineffective metal shielded areas has been the way to go. With a plasma bubble around a spacecraft, one would be giving it a minature magnetic field, so to speak, and the spacecraft could go to places which, have, until now, been decidedly unhealthy for humans, such as the radiation belts around Jupiter and Saturn.
Or do I misunderstand this totally?
If it took you a week, then I think the problem lies with you and not with Macs, OSX or Windows.