You won't see alerts on each one. This is the first one from this telescope, and they're pretty happy about it.
The way these things are done is that any discovered small bodies are found, solved, and stored in a database (the aptly named Small Body Database at JPL for instance). If they are classified as potentially hazardous (the formal definition is passing within a certain distance of the Earth's orbit I believe), then they will be tagged as such.
Small body survey instruments will then be tasked to check up on them every once in a while. Every measurement improves our knowledge of the bodies trajectory significantly. Its likely that this particular asteroid will be measured again in a few years, and that those measurements will let them refine the trajectory estimate to a point where we can say with certainty its not a threat. All of this goes on without much need for media attention.
However, if the process leads to something that is actually a real threat, more targeted follow-up investigations will refine the estimate further. If it is a real threat, you'll see much different media coverage than you do here. While the press may sensationalize, they still include those words like 'small chance of impact'. Finally, a mission will be launched to stop it. Fortunately, for something like this, with a small body and much more than 20 years of warning, you could deflect it for ~$300M easily. Quite frankly you need the same hardware to narrow down its trajectory that early, so by the time you find its a threat, you can already start mitigating it. If these class of bodies are common enough, you could reuse hardware and probably bring the costs down ~$100M.
No. I work at JPL. I've done classified work before. Just because I have done it in the past or might in the future implies nothing about whether I should have a background check for my current job. If I were to do classified work in my current job, I would need to regain my clearance. This is the same as if I decided to go work minimum wage at a fast food chain then went back to classified work.
Though I dont care for my own sake, since I've already gone through it for legitimate reasons, making all employees here go through it is absurd. My best understanding (I started well after they stopped issuing the badges, so I'm not certain of the details) is that it was an unassuming attempt to put a generic federal badging procedure, which normally applies to DOD contractors, for which the background check makes sense. However it should not apply to JPL or other NASA centers, and to me this lawsuit is against the idea that more security is always necessarily better, and should be applied without consideration for the civil liberties of federal contractors.
As a competing anecdote, I'm also a light hobby programmer myself (matlab, python, web/php), I find iOS programming pretty straightforward. The only sticking point was memory management, which android (probably?) doesn't have to deal with it, since it's java and garbage collected. However the apple document on how it works set me straight.
I can't compare it directly though, so android may be easier, iOS just isn't that hard.
I, another iOS user, did make that decision. I decided to buy an iOS device (multiple in fact,) knowing full well that it didn't support flash, because I decided I didn't need or want it. Steve Jobs didn't choose it for me, he just made a device (both hardware and software) that suited my needs, just as HTC made a device that suits yours.
Steve Jobs doesn't decide things for me. As an informed buyer, I've found that our ideas of what make a good user experience are pretty well in line.
Actually, the relationship between gas used, vehicle mass, and driving patterns is more complex.
When driving at constant speed, mass is of no consequence (except for second-order effects like tire rolling resistance). At constant speed, most of the useful energy from the drivetrain makes up for energy lost to air resistance, which is dependent on velocity, surface area, and drag coefficient.
Mass matters when accelerating and decelerating. However, when comparing a 2lb package to 3000lb vehicle thats going to be lost in the noise. It will make a difference for a semi hauling a lot of them, but in those cases starting/stopping is much less important than it is for a local mail route.
And of course, none of that accounts for the potential of a hybrid mail delivery vehicle, which stores and releases the energy from stopping and starting. While I'm usually skeptical of the advantages of hybrids, for something like a mail truck that makes frequent stops, it would be hugely advantageous.
I'm not a lawyer, or a computer/electrical engineer for that matter. However, I'm pretty sure, unless it was a direct copy of the of the intel unlock software, then the most you could do legally with regard to the software is some patent nonsense. Do a cleanroom operation to understand the process and host it from a location without software patents and its good.
As far as making modifications like that to your own hardware, the recent ruling on cell phone unlocking probably makes it pretty safe legally, although it's sure to void your warranty.
But then again, I don't really know the legal basis behind mod chip laws, and I'm no lawyer anyway. But I think a BSA issue is unlikely to be the avenue intel might try to stop it,
Even more likely, this team has patents on many of the things they did so they can either license them to large manufacturers, or sell parts to them.
Most legitimate X-Prize teams I know of, and to be fair I know the space-based ones better, have a business plan that goes beyond the mere prize. Scaled Composites always had something like Virgin Galactic in mind, and Odyssey Moon has plans for funding their lunar mission beyond what the prize provides.
Thats the real strength of these prizes -- not being the sole reason for development, but providing an extra cushion of profitability to make a useful but not quite profitable business work, along with a race mentality to make things move more quickly.
Well, considering its Boeing, I'd venture a guess that its going to be one of the two vehicles they provide with ULA, their joint venture with Lockheed. Both the Atlas and Delta rocket families are liquid cores. Whether or not any solid boosters are involved will depend on the LV and mass (heavy configurations of Atlas require solid boosters, while the Delta IV heavy has two additional liquid boosters, although smaller Deltas have solid boosters as well).
But really, LV's are done and known. They need to be man-rated (a much fuzzier concept than many people think), but they're not vaporware. A specific capsule is not necessarily tied to a specific launch vehicle. Think of it as a question of commodity computers (mix-and-match capsule and LV) vs. Apple computers (integrated solution like the Space Shuttle).
Now, I would like to see significant work on a capsule besides some animations before I get too excited. But its not unreasonable to expect this to go somewhere.
Why are you disgusted? Human spaceflight has never really been for a science, robots tend to be better for that (but then again I'm at JPL so I may be biased).
The only real sustainable purpose of human spaceflight is to learn how to do it for its own sake. For settlement. In order to that right, the costs for launch need to come down so that a person can permanently go somewhere for around a family's life savings. The only way to do that is to reduce costs, and a market with multiple competitors *and* multiple customers is the best way to do that. And like all new technology, it will start out only for the rich, and come down in price as the tech improves.
Besides, the customers for this are in the vast majority going to be other countries, not rich vacationers. Imagine India or Brazil being able to launch their own people into space without having to wear a NASA badge, and be able to go to their own Bigelow station. If they could have their own space station program for a few billion a year, I think quite a few countries would jump at the chance.
Fair enough. I think what the grandparent was trying to imply was to use a "Slow-push" method to get to orbit, with continuous thrust, rather than a traditional Impulsive transfer trajectory -- something which doesn't really apply to getting out of the atmosphere in the first place.
Who coasts into orbit? Once the engine cuts off in most any launch vehicle you've achieved orbit.
Get going at the right speed from the ground and you'll enter orbit as long as there's not a mountain in the way (you'd probably want to boost your periagee afterwards though). The main reason you go up before accelerating to orbital velocity is that you get above the atmosphere and don't lose as much energy.
Nope. Sorry. The big aerospace companies do plenty well by suckling off of the government teat. ULA doesn't bother to sell to non-domestic customers because they know they have a near monopoly on government contracts, and dealing with ITAR is a pain. They don't need ITAR reform nearly as much as tihe small companies, who have to jump through ridiculous hoops for dumb things.
My favorite example is when Bigelow was preparing to launch one of their test habitats aboard a Russian proton. For assembly, they needed a table, so they grabbed some aluminum slabs out of their warehouse and bolted them together. Turns out this particular variety of aluminum falls under ITAR restrictions, so while in Russia, the table made out of scrap aluminum had to be watched by two armed guards at all time.
I'm not a tea-partier, I believe that in many cases good regulations make the market much more robust. However, ITAR is not good regulation. It is out of date, it places undue legal and financial burden on small startups, and partitions our space industry from the rest of the world. If we're not careful, we will become a backwater of mediocrity in the high frontier.
Anything that small will burn up on entry. Anything a bit bigger (around 30-50m) will burn up some, and then airburst far above the ground so still no one will notice it. Regional devastation starts to happen when you get up above 100 or 200 meters. The prime example of this is 99942 Apophis, which at ~300 meters would make a life miserable for a large region, but still wouldn't be world-ending.
Go ahead and watch it, Its an entertaining movie. Its ridiculous, but entertaining.
I did much of my graduate work on asteroid deflection, and do spacecraft navigation for a living, so I know better than most the lack of realism -- but who cares, its entertaining.
The only complaint I have is that it keeps the nuking an asteroid thing, a wildly dangerous and unproductive thing to do in almost all cases, in the public conciouslness. But you can't blame the movie for that.
Fortunately some of the most valuable data from planet hunts isn't from the individual discoveries, but rather the overall statistics of the likelihood of planet formation. You can account for known biases (i.e. Kepler will only see a fraction of the planetary systems it could due to the geometry of the occultations,) and back out the true statistics.
While it should be fairly simple in this case (assuming theres not a correlation between the plane of a system and its likelihood of forming planets), you can actually do a lot more complicated things too. I know more about the de-biasing process for Near Earth Asteroids, and these can be very complex combinations of observational results and a priori knowledge. The models I've used most (developed by Bottke et. al.) did numerical monte carlo simulations of how asteroids move from the main belt into the NEA range, to understand the way individual sources lead them to distributed, and then combined this with observational results, as well as knowledge of detection biases (easier to see them closer and at opposition) to back out an estimate of the relative contribution of each source region.
Most people involved know their data is spotty and limited, and a lot of work goes into accounting for the limitations and extracting as much information as possible from what they do have.
1. Race and socio-economic status are highly correlated in the US. 2. Lingering racism encourages solidarity.
So really, in my estimation AAVE is as much associated with poverty as race, but due to the racial tensions that still exist here the picture is muddied. Then again, I'm also a well-off white non-linguist so I'm not exactly qualified to say for sure.
1. Browsing photos, not sorting and organizing them. Most importantly I can pick one, show it with no decoration, and hand it to someone else and say look at this in away that jut feels more natural than a small laptop. Sure, I'd rather sort and tag and do all that on the real computers, but thats nit what were talking about here.
2. Fuck flash. The only thing it ever matters for to me is YouTube, and then it links to the youtube app and its no problem. I don't expect to play flash games, its not something i do much and i assumed i wouldn't be able to , making the iPad a good, informed purchase for me.
3. Video is a problem, but there are some 3rd party apps that make xvid encoded avis quite usable via drag and drop.
Most importantly, on a recent trip I left my laptop completely behind, because everything i might want to do was handled well by the iPad. If resources are limited, then a netbook is a good choice -- however, a full sized laptop with an iPad style tablet (a good android or webos tablet would work well too) are in many cases going to be more more enjoyable to use, just significantly more expensive. As in all things, it's a matter of use cases, personal taste, and available resources.
Typically 'nanosat' refers to small, inexpensive, quick to develop satellites. Normally its applied to cubesats and the like, but its not an unusual term to indicate that a spacecraft is a small, cheap tech demonstrator.
As someone who works in the field the name is highly descriptive to me, and gives me a good deal of insight into the nature of the spacecraft.
But in this case its not a one-or-the-other situation. Rather than behave responsibly, talk to Amnesty International (who were offering to help him) he went ahead and published without looking at redacting any names (except for the ridiculous attempt to blackmail the DoD into cooperating).
The fact that he refused to have a conference call with a legitimate human rights organization paints him as someone who is not simply trying to make a positive difference in the world, but has a political and personal axe to grind instead.
Actually, the article makes specific points that itis similar to the iPad over other tablets. This primarily comes from the fact that the Okudas specifically focused on ease of use and interfaces that could change to fit the needs of the story (and thus the needs of the fictional user). This is quite a bit different from most of the tablets that came before, those that relied on styluses and desktop OS's, enforcing paradigms that worked much better for a mouse keyboard.
Once some decent Android(or MeeGo, or WebOS, or Windows Phone 7) tablets come out, and I'm sure they will, lest someone think me a mere fanboy, that won't be true anymore. But for now the comparison is quite apt for the iPad in particular.
Have you tried to help them do so? Do you have any ideas of how they could? I'm curious how you propose that they do so.
Nonprofits have limited manpower, and more importantly limited power. Amnesty International isn't going to be able to stop the US government from going to war. No chance that they can. However, here they saw an situation that they can attempt to improve, and are doing their best to bring attention to it. That's admirable in my book, far more admirable than bitching about it on the Internet.
If you want to run a unix-ish OS on something that wasn't written for the particular hardware configuration, might I suggest you try Linux. Personally I love Ubuntu. I use it on my desktop and server, and stick with OSX on my laptop because hardware integration is particularly more important there and I've had issues in the past (although I understand it has gotten much better).
I'm not sure I see the issue with OS X, at least compared with windows.
I apologize. It appears that this in fact changed a few years ago. I just remember coming across as it as I was idly looking at cars online a couple of months ago, particularly some diesel models.
And forgive me for saying something you consider trollish. I just have encountered many frustrating state laws since moving here (overtime per day rather than per week makes my schedule less flexible, having to retake my driving test, being informed that the pool at my hotel can cause cancer,) and its quite easy to let ones frustration with a faceless bureaucracy get the best of you.
Slashdot Mirror
You won't see alerts on each one. This is the first one from this telescope, and they're pretty happy about it.
The way these things are done is that any discovered small bodies are found, solved, and stored in a database (the aptly named Small Body Database at JPL for instance). If they are classified as potentially hazardous (the formal definition is passing within a certain distance of the Earth's orbit I believe), then they will be tagged as such.
Small body survey instruments will then be tasked to check up on them every once in a while. Every measurement improves our knowledge of the bodies trajectory significantly. Its likely that this particular asteroid will be measured again in a few years, and that those measurements will let them refine the trajectory estimate to a point where we can say with certainty its not a threat. All of this goes on without much need for media attention.
However, if the process leads to something that is actually a real threat, more targeted follow-up investigations will refine the estimate further. If it is a real threat, you'll see much different media coverage than you do here. While the press may sensationalize, they still include those words like 'small chance of impact'. Finally, a mission will be launched to stop it. Fortunately, for something like this, with a small body and much more than 20 years of warning, you could deflect it for ~$300M easily. Quite frankly you need the same hardware to narrow down its trajectory that early, so by the time you find its a threat, you can already start mitigating it. If these class of bodies are common enough, you could reuse hardware and probably bring the costs down ~$100M.
No. I work at JPL. I've done classified work before. Just because I have done it in the past or might in the future implies nothing about whether I should have a background check for my current job. If I were to do classified work in my current job, I would need to regain my clearance. This is the same as if I decided to go work minimum wage at a fast food chain then went back to classified work.
Though I dont care for my own sake, since I've already gone through it for legitimate reasons, making all employees here go through it is absurd. My best understanding (I started well after they stopped issuing the badges, so I'm not certain of the details) is that it was an unassuming attempt to put a generic federal badging procedure, which normally applies to DOD contractors, for which the background check makes sense. However it should not apply to JPL or other NASA centers, and to me this lawsuit is against the idea that more security is always necessarily better, and should be applied without consideration for the civil liberties of federal contractors.
As a competing anecdote, I'm also a light hobby programmer myself (matlab, python, web/php), I find iOS programming pretty straightforward. The only sticking point was memory management, which android (probably?) doesn't have to deal with it, since it's java and garbage collected. However the apple document on how it works set me straight.
I can't compare it directly though, so android may be easier, iOS just isn't that hard.
I, another iOS user, did make that decision. I decided to buy an iOS device (multiple in fact,) knowing full well that it didn't support flash, because I decided I didn't need or want it. Steve Jobs didn't choose it for me, he just made a device (both hardware and software) that suited my needs, just as HTC made a device that suits yours.
Steve Jobs doesn't decide things for me. As an informed buyer, I've found that our ideas of what make a good user experience are pretty well in line.
Actually, the relationship between gas used, vehicle mass, and driving patterns is more complex.
When driving at constant speed, mass is of no consequence (except for second-order effects like tire rolling resistance). At constant speed, most of the useful energy from the drivetrain makes up for energy lost to air resistance, which is dependent on velocity, surface area, and drag coefficient.
Mass matters when accelerating and decelerating. However, when comparing a 2lb package to 3000lb vehicle thats going to be lost in the noise. It will make a difference for a semi hauling a lot of them, but in those cases starting/stopping is much less important than it is for a local mail route.
And of course, none of that accounts for the potential of a hybrid mail delivery vehicle, which stores and releases the energy from stopping and starting. While I'm usually skeptical of the advantages of hybrids, for something like a mail truck that makes frequent stops, it would be hugely advantageous.
I'm not a lawyer, or a computer/electrical engineer for that matter. However, I'm pretty sure, unless it was a direct copy of the of the intel unlock software, then the most you could do legally with regard to the software is some patent nonsense. Do a cleanroom operation to understand the process and host it from a location without software patents and its good.
As far as making modifications like that to your own hardware, the recent ruling on cell phone unlocking probably makes it pretty safe legally, although it's sure to void your warranty.
But then again, I don't really know the legal basis behind mod chip laws, and I'm no lawyer anyway. But I think a BSA issue is unlikely to be the avenue intel might try to stop it,
Even more likely, this team has patents on many of the things they did so they can either license them to large manufacturers, or sell parts to them.
Most legitimate X-Prize teams I know of, and to be fair I know the space-based ones better, have a business plan that goes beyond the mere prize. Scaled Composites always had something like Virgin Galactic in mind, and Odyssey Moon has plans for funding their lunar mission beyond what the prize provides.
Thats the real strength of these prizes -- not being the sole reason for development, but providing an extra cushion of profitability to make a useful but not quite profitable business work, along with a race mentality to make things move more quickly.
Well, considering its Boeing, I'd venture a guess that its going to be one of the two vehicles they provide with ULA, their joint venture with Lockheed. Both the Atlas and Delta rocket families are liquid cores. Whether or not any solid boosters are involved will depend on the LV and mass (heavy configurations of Atlas require solid boosters, while the Delta IV heavy has two additional liquid boosters, although smaller Deltas have solid boosters as well).
But really, LV's are done and known. They need to be man-rated (a much fuzzier concept than many people think), but they're not vaporware. A specific capsule is not necessarily tied to a specific launch vehicle. Think of it as a question of commodity computers (mix-and-match capsule and LV) vs. Apple computers (integrated solution like the Space Shuttle).
Now, I would like to see significant work on a capsule besides some animations before I get too excited. But its not unreasonable to expect this to go somewhere.
Why are you disgusted? Human spaceflight has never really been for a science, robots tend to be better for that (but then again I'm at JPL so I may be biased).
The only real sustainable purpose of human spaceflight is to learn how to do it for its own sake. For settlement. In order to that right, the costs for launch need to come down so that a person can permanently go somewhere for around a family's life savings. The only way to do that is to reduce costs, and a market with multiple competitors *and* multiple customers is the best way to do that. And like all new technology, it will start out only for the rich, and come down in price as the tech improves.
Besides, the customers for this are in the vast majority going to be other countries, not rich vacationers. Imagine India or Brazil being able to launch their own people into space without having to wear a NASA badge, and be able to go to their own Bigelow station. If they could have their own space station program for a few billion a year, I think quite a few countries would jump at the chance.
Fair enough. I think what the grandparent was trying to imply was to use a "Slow-push" method to get to orbit, with continuous thrust, rather than a traditional Impulsive transfer trajectory -- something which doesn't really apply to getting out of the atmosphere in the first place.
Who coasts into orbit? Once the engine cuts off in most any launch vehicle you've achieved orbit.
Get going at the right speed from the ground and you'll enter orbit as long as there's not a mountain in the way (you'd probably want to boost your periagee afterwards though). The main reason you go up before accelerating to orbital velocity is that you get above the atmosphere and don't lose as much energy.
Nope. Sorry. The big aerospace companies do plenty well by suckling off of the government teat. ULA doesn't bother to sell to non-domestic customers because they know they have a near monopoly on government contracts, and dealing with ITAR is a pain. They don't need ITAR reform nearly as much as tihe small companies, who have to jump through ridiculous hoops for dumb things.
My favorite example is when Bigelow was preparing to launch one of their test habitats aboard a Russian proton. For assembly, they needed a table, so they grabbed some aluminum slabs out of their warehouse and bolted them together. Turns out this particular variety of aluminum falls under ITAR restrictions, so while in Russia, the table made out of scrap aluminum had to be watched by two armed guards at all time.
I'm not a tea-partier, I believe that in many cases good regulations make the market much more robust. However, ITAR is not good regulation. It is out of date, it places undue legal and financial burden on small startups, and partitions our space industry from the rest of the world. If we're not careful, we will become a backwater of mediocrity in the high frontier.
Anything that small will burn up on entry. Anything a bit bigger (around 30-50m) will burn up some, and then airburst far above the ground so still no one will notice it. Regional devastation starts to happen when you get up above 100 or 200 meters. The prime example of this is 99942 Apophis, which at ~300 meters would make a life miserable for a large region, but still wouldn't be world-ending.
Go ahead and watch it, Its an entertaining movie. Its ridiculous, but entertaining.
I did much of my graduate work on asteroid deflection, and do spacecraft navigation for a living, so I know better than most the lack of realism -- but who cares, its entertaining.
The only complaint I have is that it keeps the nuking an asteroid thing, a wildly dangerous and unproductive thing to do in almost all cases, in the public conciouslness. But you can't blame the movie for that.
Fortunately some of the most valuable data from planet hunts isn't from the individual discoveries, but rather the overall statistics of the likelihood of planet formation. You can account for known biases (i.e. Kepler will only see a fraction of the planetary systems it could due to the geometry of the occultations,) and back out the true statistics.
While it should be fairly simple in this case (assuming theres not a correlation between the plane of a system and its likelihood of forming planets), you can actually do a lot more complicated things too. I know more about the de-biasing process for Near Earth Asteroids, and these can be very complex combinations of observational results and a priori knowledge. The models I've used most (developed by Bottke et. al.) did numerical monte carlo simulations of how asteroids move from the main belt into the NEA range, to understand the way individual sources lead them to distributed, and then combined this with observational results, as well as knowledge of detection biases (easier to see them closer and at opposition) to back out an estimate of the relative contribution of each source region.
Most people involved know their data is spotty and limited, and a lot of work goes into accounting for the limitations and extracting as much information as possible from what they do have.
Two things that make it different here:
1. Race and socio-economic status are highly correlated in the US.
2. Lingering racism encourages solidarity.
So really, in my estimation AAVE is as much associated with poverty as race, but due to the racial tensions that still exist here the picture is muddied. Then again, I'm also a well-off white non-linguist so I'm not exactly qualified to say for sure.
1. Browsing photos, not sorting and organizing them. Most importantly I can pick one, show it with no decoration, and hand it to someone else and say look at this in away that jut feels more natural than a small laptop. Sure, I'd rather sort and tag and do all that on the real computers, but thats nit what were talking about here.
2. Fuck flash. The only thing it ever matters for to me is YouTube, and then it links to the youtube app and its no problem. I don't expect to play flash games, its not something i do much and i assumed i wouldn't be able to , making the iPad a good, informed purchase for me.
3. Video is a problem, but there are some 3rd party apps that make xvid encoded avis quite usable via drag and drop.
Most importantly, on a recent trip I left my laptop completely behind, because everything i might want to do was handled well by the iPad. If resources are limited, then a netbook is a good choice -- however, a full sized laptop with an iPad style tablet (a good android or webos tablet would work well too) are in many cases going to be more more enjoyable to use, just significantly more expensive. As in all things, it's a matter of use cases, personal taste, and available resources.
Typically 'nanosat' refers to small, inexpensive, quick to develop satellites. Normally its applied to cubesats and the like, but its not an unusual term to indicate that a spacecraft is a small, cheap tech demonstrator.
As someone who works in the field the name is highly descriptive to me, and gives me a good deal of insight into the nature of the spacecraft.
But in this case its not a one-or-the-other situation. Rather than behave responsibly, talk to Amnesty International (who were offering to help him) he went ahead and published without looking at redacting any names (except for the ridiculous attempt to blackmail the DoD into cooperating).
The fact that he refused to have a conference call with a legitimate human rights organization paints him as someone who is not simply trying to make a positive difference in the world, but has a political and personal axe to grind instead.
Actually, the article makes specific points that itis similar to the iPad over other tablets. This primarily comes from the fact that the Okudas specifically focused on ease of use and interfaces that could change to fit the needs of the story (and thus the needs of the fictional user). This is quite a bit different from most of the tablets that came before, those that relied on styluses and desktop OS's, enforcing paradigms that worked much better for a mouse keyboard.
Once some decent Android(or MeeGo, or WebOS, or Windows Phone 7) tablets come out, and I'm sure they will, lest someone think me a mere fanboy, that won't be true anymore. But for now the comparison is quite apt for the iPad in particular.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Cliche, but I cant think of anyything more appropriate.
Have you tried to help them do so? Do you have any ideas of how they could? I'm curious how you propose that they do so.
Nonprofits have limited manpower, and more importantly limited power. Amnesty International isn't going to be able to stop the US government from going to war. No chance that they can. However, here they saw an situation that they can attempt to improve, and are doing their best to bring attention to it. That's admirable in my book, far more admirable than bitching about it on the Internet.
If you want to run a unix-ish OS on something that wasn't written for the particular hardware configuration, might I suggest you try Linux. Personally I love Ubuntu. I use it on my desktop and server, and stick with OSX on my laptop because hardware integration is particularly more important there and I've had issues in the past (although I understand it has gotten much better).
I'm not sure I see the issue with OS X, at least compared with windows.
I apologize. It appears that this in fact changed a few years ago. I just remember coming across as it as I was idly looking at cars online a couple of months ago, particularly some diesel models.
And forgive me for saying something you consider trollish. I just have encountered many frustrating state laws since moving here (overtime per day rather than per week makes my schedule less flexible, having to retake my driving test, being informed that the pool at my hotel can cause cancer,) and its quite easy to let ones frustration with a faceless bureaucracy get the best of you.
Eh, I'll probably just get a decent Japanese coupe when the time comes... hopefully my current car will last a while though. Still, options are nice.