In computer databases, I always use year,month,day, and so does every other American I've met who programs. The only time the weird month,day,year order is used is when displaying to a user or receiving input from a user. Once inside the database, it's ordered the right way around (which is neither how Americans nor Europeans write it). So it's only relevant in the user interface, and nowhere else. It's no different than the problem of taking an input like "7:30 pm" and converting that into "19:30" (or seconds since epoch, or whatever you use) for internal purposes.
The metric system is sensible in that it matches our numbering system. But, the metric system is nonsensical in that our numbering system isn't a very good one, and shouldn't really be used to map a physical entity you are going to have to divide a lot. There aren't enough common denominators of 10. If we had been born with six fingers ( My name is Anigo Montoya) on each hand, and thus had a base-12 numbering system, then the imperial system would make a lot more sense than it does now. It divides things up into parts easier.
The idea solution would be to have a counting system that makes more sense than base 10, and then have a measuring system that matches it.
Wow, that's really bad, given that a modern carrier is nuclear powered. What the hell are they using for reactor fuel where it depletes a whole a gallon of it to go 17 feet?
The fact that the D/C/B/A1/A2/A3/A4.. standard has that cut-in-half aspect ratio is a good thing, but it has ZERO to do with the fact that it's measuring things in metric, and everything to do with the fact that it's a newer standard invented with machinery in mind. The same efffect could have been had with inches as with centimeters, and if there was some compelling reason to re-do the paper sizes in America, the same thing would probably happen.
Firstly, describing what you are talking about as "get a new equator" is very misleading now that I can finally tell what the hell you're talking about. That phrase sounds dumb because the equator is a mathematical construct that defines a location, not the material that exists AT that location. If the poles moved, the equator would still be defined as the location halfway between them, and that hasn't changed in the slightest. What has changed is what land exists at the equator.
Secondly, when you spin a top it precesses (the axis roates around) precisely because it is sitting in gravity and it's trying to fall over. The rotation of falling over, combined with the rotation around the main axis, results in a small rotation about another axis, one that's a little skewed from the original. BUT this happens because the object is trying to fall, but the ground is stopping it so instead it tries to tip over, and that act of tipping over is itself a rotational movement. On the other hand, the earth is NOT trying to tip over, and is not resting on some kind of ground, and so the analogy fails.
Yes, if a large object smacked the earth at the right angle it would add a rotation that would cause the earth to get a new rotational axis very fast. But to have a noticable effect it would need to be a big enough meteorite that the collision of the object itself would be a more noticable event than the poles being moved.
In other words, in order for what you're saying to happen, there would be an overwhelming abundance of evidence from the impact, more so than from the pole movements, especially if it happened recently enough to impact human history. So where is THAT evidence?
And lastly, evidence of underwater ruins is not evidence of pole shifting. Pole shifting is your proposed explanation of that evidence, and it's hadly the only possible explanation, nor even the best one.
I would add to your list an annoying tendency to assume keyboard focus and topmost window must necessarily be joined together. Yeah, they have extra tools to work on switching this around so you have a means of focus/raise being separated, but I consider it such a basic feature that I'm baffled why it's not included as an option after a default installation. Typical users are never going to know about it. If they'd made it an option you could click on or off somewhere, then typical users might try it and find out how useful it is. As it is, none of them will learn it. The only people using it will be those seeking it out because they learned about it in some other OS first. (Also, whenever something is only included as part of some extra downloadable thing, software companies don't bother supporting it (and by "support" I simply mean "refrain from screwing it up", not "provide help for". If someone writes a third-party application that made the (false) assumption that calling an API routine to give a window focus will also automatically bring it to the front, and someone complains about how this is messed up when tweakUI is used to change focus/rais behaviour, the response will be, as we all know, "Oh, that's not standard, we shouldn't have to support such an oddball setup.")
So, in *practical* terms, you can't use focus-follows-mouse or click-to-focus-but-not-autoraise in Windows' GUI.
That's a big one for me. I like to be able to type a single command into the bottom line of a shell window without having to raise the whole window to the front, thereby obscuring what I was trying to look at while I typed (i.e. I'm following some instructions on a website and want the web browser to stay on top while I type the commands to the shell window that it partly obscures.)
I also like the "always on top" option for some small windows (like a CD player, for example), which, again, only makes sense if I can give focus to a window that it's partly obscuring.
"For christ's sake", the people at the top weren't what the post was talking about. It said the ones who carried out the actions were all Republicans. Not just the majority of them, not just the highest ranking of them, but ALL of them. I think there's no need to engage in that kind of bullshittery in order to prove the case that the administration is corrupt, or that the blame for this goes very high up the chain. You don't make a good argument better by exaggerating it into the extreme, and that's exactly what the poster to whom I objected was trying to do.
When an investigation is underway, you don't publish the details - for the exact same reason you don't publish the details during a civic court trial. If you let public opinion be swayed, that gives the defense an excuse to throw the results of the trial out. This is especially true in a military tribunal. You don't want the situation to come up where the defense might claim the court was pressured into a guilty verdict by higher ranking officers, because that is one of the ways to successfully appeal the decision.
What I think really happened here is that the higher ups sort-of knew what was going on, but did a deliberate head-in-the-sand trick to try to absolve themselves of responsibility. They gave the orders to soften up the prisoners by depriving them of dignity and subjecting them to unusual circumstances, but they deliberately refrianed from being explicit about precisely how to do that - They did a "nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean" sort of thing.
You are correct that MOST are republican. But what I was objecting to was a claim that was made, which only would have made logical sense if 100% of them are, not just a mere majority.
...about this mediu is that Pixar isn't simply a digital rendering company.
They're a MOVIE company. The reason their stuff is so well loved by the general populace is that they're first[emphasis added] and foremost moviemakers.
Foremost, a movie company? These days, yes that is true. But, "First", a movie company? No. Their moviemaking talents showed up later after the company had been around for a while.
They were a digital rendering company long before they were in the movie business. They were even making computer hardware for the express purpose of rendering, back before it was practical to do it quickly on a generic workstation. There was once such a thing as a "Pixar computer", which was a "black box" without a console, that you had to feed screen description files from a secondary more console-ish computer of your own choosing, and it would spit back the final rendered result (eventually).
It's just a really wonderful coincidence that the people running the show are ALSO excellent storytellers and their talent has shined through, but this was not the reason the company was founded. It's just where they find themselves today.
The reason for disliking dubbed movies has nothing to do with the fact that it's dubbed. It has to do with the fact that the sounds of the original actors' voices actually match the characters personality and appearance well, and the sounds of the dubbing don't. The animators draw the characters to fit the original voices. And by "fit" I don't just mean the mouth matching the words. I mean the various "emotes" - the raised eyebrow at the right moment - the shaking of the fist in the air at the right moment, and the right tone of voice to express the right emotion. If I hear the orignal actor, even though I can't understand what's being said I can get the emotional message, and then when I combine that with reading the subtitled words it fits together well.
Now, that's with Japanese. With Chinese, I would prefer a dub, because the language is tonal and thus ends up accidentally communicating emotions to me that were not intended.
Consider the toys used in Toy Story: A Speak and Spell. A Mr Potato Head. A wooden pull-string cowboy. A Barrel of monkeys. etc. These were clearly not aimed at the generation that were children at the time the movie was aired. They were aimed at the generation that were children a decade or two before that, who had played with those toys. People who were adults at the time of the movie's release. It was designed so that children get the enjoyment of the storyline, while adults get the enjoyment of nostalgia, and humor borne from nostalgia references.
Do you know what the difference between "unanimous" and "majority" is? For the absentee ballots to have been a big deal, all that is required is that a majority of military personnel be Republican. For the post I was complaining about to have been true, all those who took part in the prisoner tortue scandal would have had to have been *unanimously* Republican, not just a majority of them Republican.
When the earth goes through a pole shift all that happens is the magnetic poles flip. The world still rotates the same direction. So centrifugal force is totally irrelevent to whatever the hell it is you're trying to assert.
If you reply to this, then it's obvious you're lying about not caring what I think.
Of course it was insulting. But an insulting subjective opinion (calling a language quaint and legacy) is not on the same order of magnitude as an outright factual lie about a completley objective matter - which is what you were doing by claiming he was unwilling to learn the language after he just got done describing steps he took to learn the language.
So, none of the military personnel in that unit that was guarding the prison are Democrats then? Did you check this before making such a boldly impossible to defend claim? All you really know is that the people at the very top are Republican. You have no clue what the party afilliations of the rest of the military structure under them is. In the military, you don't go about advertising your party affiliation any more so than any normal civilian would.
That's a pretty bold claim to make, given that there is no such "standard" way. There are more different UK accents than different US accents. The people on the BBC news rebroadcasts I see over here don't say "aboot".
Now, just how self centric are you to not even be willing to learn something new ?
In the alternate universe where that was what was said, your comment would have made sense. Here in the real world where all the poster said was that you should practice up on French if you want to go to Quebec (which is the exact opposite of what you accused the poster of saying, your response was insulting and uncalled for.
Keep in mind the difference between saying "ratio of gun owners to to total population" versus "number of guns per person". Consider the case where you have five people, four of whom don't own a gun, but the fifth person owns four guns by himself. Then the guns per capita is 4/5, but the gun owners rate is only 1/5.
In the U.S. it's common for a gun owner to own multiple guns. This might be throwing off that number immensely if what you're actually interested in is seeing how common gun ownership is.
And on another note, on wings vs parachutes: When de-orbiting, the fact that you can glide the plane only affects your landing zone a little bit. You still have to get the de-orbit burn to bring you down on a path that gets you right on target to glide in to your landing airstrip. And a parachute can be made controllable like a wing. While it's true that you lose the ability to be as precise as with a glider, it's also true you no longer NEED to be as precise since you don't need to land on a narrow landing airstrip. Just getting it so it doesn't land on some pissed off person's private property is enough.
Keep in mind that a lot of the things you are advocating are not advantages of wings. They are advantages of a areolift of some sort. A lifting body would do it too, and it would be less fragile to make it survive re-entry. The problem with the Rutan craft is that those are some spindly sticking-out-skinny surfaces there. That's what makes me believe that they will require replacement. Do you still think wings would be cheaper than rocket fuel if you had to replace the wings every few flights? The best flight model for re-entry is something which is compact and dense, not something with spindly bits sticking out. I do not believe in the ability of that craft, as pictured, to survive more than the couple of re-entries needed to win the X-prize. As a craft engineered to win the X-prize it works. As a prelude to an actual usable commercial craft it doesn't. A craft that's only re-usable 10 or so times isn't going to be more cost effective than using the current technology of cheap one-shot disposable rockets. But that's following the 'letter of the law' and not the spirit of the law, so to speak. A successful model that uses air to glide, and is reusable enough to be cost effective isn't going to have spindly wings sticking out of it. A lifting-body might work, though, with perhaps very short, very stubby wings. The Rutan model isn't that, though.
You, my friend are nuts. You obviously have no idea what privacy means. Privacy means precisely that my private life remains just that: private. Not that "oh, we'll put it all on a web-site, so there's no invasion of privacy."
You either didn't read all the way to the end of my post, our you didn't understand it. Read my concluding paragraph again. The point is that if you are nervous about making the data about other people public, then you shouldn't be collecting it for yourself either. That's the litmus test for whether or not you are being invasive or not. If it's information that shouldn't be public, then don't collect it at all.
I made that same migration. You might think it's because my preferences have changed so they no longer matches what Gnome does. But what's actually happened is that Gnome has changed so that it no longer matches my preferences, and it does so with misplaced accusations of elitism. It used to be that KDE was less customizable than Gnome. But now Gnome has a manefesto to remove user choices and this is no longer true. The way the project maintainers describe it, there's something aberrant about wanting to customize things in the GUI, and it's a waste of time to use something out of the ordinary. What they are blind to realizing is that *ALL* GUI interfaces are something "out of the ordinary" and are prone to being unproductive if badly set up, and by forcing me to do it their way or not at all, they have not succeeded in making me more productive - they are merely forcing me to use THEIR unproductive interface.
Wings are not a one-time install when you subject them to the stresses of a re-entry.
Besides, if you want to use the air to slow the craft, parachutes are good enough. At least they (like fuel) are designed to be quickly replaced on the cheap. Wings are only useful for flying fast, in an atmosphere, laterally to the ground. That's not what you're trying to do in a return from space. My argument isn't so much that rockets are great, but that wings are a bad choice for a space vehicle where you are ONLY using the wings for the purpose of slowing the craft down for landing and nothing else. (Now, if you want to discuss a spaceplane design, where you FLY the vehicle up high using normal airplane techniques, and then launch it into space from there, then that makes sense because now you are using the wings for more than just the landing - you are using them to help provide some of the initial launch velocity and altitude.) But the Rutan model doesn't launch the entire aircraft into space, it seperates off the space capsule from the launch airplane, and the launch airplane stays in the air. So it could have been lighter if the capsule was not winged. Using the wings on the launch vehicle makes perfect sense, but that's because the launch vehicle is only trying to go through the atmosphere as fast as a normal airplane goes. It's not trying to survive at orbital re-entry speeds. The capsule could have used just plain parachutes for the return.
The key problem with wings is that they are a large surface area that is exposed to burning on re-entry. The smaller the entry profile, the less surface has to be protected with heat sheilding. Heat sheilding is a high-damage item that needs to be checked and often replaced.
Using a parachute solves that problem by hiding the "wing" inside the capsule during the burning, and only deploying it afterward when its slow enough to be safe.
I suspect the Rutan winged design wasn't picked for cost, but for peace of mind. A glider you fly feels a lot less dangerous than burning a rocket or deploying a chute.
If your argument is that wings are cheaper, I'd disagree (with the caveat that if "wing" could include fabric deployed afterward, like a parawing, that could be very cheap.). But there are other reasons for using them that can make a lot of sense - like the fact that Rutan has oodles of experience with them and trusts them more. Safety trumps expense.
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In computer databases, I always use year,month,day, and so does every other American I've met who programs. The only time the weird month,day,year order is used is when displaying to a user or receiving input from a user. Once inside the database, it's ordered the right way around (which is neither how Americans nor Europeans write it).
So it's only relevant in the user interface, and nowhere else. It's no different than the problem of taking an input like "7:30 pm" and converting that into "19:30" (or seconds since epoch, or whatever you use) for internal purposes.
The metric system is sensible in that it matches our numbering system. But, the metric system is nonsensical in that our numbering system isn't a very good one, and shouldn't really be used to map a physical entity you are going to have to divide a lot. There aren't enough common denominators of 10. If we had been born with six fingers ( My name is Anigo Montoya) on each hand, and thus had a base-12 numbering system, then the imperial system would make a lot more sense than it does now. It divides things up into parts easier.
The idea solution would be to have a counting system that makes more sense than base 10, and then have a measuring system that matches it.
Wow, that's really bad, given that a modern carrier is nuclear powered. What the hell are they using for reactor fuel where it depletes a whole a gallon of it to go 17 feet?
The fact that the D/C/B/A1/A2/A3/A4.. standard has that cut-in-half aspect ratio is a good thing, but it has ZERO to do with the fact that it's measuring things in metric, and everything to do with the fact that it's a newer standard invented with machinery in mind. The same efffect could have been had with inches as with centimeters, and if there was some compelling reason to re-do the paper sizes in America, the same thing would probably happen.
Firstly, describing what you are talking about as "get a new equator" is very misleading now that I can finally tell what the hell you're talking about. That phrase sounds dumb because the equator is a mathematical construct that defines a location, not the material that exists AT that location. If the poles moved, the equator would still be defined as the location halfway between them, and that hasn't changed in the slightest. What has changed is what land exists at the equator.
Secondly, when you spin a top it precesses (the axis roates around) precisely because it is sitting in gravity and it's trying to fall over. The rotation of falling over, combined with the rotation around the main axis, results in a small rotation about another axis, one that's a little skewed from the original. BUT this happens because the object is trying to fall, but the ground is stopping it so instead it tries to tip over, and that act of tipping over is itself a rotational movement. On the other hand, the earth is NOT trying to tip over, and is not resting on some kind of ground, and so the analogy fails.
Yes, if a large object smacked the earth at the right angle it would add a rotation that would cause the earth to get a new rotational axis very fast. But to have a noticable effect it would need to be a big enough meteorite that the collision of the object itself would be a more noticable event than the poles being moved.
In other words, in order for what you're saying to happen, there would be an overwhelming abundance of evidence from the impact, more so than from the pole movements, especially if it happened recently enough to impact human history. So where is THAT evidence?
And lastly, evidence of underwater ruins is not evidence of pole shifting. Pole shifting is your proposed explanation of that evidence, and it's hadly the only possible explanation, nor even the best one.
Seek mental help. I'm serious.
I would add to your list an annoying tendency to assume keyboard focus and topmost window must necessarily be joined together. Yeah, they have extra tools to work on switching this around so you have a means of focus/raise being separated, but I consider it such a basic feature that I'm baffled why it's not included as an option after a default installation. Typical users are never going to know about it. If they'd made it an option you could click on or off somewhere, then typical users might try it and find out how useful it is. As it is, none of them will learn it. The only people using it will be those seeking it out because they learned about it in some other OS first. (Also, whenever something is only included as part of some extra downloadable thing, software companies don't bother supporting it (and by "support" I simply mean "refrain from screwing it up", not "provide help for". If someone writes a third-party application that made the (false) assumption that calling an API routine to give a window focus will also automatically bring it to the front, and someone complains about how this is messed up when tweakUI is used to change focus/rais behaviour, the response will be, as we all know, "Oh, that's not standard, we shouldn't have to support such an oddball setup.")
So, in *practical* terms, you can't use focus-follows-mouse or click-to-focus-but-not-autoraise in Windows' GUI.
That's a big one for me. I like to be able to type a single command into the bottom line of a shell window without having to raise the whole window to the front, thereby obscuring what I was trying to look at while I typed (i.e. I'm following some instructions on a website and want the web browser to stay on top while I type the commands to the shell window that it partly obscures.)
I also like the "always on top" option for some small windows (like a CD player, for example), which, again, only makes sense if I can give focus to a window that it's partly obscuring.
"For christ's sake", the people at the top weren't what the post was talking about. It said the ones who carried out the actions were all Republicans. Not just the majority of them, not just the highest ranking of them, but ALL of them. I think there's no need to engage in that kind of bullshittery in order to prove the case that the administration is corrupt, or that the blame for this goes very high up the chain. You don't make a good argument better by exaggerating it into the extreme, and that's exactly what the poster to whom I objected was trying to do.
When an investigation is underway, you don't publish the details - for the exact same reason you don't publish the details during a civic court trial. If you let public opinion be swayed, that gives the defense an excuse to throw the results of the trial out. This is especially true in a military tribunal. You don't want the situation to come up where the defense might claim the court was pressured into a guilty verdict by higher ranking officers, because that is one of the ways to successfully appeal the decision.
What I think really happened here is that the higher ups sort-of knew what was going on, but did a deliberate head-in-the-sand trick to try to absolve themselves of responsibility. They gave the orders to soften up the prisoners by depriving them of dignity and subjecting them to unusual circumstances, but they deliberately refrianed from being explicit about precisely how to do that - They did a "nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean" sort of thing.
You are correct that MOST are republican. But what I was objecting to was a claim that was made, which only would have made logical sense if 100% of them are, not just a mere majority.
They're a MOVIE company. The reason their stuff is so well loved by the general populace is that they're first[emphasis added] and foremost moviemakers.
Foremost, a movie company? These days, yes that is true.
But, "First", a movie company? No. Their moviemaking talents showed up later after the company had been around for a while.
They were a digital rendering company long before they were in the movie business. They were even making computer hardware for the express purpose of rendering, back before it was practical to do it quickly on a generic workstation. There was once such a thing as a "Pixar computer", which was a "black box" without a console, that you had to feed screen description files from a secondary more console-ish computer of your own choosing, and it would spit back the final rendered result (eventually).
It's just a really wonderful coincidence that the people running the show are ALSO excellent storytellers and their talent has shined through, but this was not the reason the company was founded. It's just where they find themselves today.
The reason for disliking dubbed movies has nothing to do with the fact that it's dubbed. It has to do with the fact that the sounds of the original actors' voices actually match the characters personality and appearance well, and the sounds of the dubbing don't. The animators draw the characters to fit the original voices. And by "fit" I don't just mean the mouth matching the words. I mean the various "emotes" - the raised eyebrow at the right moment - the shaking of the fist in the air at the right moment, and the right tone of voice to express the right emotion. If I hear the orignal actor, even though I can't understand what's being said I can get the emotional message, and then when I combine that with reading the subtitled words it fits together well.
Now, that's with Japanese. With Chinese, I would prefer a dub, because the language is tonal and thus ends up accidentally communicating emotions to me that were not intended.
Consider the toys used in Toy Story: A Speak and Spell. A Mr Potato Head. A wooden pull-string cowboy. A Barrel of monkeys. etc. These were clearly not aimed at the generation that were children at the time the movie was aired. They were aimed at the generation that were children a decade or two before that, who had played with those toys. People who were adults at the time of the movie's release. It was designed so that children get the enjoyment of the storyline, while adults get the enjoyment of nostalgia, and humor borne from nostalgia references.
That's been Pixar's style for quite some time.
Do you know what the difference between "unanimous" and "majority" is? For the absentee ballots to have been a big deal, all that is required is that a majority of military personnel be Republican. For the post I was complaining about to have been true, all those who took part in the prisoner tortue scandal would have had to have been *unanimously* Republican, not just a majority of them Republican.
When the earth goes through a pole shift all that happens is the magnetic poles flip. The world still rotates the same direction. So centrifugal force is totally irrelevent to whatever the hell it is you're trying to assert.
If you reply to this, then it's obvious you're lying about not caring what I think.
Of course it was insulting. But an insulting subjective opinion (calling a language quaint and legacy) is not on the same order of magnitude as an outright factual lie about a completley objective matter - which is what you were doing by claiming he was unwilling to learn the language after he just got done describing steps he took to learn the language.
So, none of the military personnel in that unit that was guarding the prison are Democrats then? Did you check this before making such a boldly impossible to defend claim? All you really know is that the people at the very top are Republican. You have no clue what the party afilliations of the rest of the military structure under them is. In the military, you don't go about advertising your party affiliation any more so than any normal civilian would.
That's a pretty bold claim to make, given that there is no such "standard" way. There are more different UK accents than different US accents. The people on the BBC news rebroadcasts I see over here don't say "aboot".
Now, just how self centric are you to not even be willing to learn something new ?
In the alternate universe where that was what was said, your comment would have made sense. Here in the real world where all the poster said was that you should practice up on French if you want to go to Quebec (which is the exact opposite of what you accused the poster of saying, your response was insulting and uncalled for.
Keep in mind the difference between saying "ratio of gun owners to to total population" versus "number of guns per person". Consider the case where you have five people, four of whom don't own a gun, but the fifth person owns four guns by himself. Then the guns per capita is 4/5, but the gun owners rate is only 1/5.
In the U.S. it's common for a gun owner to own multiple guns. This might be throwing off that number immensely if what you're actually interested in is seeing how common gun ownership is.
And on another note, on wings vs parachutes: When de-orbiting, the fact that you can glide the plane only affects your landing zone a little bit. You still have to get the de-orbit burn to bring you down on a path that gets you right on target to glide in to your landing airstrip. And a parachute can be made controllable like a wing. While it's true that you lose the ability to be as precise as with a glider, it's also true you no longer NEED to be as precise since you don't need to land on a narrow landing airstrip. Just getting it so it doesn't land on some pissed off person's private property is enough.
Keep in mind that a lot of the things you are advocating are not advantages of wings. They are advantages of a areolift of some sort. A lifting body would do it too, and it would be less fragile to make it survive re-entry. The problem with the Rutan craft is that those are some spindly sticking-out-skinny surfaces there. That's what makes me believe that they will require replacement. Do you still think wings would be cheaper than rocket fuel if you had to replace the wings every few flights? The best flight model for re-entry is something which is compact and dense, not something with spindly bits sticking out. I do not believe in the ability of that craft, as pictured, to survive more than the couple of re-entries needed to win the X-prize. As a craft engineered to win the X-prize it works. As a prelude to an actual usable commercial craft it doesn't. A craft that's only re-usable 10 or so times isn't going to be more cost effective than using the current technology of cheap one-shot disposable rockets. But that's following the 'letter of the law' and not the spirit of the law, so to speak. A successful model that uses air to glide, and is reusable enough to be cost effective isn't going to have spindly wings sticking out of it. A lifting-body might work, though, with perhaps very short, very stubby wings. The Rutan model isn't that, though.
Too bad you don't understand the basic logical concept of "burden of proof". But then again, most conspiracy nutcases are like that.
You, my friend are nuts. You obviously have no idea what privacy means. Privacy means precisely that my private life remains just that: private. Not that "oh, we'll put it all on a web-site, so there's no invasion of privacy."
You either didn't read all the way to the end of my post, our you didn't understand it. Read my concluding paragraph again. The point is that if you are nervous about making the data about other people public, then you shouldn't be collecting it for yourself either. That's the litmus test for whether or not you are being invasive or not. If it's information that shouldn't be public, then don't collect it at all.
I made that same migration. You might think it's because my preferences have changed so they no longer matches what Gnome does. But what's actually happened is that Gnome has changed so that it no longer matches my preferences, and it does so with misplaced accusations of elitism. It used to be that KDE was less customizable than Gnome. But now Gnome has a manefesto to remove user choices and this is no longer true. The way the project maintainers describe it, there's something aberrant about wanting to customize things in the GUI, and it's a waste of time to use something out of the ordinary. What they are blind to realizing is that *ALL* GUI interfaces are something "out of the ordinary" and are prone to being unproductive if badly set up, and by forcing me to do it their way or not at all, they have not succeeded in making me more productive - they are merely forcing me to use THEIR unproductive interface.
Wings are not a one-time install when you subject them to the stresses of a re-entry.
Besides, if you want to use the air to slow the craft, parachutes are good enough. At least they (like fuel) are designed to be quickly replaced on the cheap. Wings are only useful for flying fast, in an atmosphere, laterally to the ground. That's not what you're trying to do in a return from space. My argument isn't so much that rockets are great, but that wings are a bad choice for a space vehicle where you are ONLY using the wings for the purpose of slowing the craft down for landing and nothing else. (Now, if you want to discuss a spaceplane design, where you FLY the vehicle up high using normal airplane techniques, and then launch it into space from there, then that makes sense because now you are using the wings for more than just the landing - you are using them to help provide some of the initial launch velocity and altitude.) But the Rutan model doesn't launch the entire aircraft into space, it seperates off the space capsule from the launch airplane, and the launch airplane stays in the air. So it could have been lighter if the capsule was not winged. Using the wings on the launch vehicle makes perfect sense, but that's because the launch vehicle is only trying to go through the atmosphere as fast as a normal airplane goes. It's not trying to survive at orbital re-entry speeds. The capsule could have used just plain parachutes for the return.
The key problem with wings is that they are a large surface area that is exposed to burning on re-entry. The smaller the entry profile, the less surface has to be protected with heat sheilding. Heat sheilding is a high-damage item that needs to be checked and often replaced.
Using a parachute solves that problem by hiding the "wing" inside the capsule during the burning, and only deploying it afterward when its slow enough to be safe.
I suspect the Rutan winged design wasn't picked for cost, but for peace of mind. A glider you fly feels a lot less dangerous than burning a rocket or deploying a chute.
If your argument is that wings are cheaper, I'd disagree (with the caveat that if "wing" could include fabric deployed afterward, like a parawing, that could be very cheap.). But there are other reasons for using them that can make a lot of sense - like the fact that Rutan has oodles of experience with them and trusts them more. Safety trumps expense.