As the monkey once said, Developers Developers Developers! It's Microsoft trying to get people used to using Microsoft tools. If you use Visual Studio, you can use its built-in Xamarin integration to develop your Android and iOS apps. Once you're doing that, you really might as well also publish for the Windows app store - it's minimal additional effort and nets you at least a few percent more of the market - and that's what Microsoft really needs people doing.
The whole "Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile is a pretty good OS, runs on some nice hardware, etc... but it has no apps so I went with Android / iOS" thing has been discussed nigh unto death, both on Slashdot and across the broader web. Microsoft has, for years, been searching for a way to get developers to publish for the Windows [Phone] store. If they can get people using the tools and frameworks, and make it *really* easy to then target Windows as well, they can perhaps finally solve the chicken-and-egg problem: Windows phones don't have many apps, so they have low market share, so there aren't many users to buy apps, so most developers don't publish apps for them, so there aren't many apps...
If Microsoft can break that loop, they have a chance in the mobile market again. This is one (of several) approaches that they are taking to try and achieve this.
Disclaimer: Not a MS employee, and the above is based on personal observations and guesswork, not on published statements or insider information.
Terrifying... because needing to re-write code is a good thing? Because people should be using languages like C++ instead? Because it would mean Microsoft has, in effect, achieved what Sun and Oracle never *quite* pulled off (though right now they're still probably closer)? Because C# should be less useful than Java, even though it's a more-capable language? Because.NET includes Visual Basic.NET? (OK, that last one is a bit scary...)
I suppose some Slashdotters find the thought of MS succeeding at anything terrifying. On the other hand, they open-sourced all of.NET first. This isn't exactly your daddy's Microsoft anymore.
You know, you sounded reasonable until you started suggesting that hand sanitizers (which are mostly just alcohol) and vaccines (which have an extremely low rate of causing sickness) than by exposure to contaminated water in a foreign country (especially without travel vaccinations) will cause.
After that, you sound like the kind of loony that anybody with a serious respect for their own health should ignore, or even take do the opposite of your recommendations. You completely blew your credibility.
Your absurd lack of understanding about biology - and the fact that you obviously haven't put much effort into trying to understand it - is a fine example of the very point you are attempting to argue against. Thank you for demonstrating so clearly the danger of thinking you have the answer, rather than actually studying the topic in question and continuing to research it until your theory lets you make predictions consistent with future findings.
A small sampling of the ways in which you are completely wrong: 1) Mutations can be passed down from either parent; it is not necessary that the other parent have some "compatible" mutation. 2) Mutations do not need to be related to the sex chromosomes in order to be passed along, they merely need to be present in the DNA of the gametes. 3) Speciation (that is, one or more mutations which make a creature reproductively incompatible with its population of origin) does not need to occur in one generation; it's entirely possible for an intermediate species to be compatible with two species that are not compatible with each other, and that intermediate species often die out some time after breeding populations of the divergent (and better-adapted) species have become established.
For somebody who doesn't appear to even understand the most basic concepts of Mandelian inheritance, you sure seem to *think* you know a lot about evolution, though. Perhaps your science teachers and/or classroom materials were selected more for ideological compliance than for accurate scientific knowledge?
If religious people minded their own business, rather than attempting to shape the world around them in ways compatible with their mythology, election days would be a very different affair.
Taken to extremes, "everyone minding their own business" is nothing but anarchy. People promoting the common good often requires punishing those who defect from it; this is simple game theory. Promoting irrational views harms society.
Besides, religious people - quite notably including Christians - aren't just bad at "minding their own business", their religions usually explicitly instruct them to not do so. Missionaries and other evangelists are the most obvious examples, but religions also tend to wield much real-world societal pressure and are rarely content with (for example) merely excommunicating those who do not agree with the religion, its laws, and its leaders. Some religions instruct that gays are to be killed, and even when people choose to not strictly follow their religious teachings on this topic they often nonetheless bring harm to those who have never harmed them.
What's stopping you from just minding your own business and coexisting peacefully with your neighbors who may or may not be as "informed" as you'd prefer?
Many of them vote. Some of them control grants for scientific research. A few of them control the education of millions of children.
That's without even getting away from the scientific and into the social issues. For example, some of them would attempt to attempt to harm some of my family members, for the sin of having sex with others of the same gender. Some would publicly and stridently question my morality, and therefore limit my ability to do things like run for public office, simply because I do not believe their mythology is true and do not believe their God is the ultimate source of morality. Some (admittedly, not Americans, but definitely Christians) would have let a family friend die, rather than staff the airport on a Sunday to allow an emergency medical evacuation (the plane had to circle until after midnight; it was lucky they had the fuel and that it was still able to get her to treatment in time).
Evolution simply means that populations experience genetic drift, eventually becoming reproductively incompatible with populations whose genetics changed in different ways. We call that breaking point "speciation". Evolution does not, by itself, define a motivating factor to this genetic drift, nor explain which species survive and which die out. Evolution is compatible with many possible motivating factors; for example, it could be guided by an intelligent being deliberately introducing genetic changes in a population. Humanity has played this role with some of the species in the world today.
Natural selection explains the motivating factor for most of the evolution that has occurred throughout natural history. It is the reason there are so many plants with flowers and seeds, both of which were once non-existent, while the myriad other plant species have been largely eliminated. Natural selection has led to a number of increasingly intelligent and adaptable primates, most of which were outcompeted by their successors, leading at last to humans (who threaten to out-compete the entire world sometimes). Natural selection has even responded to artificial pressures, leading to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. However, natural selection doesn't actually require evolution; it would work (in the sense of species flourishing or dying off) even if all species were static and didn't experience any genetic drift, but a new species with randomly-selected attributes appeared in the world every 100 years.
Now that many of the Christian faiths have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into something vaguely resembling modern understandings of the natural (i.e. real) world... we are now supposed to treat Christianity as though it is not an impairment on the rationality of the world? It will not take long until the next example of a scientific truth that offends religious sensibilities starts the whole thing over again. In the meantime, there are plenty of other things which are not technically evolution but are certainly science, which substantial parts of Christianity still reject. Geology, paleontology, anthropology, and astronomy all conflict with young-Earth creationism, for example, which is certainly still a (troublingly-widespread) part of many peoples' Christianity.
Also, the fact that you think evolution is such a "miniscule" thing speaks volumes about your ignorance of the wider fields of science. Evolution influences everything from epidemiology to sociology. If you reject evolution you will have a much harder time coming to the correct conclusions in a huge range of both theoretical and practical sciences. It's not of much use in software development or semiconductor design, but there is far more to the world than that.
Large swathes of modern Christianity still teaches that gays are evil, than atheists are evil (if you think that your belief in a divine moral code is the only thing that makes you moral - an argument I've heard from quite a few Christians - then that says far worse things about your morality than about mine), that Wiccans are evil, that contraception is evil, that sexual promiscuity is evil, that divorce is always wrong, that men have divinely-granted authority over women, and many other ills of society.
Just because evolution is the current major battleground in the centuries-long war of Christianity vs. scientific truth does not mean that Christianity is not still responsible for many other harmful lies in society today. You may personally disagree with many of them, but they are an undeniable part of Christianity. There is much to hate in Christianity.
There is no need for a "society of atheists" to run anything; atheism isn't even a religion, much less an organized religion. Nonetheless, many charities are fun by non-religious people. The most effective charities, in terms of lives saved or improved per dollar donated, are largely run by non-religious people; I would go so far as to say that a refusal to let their beliefs and emotional desires interfere with the evidence of what actually works is part of why they are so effective. Some of the largest organizations that could arguably be called charitable - the democratic socialist governments of much of western Europe, which provide a far better standard of food and medical care than all of your soup kitchens and free surgery ships - are largely controlled by the non-religious.
Windows 10 Mobile does still exist (well, it's technically pre-release right now, but it's easy to get on Windows phones and some even come with it). It's a solid OS that provides a degree of balance between Android and iOS on openness (easy sideloading - easier than Android these days, even - and more permissive than Apple on what an app is allowed to do). There are even new phones with the OS still being announced; it's not as if it's been abandoned.
Its main problem, of course, is application availability. Microsoft (and W10M users) is hoping that developers will embrace the Windows 10 Universal app platform, but Microsoft may ultimately need to complete the work they began to get Android apps working on the platform, which they demonstrated partial support for a few months ago and then removed without further ado.
In no particular order, and off the top of my head:
Win10 uses less RAM and boots faster than Win7. * Win10 has a built-in "reset the OS" feature that basically does the "clean re-install" process for you, like factory-reset on a phone (Win7 doesn't have this). * Win10 has a pretty good built-in email client, easily an alternative to Outlook if you don't need full MS Exchange support (it has some Exchange support). Win10 supports sandboxed apps seamlessly with "classic" desktop apps, which largely fixes Win8's "Metro apps suck" problem. Win10 has virtual desktop support built in. Win10 has greatly-improved multi-monitor support, such as showing the taskbar across monitors or not, and controlling which taskbars icons appear on. * Win10 has significantly improved on the "Aero Snap" feature (snap to corners, move the edge between two apps with one drag, etc.). Win10 has native USB3 support. * Win10 has native support for mounting ISO files. * Win10 supports using a Microsoft account to sign in, so all your PCs get the same OS settings, wallpapers, automatic sign-in to Skype and OneDrive, etc. * Win10's notification center lets you see alerts that you missed or ignored. Win10 finally has a decent terminal emulator (conhost.exe) that supports things like line-based select and horizontal resize (with re-flow, where relevant). Win10 has Cortana, which automatically does stuff like track package shipping numbers and tell you when to leave to get to events in your calendar.
That's far from a complete list, but I didn't consult any lists anybody else put together either. That's all just stuff I actually use. I also omitted everything that has to do with touch, focusing exclusively on stuff useful with a keyboard and mouse. Of course, I also didn't list the negatives (and there are some) but there are definitely many things in Win10 that are "truly better than Windows 7".
* denotes changes that were introduced in Win8.x and are still in Win10.
Well, maybe not using official third-party SDKs, but it's certainly not impossible. OpenVPN relies on the TUN/TAP driver, which I'm not sure anybody has bothered to port to WP8.1/W10M yet, but on a jailbroken phone (yes, they exist) you can do it.
There is also an official API for TLS-based VPNs, which may be usable for OpenVPN, though you'd need to re-write the client to use those APIs instead of using TUN/TAP like it usually does. They only officially allow a few limited partners to use those APIs (they aren't in the public SDK), but in practice you can certainly write an app that uses them.
Whether you could get it published in the store is another question, of course. At least W10M (finally) has dead-easy sideloading right out of the box.
The Lumia 950 (and 950 XL) are the new flagships of the Windows Phone 8^W^W10 Mobile family, and hardware-wise, they're great. Unfortunately, they were released with a very premature version of W10M. While it's technically branded as "Windows 10 Mobile Preview", you don't usually see that "preview" part; they don't make it obvious. They probably should have. The OS has improved dramatically in the last couple months, from complete shit in November to "only occasionally completely fails to do stuff like launch the music player" today, but there are damn good reasons why Microsoft hasn't started pushing out W10M upgrades to existing devices (unless the user specifically opts in to the preview program).
Unfortunately, in their rush to get the new Lumia flagships out the door in time for the holiday shopping season, Microsoft inadvertently exposed people (who probably had to be nagged for months before upgrading to Win10 on their PCs) to some very beta-quality software. Bad enough at any time, but they did it on expensive, brand-new devices that people rely on for a lot of their daily live these days.
It's given W10M so much reputational harm that I wouldn't be surprised if they alter the branding slightly when they decide to make the W10M release "official". The current builds, which I'd call RC quality, are definitely getting there... but anybody who bought a Lumia 950 [XL] before January and didn't already know exactly what they were getting into software-wise probably got a very unpleasant shock that soured them on the whole device family.
You actually can; there was a jailbreak for RT 8.0 within a few months of release. RT8.1 took much longer - Microsoft for some reason put a ton of effort into anti-jailbreaking for 8.1, lest somebody do something useful with the device - but that too has been defeated. The jailbreaks let you run arbitrary Win32 or.NET programs (the Win32 ones need recompiling for ARM, but Visual Studio can do that; the.NET ones work as-is). People quickly ported everything from Vim and Notepad++ to Python and Node.JS (not that I could tell you why...) over to RT.
A few custom programs for RT also came along, most notably a x86 compatibility layer that uses dynamic recompilation and shims that thunk Win32 calls to the ARM libraries.
For what it's worth, some WP8.x phones can now be fully rooted as well, even after upgrade to W10M.
Well, we get to mock an idiot criminal (which, to be fair, is the most common kind) who used somebody else's intentionally-backdoored code in an attempt to extort money out of people. That's some high-grade stupid right there...
Don't know of any case in the US where the only minor involved was 17 and 11 months, but in a broader sense it appears that it does happen.
@xiando's explanation of the laws is essentially correct; although age of consent varies by state (not nation) in the USA, sexual pictures of anybody under 18, even if voluntarily generated and only shared privately with other minors who are already in a (legal!) relationship with the minor pictured, are legally child porn and have led to child porn prosecutions and even convictions.
Ah, if *most* jurisdictions have provisions, that means it's not a problem? For example, feel free to peruse the relevant WA state legal code and point out the relevant provision (spoiler: the ACLU doesn't seem to think it exists). In any case, 18 US code 2251, a law against child porn is a federal law and - while I believe it only covers inter-state or foreign transmission - contains no such provisions. Fortunately, minors are definitely never in a different state from their SOs, and if they somehow were, would never request or send naughty pictures, right? Not that I know of any cases of the feds prosecuting such a case of private communications between consenting teens, but if they did the law would appear to be on their side.
While states certainly have some de facto control over what cases they will prosecute, in many cases they have certainly attempted to convict sexting teens as child pornographers, and sometimes they have succeeded. The situation does seem less outrageous than I believed it to be, especially after the first few cases to make the news generated enough outrage at this travesty, but it's still far from perfect.
http://www.cnet.com/news/polic... - 17 and 16 year old in Florida prosecuted, found guilty, conviction upheld on appeal. http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... - 15 year old arrested on felony charge (apparently got put on no-cell-phone-or-unsupervised-Internet probation, charges probably dropped afterward) http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... - 7 teens charged with felonies, at least 6 plea bargained to misdemeanors (better than it could have been, still very wrong) http://laist.com/2013/05/17/re... - Key quote: "... anyone who sends obscene images of persons under the age of 18, whether it’s of themselves or someone else, are violating child pornography laws,” San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept. https://www.washingtonpost.com... - Cops photographing a 17-year-old's junk to try and enter the pictures as evidence. They eventually backed down, after massive public ridicule, on the plan to have him given an injection to make him erect before photographing him *again*. http://pilotonline.com/news/go... - Provisions, you say? Nope, can't even downgrade it to a misdemeanor, gotta stay a felony!
Isn't H2, even liquefied, a lot less dense than RP-1 or even (liquid) methane? Lower density means more volume for the same mass. Sufficiently lower density that even with H2's increased efficiency (i.e. you need less mass of it) you need more volume.
While that's irrelevant in space, it's very relevant for getting *to* space. More volume means you need a bigger rocket, with more air resistance, more metal (increasing both materials and manufacturing labor costs), more windage if you try to land it, and so on.
I thought the argument was that if you want it, you're creating a demand for it, which means it will be created, which means children will be abused (or, you know, will take pictures to give to their boyfriend, who then posts them on 4chan after they break up, whatever). I hadn't heard "victimizes those displayed" before. It's a better argument for banning such media if you take the premise (that viewing causes victimization) as true, but that seems a shakier premise than that demand creates a market...
Yes, a high school couple (at least one of whom is 17) sexting each other is definitely causing harm to innocent victims! After all, they are manufacturing, possessing, and distributing sexually explicit images of minors. Won't somebody think of the children?!?
The child porn laws are broken, very badly. There's no room in them for taking the actual situation into consideration. That's what happens when you laws that are written in absolutes, when the world is more complex than righteously angry legislators (and the fools who vote for them) can bother to take into consideration.
People making claims like "always causes harm to an innocent victim" without actually paying any attention to what qualifies as "childporn" in this country are part of the problem. Yes, this means you.
Rockets cost a lot of money, but spacecraft aren't cheap, either. Dragon, Cygnus, and Dream Chaser (assuming it ever goes anywhere) are major R&D costs, plus a bunch of complicated engineering to manufacture.
As for launchers, Dream Chaser may currently be slated to fly on Atlas V, but Falcon Heavy (or something else) could end up taking that role. By the time Dream Chaser is operational, Atlas V may well no longer be the best option in its weight class.
Also, for something that needs a pretty heavy booster, the Dream Chaser cargo capacity is miserable. I suppose that's not surprising, given the weight cost of its chosen landing mechanism, but it does make me wonder *why* they chose that mechanism.
IE11 is stull supported, for legacy sites that need things which Edge doesn't provide (like ActiveX, or any of the other ~95% of IE's features that Edge doesn't have). It's mostly used by businesses, but anybody can use it, even on Win10.
Of course, lots of people still aren't on Win10. You can't install Edge on Win7, or Win8.x. So no, IE11 is definitely not going away yet.
I really wish they would just let IE use Edge's rendering engine. They could even call it... Edge mode! Fall back to Trident for legacy pages, but use EdgeHTML on everything else; sites that are coded to cutting-edge standards would work, legacy sites (including business-internal ones) would work, and nobody would use that abomination of an overgrown phone browser that Microsoft tried to make the default on Win10 PCs.
Interestingly enough, Win8 Enterprise doesn't actually get the automatic update to Win8.1. You can do an in-place upgrade using install media, but you can't get it from Windows Update, or from the Store, or anything like that. Nor does it nag you to upgrade.
I *think* C# (and possibly other.NET languages; I wasn't using any others at the time) was the first language to have universal support for optionals (technically called "nullables" and the syntax is just a shorthand for System.Nullable, but it works like you'd expect), but I agree with your statement about their usefulness. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up databases; the.NET libraries for getting database values use nullables for those types which aren't inherently nullable in.NET, so that you are forced to be aware that a database record's Boolean or integer or date or whatever may simply be missing. It works very nicely.
True, but if launches get cheap enough that this risk becomes significant, somebody (probably NASA) will probably start looking at ways to clean up space. Send up a small spacecraft (unmanned, of course) with a couple of big catcher nets and the rest of it engine and propellant. Match velocities with particularly risky junk (or at least, get close to matching) and overtake it slowly, so the stress on the catcher isn't too great and you aren't creating more debris. Collect as much as you safely can on each flight, then de-orbit with your captured wreckage (burning up in the atmosphere being the easy way to get rid of stuff in space).
Or maybe you'd launch multiple catchers, each of which targets a single piece of pile of junk and de-orbits it. The point is, we can do this. The costs are high enough to be effectively prohibitive right now, of course, but that's almost entirely the launch costs; the catcher spacecraft themselves can be very simple and only need to operate for a few days at most. Get the launches cheap enough - and for super-cheap payloads, they can use the nearly-end-of-life, most-times-reused boosters, so they should be cheap indeed - and you can clean up the dangerous stuff enough for future launches to be safe.
Slashdot Mirror
As the monkey once said, Developers Developers Developers! It's Microsoft trying to get people used to using Microsoft tools. If you use Visual Studio, you can use its built-in Xamarin integration to develop your Android and iOS apps. Once you're doing that, you really might as well also publish for the Windows app store - it's minimal additional effort and nets you at least a few percent more of the market - and that's what Microsoft really needs people doing.
The whole "Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile is a pretty good OS, runs on some nice hardware, etc... but it has no apps so I went with Android / iOS" thing has been discussed nigh unto death, both on Slashdot and across the broader web. Microsoft has, for years, been searching for a way to get developers to publish for the Windows [Phone] store. If they can get people using the tools and frameworks, and make it *really* easy to then target Windows as well, they can perhaps finally solve the chicken-and-egg problem: Windows phones don't have many apps, so they have low market share, so there aren't many users to buy apps, so most developers don't publish apps for them, so there aren't many apps...
If Microsoft can break that loop, they have a chance in the mobile market again. This is one (of several) approaches that they are taking to try and achieve this.
Disclaimer: Not a MS employee, and the above is based on personal observations and guesswork, not on published statements or insider information.
Terrifying... because needing to re-write code is a good thing? Because people should be using languages like C++ instead? Because it would mean Microsoft has, in effect, achieved what Sun and Oracle never *quite* pulled off (though right now they're still probably closer)? Because C# should be less useful than Java, even though it's a more-capable language? Because .NET includes Visual Basic .NET? (OK, that last one is a bit scary...)
I suppose some Slashdotters find the thought of MS succeeding at anything terrifying. On the other hand, they open-sourced all of .NET first. This isn't exactly your daddy's Microsoft anymore.
You know, you sounded reasonable until you started suggesting that hand sanitizers (which are mostly just alcohol) and vaccines (which have an extremely low rate of causing sickness) than by exposure to contaminated water in a foreign country (especially without travel vaccinations) will cause.
After that, you sound like the kind of loony that anybody with a serious respect for their own health should ignore, or even take do the opposite of your recommendations. You completely blew your credibility.
Your absurd lack of understanding about biology - and the fact that you obviously haven't put much effort into trying to understand it - is a fine example of the very point you are attempting to argue against. Thank you for demonstrating so clearly the danger of thinking you have the answer, rather than actually studying the topic in question and continuing to research it until your theory lets you make predictions consistent with future findings.
A small sampling of the ways in which you are completely wrong:
1) Mutations can be passed down from either parent; it is not necessary that the other parent have some "compatible" mutation.
2) Mutations do not need to be related to the sex chromosomes in order to be passed along, they merely need to be present in the DNA of the gametes.
3) Speciation (that is, one or more mutations which make a creature reproductively incompatible with its population of origin) does not need to occur in one generation; it's entirely possible for an intermediate species to be compatible with two species that are not compatible with each other, and that intermediate species often die out some time after breeding populations of the divergent (and better-adapted) species have become established.
For somebody who doesn't appear to even understand the most basic concepts of Mandelian inheritance, you sure seem to *think* you know a lot about evolution, though. Perhaps your science teachers and/or classroom materials were selected more for ideological compliance than for accurate scientific knowledge?
If religious people minded their own business, rather than attempting to shape the world around them in ways compatible with their mythology, election days would be a very different affair.
Taken to extremes, "everyone minding their own business" is nothing but anarchy. People promoting the common good often requires punishing those who defect from it; this is simple game theory. Promoting irrational views harms society.
Besides, religious people - quite notably including Christians - aren't just bad at "minding their own business", their religions usually explicitly instruct them to not do so. Missionaries and other evangelists are the most obvious examples, but religions also tend to wield much real-world societal pressure and are rarely content with (for example) merely excommunicating those who do not agree with the religion, its laws, and its leaders. Some religions instruct that gays are to be killed, and even when people choose to not strictly follow their religious teachings on this topic they often nonetheless bring harm to those who have never harmed them.
Many of them vote. Some of them control grants for scientific research. A few of them control the education of millions of children.
That's without even getting away from the scientific and into the social issues. For example, some of them would attempt to attempt to harm some of my family members, for the sin of having sex with others of the same gender. Some would publicly and stridently question my morality, and therefore limit my ability to do things like run for public office, simply because I do not believe their mythology is true and do not believe their God is the ultimate source of morality. Some (admittedly, not Americans, but definitely Christians) would have let a family friend die, rather than staff the airport on a Sunday to allow an emergency medical evacuation (the plane had to circle until after midnight; it was lucky they had the fuel and that it was still able to get her to treatment in time).
Evolution simply means that populations experience genetic drift, eventually becoming reproductively incompatible with populations whose genetics changed in different ways. We call that breaking point "speciation". Evolution does not, by itself, define a motivating factor to this genetic drift, nor explain which species survive and which die out. Evolution is compatible with many possible motivating factors; for example, it could be guided by an intelligent being deliberately introducing genetic changes in a population. Humanity has played this role with some of the species in the world today.
Natural selection explains the motivating factor for most of the evolution that has occurred throughout natural history. It is the reason there are so many plants with flowers and seeds, both of which were once non-existent, while the myriad other plant species have been largely eliminated. Natural selection has led to a number of increasingly intelligent and adaptable primates, most of which were outcompeted by their successors, leading at last to humans (who threaten to out-compete the entire world sometimes). Natural selection has even responded to artificial pressures, leading to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. However, natural selection doesn't actually require evolution; it would work (in the sense of species flourishing or dying off) even if all species were static and didn't experience any genetic drift, but a new species with randomly-selected attributes appeared in the world every 100 years.
Now that many of the Christian faiths have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into something vaguely resembling modern understandings of the natural (i.e. real) world... we are now supposed to treat Christianity as though it is not an impairment on the rationality of the world? It will not take long until the next example of a scientific truth that offends religious sensibilities starts the whole thing over again. In the meantime, there are plenty of other things which are not technically evolution but are certainly science, which substantial parts of Christianity still reject. Geology, paleontology, anthropology, and astronomy all conflict with young-Earth creationism, for example, which is certainly still a (troublingly-widespread) part of many peoples' Christianity.
Also, the fact that you think evolution is such a "miniscule" thing speaks volumes about your ignorance of the wider fields of science. Evolution influences everything from epidemiology to sociology. If you reject evolution you will have a much harder time coming to the correct conclusions in a huge range of both theoretical and practical sciences. It's not of much use in software development or semiconductor design, but there is far more to the world than that.
Large swathes of modern Christianity still teaches that gays are evil, than atheists are evil (if you think that your belief in a divine moral code is the only thing that makes you moral - an argument I've heard from quite a few Christians - then that says far worse things about your morality than about mine), that Wiccans are evil, that contraception is evil, that sexual promiscuity is evil, that divorce is always wrong, that men have divinely-granted authority over women, and many other ills of society.
Just because evolution is the current major battleground in the centuries-long war of Christianity vs. scientific truth does not mean that Christianity is not still responsible for many other harmful lies in society today. You may personally disagree with many of them, but they are an undeniable part of Christianity. There is much to hate in Christianity.
There is no need for a "society of atheists" to run anything; atheism isn't even a religion, much less an organized religion. Nonetheless, many charities are fun by non-religious people. The most effective charities, in terms of lives saved or improved per dollar donated, are largely run by non-religious people; I would go so far as to say that a refusal to let their beliefs and emotional desires interfere with the evidence of what actually works is part of why they are so effective. Some of the largest organizations that could arguably be called charitable - the democratic socialist governments of much of western Europe, which provide a far better standard of food and medical care than all of your soup kitchens and free surgery ships - are largely controlled by the non-religious.
Windows 10 Mobile does still exist (well, it's technically pre-release right now, but it's easy to get on Windows phones and some even come with it). It's a solid OS that provides a degree of balance between Android and iOS on openness (easy sideloading - easier than Android these days, even - and more permissive than Apple on what an app is allowed to do). There are even new phones with the OS still being announced; it's not as if it's been abandoned.
Its main problem, of course, is application availability. Microsoft (and W10M users) is hoping that developers will embrace the Windows 10 Universal app platform, but Microsoft may ultimately need to complete the work they began to get Android apps working on the platform, which they demonstrated partial support for a few months ago and then removed without further ado.
In no particular order, and off the top of my head:
Win10 uses less RAM and boots faster than Win7. *
Win10 has a built-in "reset the OS" feature that basically does the "clean re-install" process for you, like factory-reset on a phone (Win7 doesn't have this). *
Win10 has a pretty good built-in email client, easily an alternative to Outlook if you don't need full MS Exchange support (it has some Exchange support).
Win10 supports sandboxed apps seamlessly with "classic" desktop apps, which largely fixes Win8's "Metro apps suck" problem.
Win10 has virtual desktop support built in.
Win10 has greatly-improved multi-monitor support, such as showing the taskbar across monitors or not, and controlling which taskbars icons appear on. *
Win10 has significantly improved on the "Aero Snap" feature (snap to corners, move the edge between two apps with one drag, etc.).
Win10 has native USB3 support. *
Win10 has native support for mounting ISO files. *
Win10 supports using a Microsoft account to sign in, so all your PCs get the same OS settings, wallpapers, automatic sign-in to Skype and OneDrive, etc. *
Win10's notification center lets you see alerts that you missed or ignored.
Win10 finally has a decent terminal emulator (conhost.exe) that supports things like line-based select and horizontal resize (with re-flow, where relevant).
Win10 has Cortana, which automatically does stuff like track package shipping numbers and tell you when to leave to get to events in your calendar.
That's far from a complete list, but I didn't consult any lists anybody else put together either. That's all just stuff I actually use. I also omitted everything that has to do with touch, focusing exclusively on stuff useful with a keyboard and mouse. Of course, I also didn't list the negatives (and there are some) but there are definitely many things in Win10 that are "truly better than Windows 7".
* denotes changes that were introduced in Win8.x and are still in Win10.
Well, maybe not using official third-party SDKs, but it's certainly not impossible. OpenVPN relies on the TUN/TAP driver, which I'm not sure anybody has bothered to port to WP8.1/W10M yet, but on a jailbroken phone (yes, they exist) you can do it.
There is also an official API for TLS-based VPNs, which may be usable for OpenVPN, though you'd need to re-write the client to use those APIs instead of using TUN/TAP like it usually does. They only officially allow a few limited partners to use those APIs (they aren't in the public SDK), but in practice you can certainly write an app that uses them.
Whether you could get it published in the store is another question, of course. At least W10M (finally) has dead-easy sideloading right out of the box.
The Lumia 950 (and 950 XL) are the new flagships of the Windows Phone 8^W^W10 Mobile family, and hardware-wise, they're great. Unfortunately, they were released with a very premature version of W10M. While it's technically branded as "Windows 10 Mobile Preview", you don't usually see that "preview" part; they don't make it obvious. They probably should have. The OS has improved dramatically in the last couple months, from complete shit in November to "only occasionally completely fails to do stuff like launch the music player" today, but there are damn good reasons why Microsoft hasn't started pushing out W10M upgrades to existing devices (unless the user specifically opts in to the preview program).
Unfortunately, in their rush to get the new Lumia flagships out the door in time for the holiday shopping season, Microsoft inadvertently exposed people (who probably had to be nagged for months before upgrading to Win10 on their PCs) to some very beta-quality software. Bad enough at any time, but they did it on expensive, brand-new devices that people rely on for a lot of their daily live these days.
It's given W10M so much reputational harm that I wouldn't be surprised if they alter the branding slightly when they decide to make the W10M release "official". The current builds, which I'd call RC quality, are definitely getting there... but anybody who bought a Lumia 950 [XL] before January and didn't already know exactly what they were getting into software-wise probably got a very unpleasant shock that soured them on the whole device family.
You actually can; there was a jailbreak for RT 8.0 within a few months of release. RT8.1 took much longer - Microsoft for some reason put a ton of effort into anti-jailbreaking for 8.1, lest somebody do something useful with the device - but that too has been defeated. The jailbreaks let you run arbitrary Win32 or .NET programs (the Win32 ones need recompiling for ARM, but Visual Studio can do that; the .NET ones work as-is). People quickly ported everything from Vim and Notepad++ to Python and Node.JS (not that I could tell you why...) over to RT.
A few custom programs for RT also came along, most notably a x86 compatibility layer that uses dynamic recompilation and shims that thunk Win32 calls to the ARM libraries.
For what it's worth, some WP8.x phones can now be fully rooted as well, even after upgrade to W10M.
Well, we get to mock an idiot criminal (which, to be fair, is the most common kind) who used somebody else's intentionally-backdoored code in an attempt to extort money out of people. That's some high-grade stupid right there...
Don't know of any case in the US where the only minor involved was 17 and 11 months, but in a broader sense it appears that it does happen.
@xiando's explanation of the laws is essentially correct; although age of consent varies by state (not nation) in the USA, sexual pictures of anybody under 18, even if voluntarily generated and only shared privately with other minors who are already in a (legal!) relationship with the minor pictured, are legally child porn and have led to child porn prosecutions and even convictions.
Ah, if *most* jurisdictions have provisions, that means it's not a problem? For example, feel free to peruse the relevant WA state legal code and point out the relevant provision (spoiler: the ACLU doesn't seem to think it exists). In any case, 18 US code 2251, a law against child porn is a federal law and - while I believe it only covers inter-state or foreign transmission - contains no such provisions. Fortunately, minors are definitely never in a different state from their SOs, and if they somehow were, would never request or send naughty pictures, right? Not that I know of any cases of the feds prosecuting such a case of private communications between consenting teens, but if they did the law would appear to be on their side.
While states certainly have some de facto control over what cases they will prosecute, in many cases they have certainly attempted to convict sexting teens as child pornographers, and sometimes they have succeeded. The situation does seem less outrageous than I believed it to be, especially after the first few cases to make the news generated enough outrage at this travesty, but it's still far from perfect.
http://www.cnet.com/news/polic... - 17 and 16 year old in Florida prosecuted, found guilty, conviction upheld on appeal.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... - 15 year old arrested on felony charge (apparently got put on no-cell-phone-or-unsupervised-Internet probation, charges probably dropped afterward)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... - 7 teens charged with felonies, at least 6 plea bargained to misdemeanors (better than it could have been, still very wrong)
http://laist.com/2013/05/17/re... - Key quote: "... anyone who sends obscene images of persons under the age of 18, whether it’s of themselves or someone else, are violating child pornography laws,” San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... - Cops photographing a 17-year-old's junk to try and enter the pictures as evidence. They eventually backed down, after massive public ridicule, on the plan to have him given an injection to make him erect before photographing him *again*.
http://pilotonline.com/news/go... - Provisions, you say? Nope, can't even downgrade it to a misdemeanor, gotta stay a felony!
Sorry for doing the research...
Isn't H2, even liquefied, a lot less dense than RP-1 or even (liquid) methane? Lower density means more volume for the same mass. Sufficiently lower density that even with H2's increased efficiency (i.e. you need less mass of it) you need more volume.
While that's irrelevant in space, it's very relevant for getting *to* space. More volume means you need a bigger rocket, with more air resistance, more metal (increasing both materials and manufacturing labor costs), more windage if you try to land it, and so on.
I thought the argument was that if you want it, you're creating a demand for it, which means it will be created, which means children will be abused (or, you know, will take pictures to give to their boyfriend, who then posts them on 4chan after they break up, whatever). I hadn't heard "victimizes those displayed" before. It's a better argument for banning such media if you take the premise (that viewing causes victimization) as true, but that seems a shakier premise than that demand creates a market...
Yes, a high school couple (at least one of whom is 17) sexting each other is definitely causing harm to innocent victims! After all, they are manufacturing, possessing, and distributing sexually explicit images of minors. Won't somebody think of the children?!?
The child porn laws are broken, very badly. There's no room in them for taking the actual situation into consideration. That's what happens when you laws that are written in absolutes, when the world is more complex than righteously angry legislators (and the fools who vote for them) can bother to take into consideration.
People making claims like "always causes harm to an innocent victim" without actually paying any attention to what qualifies as "childporn" in this country are part of the problem. Yes, this means you.
Probably not RT, since that was discontinued, but quite possibly Win10 IoT.
Rockets cost a lot of money, but spacecraft aren't cheap, either. Dragon, Cygnus, and Dream Chaser (assuming it ever goes anywhere) are major R&D costs, plus a bunch of complicated engineering to manufacture.
As for launchers, Dream Chaser may currently be slated to fly on Atlas V, but Falcon Heavy (or something else) could end up taking that role. By the time Dream Chaser is operational, Atlas V may well no longer be the best option in its weight class.
Also, for something that needs a pretty heavy booster, the Dream Chaser cargo capacity is miserable. I suppose that's not surprising, given the weight cost of its chosen landing mechanism, but it does make me wonder *why* they chose that mechanism.
IE11 is stull supported, for legacy sites that need things which Edge doesn't provide (like ActiveX, or any of the other ~95% of IE's features that Edge doesn't have). It's mostly used by businesses, but anybody can use it, even on Win10.
Of course, lots of people still aren't on Win10. You can't install Edge on Win7, or Win8.x. So no, IE11 is definitely not going away yet.
I really wish they would just let IE use Edge's rendering engine. They could even call it... Edge mode! Fall back to Trident for legacy pages, but use EdgeHTML on everything else; sites that are coded to cutting-edge standards would work, legacy sites (including business-internal ones) would work, and nobody would use that abomination of an overgrown phone browser that Microsoft tried to make the default on Win10 PCs.
Interestingly enough, Win8 Enterprise doesn't actually get the automatic update to Win8.1. You can do an in-place upgrade using install media, but you can't get it from Windows Update, or from the Store, or anything like that. Nor does it nag you to upgrade.
I *think* C# (and possibly other .NET languages; I wasn't using any others at the time) was the first language to have universal support for optionals (technically called "nullables" and the syntax is just a shorthand for System.Nullable, but it works like you'd expect), but I agree with your statement about their usefulness. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up databases; the .NET libraries for getting database values use nullables for those types which aren't inherently nullable in .NET, so that you are forced to be aware that a database record's Boolean or integer or date or whatever may simply be missing. It works very nicely.
True, but if launches get cheap enough that this risk becomes significant, somebody (probably NASA) will probably start looking at ways to clean up space. Send up a small spacecraft (unmanned, of course) with a couple of big catcher nets and the rest of it engine and propellant. Match velocities with particularly risky junk (or at least, get close to matching) and overtake it slowly, so the stress on the catcher isn't too great and you aren't creating more debris. Collect as much as you safely can on each flight, then de-orbit with your captured wreckage (burning up in the atmosphere being the easy way to get rid of stuff in space).
Or maybe you'd launch multiple catchers, each of which targets a single piece of pile of junk and de-orbits it. The point is, we can do this. The costs are high enough to be effectively prohibitive right now, of course, but that's almost entirely the launch costs; the catcher spacecraft themselves can be very simple and only need to operate for a few days at most. Get the launches cheap enough - and for super-cheap payloads, they can use the nearly-end-of-life, most-times-reused boosters, so they should be cheap indeed - and you can clean up the dangerous stuff enough for future launches to be safe.