There is no glory in fighting and killing is wrong, period.
If someone is bent on killing you and the only means you have to defend yourself is with deadly force, is it wrong to exercise that force? Or would you stand on your morals and be slaughtered like an animal?
Your lofty rhetoric doesn't stand up to real-world scenarios, I'm afraid.
I love it when somebody thinks our all volunteer military is somehow full of pitiful victims who are being railroaded into shooting innocent women and babies by their evil overlords. What a load of tripe!
When you join the U.S. military, you take an oath with full understanding of the meaning of that oath. If you don't, you're a fool who deserves whatever you get, but that's a separate argument. If people join because they think they'll get free travel, pretty uniforms, college tuition, and so forth, they're joining for the wrong reasons. Again, having served in Iraq, I have no pity for those types. Service is a calling. There is no other way to describe it. Freeloaders and opportunists need not apply.
So, you don't want to go fight when ordered to do so? Too bad. You swore an oath to do it and were given all kinds of opportunities to get out beforehand. Still object on moral (i.e. conscientious objector) grounds? Fine. You'll get your discharge and can go your own way. If you refuse to do the job you were hired (and sworn) to do, you deserve to be kicked out. You damn sure shouldn't have been inducted in the first place because you joined for the wrong reason.
Response: Well, that doesn't do me any good as an end-user. I just want my desktop to work - I don't care whose fault it is - and Windows XP doesn't blue screen for me.
I agree that it doesn't do you any good as an end-user, but if you're going to complain and assign blame for the problem, assign it where it belongs: with your driver manufacturer. Put pressure on them to fix whatever the problem is and, if it's a legit problem affecting thousands of users, they will. Either that or boycott them for future purchases (i.e. Creative Labs) until they get the message.
It is, after all, a beta. MS updated the WDM to 1.1 for Win7. It's almost a sure thing your issues are rooted in the driver, not the OS. I've got a problem with my Dell D830 and Win7 where the latest nVidia Quadro driver will not enable 32-bit color, thus no Aero Glass interface. Going backwards to an earlier driver release fixes it. You might want to try the same. nVidia has acknowledged its a driver issue and they're fixing it with the next release.
OMG its pretty, thats exactlt the reason they should release it, its not like anyone cares if it actually works right?, as long as it is pretty
Perhaps you should've read the entire sentence. Then you'd have noted I also praised it for being much faster than Vista for typical operations. I also praised its stability, although that's a carryover from Vista (and XP before it).
Having an attractive, functional UI does not in any way preclude an OS that "actually works." If you were being funny, it fell flat. If you were being sarcastic, you should get the chip off your shoulder.
I haven't seen any new Windows features in subsequent releases that made me want to upgrade.
Gee, I guess that whole "no longer supporting patches for this OS" thing just doesn't do anything for you, does it? But hey! Until you get rooted by an unpatched vulnerability, it does everything you want, right?
Perhaps the descriptor wasn't the best one, but it's the best one I could come up with at that moment. I was describing how the core OS features and services compare to Vista. If you poke around a bit and look at what's changed (not just the interface) you'll see not much is different from Vista.
For what is touted as a major OS release I really can't believe that a single beta can get the job done. Either they are rushing it, or it's really just a minor change to Vista.
Having run the beta since its release, I can say it's more the latter than the former. Windows 7 is prettier and feels faster than Vista ever did on the same hardware. Underneath, Win7 kernel feels like it's about 90% the same as Vista. WinXP SP2 was arguably as big a change (or bigger) than Win7 is to Vista. I think it's ridiculous that MS is making customers pay for this as an upgrade when it's really a very pretty service pack.
That said, there are a couple of very rough areas still present in Win7. The ones I've found thus far are:
- It breaks quite a few AV packages, but then again what major system change (SP, upgrade, etc.) doesn't?
- The Windows Mobile Device Center is unusable with most phones. It just crashes when I plug in my AT&T Fuze (aka HTC Touch Pro).
- IE 8 is something of a disaster right now. All kinds of rendering issues. It shows a lot of promise but is probably the most "beta" thing in Win7.
- Windows Media Player is seriously buggy. There was an announced bug that adding MP3's to the library would irreversibly trim a few seconds from every file. Eek! Glad I don't use it.
There is one thing I find comfortably similar between Vista and Win7: stability. My Vista setup had not one single BSOD in over a year of operation. Never. Not once. It would routinely go any length of time between reboots that I cared to go, although I typically rebooted for patches once a month. Win7 has been rock solid stable, much more so than any previous MS beta OS I've ever used and way more stable than the Vista betas. Honestly, since I don't use IE or WMP, they could release Win7 today and I'd have no problem using it as my production OS. The WMDC is kind of a pain, but I sync OTA so I really only use it to add/remove files from my phone.
There are 47+ programs in Vista that collect information and sends it back to Microsoft and that information includes your IP and the date/time.
Care to post a source for this bit of information? Or perhaps you can post some network traces from your machine that point out what's being sent? Honestly, this sounds like a lot of frothing without much substance to back it up.
Woot! Rich people deserve to be treated differently! I bet you're a hypocrite.
But isn't "treating them differently" just what you're trying to do? I don't suppose you want someone else telling *you* how you can spend *your* money, do you? No, you'd bristle at that. But you damn sure want to tell someone *else* how to spend *their* money -- just so long as they make more than you.
high income people do not have to consume more than middle or lower income people. In fact, the oppose should be true.
"Should be true"? Why? Because you say so? What gives you *any* right whatsoever to determine what anyone else in this world can do with their hard-earned money? If I wish to drive a gas-guzzling vehicle (and deal with the associated high fuel costs), that's *my* choice. If it exacts a toll on the environment then I expect someone will tax my vehicle and my fuel to offset my impact. But if I *still* wish to operate that vehicle *despite* the higher cost, then that's my damned business and none of yours.
Why not just come out and admit that you're just experiencing a severe case of class envy and be done with it? It's clear you have no rational basis for your argument, so it's obviously an emotional basis rooted in jealousy of anyone who has more than you.
I don't know what Mr. Gore is running to produce a bill like that. It is obscene, even for an American.
What's obscene about it? If he has the means and wishes to spend *his* money on power for whatever he wants, that's *his* business, isn't it? I'm no fan of Al Gore, but I find something completely absurd about how people classify consumption -- regardless of scale -- as somehow wrong. If you work a job and make money, why shouldn't you be allowed to spend it however you see fit? Granted, this flies in the face of Communism and Socialism, so if you lean in that direction then we're just not going to agree.
I suspect it's going to take all of five seconds for someone at Lucasfilm, Ltd. to send a cease & desist on the use of the name and any possible resemblance to the intellectual property of George Lucas. There are three groups of lawyer-happy folks in the movie business that are well known for having itchy legal fingers. They are Disney (the worst by far), the MPAA (go see what they do to folks who use Oscar statue likenesses), and Lucasfilm. All of Hollywood is ready to sue anybody anytime, but these three stand out of a crowd.
Not even remotely. There is an enormous difference between the two; glancing at any climate journal will show you that.
Oh, so there's no dissent? No credible scientist or organization is speaking out saying there's a lack of consensus? There's no alternative theories being bandied about? It's all locked up tight in unassailable, infallible data and nobody anywhere of any reasonable persuasion is disagreeing. What a big, happy, groupthinking family you live in.
There is rather widespread agreement on that, too.
See above comment. Your peers seem rather adept at squelching dissent. Not that such a thing is new in the staid, stolid, hierarchical scientific community.
CO2 is not a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to water vapor, when you look at what has CHANGED.
Ah! A rational man! You want to look at what has changed, do you? How nice that the only thing that mother nature has changed in the last few millenia is the CO2 level! That makes it so much easier to blame CO2, right? After all, solar output hasn't varied. The Earth's albedo hasn't varied. Ocean currents haven't varied. In fact, the whole darn globe has been a model of continuity except for that nasty old CO2 stuff, right? Get off it. A lot more has "CHANGED" (to use your phraseology) than just the CO2. Are these other factors big contributors or little ones? You don't know. You can't know because the models you're using are knowingly incomplete. You're guessing that this variable means less than that variable. If you're right and all the little variables line up, CO2 is the culprit. Or maybe CO2 is but only if amplified by this factor, or that one, or fifteen different ones put together. Yet you expect me to take your word that, even though you have a huge gap in climate understanding, you're sure you've got it right...this time. Sorry, I'm not buying it. You'll have to do better than pointing at a CO2 hockey stick graph that's been jiggered to fit the conclusion you want rather than the other way around. It's not too much to ask for some ironclad proof before we make drastic, costly, and perhaps even destructive changes in our way of life, is it?
Fossil fuels are by far the cheapest way to put in place a very long term planetary warming effect, should anyone want to do so.
I left the door open hoping you'd fall into this trap. So, if we burn all of it now or later, what's the difference? The CO2 doesn't magically disappear if we use it all tomorrow. It takes a long time for CO2 to get sequestered. So burning it all today or two decades from now makes absolutely no difference on a geological (or climatological) timescale. I figured you'd be smart enough to spot that, but you weren't.
And while nuclear plants are pretty safe, there are real safety, proliferation, and storage issues â" especially if you're talking about this being a worldwide solution, and not just for a few developed nations and their allies.
Let me be clear: I am only concerned with my developed nation and its allies. Other countries lift not a finger to help us in any way; quite the opposite, actually. So I find it difficult to muster much concern over whether someone else might find hardship in this plan. If they don't like the situation, they can try being our "allies" instead of our enemies (or neutrals). Don't like me attaching strings to things? Too bad. That's how the world works.
Oh really? Then explain to me why the climate models the "scientists" keep trotting out to prove GW are the same ones that can't accurately predict past climactic trends with any reasonable accuracy? If you gear the models to accurately track past weather then they don't predict any significant warming now. Likewise, if you gear the models to show warming now, they no longer make sense of past weather. Clearly the models are flawed, yet the general public is led to believe they are infallible. Hell, it was just thirty years ago we are being told a global ice age was on the way...and they were giving the same type of dire predictions, the same hand wringing, and the same "we're absolutely sure we're right" speeches from all the noted scientists. I'm not buying it. Not then, and not now.
If the trends are that ironclad, there ought to be an objective model that everyone can agree upon that accurately (within typical deviation) models our climate's past, present, and future. Until such a model exists, GW is a guess, a fudge, a supposition, a hypothesis in search of a proof. I'm not going to alter my life or my business for something as flimsy as that.
This is NOT a benchmark or any kind. It is a paid-for-MS-Win-7 advert. Seriously, no real performance tester would grade results as 1,2,3. WTF?
If you'd get that enormous chip off your shoulder for just a microsecond, you'd realize that the Win7 Beta EULA specifically forbids benchmarking. If he'd posted actual times or scores, MS can and would sue to get his site taken down. He did the only thing he could, which was posting 1st/2nd/3rd scores.
Instead of being so quick to scream "he's being paid by MS" (something, by the way, you have absolutely no basis for claiming), you'd appear less of an idiot if you bothered learning a bit about what you're frothing. I'll also remind you that Win7 is not available for purchase and won't be for another 6-12 months. Far from MS paying him to review Win7, they have a vested interest in not making people think they need to wait for Win7. Every person who sticks with XP while waiting for Win7 is a lost Vista sale.
Depends on who you ask. For every noted, accredited, respected supporter of GW you can find a similarly noted, accredited, and respected opposer of GW. The data are not conclusive unless you selectively interpret it. Some have done so one way, some another. Both can put forth convincing claims that are factually supported. As Abe Lincoln once said, "both may be, but one must be, wrong."
And that's not the half of it. I'll admit there is probably more evidence in favor of GW than there is against it, but is it natural or man-made? Even those in support of GW cannot agree on whether it's anthropogenic. Personally, I believe any warming we might be experiencing is non-anthropogenic. CO2/temp graphs are not terribly convincing when you consider (a) the data models have been unable to accurately model past and current weather trends when supplied with "accurate" data and (b) CO2 is a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to other factors such as water vapor. Yet I'm expected to believe all of this is ironclad, airtight, and unassailable; those that dissent are heretics, patsies, shills, idiots, or insane. Sorry, I buy into science, not dogma masquerading as science.
Then we'll probably wish we'd have saved our fossil fuels to counteract that, instead of using them up now when we don't need the warming.
This is a rather silly response since you assume a zero sum game. We aren't dependent solely on fossil fuels to stay warm. If the public were to ever get over its idiotic aversion to nuclear power, all of the above arguing would become moot. We have enough nuclear fuel for centuries, and perhaps thousands of centuries if we can ever get this whole fusion thing worked out. Fossil fuels is a useful starting point, but humanity's future energy source will have to either be nuclear (fission or fusion) or matter/antimatter. Nothing else comes close in energy density and portability.
Major problem for humanity that needs the farmland, but not so bad for all other life on land.
Why must people assume there will be a net loss in farmland? Must I remind you that a significant portion of the world's land area is not open to agriculture because it is too cold? While I certainly don't see GW (or "climate change" if you prefer) as a panacea designed to help out mankind, I find the whole "loss of farmland" argument to be the weakest one when considering its impacts. Ditto for rising sea levels, as you pointed out.
Deserts will remain deserts. Some agricultural lands will be lost. Others will be created through warming of cold climates. Overall there may be a net loss, a break even, or a net gain; nobody knows and nobody can know since we understand so little about our climate and what makes it tick. What people are afraid of isn't that we'll all starve. They're afraid that things will change. In my mind, that's the silliest stance anyone could possibly take.
This planet has had a changing climate long before we came on the scene. Just because our pathetic little slice of geological time makes it seem like the climate is stable does not make it so. Earth has been colder. Earth has been warmer. Earth is going to do what it damn well pleases whether we like it or not. As I've heard other climatologists say, how can we say that "this" temperature is the "right" temp for the planet? Maybe the Earth's "natural" state is warmer and we've just been fortunate evolve along during a few hundred millenia of cooler temps? Until we come up with a computer model that accurately predicts the past climates along with current trends -- something that has not been done despite much alarmist arm waving to the contrary -- we won't know. Hell, we may not know even if we get the models right.
We evolved big brains and opposable thumbs so we could better cope with a changing, hostile environment. Humanity seems to have forgotten that.
Just a little more plating or Titanium instead of Aluminum in the right spots.
So it's just that simple, eh? And you've completely solved the issues of increased materials cost (checked the price of Titanium lately?), total recertification of the entire Shuttle system, and the inevitable weight gain associated with such strengthening which would cut into the already-anemic lifting capacity of the Shuttle?
To wit, such a solution was studied post-Challenger. It is possible to strengthen the crew module such that crew survivability and bailout becomes more likely. It is not, however, a practical solution to the flawed Shuttle design. It would result in a safer-yet-useless Shuttle.
Insisting that the only way up and down is in a ballistic capsule is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Something like the Soyuz is fine for now, but there are plenty of ways to make a spaceplane that are not quite as flawed as the shuttle.
And which of these "ways" are as practical and cost effective as a capsule?
The answer, given our current or near-term-projected level of materials and propulsion technology, is "none of them." The idea of a spaceplane is great, but if it's strong enough to be reusable it can't lift enough to be useful. We need more powerful, efficient propulsion technology before a spaceplane is practical. Either that or a materials science breakthrough that gives us cheap, light, durable materials.
I don't think there's any hard data to support that allegation. Solid-fuel rockets are much simpler and thus more reliable (in general), albeit less efficient, than liquid-fuelled rockets, which makes them good candidates for the first stage.
With but one huge, glaring, ominous difference: solid-fueled rockets cannot be switched off or throttled once ignited, unlike liquid-fueled or solid/liquid hybrid designs. So, while solid boosters are simpler, they preclude any kind of escape system while they are firing. So, they're perfectly safe to use so long as they function perfectly, all the time, every time, for the entire duration of the launch. Such restrictions fly in the face of rationality.
I'd rather have a slightly more failure-prone booster that allows me to actually escape the failure compared to a "safer" design that, if it fails, guarantees loss of vehicle, mission, and crew. Stuff is going to fail, so you'd be better off with a design than anticipates and allows for that failure rather than one that strives to eliminate the possibility of failure. The former is achievable; the latter is impossible.
You know, for an 'inherently flawed and unsafe design' it did pretty well for almost 30 years, outliving it's expected life by, what, 15?
The Shuttles lifetime was based on number of flights, not number of years of service. In that light, the Shuttle fleet has flown less than half of its design lifetime.
Regarding capsules, you're not exactly going to survive uncontrolled re-entry if, say, a tile breaks off or the parachutes fail to deploy.
Capsules didn't have tiles, they had one-piece, single-use ablative shields. Given their single-use nature, they could be engineered robustly. Contrast that with Shuttle TPS tiles, which are so fragile you can damage one by pressing on it too hard with a finger. But they had to be fragile in order to be light enough to be reusable.
Regarding parachute failure, every capsule has multiple redundant parachute systems. Sure, all of them could have simultaneously failed, but that would be extremely unlikely. Contrast that with the Shuttle TPS, where a critical tile failure would invariably cause total loss of vehicle, mission, and crew. The difference here is not in the overall danger, it's in the safety margin. Capsules had more redundancies, simpler designs, and fewer compromises placed upon them. The Shuttle tried to be all things to all people and ended up being a compromise at everything it tried to do.
We've just had less capsule launches than shuttle launches.
And you could play Russian Roulette once an hour, every hour, for thirty years and not blow your head off. Statistically it's unlikely, but it's entirely possible.
NASA rolled the dice every time a Shuttle launched, and NASA did it knowing that the Shuttle's design required it to violate the engineering assumptions in order to operate. Specifically, the Shuttle design requirements stated categorically that "no debris" could impact the TPS during launch. This flew in the face of simple physics: the TPS is only a few feet away from a tank full of supercold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and Florida's humid climate virtually guarantees ice accumulation on the tank...ice which will flake off during launch and likely impact the TPS, the boosters, the tank, or all three. Historical tile damage reports indicate this happened from the very first Shuttle launch onwards, but NASA just accepted it and kept on launching.
Tile design guidelines specifically stated they were not designed to withstand any significant impact. Yet NASA continued to operate the Shuttle outside its design criteria for years. They did the same thing with O-ring burn throughs until Challenger caught up with them. Columbia's disaster was rooted in a similar history, where many other flights were near disasters had debris impacted an inch to the left here or an inch to the right there.
The Shuttle's "fantastic" safety record is much more attributable to luck than anything remotely resembling a good design.
If the crew had been wearing their pressurized suits, had their visors down and were restrained properly and the parachutes were not MANUAL we might have had a different turn out for the crew.::shrugs:: just my two cents I suppose.
You forgot the bit about actually escaping the crew module in order to use the parachutes. The Shuttle has no ejection seats. The first couple of missions with only two astronauts had them, but they were removed when NASA started flying full crews. The Shuttle design precluded any possible way of ejecting anyone on the lower crew deck, and a moral decision was made that if you can't eject everybody, it's better to remove the option entirely. It's grim logic, but I agree with it.
I disagree, however, on NASA's decision to actually accept a design that has absolutely no provisions for total crew escape in the event of a catastrophic emergency. Every single manned vehicle NASA had ever used had some sort of escape mechanism built in from day one. Sure, some of them were long shots, but the Shuttle is the only vehicle ever used by NASA that absolutely has no survivable escape mode during the entire launch phase. Everything has to work right, all the time, every time, every launch...or you lose the vehicle, mission, and crew. Given the enormous complexity of the Shuttle, it's a miracle we haven't lost more crews. That NASA would knowingly use such a design shows amazing hubris, hearkening back to folks thinking the Titanic couldn't sink because it was such a technological marvel of safety.
The Shuttle was and is a broken design that cannot ever be made as safe, effective, or economical as the expendable boosters that preceded it. It was a neat idea, but ultimately impractical. The Shuttle gave us a perfect example of what not to build if you want reliable, relatively safe manned missions into orbit.
What if there was an event that shook the cabin really hard, but was non-lethal?
Given the design tolerances of the Shuttle, I would posit that any such shaking strong enough to be hazardous to the crew (and outside the limits of the standard restraints) would result in vehicle destruction. The Shuttle has a structural weak point where the crew module meets the cargo bay. Challenger and Columbia both fractured there first -- and in largely the same fashion -- long before either burned up or impacted anything.
The real question is, would you really want to keep the crew alive through the early parts of such a catastrophic failure just so they could be burned to death a few minutes later? In other words, should NASA act on what they've discovered in this report, or should they just let things be and accept that when a spacecraft breaks up on reentry, the crew is going to die?
I've got another option: how about NASA not using a spacecraft that is required to violate its own design criteria in order to function.
In case you're unaware of it, Thermal Protection System (TPS) design criteria were that the tiles would not be exposed to debris impacts during launch. Since the very first launch of the Shuttle, tile dings have been recorded despite the fact that the tiles were never designed to deal with impacts. This should have sent up a huge red flag at NASA. For some engineers, it did. But the problem was the fundamentally flawed design of the entire Shuttle system, namely that of having the exposed TPS tiles alongside the External Tank (ET), which being full of liquid hydrogen and oxygen was guaranteed to produce ice debris. Since NASA accepted and built a known-flawed design, they couldn't "fix" it without scrapping the entire Shuttle system. Since that wasn't an option, NASA crossed its fingers and rolled the dice...again, and again, and again...until people died.
Thermal protection materials are, by their very nature, fragile materials. So long as our space program relies on either thermal tiles or ablative shielding, that re-entry system must be protected from damage during launch and spaceflight. The only way we can do that (with existing technology) is to put the crew module above anything that's likely to produce debris. We had that on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We'll have it again for Ares or whatever the next administration decides to fund after the Shuttle is thankfully and deservedly retired.
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There is no glory in fighting and killing is wrong, period.
If someone is bent on killing you and the only means you have to defend yourself is with deadly force, is it wrong to exercise that force? Or would you stand on your morals and be slaughtered like an animal?
Your lofty rhetoric doesn't stand up to real-world scenarios, I'm afraid.
Lawyers can turn down cases and keep their job.
I love it when somebody thinks our all volunteer military is somehow full of pitiful victims who are being railroaded into shooting innocent women and babies by their evil overlords. What a load of tripe!
When you join the U.S. military, you take an oath with full understanding of the meaning of that oath. If you don't, you're a fool who deserves whatever you get, but that's a separate argument. If people join because they think they'll get free travel, pretty uniforms, college tuition, and so forth, they're joining for the wrong reasons. Again, having served in Iraq, I have no pity for those types. Service is a calling. There is no other way to describe it. Freeloaders and opportunists need not apply.
So, you don't want to go fight when ordered to do so? Too bad. You swore an oath to do it and were given all kinds of opportunities to get out beforehand. Still object on moral (i.e. conscientious objector) grounds? Fine. You'll get your discharge and can go your own way. If you refuse to do the job you were hired (and sworn) to do, you deserve to be kicked out. You damn sure shouldn't have been inducted in the first place because you joined for the wrong reason.
Response: Well, that doesn't do me any good as an end-user. I just want my desktop to work - I don't care whose fault it is - and Windows XP doesn't blue screen for me.
I agree that it doesn't do you any good as an end-user, but if you're going to complain and assign blame for the problem, assign it where it belongs: with your driver manufacturer. Put pressure on them to fix whatever the problem is and, if it's a legit problem affecting thousands of users, they will. Either that or boycott them for future purchases (i.e. Creative Labs) until they get the message.
it needs work on the stability front
It is, after all, a beta. MS updated the WDM to 1.1 for Win7. It's almost a sure thing your issues are rooted in the driver, not the OS. I've got a problem with my Dell D830 and Win7 where the latest nVidia Quadro driver will not enable 32-bit color, thus no Aero Glass interface. Going backwards to an earlier driver release fixes it. You might want to try the same. nVidia has acknowledged its a driver issue and they're fixing it with the next release.
OMG its pretty, thats exactlt the reason they should release it, its not like anyone cares if it actually works right?, as long as it is pretty
Perhaps you should've read the entire sentence. Then you'd have noted I also praised it for being much faster than Vista for typical operations. I also praised its stability, although that's a carryover from Vista (and XP before it).
Having an attractive, functional UI does not in any way preclude an OS that "actually works." If you were being funny, it fell flat. If you were being sarcastic, you should get the chip off your shoulder.
I haven't seen any new Windows features in subsequent releases that made me want to upgrade.
Gee, I guess that whole "no longer supporting patches for this OS" thing just doesn't do anything for you, does it? But hey! Until you get rooted by an unpatched vulnerability, it does everything you want, right?
Perhaps the descriptor wasn't the best one, but it's the best one I could come up with at that moment. I was describing how the core OS features and services compare to Vista. If you poke around a bit and look at what's changed (not just the interface) you'll see not much is different from Vista.
For what is touted as a major OS release I really can't believe that a single beta can get the job done. Either they are rushing it, or it's really just a minor change to Vista.
Having run the beta since its release, I can say it's more the latter than the former. Windows 7 is prettier and feels faster than Vista ever did on the same hardware. Underneath, Win7 kernel feels like it's about 90% the same as Vista. WinXP SP2 was arguably as big a change (or bigger) than Win7 is to Vista. I think it's ridiculous that MS is making customers pay for this as an upgrade when it's really a very pretty service pack.
That said, there are a couple of very rough areas still present in Win7. The ones I've found thus far are:
- It breaks quite a few AV packages, but then again what major system change (SP, upgrade, etc.) doesn't?
- The Windows Mobile Device Center is unusable with most phones. It just crashes when I plug in my AT&T Fuze (aka HTC Touch Pro).
- IE 8 is something of a disaster right now. All kinds of rendering issues. It shows a lot of promise but is probably the most "beta" thing in Win7.
- Windows Media Player is seriously buggy. There was an announced bug that adding MP3's to the library would irreversibly trim a few seconds from every file. Eek! Glad I don't use it.
There is one thing I find comfortably similar between Vista and Win7: stability. My Vista setup had not one single BSOD in over a year of operation. Never. Not once. It would routinely go any length of time between reboots that I cared to go, although I typically rebooted for patches once a month. Win7 has been rock solid stable, much more so than any previous MS beta OS I've ever used and way more stable than the Vista betas. Honestly, since I don't use IE or WMP, they could release Win7 today and I'd have no problem using it as my production OS. The WMDC is kind of a pain, but I sync OTA so I really only use it to add/remove files from my phone.
There are 47+ programs in Vista that collect information and sends it back to Microsoft and that information includes your IP and the date/time.
Care to post a source for this bit of information? Or perhaps you can post some network traces from your machine that point out what's being sent? Honestly, this sounds like a lot of frothing without much substance to back it up.
Woot! Rich people deserve to be treated differently! I bet you're a hypocrite.
But isn't "treating them differently" just what you're trying to do? I don't suppose you want someone else telling *you* how you can spend *your* money, do you? No, you'd bristle at that. But you damn sure want to tell someone *else* how to spend *their* money -- just so long as they make more than you.
high income people do not have to consume more than middle or lower income people. In fact, the oppose should be true.
"Should be true"? Why? Because you say so? What gives you *any* right whatsoever to determine what anyone else in this world can do with their hard-earned money? If I wish to drive a gas-guzzling vehicle (and deal with the associated high fuel costs), that's *my* choice. If it exacts a toll on the environment then I expect someone will tax my vehicle and my fuel to offset my impact. But if I *still* wish to operate that vehicle *despite* the higher cost, then that's my damned business and none of yours.
Why not just come out and admit that you're just experiencing a severe case of class envy and be done with it? It's clear you have no rational basis for your argument, so it's obviously an emotional basis rooted in jealousy of anyone who has more than you.
I don't know what Mr. Gore is running to produce a bill like that. It is obscene, even for an American.
What's obscene about it? If he has the means and wishes to spend *his* money on power for whatever he wants, that's *his* business, isn't it? I'm no fan of Al Gore, but I find something completely absurd about how people classify consumption -- regardless of scale -- as somehow wrong. If you work a job and make money, why shouldn't you be allowed to spend it however you see fit? Granted, this flies in the face of Communism and Socialism, so if you lean in that direction then we're just not going to agree.
I suspect it's going to take all of five seconds for someone at Lucasfilm, Ltd. to send a cease & desist on the use of the name and any possible resemblance to the intellectual property of George Lucas. There are three groups of lawyer-happy folks in the movie business that are well known for having itchy legal fingers. They are Disney (the worst by far), the MPAA (go see what they do to folks who use Oscar statue likenesses), and Lucasfilm. All of Hollywood is ready to sue anybody anytime, but these three stand out of a crowd.
Not even remotely. There is an enormous difference between the two; glancing at any climate journal will show you that.
Oh, so there's no dissent? No credible scientist or organization is speaking out saying there's a lack of consensus? There's no alternative theories being bandied about? It's all locked up tight in unassailable, infallible data and nobody anywhere of any reasonable persuasion is disagreeing. What a big, happy, groupthinking family you live in.
There is rather widespread agreement on that, too.
See above comment. Your peers seem rather adept at squelching dissent. Not that such a thing is new in the staid, stolid, hierarchical scientific community.
CO2 is not a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to water vapor, when you look at what has CHANGED.
Ah! A rational man! You want to look at what has changed, do you? How nice that the only thing that mother nature has changed in the last few millenia is the CO2 level! That makes it so much easier to blame CO2, right? After all, solar output hasn't varied. The Earth's albedo hasn't varied. Ocean currents haven't varied. In fact, the whole darn globe has been a model of continuity except for that nasty old CO2 stuff, right? Get off it. A lot more has "CHANGED" (to use your phraseology) than just the CO2. Are these other factors big contributors or little ones? You don't know. You can't know because the models you're using are knowingly incomplete. You're guessing that this variable means less than that variable. If you're right and all the little variables line up, CO2 is the culprit. Or maybe CO2 is but only if amplified by this factor, or that one, or fifteen different ones put together. Yet you expect me to take your word that, even though you have a huge gap in climate understanding, you're sure you've got it right...this time. Sorry, I'm not buying it. You'll have to do better than pointing at a CO2 hockey stick graph that's been jiggered to fit the conclusion you want rather than the other way around. It's not too much to ask for some ironclad proof before we make drastic, costly, and perhaps even destructive changes in our way of life, is it?
Fossil fuels are by far the cheapest way to put in place a very long term planetary warming effect, should anyone want to do so.
I left the door open hoping you'd fall into this trap. So, if we burn all of it now or later, what's the difference? The CO2 doesn't magically disappear if we use it all tomorrow. It takes a long time for CO2 to get sequestered. So burning it all today or two decades from now makes absolutely no difference on a geological (or climatological) timescale. I figured you'd be smart enough to spot that, but you weren't.
And while nuclear plants are pretty safe, there are real safety, proliferation, and storage issues â" especially if you're talking about this being a worldwide solution, and not just for a few developed nations and their allies.
Let me be clear: I am only concerned with my developed nation and its allies. Other countries lift not a finger to help us in any way; quite the opposite, actually. So I find it difficult to muster much concern over whether someone else might find hardship in this plan. If they don't like the situation, they can try being our "allies" instead of our enemies (or neutrals). Don't like me attaching strings to things? Too bad. That's how the world works.
Oh really? Then explain to me why the climate models the "scientists" keep trotting out to prove GW are the same ones that can't accurately predict past climactic trends with any reasonable accuracy? If you gear the models to accurately track past weather then they don't predict any significant warming now. Likewise, if you gear the models to show warming now, they no longer make sense of past weather. Clearly the models are flawed, yet the general public is led to believe they are infallible. Hell, it was just thirty years ago we are being told a global ice age was on the way...and they were giving the same type of dire predictions, the same hand wringing, and the same "we're absolutely sure we're right" speeches from all the noted scientists. I'm not buying it. Not then, and not now.
If the trends are that ironclad, there ought to be an objective model that everyone can agree upon that accurately (within typical deviation) models our climate's past, present, and future. Until such a model exists, GW is a guess, a fudge, a supposition, a hypothesis in search of a proof. I'm not going to alter my life or my business for something as flimsy as that.
This is NOT a benchmark or any kind. It is a paid-for-MS-Win-7 advert. Seriously, no real performance tester would grade results as 1,2,3. WTF?
If you'd get that enormous chip off your shoulder for just a microsecond, you'd realize that the Win7 Beta EULA specifically forbids benchmarking. If he'd posted actual times or scores, MS can and would sue to get his site taken down. He did the only thing he could, which was posting 1st/2nd/3rd scores.
Instead of being so quick to scream "he's being paid by MS" (something, by the way, you have absolutely no basis for claiming), you'd appear less of an idiot if you bothered learning a bit about what you're frothing. I'll also remind you that Win7 is not available for purchase and won't be for another 6-12 months. Far from MS paying him to review Win7, they have a vested interest in not making people think they need to wait for Win7. Every person who sticks with XP while waiting for Win7 is a lost Vista sale.
It's rather well established by now.
Depends on who you ask. For every noted, accredited, respected supporter of GW you can find a similarly noted, accredited, and respected opposer of GW. The data are not conclusive unless you selectively interpret it. Some have done so one way, some another. Both can put forth convincing claims that are factually supported. As Abe Lincoln once said, "both may be, but one must be, wrong."
And that's not the half of it. I'll admit there is probably more evidence in favor of GW than there is against it, but is it natural or man-made? Even those in support of GW cannot agree on whether it's anthropogenic. Personally, I believe any warming we might be experiencing is non-anthropogenic. CO2/temp graphs are not terribly convincing when you consider (a) the data models have been unable to accurately model past and current weather trends when supplied with "accurate" data and (b) CO2 is a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to other factors such as water vapor. Yet I'm expected to believe all of this is ironclad, airtight, and unassailable; those that dissent are heretics, patsies, shills, idiots, or insane. Sorry, I buy into science, not dogma masquerading as science.
Then we'll probably wish we'd have saved our fossil fuels to counteract that, instead of using them up now when we don't need the warming.
This is a rather silly response since you assume a zero sum game. We aren't dependent solely on fossil fuels to stay warm. If the public were to ever get over its idiotic aversion to nuclear power, all of the above arguing would become moot. We have enough nuclear fuel for centuries, and perhaps thousands of centuries if we can ever get this whole fusion thing worked out. Fossil fuels is a useful starting point, but humanity's future energy source will have to either be nuclear (fission or fusion) or matter/antimatter. Nothing else comes close in energy density and portability.
Major problem for humanity that needs the farmland, but not so bad for all other life on land.
Why must people assume there will be a net loss in farmland? Must I remind you that a significant portion of the world's land area is not open to agriculture because it is too cold? While I certainly don't see GW (or "climate change" if you prefer) as a panacea designed to help out mankind, I find the whole "loss of farmland" argument to be the weakest one when considering its impacts. Ditto for rising sea levels, as you pointed out.
Deserts will remain deserts. Some agricultural lands will be lost. Others will be created through warming of cold climates. Overall there may be a net loss, a break even, or a net gain; nobody knows and nobody can know since we understand so little about our climate and what makes it tick. What people are afraid of isn't that we'll all starve. They're afraid that things will change. In my mind, that's the silliest stance anyone could possibly take.
This planet has had a changing climate long before we came on the scene. Just because our pathetic little slice of geological time makes it seem like the climate is stable does not make it so. Earth has been colder. Earth has been warmer. Earth is going to do what it damn well pleases whether we like it or not. As I've heard other climatologists say, how can we say that "this" temperature is the "right" temp for the planet? Maybe the Earth's "natural" state is warmer and we've just been fortunate evolve along during a few hundred millenia of cooler temps? Until we come up with a computer model that accurately predicts the past climates along with current trends -- something that has not been done despite much alarmist arm waving to the contrary -- we won't know. Hell, we may not know even if we get the models right.
We evolved big brains and opposable thumbs so we could better cope with a changing, hostile environment. Humanity seems to have forgotten that.
A Democrat who thinks the answer to everything is raising taxes! Imagine that!
Just a little more plating or Titanium instead of Aluminum in the right spots.
So it's just that simple, eh? And you've completely solved the issues of increased materials cost (checked the price of Titanium lately?), total recertification of the entire Shuttle system, and the inevitable weight gain associated with such strengthening which would cut into the already-anemic lifting capacity of the Shuttle?
To wit, such a solution was studied post-Challenger. It is possible to strengthen the crew module such that crew survivability and bailout becomes more likely. It is not, however, a practical solution to the flawed Shuttle design. It would result in a safer-yet-useless Shuttle.
Insisting that the only way up and down is in a ballistic capsule is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Something like the Soyuz is fine for now, but there are plenty of ways to make a spaceplane that are not quite as flawed as the shuttle.
And which of these "ways" are as practical and cost effective as a capsule?
The answer, given our current or near-term-projected level of materials and propulsion technology, is "none of them." The idea of a spaceplane is great, but if it's strong enough to be reusable it can't lift enough to be useful. We need more powerful, efficient propulsion technology before a spaceplane is practical. Either that or a materials science breakthrough that gives us cheap, light, durable materials.
I don't think there's any hard data to support that allegation. Solid-fuel rockets are much simpler and thus more reliable (in general), albeit less efficient, than liquid-fuelled rockets, which makes them good candidates for the first stage.
With but one huge, glaring, ominous difference: solid-fueled rockets cannot be switched off or throttled once ignited, unlike liquid-fueled or solid/liquid hybrid designs. So, while solid boosters are simpler, they preclude any kind of escape system while they are firing. So, they're perfectly safe to use so long as they function perfectly, all the time, every time, for the entire duration of the launch. Such restrictions fly in the face of rationality.
I'd rather have a slightly more failure-prone booster that allows me to actually escape the failure compared to a "safer" design that, if it fails, guarantees loss of vehicle, mission, and crew. Stuff is going to fail, so you'd be better off with a design than anticipates and allows for that failure rather than one that strives to eliminate the possibility of failure. The former is achievable; the latter is impossible.
You know, for an 'inherently flawed and unsafe design' it did pretty well for almost 30 years, outliving it's expected life by, what, 15?
The Shuttles lifetime was based on number of flights, not number of years of service. In that light, the Shuttle fleet has flown less than half of its design lifetime.
Regarding capsules, you're not exactly going to survive uncontrolled re-entry if, say, a tile breaks off or the parachutes fail to deploy.
Capsules didn't have tiles, they had one-piece, single-use ablative shields. Given their single-use nature, they could be engineered robustly. Contrast that with Shuttle TPS tiles, which are so fragile you can damage one by pressing on it too hard with a finger. But they had to be fragile in order to be light enough to be reusable.
Regarding parachute failure, every capsule has multiple redundant parachute systems. Sure, all of them could have simultaneously failed, but that would be extremely unlikely. Contrast that with the Shuttle TPS, where a critical tile failure would invariably cause total loss of vehicle, mission, and crew. The difference here is not in the overall danger, it's in the safety margin. Capsules had more redundancies, simpler designs, and fewer compromises placed upon them. The Shuttle tried to be all things to all people and ended up being a compromise at everything it tried to do.
We've just had less capsule launches than shuttle launches.
And you could play Russian Roulette once an hour, every hour, for thirty years and not blow your head off. Statistically it's unlikely, but it's entirely possible.
NASA rolled the dice every time a Shuttle launched, and NASA did it knowing that the Shuttle's design required it to violate the engineering assumptions in order to operate. Specifically, the Shuttle design requirements stated categorically that "no debris" could impact the TPS during launch. This flew in the face of simple physics: the TPS is only a few feet away from a tank full of supercold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and Florida's humid climate virtually guarantees ice accumulation on the tank...ice which will flake off during launch and likely impact the TPS, the boosters, the tank, or all three. Historical tile damage reports indicate this happened from the very first Shuttle launch onwards, but NASA just accepted it and kept on launching.
Tile design guidelines specifically stated they were not designed to withstand any significant impact. Yet NASA continued to operate the Shuttle outside its design criteria for years. They did the same thing with O-ring burn throughs until Challenger caught up with them. Columbia's disaster was rooted in a similar history, where many other flights were near disasters had debris impacted an inch to the left here or an inch to the right there.
The Shuttle's "fantastic" safety record is much more attributable to luck than anything remotely resembling a good design.
If the crew had been wearing their pressurized suits, had their visors down and were restrained properly and the parachutes were not MANUAL we might have had a different turn out for the crew. ::shrugs:: just my two cents I suppose.
You forgot the bit about actually escaping the crew module in order to use the parachutes. The Shuttle has no ejection seats. The first couple of missions with only two astronauts had them, but they were removed when NASA started flying full crews. The Shuttle design precluded any possible way of ejecting anyone on the lower crew deck, and a moral decision was made that if you can't eject everybody, it's better to remove the option entirely. It's grim logic, but I agree with it.
I disagree, however, on NASA's decision to actually accept a design that has absolutely no provisions for total crew escape in the event of a catastrophic emergency. Every single manned vehicle NASA had ever used had some sort of escape mechanism built in from day one. Sure, some of them were long shots, but the Shuttle is the only vehicle ever used by NASA that absolutely has no survivable escape mode during the entire launch phase. Everything has to work right, all the time, every time, every launch...or you lose the vehicle, mission, and crew. Given the enormous complexity of the Shuttle, it's a miracle we haven't lost more crews. That NASA would knowingly use such a design shows amazing hubris, hearkening back to folks thinking the Titanic couldn't sink because it was such a technological marvel of safety.
The Shuttle was and is a broken design that cannot ever be made as safe, effective, or economical as the expendable boosters that preceded it. It was a neat idea, but ultimately impractical. The Shuttle gave us a perfect example of what not to build if you want reliable, relatively safe manned missions into orbit.
What if there was an event that shook the cabin really hard, but was non-lethal?
Given the design tolerances of the Shuttle, I would posit that any such shaking strong enough to be hazardous to the crew (and outside the limits of the standard restraints) would result in vehicle destruction. The Shuttle has a structural weak point where the crew module meets the cargo bay. Challenger and Columbia both fractured there first -- and in largely the same fashion -- long before either burned up or impacted anything.
The real question is, would you really want to keep the crew alive through the early parts of such a catastrophic failure just so they could be burned to death a few minutes later? In other words, should NASA act on what they've discovered in this report, or should they just let things be and accept that when a spacecraft breaks up on reentry, the crew is going to die?
I've got another option: how about NASA not using a spacecraft that is required to violate its own design criteria in order to function.
In case you're unaware of it, Thermal Protection System (TPS) design criteria were that the tiles would not be exposed to debris impacts during launch. Since the very first launch of the Shuttle, tile dings have been recorded despite the fact that the tiles were never designed to deal with impacts. This should have sent up a huge red flag at NASA. For some engineers, it did. But the problem was the fundamentally flawed design of the entire Shuttle system, namely that of having the exposed TPS tiles alongside the External Tank (ET), which being full of liquid hydrogen and oxygen was guaranteed to produce ice debris. Since NASA accepted and built a known-flawed design, they couldn't "fix" it without scrapping the entire Shuttle system. Since that wasn't an option, NASA crossed its fingers and rolled the dice...again, and again, and again...until people died.
Thermal protection materials are, by their very nature, fragile materials. So long as our space program relies on either thermal tiles or ablative shielding, that re-entry system must be protected from damage during launch and spaceflight. The only way we can do that (with existing technology) is to put the crew module above anything that's likely to produce debris. We had that on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We'll have it again for Ares or whatever the next administration decides to fund after the Shuttle is thankfully and deservedly retired.