That was my first thought, actually. A few years back few people would have cared, today the airport Nazis will probably have you marched off and interrogated as a potential terrorist (even though no terrorist in their right mind would wear such a thing).
As wearable computers become more common, these airport practices are going to become more and more insane.
I already have stopped, as much as possible: I now only fly when I really have to go somewhere and there's no other sensible choice. Not because I think the plane will be hijacked, since it's pretty clear that hijacking will never work again, but because of the minimum-wage Hitlers imposing stupid and petty "security" measures.
If it was a bigger problem it would probably be easier to find. If you were losing 1 psi an hour from a significant leak, it wouldn't be hard to track down even without any special instruments.
"People who are still running 98 should really consider performing some upgrades to newer (and, in theory, better) operating systems."
Why? If you don't play games or edit video, what benefit is there to replacing your PII-350 running Win98 with a PIV-3GHz running XP? For email, web-browsing and word processing, the PII is plenty good enough.
And exactly how much 'support' has anyone ever got from Microsoft? The one time I ever tried to get phone support it was just a waste of an hour of my time. I doubt that many home users ever call them and get any useful response.
As far as I can see, the only useful support Microsoft provides is fixes for their security flaws.
It doesn't matter that only a few people in the world can fix bugs, because that's infinitely more than the number of people outside Microsoft who can fix Win98 bugs. If enough people care about that version of Linux then some of those people will continue to fix the bugs. If not, they won't.
Of course with Linux the source is readily available (though presumably not for any Redhat-specific addons), so anyone who wants to continue using it and fix bugs can do so. With Win98, that's not an option.
Weird: a few years back (98-ish?) I was running Netscape on Linux and I'd have to exit Netscape about once a month because the memory got too fragmented: otherwise it was rock-solid for the time.
Then again, I remember when J. Random User could cause a kernel panic and reboot on Solaris just by opening the floppy device and sending the right IOCTL: I suspect the OS was the problem, not Netscape.
"The money spent on space development has allowed (forced?) us to develop technology, which we have sold to the world and made a tidy profit on."
And exactly which technology would that be? Space nuts like to make these claims, but as soon as you look at the facts they turn out to be mostly bogus.
"A "Manhattan Project" to end Malaria would be a boon to hundreds of millions of people."
We already know how to end malaria: it's called appropriate use of DDT. However, the eco-nuts got that banned based on what now appears to be largely bogus "science".
"SSTO machines are something like 97%+ fuel, which is why nobody has built one"
Actually we've already built several SSTOs: for example, the Saturn SII stage was theoretically capable of putting itself into orbit, and AFAIR the Atlas could too, even without dropping the engines that it normally dumps. Certainly one Atlas was orbited, but that one dropped the engines and carried a payload.
The problem is building an SSTO that can carry a useful payload and return to Earth (an expendable SSTO isn't much of an improvement over other expendable launchers), not building an SSTO per se.
"Manned space flight will be NASAs only priority. Almost all non-manned projects will done away with or rolled into the manned program if appropriate."
Only a mad-man would cancel the most cost-efficient and useful part of NASA in favor of expanding the wasteful and useless part.
There's no way that NASA would fly a Mars Direct style mission. Too much new technology that has to work first time, and not cool enough. Big fricking spaceships are what NASA want, not small and efficient.
"He proposes a return of a heavy lift booster either by reviving saturn V, using the russian energia design or adapting shuttle hardware to lift payload mass rather than a heatshield/landing gear/control surfaces for the shuttle."
Which would cost well over $20 billion in itself if NASA was in charge of the development program. NASA just can't do anything cheap in manned spaceflight without screwing it up.
"As a side note I will simply say Station is a very poor example for you to use as a program that suffered over runs."
Why? The space station was always a purely political project, and any future moon or mars mission will be too. As with the station they'll be continually redesigned in order to meet changing political requirements to maintain funding. If you're lucky, they'll land on the moon in the year 2100 and it will only have cost $500,000,000,000 in today's money.
"The actually cost of manufacturing one will likely be quite a bit less."
You're talking about the US military here: by the time it hits the battlefield it will probably cost a billion dollars and be considered far too valuable to actually risk in a combat zone.
"Films are out of the league of small companies due to the costs of making them"
Only if by "films" you mean $200,000,000 Hollywood movies. The problem for small film companies is not raising money to make movies for a couple of million dollars, it's getting them distributed when the big movie studios own or control the vast majority of the distribution channels.
Most cinemas would rather take a crap Hollywood movie than a good independent movie because they know that Hollywood will spend another $100,000,000 advertising their crap and bringing in customers to buy the popcorn and soft drinks that make the profits, and that the studios will punish them in the future if they show non-Hollywood movies.
"Seriously though, how many "regular" computer users have access to the source code for their applications or would even know what to do with it if they did."
Uh, that's irrelevant, as people will buy 64-bit versions of software for their 64-bit PC... and that software will run faster just because it's been recompiled with a 64-bit compiler that doesn't waste half the time copying data between registers and memory.
"But before it becomes really mainstream, you are going to have to have the 64-bit windows (not sure if it is available or not) and a decent selection of 64-bit commercial software."
Yes, but I thought that was obvious. I'm sure Microsoft are just gagging to sell us all yet more copies of Windows and Office just so we have 64-bit versions.
Well, if they'd kept the Saturns it would almost certainly have been easier to launch a new one: Skylab had a limited lifespan because it couldn't readily be resupplied and waste was stored onboard and couldn't be dumped out... things you couldn't really fix in orbit. The only reason they planned on rescuing it with the shuttle was because they no longer had the capability to launch a new one.
"I am hardly seeing any that is going into the Space Shuttle program either (only those missions that carry something too big to fly abourd a Saturn V or similar rocket)."
Um, the Saturn V could put over a hundred tons in orbit, the Shuttle can put about thirty tons in orbit. So anything "too big to fly on a Saturn V" is much, much too big to fly on the shuttle.
Dumping the Saturns for the Shuttle was a huge mistake on NASA's part. By now the Saturn-derivatives would be much cheaper to fly than the shuttle.
"I don't think that most people do the really computer intensive tasks that would benefit from 64bit chips"
Everyone would benefit from switching because of the extra registers in 64-bit mode and the low-latency memory controller. Some people have said they got a 10-20% speedup just from recompiling in 64-bit mode without making any changes to their code.
Of course if all you do is run Word all day that will make little difference... but if all you do is run Word all day you'd probably be happy with a Pentium-II.
"If there hadn't been international cooperation, we wouldn't have a space station in orbit right now"
The only way that "international cooperation" helped get ISS in orbit was that turning it into a welfare program for Russian space engineers rather than a space station stopped it being cancelled a few years back. In terms of building and operating a useful space station, "international cooperation" has been a huge problem, by forcing it into a stupid orbit just so the Russians can launch to it... if it had been designed as a real space station rather than a welfare program it would have been put into an orbit to optimise launches from KSC and the ESA site, not Russia.
"Lest you forget, Skylab wasn't exactly a screaming success"
Skylab achieved everything it was designed to do: I call that a success. From what I hear the astronauts on ISS spend so much time fixing things they rarely get around to doing anything useful (if there is actually anything useful to do other than keeping the Russian space engineers in vodka and cabbage).
"it was deployed as one unit and nothing like as modular as the ISS"
And it was probably cheaper to launch an entire new Skylab than to launch a single ISS module. AFAIR follow-on Skylab missions were one of the things that NASA sacrificed to help justify spending more money on the shuttle.
"Please don't deride this old man, but feel sorry for him. He's ruined, with a disabled wife to take care of."
He's been ruined by his own greed and stupidity, and was apparently quite happy to steal money from the bank account of a dead man. Why should I have any sympathy whatsoever for someone like that?
"What if, 50 years from now, there's a scam going around , today, you won't in your wildest imagination consider possible?"
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you remember that, you'll never fall for one of these scams. To do so you need to be either crooked or stupid or both.
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That was my first thought, actually. A few years back few people would have cared, today the airport Nazis will probably have you marched off and interrogated as a potential terrorist (even though no terrorist in their right mind would wear such a thing).
As wearable computers become more common, these airport practices are going to become more and more insane.
I already have stopped, as much as possible: I now only fly when I really have to go somewhere and there's no other sensible choice. Not because I think the plane will be hijacked, since it's pretty clear that hijacking will never work again, but because of the minimum-wage Hitlers imposing stupid and petty "security" measures.
If it was a bigger problem it would probably be easier to find. If you were losing 1 psi an hour from a significant leak, it wouldn't be hard to track down even without any special instruments.
"People who are still running 98 should really consider performing some upgrades to newer (and, in theory, better) operating systems."
Why? If you don't play games or edit video, what benefit is there to replacing your PII-350 running Win98 with a PIV-3GHz running XP? For email, web-browsing and word processing, the PII is plenty good enough.
And exactly how much 'support' has anyone ever got from Microsoft? The one time I ever tried to get phone support it was just a waste of an hour of my time. I doubt that many home users ever call them and get any useful response.
As far as I can see, the only useful support Microsoft provides is fixes for their security flaws.
Few people who are happy with Win98 are going to switch to Longhorn until and unless their hardware dies.
It doesn't matter that only a few people in the world can fix bugs, because that's infinitely more than the number of people outside Microsoft who can fix Win98 bugs. If enough people care about that version of Linux then some of those people will continue to fix the bugs. If not, they won't.
Of course with Linux the source is readily available (though presumably not for any Redhat-specific addons), so anyone who wants to continue using it and fix bugs can do so. With Win98, that's not an option.
Weird: a few years back (98-ish?) I was running Netscape on Linux and I'd have to exit Netscape about once a month because the memory got too fragmented: otherwise it was rock-solid for the time.
Then again, I remember when J. Random User could cause a kernel panic and reboot on Solaris just by opening the floppy device and sending the right IOCTL: I suspect the OS was the problem, not Netscape.
"The money spent on space development has allowed (forced?) us to develop technology, which we have sold to the world and made a tidy profit on."
And exactly which technology would that be? Space nuts like to make these claims, but as soon as you look at the facts they turn out to be mostly bogus.
"A "Manhattan Project" to end Malaria would be a boon to hundreds of millions of people."
We already know how to end malaria: it's called appropriate use of DDT. However, the eco-nuts got that banned based on what now appears to be largely bogus "science".
"SSTO machines are something like 97%+ fuel, which is why nobody has built one"
Actually we've already built several SSTOs: for example, the Saturn SII stage was theoretically capable of putting itself into orbit, and AFAIR the Atlas could too, even without dropping the engines that it normally dumps. Certainly one Atlas was orbited, but that one dropped the engines and carried a payload.
The problem is building an SSTO that can carry a useful payload and return to Earth (an expendable SSTO isn't much of an improvement over other expendable launchers), not building an SSTO per se.
"However, it's been well proven that launching rockets destroys the ozone layer"
In wacko-world, perhaps. In the real world it may have a short-term impact, but long-term it will be negligible.
Or are you talking about the chlorine emissions from the shuttle SRBs? It's not like we'd be using the shuttle to launch this stuff.
"Manned space flight will be NASAs only priority. Almost all non-manned projects will done away with or rolled into the manned program if appropriate."
Only a mad-man would cancel the most cost-efficient and useful part of NASA in favor of expanding the wasteful and useless part.
Ah, OK, it is Bush...
There's no way that NASA would fly a Mars Direct style mission. Too much new technology that has to work first time, and not cool enough. Big fricking spaceships are what NASA want, not small and efficient.
"He proposes a return of a heavy lift booster either by reviving saturn V, using the russian energia design or adapting shuttle hardware to lift payload mass rather than a heatshield/landing gear/control surfaces for the shuttle."
Which would cost well over $20 billion in itself if NASA was in charge of the development program. NASA just can't do anything cheap in manned spaceflight without screwing it up.
"As a side note I will simply say Station is a very poor example for you to use as a program that suffered over runs."
Why? The space station was always a purely political project, and any future moon or mars mission will be too. As with the station they'll be continually redesigned in order to meet changing political requirements to maintain funding. If you're lucky, they'll land on the moon in the year 2100 and it will only have cost $500,000,000,000 in today's money.
"The actually cost of manufacturing one will likely be quite a bit less."
You're talking about the US military here: by the time it hits the battlefield it will probably cost a billion dollars and be considered far too valuable to actually risk in a combat zone.
"Films are out of the league of small companies due to the costs of making them"
Only if by "films" you mean $200,000,000 Hollywood movies. The problem for small film companies is not raising money to make movies for a couple of million dollars, it's getting them distributed when the big movie studios own or control the vast majority of the distribution channels.
Most cinemas would rather take a crap Hollywood movie than a good independent movie because they know that Hollywood will spend another $100,000,000 advertising their crap and bringing in customers to buy the popcorn and soft drinks that make the profits, and that the studios will punish them in the future if they show non-Hollywood movies.
I take it you're not old enough to remember the stupid 85mph speedometers which used to be fitted to most (all?) American cars?
"Seriously though, how many "regular" computer users have access to the source code for their applications or would even know what to do with it if they did."
Uh, that's irrelevant, as people will buy 64-bit versions of software for their 64-bit PC... and that software will run faster just because it's been recompiled with a 64-bit compiler that doesn't waste half the time copying data between registers and memory.
"But before it becomes really mainstream, you are going to have to have the 64-bit windows (not sure if it is available or not) and a decent selection of 64-bit commercial software."
Yes, but I thought that was obvious. I'm sure Microsoft are just gagging to sell us all yet more copies of Windows and Office just so we have 64-bit versions.
Well, if they'd kept the Saturns it would almost certainly have been easier to launch a new one: Skylab had a limited lifespan because it couldn't readily be resupplied and waste was stored onboard and couldn't be dumped out... things you couldn't really fix in orbit. The only reason they planned on rescuing it with the shuttle was because they no longer had the capability to launch a new one.
"I am hardly seeing any that is going into the Space Shuttle program either (only those missions that carry something too big to fly abourd a Saturn V or similar rocket)."
Um, the Saturn V could put over a hundred tons in orbit, the Shuttle can put about thirty tons in orbit. So anything "too big to fly on a Saturn V" is much, much too big to fly on the shuttle.
Dumping the Saturns for the Shuttle was a huge mistake on NASA's part. By now the Saturn-derivatives would be much cheaper to fly than the shuttle.
"I don't think that most people do the really computer intensive tasks that would benefit from 64bit chips"
Everyone would benefit from switching because of the extra registers in 64-bit mode and the low-latency memory controller. Some people have said they got a 10-20% speedup just from recompiling in 64-bit mode without making any changes to their code.
Of course if all you do is run Word all day that will make little difference... but if all you do is run Word all day you'd probably be happy with a Pentium-II.
Hardly a problem given that NASA couldn't justify ISS on its own merits, only as a way to funnel money to Russia.
"If there hadn't been international cooperation, we wouldn't have a space station in orbit right now"
The only way that "international cooperation" helped get ISS in orbit was that turning it into a welfare program for Russian space engineers rather than a space station stopped it being cancelled a few years back. In terms of building and operating a useful space station, "international cooperation" has been a huge problem, by forcing it into a stupid orbit just so the Russians can launch to it... if it had been designed as a real space station rather than a welfare program it would have been put into an orbit to optimise launches from KSC and the ESA site, not Russia.
"Lest you forget, Skylab wasn't exactly a screaming success"
Skylab achieved everything it was designed to do: I call that a success. From what I hear the astronauts on ISS spend so much time fixing things they rarely get around to doing anything useful (if there is actually anything useful to do other than keeping the Russian space engineers in vodka and cabbage).
"it was deployed as one unit and nothing like as modular as the ISS"
And it was probably cheaper to launch an entire new Skylab than to launch a single ISS module. AFAIR follow-on Skylab missions were one of the things that NASA sacrificed to help justify spending more money on the shuttle.
"Please don't deride this old man, but feel sorry for him. He's ruined, with a disabled wife to take care of."
He's been ruined by his own greed and stupidity, and was apparently quite happy to steal money from the bank account of a dead man. Why should I have any sympathy whatsoever for someone like that?
"What if, 50 years from now, there's a scam going around , today, you won't in your wildest imagination consider possible?"
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you remember that, you'll never fall for one of these scams. To do so you need to be either crooked or stupid or both.