***Anything that looks like a car and is traveling through the air much faster than a car, is going to get terrible gas mileage. Just my humble opinion there.***
Basically, yes. Modern cars are fairly light and aerodynamic. But even the smallest econobox with no passengers or cargo weighs substantially more than the maximum takeoff weight of small fuel-efficient aircraft. The big problem is that a hybrid car/airplane has to carry much or all the stuff required by either -- wings, control surfaces, a transmission with a reverse gear, turnable front wheels, shock absorbers, turn indicators, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be heavy. And by the time the engineering compromises are made, it'll most likely ride and handle on the road like a buckboard. I doubt it will be an especially good aircraft and it'll likely be a really awful car.
*** don't agree with bullet #1. A well designed, 2-4 passenger, general aviation aircraft shouldn't burn all that much fuel.***
Basically, you're right. The best general aviation aircraft get respectable mileage. Probably as good as the better cars when you allow for the ability of the aircraft to fly in straight lines. But, those aircraft need fairly lengthy runways. The technologies like VTOL and helicopters that allow you to take off and land from your driveway are fuel hungry and likely to stay that way.
***Bullet #3***
Sure, many aircraft emergencies are easily survivable, but almost all auto emergencies other than a fire, broken ball joint, some brake failures, or a sheared tie rod just result in a dead car. My point is that if people maintain their flying cars like they maintain their rolling on the ground cars, Funeral homes are going to be a growth industry.
***So leave the licening to the people who are competent, ie. not the government but people operating in the private sector.***
If you are an American you are almost certainly about to learn in a very painful way about some of the pitfalls of letting the private sector operate totally without interference from the government. Specifically, you are going to find out why it might have been a good idea to have the government have a voice in the selection of real estate appraisers and why it is not a good idea to let lenders pick appraisers who will come up with the numbers they want to see. Try this link. http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/. You want the article entitled What's Wrong With Approved Appraiser Lists. If you have time, be sure and follow the links to www.prudentbear.com where serious questions that might even be valid are raised about the near-term solvency of much of the US financial system. (The criticism of the government here incidentally is not that it screwed things up but that it didn't do enough to stop this nonsense before it got so serious).
***Flying could be quite practical. Unfortunately, every time it comes up, everybody assumes "flying" means "planes". OK, planes are impractical as a replacement for cars. But what about lighter-than-air craft? They don't require massive amounts of energy, are quiet, can basically hover for free, and can even look quite pretty.***
Good question. Problem is that in order to lift a few hundred kg of payload -- say two people, a couple of modest suitcases, and a power plant of some sort, you need a gasbag about the volume of a suburban US house. Surprisingly, it doesn't matter all that much what you fill it with -- Hydrogen, Helium, Hot Air, or Methane -- you still need a big gasbag. In addition to major congestion when a bunch of these things try to get in and out of downtown at rush hour, what happens when a sudden breeze comes along and blows 40,000 commuters out to sea? And a large gasbag means major drag problems (i.e. lousy gas mileage) if you try to fly into a stiff breeze or to fly fast.
I can envision "tramp blimps" riding the Westerlies in the mid latitudes and the trade winds in the tropics carrying non-perishable freight long distances with minimal transport costs. But I just can't see lighter than air for personal transport vehicles except in very special circumstances.
Flying cars aren't really impractical, but flying cars for the masses look to be many decades away.
There are three huge problems that need to be solved
Most types of aircraft are either fuel hogs or can't take off and land without a runway. Unless and until we get some power source "too cheap to meter", flying cars are likely to be like the one in the article. Mediocre aircraft and probably worse cars.
There is no chance that the average person can fly or control anything other than a balloon without being a menace to themself; other fliers; and people, property, and livestock on the ground. Computers can surely overcome this eventually -- but not this decade. We can't even design voting machines that work. (Not to mention that the US ATC system has been on the verge of breaking for decades handling the comparatively small number aircraft that are currently in the air.)
Broken cars stop. Broken aircraft drop. Flying cars are going to require safety standards far beyond what we are used to for ground cars.
I imagine that we'll have flying cars in our garages some day. But not any time soon.
For the edification of the kiddies, I went out to the garage and found the December 1993 issue of Computer Shopper. Top Data's full page ad says you can get an NT workstation -- 486DX-2-66 with 8mb of memory and a 340mb SCSI hard Drive for $2980. Need a bigger hard drive? 4C will sell you a 1200MB SCSI drive for $1000. Need more memory? At Associates Computer Supply, generic SIMMS are down to $40 a megabyte -- from $100 a megabyte a few years earlier.
***Kinda makes ya wonder when DirecTV & Dish can put things in orbit around the planet and still be cheaper than cable.***
Until you look at what it costs to deploy and maintain a wired cable network. When a connection on our household cable went out, Adelphia had to make a service call to diagnose the problem. Another to get permission from our neighbor to tap his cable at the entry point and run a wire through his flower bed to our house. Then, when the ground thawed in the Spring, three of them spent an afternoon digging up our cable only to find out that Bell Atlantic had hijacked the cable run under our neighbor's driveway that they planned to use. They then spent another day -- about six of them -- running a new underground cable to our house.
I suspect the repair could have been done with fewer man hours, but I wasn't doing it so what do I know? Even if it had been a model of efficiency, it probably would have needed several man days.
***I've never heard of having real cable company choices at a single address, however.***
As I recall, when cable started out four decades ago, the companies insisted on sole franchises on the grounds that competing cable deployments would increase costs for both suppliers since they would be serving fewer customers per mile of backbone. A few cities held out and eventually licensed multiple, competing systems.
Suprise, Suprise. The handful of places with competition ended up with lower rather than higher rates. Funny thing about that. Given the constant sale, agglomeration, resale and rebranding of American telecommunication companies, I'm not sure how many places still have actual competition. Not many I suspect. But there could be some.
***My trouble with airline trays is that I usually have some kid sitting in the seat in front, who insists on not slowly reclining their seat, but slamming it back to the stop at close to relativistic speeds.***
They should ship those things (kids) as luggage -- or, at the very least, tie them up and stuff them into the overhead bins. It'd make air travel much less stressful for non-related adults.
***I'd say that that the Eee PC deprecates that little toy in every single category possibly imaginable.***
I don't know about the Alphasmart Neo, but when I did school IT, we bought the old Alphasmarts instead of real laptops for Special Ed students for one reason. The Alphasmarts are virtually indestructible. Like military computers, they may be mediocre at computing, but they are still mediocre rather than dead after being dropped, stepped on, used as weapons, or otherwise abused.
Ehrrrrrr. The correct phraseology is "At least the wireless MIGHT work". I made my living for a decade before I retired out of the reality that not everything that should work in Windows does work in Windows. I've had two "identical" brand new Windows machines with consecutive serial numbers exhibit significantly different behavior after Ghosting in an applications image. More than once, in fact.
***At least one state (MA) and perhaps others have laws that require your AVERAGE speed over some distance (I believe MA is 1/4 mi) to be over the limit for a speeding ticket.***
They have traffic laws in Massachusetts? When did that happen?
***Personally I would prefer the US occupying the country I was in rather than having Saddam run it.***
You might want to talk to an Iraqi about that. I don't think most of them regard a country with no jobs, no power, no fuel, no medical care, infested with trigger happy foreigners, and run by gangs who are fanatical and/or corrupt, as an vast improvement over a brutal dictatorship. And after I year or two, I imagine that you'd grab a Kalashnikov and start plinking at the gringos yourself.
About 72 hours apparently. Oh well, looks like they learned SOMETHING from Katrina. Not necessarily what one would have hoped they would learn... but something.
***As the Glasgow "terrorists" so brilliantly displayed, anybody can be a terrorist. All it takes is a car, a bunch of primitive explosive, flammable material and the motivation to endanger human life. ***
You don't really need a car. Witness the Madrid bombings of 2004.
***In my view, after September 11th the United States should have responded by doing one thing: Passing regulations that ensure that the cockpits of passenger aircraft are unable to be accessed from the passenger carrying part of the plane. ***
Absolutely, and not just passenger aircraft. There's not all that much that prevents a clever terrorist (and perhaps some of his buds) from hijacking a cargo plane or even a military aircraft. Heck, I imagine that even a private jet flown into the White House, Capitol building etc would do a lot of damage.
***That's a proportionate response to the threat.***
Regrettably, it is not really. What 9/11 should have taught us, but did not, is that a fuel laden commercial jet aircraft is an attractive nuisance for fanatics and that it can do an incredible amount of damage if the fanatic is not interested in survival.
Keeping terrorists off aircraft is such a stupid and obviously unworkable strategy that you'd think it would have been rejected out of hand. It should be obvious that if a clever individual wants to hijack a aircraft, his (or her) chances of doing so are pretty good.
What a more sensible society would do is start phasing out the use of large aircraft for jobs that can be done more safely by other methods. Do we need aircraft to cross the Pacific or Atlantic? Sure. Do we need aircraft to travel between Boston and New York? Of course not. High speed trains have been used for decades in Japan and France. Which is faster? Fight your way to Logan, spend 2-3 hours waiting in ticket lines, security lines, waiting for a late flight, fly 50 minutes, wait for your luggage (if it isn't lost), then fight your way in from LaGuardia or JFK. Or -- fight your way into Boston, take a Shinkansen from South Station to Pennsyvania Station requiring maybe 90 minutes. A train can be hijacked, or bombed. But it can't be taken very far off the tracks.
Real high speed transcontinental trains might take most of a day to cross the US. (Which is an average speed of around 115mph) But the reality is that for most of us, crossing the continent by plane takes a day. My last transcontinental flight (last ever, if I have my druthers) took 30 hours after all the cancelled flights and other delays -- and that was not in Winter..
Automatic Updates do not seem to me to be a very good idea -- for users anyway. The big problem is that on bad days, they have the potential to shut down you or your organization with no warning. In fact, they can easily be more cataclysmic than a virus or rootkit. Malware may well try not crash your machine because killing the host is a bad strategy for a parasite. Bad updates do not have any such constraint.
QA of patches is very difficult. Lots of time pressure. Lots of things to check. Easy to overlook things. It's not like Windows and other modern Megasoftware have any coherent set of specifications that can be tested against. Or that test procedures would be perfect if there were specificiations. Or that a thorough test could be run in a realistic amount of time. This looks like yet another QA screwup.
Better to defer installing updates for a few days I think and let others Beta test the fixes. There's some risk to that also of course. But not as much. At least not in my estimation.
It is my sad duty to inform you that you are somehow posting in a parallel universe where PCs typically ***DO*** come with loads of nagware, XP activation is buggy, and where Microsoft is no longer a benevolent friend thinking only of its users best interests. If whatever spacewarp you are working through has physically dumped you over here, you are in for one hell of a suprise... not to mention unending abuse from those you conceive to be your friends.
***It simply doesn't have the capability of other Operating Systems. This is a problem.***
Y'know. I thought the same thing a year ago. I got exasperated enough that I spent a lot of hours trying to find out how clipboards work on the major OSes. That isn't easy incidentally. the Documentation is scattered, obtuse, fragmentary, misleading, and sometimes wrong. What I found out is that the Linux clipboard actually does work pretty well most of the time. I started noticing that the Windows clipboard has problems. It's actually not all that uncommon for Windows to quietly refuse to copy or to paste something unexpected or to make you jump through weird hoops to get stuff in or out of the clipboard.
I think that the issue is that we get used to a particular set of clipboard peculiarities in desktop environment and are frustrated when we encounter a different set of peculiarities.
All I can tell you is that I am now doing about 50% of my computer stuff in a Linux environment -- Slackware 12 and Xfce. I probably use the clipboard more than most folks, and I don't have any more Clipboard problems on the Linux machine than I do on the Windows machine at the other end of the desk. I have some gripes about many Linux applications (e.g.why can't Ark unpack tar.gz files that tar -zxf handles fine?), but the clipboard handling isn't one of them.
4. Paste. On Windows and Mac, it works. On Linux, nothing happens.
***
That's somewhat true. Windows and Mac have basic (single object per object type) clipboard management by default -- data is moved to a buffer when Cut or Copy are requested and are Pasted from the buffer when (if) a Paste is requested. Linux (and Java incidentally) don't. But you can run a clipboard manager like Klipper if you wish to get that behavior in Linux. KDE generally does that by default. I think GNOME has something similar although Klipper is said to work fine in a GNOME environment.. (glipper?) .
Some people find Klipper to be obnoxious. I'm not sure whether they have some set of problems I don't or just have a different world view. Anyway, they have the option of not using it or of using some other clipboard manager. In Windows (and I assume Mac) you apparently are going to get clipboard management whether you want it or not.
***but the shocking thing is that the FAA (and the public) is still dealing with a completely antiquated air traffic control system that like other aspects of our national infrastructure is woefully lacking***
I've been hearing about how the US ATC system is three months away from total collapse for about four and a half decades. So far, it has not collapsed. That's not to say that it is in good shape. It probably isn't. But unlike many other infrastructure problems, this one is nothing new.
Fixing Air Traffic Control is apparently a very difficult job. Fixing it apparently is not just a matter of throwing money, manpower, and the miracle technology d'jour at it.
For Broadcom support, look into ndiswrapper. It'll take you an evening to get it working (if it works) and the spouse and household pets may well be hiding under the furniture with their paws/hands over their ears about half way through the process. But on good days, it'll allow a Windows driver to work on Linux with some Broadcom hardware that the Linux driver can't support. The problem incidentally is that ^#@$*! Broadcom won't tell anyone how their ^#@$*!ing cards work
***A proper clipboard would also be nice. The fact that you can't copy and paste more than text between applications is laughable, and even simple text can be iffy from time to time.***
The Linux clipboard is a perfectly conventional clipboard although it has some minor differences at the nuts and bolts level. (Unlike Windows and Mac, it doesn't move any data until a Paste is requested). Clipboards are an application level entity not an OS thing. All the OS does is allow the destination to talk to the source and vice versa. Unix in general and Linux in particular allow non-text objects to be moved via the clipboard just as easily as they do text objects. But the applications need to support that. Some do. Some Don't. Same is true for Windows.
You, can, for example, use the clipboard to copy images from a web site viewed in Konqueror to Kword. You can't copy the same image from the same web site viewed in Firefox, but that's because Firefox doesn't support it, not because Linux doesn't.
The only clipboard thing that is actually different in Linux is that the text mode clipboard for tty consoles is a different clipboard than the GUI clipboard (so that it can work if the GUI is dead or not started). But if you run a console application in a terminal program under the GUI, it uses the GUI clipboard so you can move text to and from console applications if you need to.
If you read the article, the belief that the storm botnet is shrinking is based on the fact that the guy has a tool for actively crawling the Storm network. His estimates are based on the number of machines he can see vs the number that he used to be able to see. He agrees with you that there never were 50 million machines in the network BTW. He says maybe 15 million total over time and most of those have been deloused.
Since a tenfold reduction in the number of infected machines seems sort of optimistic, my guess would be that you might be closer to right than he is and that parts of the network might be hidden from him nowadays somehow. But what the hell do I know?
***Anyone else think that the rather lax enforcement of Windows piracy is helping to create the possibility of massive botnets?***
Why would anyone think that? Windows is Windows whether it's pirated or paid for. Is a drunk weaving through heavy traffic at 135kph any more or less of a menace if he's driving a stolen car rather than a car he "owns"?
***In this administation of incompetence, this guy is a real relief to hear speak - about what is the people's, he is the real deal.***
Yes, Copps appears to be pure of heart and soul. But he is one of the two Democratic (minority) members of the FCC. He is in no way, shape, or form representative of the Bush administration. In fact, he has devoted most of his time on the FCC trying, as best he could, to balk the plans of ex Chairman Michael Powell to give away everything not nailed down and many things that are nailed down to the Telcos and other large corporations.
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Basically, yes. Modern cars are fairly light and aerodynamic. But even the smallest econobox with no passengers or cargo weighs substantially more than the maximum takeoff weight of small fuel-efficient aircraft. The big problem is that a hybrid car/airplane has to carry much or all the stuff required by either -- wings, control surfaces, a transmission with a reverse gear, turnable front wheels, shock absorbers, turn indicators, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be heavy. And by the time the engineering compromises are made, it'll most likely ride and handle on the road like a buckboard. I doubt it will be an especially good aircraft and it'll likely be a really awful car.
Basically, you're right. The best general aviation aircraft get respectable mileage. Probably as good as the better cars when you allow for the ability of the aircraft to fly in straight lines. But, those aircraft need fairly lengthy runways. The technologies like VTOL and helicopters that allow you to take off and land from your driveway are fuel hungry and likely to stay that way.
***Bullet #3***
Sure, many aircraft emergencies are easily survivable, but almost all auto emergencies other than a fire, broken ball joint, some brake failures, or a sheared tie rod just result in a dead car. My point is that if people maintain their flying cars like they maintain their rolling on the ground cars, Funeral homes are going to be a growth industry.
If you are an American you are almost certainly about to learn in a very painful way about some of the pitfalls of letting the private sector operate totally without interference from the government. Specifically, you are going to find out why it might have been a good idea to have the government have a voice in the selection of real estate appraisers and why it is not a good idea to let lenders pick appraisers who will come up with the numbers they want to see. Try this link. http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/. You want the article entitled What's Wrong With Approved Appraiser Lists. If you have time, be sure and follow the links to www.prudentbear.com where serious questions that might even be valid are raised about the near-term solvency of much of the US financial system. (The criticism of the government here incidentally is not that it screwed things up but that it didn't do enough to stop this nonsense before it got so serious).
Good question. Problem is that in order to lift a few hundred kg of payload -- say two people, a couple of modest suitcases, and a power plant of some sort, you need a gasbag about the volume of a suburban US house. Surprisingly, it doesn't matter all that much what you fill it with -- Hydrogen, Helium, Hot Air, or Methane -- you still need a big gasbag. In addition to major congestion when a bunch of these things try to get in and out of downtown at rush hour, what happens when a sudden breeze comes along and blows 40,000 commuters out to sea? And a large gasbag means major drag problems (i.e. lousy gas mileage) if you try to fly into a stiff breeze or to fly fast.
I can envision "tramp blimps" riding the Westerlies in the mid latitudes and the trade winds in the tropics carrying non-perishable freight long distances with minimal transport costs. But I just can't see lighter than air for personal transport vehicles except in very special circumstances.
There are three huge problems that need to be solved
I imagine that we'll have flying cars in our garages some day. But not any time soon.
So I guess that basically I agree with you.
For the edification of the kiddies, I went out to the garage and found the December 1993 issue of Computer Shopper. Top Data's full page ad says you can get an NT workstation -- 486DX-2-66 with 8mb of memory and a 340mb SCSI hard Drive for $2980. Need a bigger hard drive? 4C will sell you a 1200MB SCSI drive for $1000. Need more memory? At Associates Computer Supply, generic SIMMS are down to $40 a megabyte -- from $100 a megabyte a few years earlier.
Until you look at what it costs to deploy and maintain a wired cable network. When a connection on our household cable went out, Adelphia had to make a service call to diagnose the problem. Another to get permission from our neighbor to tap his cable at the entry point and run a wire through his flower bed to our house. Then, when the ground thawed in the Spring, three of them spent an afternoon digging up our cable only to find out that Bell Atlantic had hijacked the cable run under our neighbor's driveway that they planned to use. They then spent another day -- about six of them -- running a new underground cable to our house.
I suspect the repair could have been done with fewer man hours, but I wasn't doing it so what do I know? Even if it had been a model of efficiency, it probably would have needed several man days.
As I recall, when cable started out four decades ago, the companies insisted on sole franchises on the grounds that competing cable deployments would increase costs for both suppliers since they would be serving fewer customers per mile of backbone. A few cities held out and eventually licensed multiple, competing systems.
Suprise, Suprise. The handful of places with competition ended up with lower rather than higher rates. Funny thing about that. Given the constant sale, agglomeration, resale and rebranding of American telecommunication companies, I'm not sure how many places still have actual competition. Not many I suspect. But there could be some.
They should ship those things (kids) as luggage -- or, at the very least, tie them up and stuff them into the overhead bins. It'd make air travel much less stressful for non-related adults.
I don't know about the Alphasmart Neo, but when I did school IT, we bought the old Alphasmarts instead of real laptops for Special Ed students for one reason. The Alphasmarts are virtually indestructible. Like military computers, they may be mediocre at computing, but they are still mediocre rather than dead after being dropped, stepped on, used as weapons, or otherwise abused.
Ehrrrrrr. The correct phraseology is "At least the wireless MIGHT work". I made my living for a decade before I retired out of the reality that not everything that should work in Windows does work in Windows. I've had two "identical" brand new Windows machines with consecutive serial numbers exhibit significantly different behavior after Ghosting in an applications image. More than once, in fact.
I'd agree that 'might' is better than 'won't'
They have traffic laws in Massachusetts? When did that happen?
You might want to talk to an Iraqi about that. I don't think most of them regard a country with no jobs, no power, no fuel, no medical care, infested with trigger happy foreigners, and run by gangs who are fanatical and/or corrupt, as an vast improvement over a brutal dictatorship. And after I year or two, I imagine that you'd grab a Kalashnikov and start plinking at the gringos yourself.
About 72 hours apparently. Oh well, looks like they learned SOMETHING from Katrina. Not necessarily what one would have hoped they would learn ... but something.
You don't really need a car. Witness the Madrid bombings of 2004.
***In my view, after September 11th the United States should have responded by doing one thing: Passing regulations that ensure that the cockpits of passenger aircraft are unable to be accessed from the passenger carrying part of the plane. ***
Absolutely, and not just passenger aircraft. There's not all that much that prevents a clever terrorist (and perhaps some of his buds) from hijacking a cargo plane or even a military aircraft. Heck, I imagine that even a private jet flown into the White House, Capitol building etc would do a lot of damage.
***That's a proportionate response to the threat.***
Regrettably, it is not really. What 9/11 should have taught us, but did not, is that a fuel laden commercial jet aircraft is an attractive nuisance for fanatics and that it can do an incredible amount of damage if the fanatic is not interested in survival.
Keeping terrorists off aircraft is such a stupid and obviously unworkable strategy that you'd think it would have been rejected out of hand. It should be obvious that if a clever individual wants to hijack a aircraft, his (or her) chances of doing so are pretty good.
What a more sensible society would do is start phasing out the use of large aircraft for jobs that can be done more safely by other methods. Do we need aircraft to cross the Pacific or Atlantic? Sure. Do we need aircraft to travel between Boston and New York? Of course not. High speed trains have been used for decades in Japan and France. Which is faster? Fight your way to Logan, spend 2-3 hours waiting in ticket lines, security lines, waiting for a late flight, fly 50 minutes, wait for your luggage (if it isn't lost), then fight your way in from LaGuardia or JFK. Or -- fight your way into Boston, take a Shinkansen from South Station to Pennsyvania Station requiring maybe 90 minutes. A train can be hijacked, or bombed. But it can't be taken very far off the tracks.
Real high speed transcontinental trains might take most of a day to cross the US. (Which is an average speed of around 115mph) But the reality is that for most of us, crossing the continent by plane takes a day. My last transcontinental flight (last ever, if I have my druthers) took 30 hours after all the cancelled flights and other delays -- and that was not in Winter..
QA of patches is very difficult. Lots of time pressure. Lots of things to check. Easy to overlook things. It's not like Windows and other modern Megasoftware have any coherent set of specifications that can be tested against. Or that test procedures would be perfect if there were specificiations. Or that a thorough test could be run in a realistic amount of time. This looks like yet another QA screwup.
Better to defer installing updates for a few days I think and let others Beta test the fixes. There's some risk to that also of course. But not as much. At least not in my estimation.
It is my sad duty to inform you that you are somehow posting in a parallel universe where PCs typically ***DO*** come with loads of nagware, XP activation is buggy, and where Microsoft is no longer a benevolent friend thinking only of its users best interests. If whatever spacewarp you are working through has physically dumped you over here, you are in for one hell of a suprise ... not to mention unending abuse from those you conceive to be your friends.
Y'know. I thought the same thing a year ago. I got exasperated enough that I spent a lot of hours trying to find out how clipboards work on the major OSes. That isn't easy incidentally. the Documentation is scattered, obtuse, fragmentary, misleading, and sometimes wrong. What I found out is that the Linux clipboard actually does work pretty well most of the time. I started noticing that the Windows clipboard has problems. It's actually not all that uncommon for Windows to quietly refuse to copy or to paste something unexpected or to make you jump through weird hoops to get stuff in or out of the clipboard.
I think that the issue is that we get used to a particular set of clipboard peculiarities in desktop environment and are frustrated when we encounter a different set of peculiarities.
All I can tell you is that I am now doing about 50% of my computer stuff in a Linux environment -- Slackware 12 and Xfce. I probably use the clipboard more than most folks, and I don't have any more Clipboard problems on the Linux machine than I do on the Windows machine at the other end of the desk. I have some gripes about many Linux applications (e.g.why can't Ark unpack tar.gz files that tar -zxf handles fine?), but the clipboard handling isn't one of them.
1. Copy something to clipboard.
2. Close the application.
3. Start another application
4. Paste. On Windows and Mac, it works. On Linux, nothing happens. ***
That's somewhat true. Windows and Mac have basic (single object per object type) clipboard management by default -- data is moved to a buffer when Cut or Copy are requested and are Pasted from the buffer when (if) a Paste is requested. Linux (and Java incidentally) don't. But you can run a clipboard manager like Klipper if you wish to get that behavior in Linux. KDE generally does that by default. I think GNOME has something similar although Klipper is said to work fine in a GNOME environment.. (glipper?) .
Some people find Klipper to be obnoxious. I'm not sure whether they have some set of problems I don't or just have a different world view. Anyway, they have the option of not using it or of using some other clipboard manager. In Windows (and I assume Mac) you apparently are going to get clipboard management whether you want it or not.
I've been hearing about how the US ATC system is three months away from total collapse for about four and a half decades. So far, it has not collapsed. That's not to say that it is in good shape. It probably isn't. But unlike many other infrastructure problems, this one is nothing new.
Fixing Air Traffic Control is apparently a very difficult job. Fixing it apparently is not just a matter of throwing money, manpower, and the miracle technology d'jour at it.
For Broadcom support, look into ndiswrapper. It'll take you an evening to get it working (if it works) and the spouse and household pets may well be hiding under the furniture with their paws/hands over their ears about half way through the process. But on good days, it'll allow a Windows driver to work on Linux with some Broadcom hardware that the Linux driver can't support. The problem incidentally is that ^#@$*! Broadcom won't tell anyone how their ^#@$*!ing cards work
The Linux clipboard is a perfectly conventional clipboard although it has some minor differences at the nuts and bolts level. (Unlike Windows and Mac, it doesn't move any data until a Paste is requested). Clipboards are an application level entity not an OS thing. All the OS does is allow the destination to talk to the source and vice versa. Unix in general and Linux in particular allow non-text objects to be moved via the clipboard just as easily as they do text objects. But the applications need to support that. Some do. Some Don't. Same is true for Windows.
You, can, for example, use the clipboard to copy images from a web site viewed in Konqueror to Kword. You can't copy the same image from the same web site viewed in Firefox, but that's because Firefox doesn't support it, not because Linux doesn't.
The only clipboard thing that is actually different in Linux is that the text mode clipboard for tty consoles is a different clipboard than the GUI clipboard (so that it can work if the GUI is dead or not started). But if you run a console application in a terminal program under the GUI, it uses the GUI clipboard so you can move text to and from console applications if you need to.
Since a tenfold reduction in the number of infected machines seems sort of optimistic, my guess would be that you might be closer to right than he is and that parts of the network might be hidden from him nowadays somehow. But what the hell do I know?
Why would anyone think that? Windows is Windows whether it's pirated or paid for. Is a drunk weaving through heavy traffic at 135kph any more or less of a menace if he's driving a stolen car rather than a car he "owns"?
Yes, Copps appears to be pure of heart and soul. But he is one of the two Democratic (minority) members of the FCC. He is in no way, shape, or form representative of the Bush administration. In fact, he has devoted most of his time on the FCC trying, as best he could, to balk the plans of ex Chairman Michael Powell to give away everything not nailed down and many things that are nailed down to the Telcos and other large corporations.