There's another weird aspect beyond that one: the EM radiation is released into a sealed (non-microwave-permeable) chamber. The QED thrusts ought to be canceled out by the photons reflecting off both ends of the chamber.
Given the thrusts in question, I'm not sure which is weirder, the presence of a net thrust at all given the chamber being sealed, or the roughly three orders of magnitude more thrust than a photon drive would have, but either one suggests that something very odd is happening here.
You can't even convince a minority of Slashdot commenters that you're right (or electable)... I don't think you even realize the order magnitude of the odds against you.
Well, the only way you can demote a voter is to disenfranchise them. So, by your view, the entire* voting citizenry of the world, almost certainly including both you and me (for all that I, and presumably you, try to avoid it) needs to be disenfranchised. Good luck with that!
* Possibly excluding a trivially small group of people who are somehow immune the vast number of biases that affect the decisions all of us make at the polls.
Um... because they vote? You seem completely unaware of what being a politician requires. If you aren't ashamed of the things society demands you be ashamed of, society won't vote for you (or support you in any other way).
"If you're going to be a jerk I'm going to ignore you" works fine in private life. It will get you absolutely nowhere in public.
Unfortunately for you and anybody else who has such a fantasyland world view, the concept of "meriting" being a politician is meaningless. In the real world, people who get to be real politicians don't give a fuck about merit. Anybody who does is so far from being electable they probably don't understand why nobody takes them seriously. If you don't pay attention to what society thinks of the things you have done (and been), then you aren't even going to going to be able to pretend to mount an effective campaign, and don't have a hope in hell of getting elected. The vast majority of people simply are not, come polling day, going to vote for somebody who doesn't care about the things that the voter in question thinks the candidate should care about, and few of those have much to do with the job. Saying "I don't care what society thinks of me" is simply another way of saying "I'm un-electable". It's hard to believe any adult could seriously contemplate entering politics while claiming to not care what the voters think... it's like you're missing the entire point of what it takes to be a politician.
Not that I mean to discourage your worldview; in an ideal society, it's exactly correct. Of course, in an ideal society, communism would probably work, too. We don't live in an ideal society, and putting your hounds over your ears, shutting your eyes, and saying "I don't care what you think" isn't going to change that. It would be interesting to see you, or somebody like you, put together the kind of time and money it takes to get anywhere in western politics today and hit the campaign trail. I expect you'd be wasting it all, and forgotten as nothing more than a footnote in whatever race you ran in, but I'd like to be wrong.
I've seen absolutely no evidence that society (at anything beyond the clan level, and often not even that) works the way you think it ought to.
GOG Galaxy doesn't require you log in to launch games. It isn't required for anything in any game at all, in fact. I'm not saying that GOG won't eventually change their tune, but their promise right now is that Galaxy will never be required for any gaming. You can download the games, install the games, update the games, and play the games without needing Galaxy. If you do have Galaxy, you can use it as a simple launcher without signing into your GOG account.
You do (legally) need a GOG account to download GOG games, which is suboptimal, but the installers and the games themselves are free of all DRM, including sign-in requirements.
I see you weren't one of the unfortunate people with a DX9-only NVidia laptop card when Vista came out. From the Beta 2 days through until around six months after release, there were two choices of driver for my GeForce GO 7600: 1) The "official" driver, which ran at about 40% of the framerate the card was capable of and lacked such basic features as "preserve aspect ratio" scaling. 2) The current "beta" or "unsupported" driver, which ran at full speed with full features but was so unstable it would crash every time I alt-tabbed out of a full-screen game, and most times that I changed resolution. At least it was WDDM, so a video driver crash usually just meant a few second of black screen instead of a BSOD, but on occasion it would crash *twice* within a few seconds, causing the kernel to give up on the user-mode driver and resulting in a BSOD.
Meanwhile, AMD (well, ATi) had a working, full-performance driver for my other laptop (also a DX9-only chip) six months before Vista released - a full year before NVidia got their act together, at least for the pre-8000-serieis GPUs - and only minor issues before that. Then I had a Win7 laptop with an NVidia card - a DX10-capable 9600 something-or-other - and it had its own plethora of driver issues.
While AMD graphics cards definitely run hotter than NVidia ones, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that NVidia drivers are superior. My home-built gaming desktop has been using AMD graphics for three years now, and has had fewer driver problems in that whole time than my roommate's machine has had since he switched to NVidia graphics a mere six months ago (also a homebuild, though he uses Intel CPUs).
That has what all to do with the comment you're replying to? The topic isn't racism in general, it's the KKK in particular and vigilante action / doxxing in general. Yes, the KKK are bad because they're racist, but this disclosure (even if 100% accurate and not leading to any false positives, which is respectively unlikely and laughably absurd) doesn't actually do anything about racism as a problem or viewpoint of the people in question.
In fact, it makes anti-racists look like hypocrites who don't care about collateral damage, which is... not the best way to go about convincing people of the righteousness of your cause.
Because, of course, the sexual attractiveness of the actress (and only actresses, of course) is clearly a relevant point - in fact, *the* relevant point - when determining what makes a good character, yes?
Stainless Steel Rat would be a very cool show, I think. Probably not worth making a movie out of, at least not initially, but well worth exploring. It would probably resonate somewhat with fans of Firefly, even if they'd never read or even heard of the books (jeez, those came out when my dad was younger than I am now, and I'm pushing 30). There'd be room for a little bit of tweaking the technology and otherwise modernizing the society a bit, but I don't think it would take much. They'd have to come up with a bunch more plot - the original series of stories could maybe be stretched into a single season, at best, but it has enough timeskips I think it would better be used as a framework for a multi-year season if they want to preserve it in any detail at all - but this is something that Hollywood can do. Not always do well, but sometimes they manage it.
While you have a point with flag #2, let me offer a counterpoint: with the show not being on broadcast, it competes less to be one of the top dogs in their lineup and can afford to target a more niche market, or to be bolder and riskier without putting an important timeslot on the line. It also may mean that the executives are less interested in meddling, since it's not as important to the overall success of the station. Finally, it provides a good opportunity for feedback from the fans, which may let the show be more guided by those who care about it rather than just those who see it as a bunch of statistics, demographics, and cash flows.
Your comment smells awfully sarcastic, but I think having a trans or non-binary-gendered captain (or at least prominent bridge officer) would be quite interesting. No need to make them human, if you fear that will upset too many transphobes; the message could be gotten across very nearly as effectively (and with more room to satirize and/or compare with Earth's history) with a non-human. Give the opportunity to present a different opinion on sex and gender issues. Have somebody else - or possibly several others, since there are often more than two viewpoints - act as a foil.
Only a blind zealot thinks their cause is *always* righteous, and Star Trek has a long and glorious history of exploring the harder questions via byplay between characters. I think the show could do a lot of good to settle that particular source of rot in our society without needing to focus on it constantly, just by having a general background "yeah, that person uses weird pronouns and it's a little weird how ey are attractive without quite being either masculine or feminine... but ey do eir job and it's no big deal". Some episodes would have the issue front and center, of course, but no need to shoehorn it in everywhere or make it the central plot topic.
I suspect this could be done without being overly distressing to any but the dyed-in-the-wool bigots who will never like any show true to the traditions of Star Trek at all.
Counterargument: by placing the show on their near-limitless Internet offering (streaming bandwidth at any given time is limited, options for what to send over that bandwidth is not, but options for what to *broadcast* at any given time *is* limited), they are freeing themselves of the *need* to produce a high-ratings, universally-appealing show. They can take more risks with an online show, focus on things that will appeal to a core audience even if it loses the more casual viewers, monitor the appeal of (and even solicit feedback on) each episode in the show quite directly, and generally let a narrow but highly-appreciative audience guide the show more than is possible for something that needs to be as mass-market as possible.
Not that they necessarily *will* do any such thing, of course. Doing it right has a bunch of challenges, starting with creating something that the core audience will find appealing (and remember, a lot of today's viewers weren't even alive during the golden years; to many, Star Trek means the Abrams movies, Enterprise, and "that old series" Voyager). If they stick to the rebootverse but make a play for the old-school viewers, the shows will likely seem slower and more cerebral than the fans of Abrams' movies expect. If they stick to the rebootverse and keep its style, they may create a following among those who thought Into Darkness was anything other than an utter failure (second only *barely* to Nemesis, IMO) but they will entirely lose sight of the point of calling it Star Trek. If they go back to the prime universe or to before the timelines forked (something between ENT and TOS, timeline-wise? The Romulan war?) they might have a better shot at interesting the older viewers, but will likely miss the crowd (and it is a substantial crowd) to whom the Abrams movies formed the core of their interest in Star Trek. If they do something *really* different - like setting the entire series primarily in [the/a] mirror universe - they get a reasonably clean slate but have an uphill battle to convince the existing fans of the franchise that their show is worthy.
Even if they pick a good setting and a good premise, and stick (as close as any show ever does) to some canon that will come with an automatic base, they risk the same things any show does: the desire to make more money by broadening appeal and making the show more of a crowd-pleaser at the expense of ]the interesting questions and dilemmas that make Star Trek actually something special. The fanbase will be divided, too; even without the rebootverse and the multi-generational aspects, if you keep to the sort of social progressivism that defined the earlier shows you'll have some people crying "the SJWs ruined everything" and if you don't you'll have people claiming it's only superficially Star Trek at all. Another DS9-esque show could be quite appealing to people who liked the mixture of diplomatic and moral issues plus darker and more violent times, but would risk losing those who feel that the core of Star Trek is in the exploration; another TNG might feel too idealistic and out of touch to today's viewers, etc. Following what "the fans" want is far from a guaranteed success; the fans are far from a unified bunch.
Nonetheless, I think that going with online distribution likely means that the writers will have a lot more rein to produce interesting, rather than inoffensive, scripts. I'm cautiously hopeful.
I sometimes get the feeling that graphene is like the discovery of semiconductors (or possibly of semiconductor doping). It's got revolutionary applications, making the formerly impossible (or at least impractical) practical, and the formerly expensive affordable. On the other hand, at this point in its lifetime it gets used far more in the research lab than in the manufacturing plant, and for all the times it appears in the scientific literature it is slow (or at least, it feels slow) to appear in consumer products. I suspect it will get there, and become ubiquitous, though. Once a "killer application" of the material is discovered - something that is sufficiently economically valuable that development teams will throw huge resources behind it and a new area of competition across multiple consumer product R&D teams arises - it will produce a change - probably the next big change in electronics. Think about how lithium-ion batteries revolutionized portable electronics and miniature aircraft (and are in the process of revolutionizing electric cars).
Meh, I'd take what my company currently charges for me time (which is only something like a quarter that much per *day*, depending on the job). Of course, I would only be *available* if said current company didn't already have me on job (which they pay me a salary for, regardless of whether I'm on a job that particular week) so it would make a lot more sense for the previous employer to just hire my company and request me in particular, but not everybody works for a consulting agency. Also, "sense" seems to be a bit in short supply for anybody who thinks a clause like that is a good idea.
Oh, I don't know. A good lawyer could possibly argue that, if they ever actually tried to enforce that clause on you, they were saying they hadn't *actually* let you go, so you were not only entitled to pay for the time in question, but also to back pay for the entire intervening period. That + legal fees (which are commonly awarded to the winner in some parts of the world, and occasionally even in the US) might mean getting paid a year (or more) worth of salary for a few months of legal battle. Not fun, but better than only losing the few months (with nothing to show for it).
Whoa, flashback. Thanks for that. I was... probably around 7 the last time I seriously used XTree? It was a great program for the time - a superb file manager, and I really liked the option to have it unload itself from memory when launching another program (read: game) - but unless I *had* to operate over a text console it really wasn't my preferred environment. I used GEOS/GeoWorks for a few years in the early 90s, though still sometimes went back to XTree for heavier lifting in file operations (read: putting games onto, or pulling them off of, floppy disks). File Manager in WFW 3.11 pretty much replaced XTree for me, though I suspect I still had it installed on my first Win-capable box.
Yep. There was actually a reverse-Wine project called Linux Binaries on Windows that basically strapped an ELF program loader to the POSIX subsystem. It never really got anywhere - partially because it was one person's hobby project, not a major long-running effort like Wine, and partially because a lot fewer people cared - but it was a cool idea. In theory, the same thing could be done with Cygwin, but it would be (even) less performant.
You do realize that, between Windows Crypto API (released with NT 4.0, in 1996) and OpenSSL (first released in 1998), the Windows crypto API is the older, right? Granted, SSLeay (the precursor to OpenSSL) was started in 1995, so it predates the NT4.0 release, but it's hard to say when development *started* on CAPI. In either case, you're talking about very long-existing and well-established crypto code.
Um... I'm going to give you the benefit of a doubt that you meant to say
Only one instance of a DLL can be loaded in a given process address space, so if two Cygwin libraries used by the same application rely on different versions of cygwin1.dll, one will fail
.
What you wrote initially is completely false. Windows is entirely capable of loading two DLLs with the same name but different paths at the same time, across different processes.
NT was designed from the beginning to support essentially a union of the system calls from a bunch of OS standards, which it implemented as "subsystems". Win32 is the *default* subsystem, but it's still a subsystem; calling the Win32 "system call" CreateFile goes into a user-mode library that translates it into the actual NT syscall NtCreateFile. NtCreateFile also implements all the functionality needed for POSIX open. Similarly, NtCreateProcess has several options never used by the Win32 call CreateProcess, but that facilitate syscalls such as POSIX fork.
I'm very skeptical that the POSIX subsystem "can't be added without breaking way too many other things" since it was available in Win8.0 (NT 6.2) and removed in Win8.1 (NT 6.3), and there's really not *that* big a difference under the covers between those versions. Maybe MS took the opportunity of Win10 to make a bunch more changes that they couldn't make without breaking POSIX compatibility, but I'm skeptical.
While what you say was roughly true (though MS themselves used it internally to do things like host Hotmail for years) for the early versions, Interix (the name of the runtime environment - or pseudo-OS - that ran in the POSIX subsystem) versions 3.5 (XP) through 6.1 (Win7) were all quite usable. They added features that made it a lot more capable than most people seem to realize. I'm not claiming it didn't still have limitations (mostly in the forms of APIs that are common on modern *nix-like systems being missing) or bugs (though the 6.1 release quashed most of the worst of those), but it was quite usable and in many ways (speed, user account management, file system conventions, etc.) better than Cygwin.
The most obviously missing thing, in terms of day-to-day usability, was software package support; you could build your own (after getting and building all the dependencies) but it wasn't usually very pretty. There were a number of attempts to solve this, of which the two most notable were InteropSystems/SUACommunity (a now basically defunct site; Microsoft was funding it and stopped when Win8 deprecated the Unix subsystem) and NetBSD pkgsrc. SUACommunity offered a fairly-usable collection of pre-built binaries (including useful things like newer compilers than MS provided and compatibility shims to implement functions missing from the official Interix SDK), while pkgsrc offered a *huge* collection of software (comparable to a typical Linux distro) in source form, with scripts to build and install it in Interix.
I used Interix, with great success, for years. I used it on school projects (faster and needing less HD footprint than dual-booting or virtualizing Linux on Windows), I used it (bash, from SUACommunity) as my everyday shell, I used its tools (everything from sed to git) for everyday operations (even piping output between Win32 and POSIX programs) both at home and at work, I used its openssh server to remotely access my Windows box (and of course used its client too, including for X forwarding, though I had to use the Win32 "Xming" server), and I used it to compile programs that would only build on *nix but that I wanted to run on Windows. It was one of the first things I installed on any new Windows machine (helped that I had MSDN access so I could get the supported Windows versions).
I was really pissed when Microsoft deprecated that subsystem. It was still usable for a while, of course, but with the SUACommunity site losing funding, its repo became dangerously outdated and then went offline entirely. I wasn't willing to run code (especially stuff like git and ssh/sshd) with known vulnerabilities, wasn't interested in maintaining the packages from source, and knew I'd eventually want to move to Windows versions that didn't support Interix at all.
MSYS helps provide the stuff I need, like git. Cygwin has gotten better than it used to be, though (last I checked) it still fails on some things that Interix could handle (like case-insensitive file system behavior and sudo). PowerShell is, once you learn it, actually preferable to a Unix shell for most purposes. Hardware is now cheap/powerful enough that virtualizing is no longer a significant burden on most machines. In the end, though, I still find myself really missing the easy power and interoperability of Interix.
Well, WP does have pretty strict limits on how much OEMs and carriers are allowed to screw with the devices, or at least did for WP7.x and 8.x. Not sure what the policies for W10M will be yet. Among those limitations is a requirement that carrier-installed apps be removable (though in practice the apps may simply be UI for carrier stuff that is included in the firmware and stays when the app is removed, like T-Mobile's WiFi Calling), and that the primary shell UI not be modified. WP app compatibility is also much better between devices than Android app compatibility, though some very-low-end phones are still unable to run some of the most demanding games. As for updates, there's the Preview for Developers program (get OS updates the moment that MS releases them, without waiting for OEM and carrier approval) and the Windows Insider program (get pre-release OS updates to help test), both of which are free and are available for all phones (though Windows Insider builds aren't always available for all phones initially). Those factors avoid a lot of the Android fragmentation.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another weird aspect beyond that one: the EM radiation is released into a sealed (non-microwave-permeable) chamber. The QED thrusts ought to be canceled out by the photons reflecting off both ends of the chamber.
Given the thrusts in question, I'm not sure which is weirder, the presence of a net thrust at all given the chamber being sealed, or the roughly three orders of magnitude more thrust than a photon drive would have, but either one suggests that something very odd is happening here.
You can't even convince a minority of Slashdot commenters that you're right (or electable)... I don't think you even realize the order magnitude of the odds against you.
Well, the only way you can demote a voter is to disenfranchise them. So, by your view, the entire* voting citizenry of the world, almost certainly including both you and me (for all that I, and presumably you, try to avoid it) needs to be disenfranchised. Good luck with that!
* Possibly excluding a trivially small group of people who are somehow immune the vast number of biases that affect the decisions all of us make at the polls.
Um... because they vote? You seem completely unaware of what being a politician requires. If you aren't ashamed of the things society demands you be ashamed of, society won't vote for you (or support you in any other way).
"If you're going to be a jerk I'm going to ignore you" works fine in private life. It will get you absolutely nowhere in public.
Unfortunately for you and anybody else who has such a fantasyland world view, the concept of "meriting" being a politician is meaningless. In the real world, people who get to be real politicians don't give a fuck about merit. Anybody who does is so far from being electable they probably don't understand why nobody takes them seriously. If you don't pay attention to what society thinks of the things you have done (and been), then you aren't even going to going to be able to pretend to mount an effective campaign, and don't have a hope in hell of getting elected. The vast majority of people simply are not, come polling day, going to vote for somebody who doesn't care about the things that the voter in question thinks the candidate should care about, and few of those have much to do with the job. Saying "I don't care what society thinks of me" is simply another way of saying "I'm un-electable". It's hard to believe any adult could seriously contemplate entering politics while claiming to not care what the voters think... it's like you're missing the entire point of what it takes to be a politician.
Not that I mean to discourage your worldview; in an ideal society, it's exactly correct. Of course, in an ideal society, communism would probably work, too. We don't live in an ideal society, and putting your hounds over your ears, shutting your eyes, and saying "I don't care what you think" isn't going to change that. It would be interesting to see you, or somebody like you, put together the kind of time and money it takes to get anywhere in western politics today and hit the campaign trail. I expect you'd be wasting it all, and forgotten as nothing more than a footnote in whatever race you ran in, but I'd like to be wrong.
I've seen absolutely no evidence that society (at anything beyond the clan level, and often not even that) works the way you think it ought to.
GOG Galaxy doesn't require you log in to launch games. It isn't required for anything in any game at all, in fact. I'm not saying that GOG won't eventually change their tune, but their promise right now is that Galaxy will never be required for any gaming. You can download the games, install the games, update the games, and play the games without needing Galaxy. If you do have Galaxy, you can use it as a simple launcher without signing into your GOG account.
You do (legally) need a GOG account to download GOG games, which is suboptimal, but the installers and the games themselves are free of all DRM, including sign-in requirements.
I see you weren't one of the unfortunate people with a DX9-only NVidia laptop card when Vista came out. From the Beta 2 days through until around six months after release, there were two choices of driver for my GeForce GO 7600:
1) The "official" driver, which ran at about 40% of the framerate the card was capable of and lacked such basic features as "preserve aspect ratio" scaling.
2) The current "beta" or "unsupported" driver, which ran at full speed with full features but was so unstable it would crash every time I alt-tabbed out of a full-screen game, and most times that I changed resolution. At least it was WDDM, so a video driver crash usually just meant a few second of black screen instead of a BSOD, but on occasion it would crash *twice* within a few seconds, causing the kernel to give up on the user-mode driver and resulting in a BSOD.
Meanwhile, AMD (well, ATi) had a working, full-performance driver for my other laptop (also a DX9-only chip) six months before Vista released - a full year before NVidia got their act together, at least for the pre-8000-serieis GPUs - and only minor issues before that. Then I had a Win7 laptop with an NVidia card - a DX10-capable 9600 something-or-other - and it had its own plethora of driver issues.
While AMD graphics cards definitely run hotter than NVidia ones, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that NVidia drivers are superior. My home-built gaming desktop has been using AMD graphics for three years now, and has had fewer driver problems in that whole time than my roommate's machine has had since he switched to NVidia graphics a mere six months ago (also a homebuild, though he uses Intel CPUs).
That has what all to do with the comment you're replying to? The topic isn't racism in general, it's the KKK in particular and vigilante action / doxxing in general. Yes, the KKK are bad because they're racist, but this disclosure (even if 100% accurate and not leading to any false positives, which is respectively unlikely and laughably absurd) doesn't actually do anything about racism as a problem or viewpoint of the people in question.
In fact, it makes anti-racists look like hypocrites who don't care about collateral damage, which is... not the best way to go about convincing people of the righteousness of your cause.
Because, of course, the sexual attractiveness of the actress (and only actresses, of course) is clearly a relevant point - in fact, *the* relevant point - when determining what makes a good character, yes?
Bloody hell you're pathetic.
Stainless Steel Rat would be a very cool show, I think. Probably not worth making a movie out of, at least not initially, but well worth exploring. It would probably resonate somewhat with fans of Firefly, even if they'd never read or even heard of the books (jeez, those came out when my dad was younger than I am now, and I'm pushing 30). There'd be room for a little bit of tweaking the technology and otherwise modernizing the society a bit, but I don't think it would take much. They'd have to come up with a bunch more plot - the original series of stories could maybe be stretched into a single season, at best, but it has enough timeskips I think it would better be used as a framework for a multi-year season if they want to preserve it in any detail at all - but this is something that Hollywood can do. Not always do well, but sometimes they manage it.
While you have a point with flag #2, let me offer a counterpoint: with the show not being on broadcast, it competes less to be one of the top dogs in their lineup and can afford to target a more niche market, or to be bolder and riskier without putting an important timeslot on the line. It also may mean that the executives are less interested in meddling, since it's not as important to the overall success of the station. Finally, it provides a good opportunity for feedback from the fans, which may let the show be more guided by those who care about it rather than just those who see it as a bunch of statistics, demographics, and cash flows.
Your comment smells awfully sarcastic, but I think having a trans or non-binary-gendered captain (or at least prominent bridge officer) would be quite interesting. No need to make them human, if you fear that will upset too many transphobes; the message could be gotten across very nearly as effectively (and with more room to satirize and/or compare with Earth's history) with a non-human. Give the opportunity to present a different opinion on sex and gender issues. Have somebody else - or possibly several others, since there are often more than two viewpoints - act as a foil.
Only a blind zealot thinks their cause is *always* righteous, and Star Trek has a long and glorious history of exploring the harder questions via byplay between characters. I think the show could do a lot of good to settle that particular source of rot in our society without needing to focus on it constantly, just by having a general background "yeah, that person uses weird pronouns and it's a little weird how ey are attractive without quite being either masculine or feminine... but ey do eir job and it's no big deal". Some episodes would have the issue front and center, of course, but no need to shoehorn it in everywhere or make it the central plot topic.
I suspect this could be done without being overly distressing to any but the dyed-in-the-wool bigots who will never like any show true to the traditions of Star Trek at all.
Counterargument: by placing the show on their near-limitless Internet offering (streaming bandwidth at any given time is limited, options for what to send over that bandwidth is not, but options for what to *broadcast* at any given time *is* limited), they are freeing themselves of the *need* to produce a high-ratings, universally-appealing show. They can take more risks with an online show, focus on things that will appeal to a core audience even if it loses the more casual viewers, monitor the appeal of (and even solicit feedback on) each episode in the show quite directly, and generally let a narrow but highly-appreciative audience guide the show more than is possible for something that needs to be as mass-market as possible.
Not that they necessarily *will* do any such thing, of course. Doing it right has a bunch of challenges, starting with creating something that the core audience will find appealing (and remember, a lot of today's viewers weren't even alive during the golden years; to many, Star Trek means the Abrams movies, Enterprise, and "that old series" Voyager). If they stick to the rebootverse but make a play for the old-school viewers, the shows will likely seem slower and more cerebral than the fans of Abrams' movies expect. If they stick to the rebootverse and keep its style, they may create a following among those who thought Into Darkness was anything other than an utter failure (second only *barely* to Nemesis, IMO) but they will entirely lose sight of the point of calling it Star Trek. If they go back to the prime universe or to before the timelines forked (something between ENT and TOS, timeline-wise? The Romulan war?) they might have a better shot at interesting the older viewers, but will likely miss the crowd (and it is a substantial crowd) to whom the Abrams movies formed the core of their interest in Star Trek. If they do something *really* different - like setting the entire series primarily in [the/a] mirror universe - they get a reasonably clean slate but have an uphill battle to convince the existing fans of the franchise that their show is worthy.
Even if they pick a good setting and a good premise, and stick (as close as any show ever does) to some canon that will come with an automatic base, they risk the same things any show does: the desire to make more money by broadening appeal and making the show more of a crowd-pleaser at the expense of ]the interesting questions and dilemmas that make Star Trek actually something special. The fanbase will be divided, too; even without the rebootverse and the multi-generational aspects, if you keep to the sort of social progressivism that defined the earlier shows you'll have some people crying "the SJWs ruined everything" and if you don't you'll have people claiming it's only superficially Star Trek at all. Another DS9-esque show could be quite appealing to people who liked the mixture of diplomatic and moral issues plus darker and more violent times, but would risk losing those who feel that the core of Star Trek is in the exploration; another TNG might feel too idealistic and out of touch to today's viewers, etc. Following what "the fans" want is far from a guaranteed success; the fans are far from a unified bunch.
Nonetheless, I think that going with online distribution likely means that the writers will have a lot more rein to produce interesting, rather than inoffensive, scripts. I'm cautiously hopeful.
I sometimes get the feeling that graphene is like the discovery of semiconductors (or possibly of semiconductor doping). It's got revolutionary applications, making the formerly impossible (or at least impractical) practical, and the formerly expensive affordable. On the other hand, at this point in its lifetime it gets used far more in the research lab than in the manufacturing plant, and for all the times it appears in the scientific literature it is slow (or at least, it feels slow) to appear in consumer products. I suspect it will get there, and become ubiquitous, though. Once a "killer application" of the material is discovered - something that is sufficiently economically valuable that development teams will throw huge resources behind it and a new area of competition across multiple consumer product R&D teams arises - it will produce a change - probably the next big change in electronics. Think about how lithium-ion batteries revolutionized portable electronics and miniature aircraft (and are in the process of revolutionizing electric cars).
He got fired... for letting her carry on, "testing" thousands more samples than her colleagues each year, for nine years.
So, on the one hand, at least he (and several other people above her) got the axe.
On the other hand, NINE YEARS?!? What the HELL, people?
Meh, I'd take what my company currently charges for me time (which is only something like a quarter that much per *day*, depending on the job). Of course, I would only be *available* if said current company didn't already have me on job (which they pay me a salary for, regardless of whether I'm on a job that particular week) so it would make a lot more sense for the previous employer to just hire my company and request me in particular, but not everybody works for a consulting agency. Also, "sense" seems to be a bit in short supply for anybody who thinks a clause like that is a good idea.
Oh, I don't know. A good lawyer could possibly argue that, if they ever actually tried to enforce that clause on you, they were saying they hadn't *actually* let you go, so you were not only entitled to pay for the time in question, but also to back pay for the entire intervening period. That + legal fees (which are commonly awarded to the winner in some parts of the world, and occasionally even in the US) might mean getting paid a year (or more) worth of salary for a few months of legal battle. Not fun, but better than only losing the few months (with nothing to show for it).
Whoa, flashback. Thanks for that. I was... probably around 7 the last time I seriously used XTree? It was a great program for the time - a superb file manager, and I really liked the option to have it unload itself from memory when launching another program (read: game) - but unless I *had* to operate over a text console it really wasn't my preferred environment. I used GEOS/GeoWorks for a few years in the early 90s, though still sometimes went back to XTree for heavier lifting in file operations (read: putting games onto, or pulling them off of, floppy disks). File Manager in WFW 3.11 pretty much replaced XTree for me, though I suspect I still had it installed on my first Win-capable box.
Yep. There was actually a reverse-Wine project called Linux Binaries on Windows that basically strapped an ELF program loader to the POSIX subsystem. It never really got anywhere - partially because it was one person's hobby project, not a major long-running effort like Wine, and partially because a lot fewer people cared - but it was a cool idea. In theory, the same thing could be done with Cygwin, but it would be (even) less performant.
You do realize that, between Windows Crypto API (released with NT 4.0, in 1996) and OpenSSL (first released in 1998), the Windows crypto API is the older, right? Granted, SSLeay (the precursor to OpenSSL) was started in 1995, so it predates the NT4.0 release, but it's hard to say when development *started* on CAPI. In either case, you're talking about very long-existing and well-established crypto code.
Um... I'm going to give you the benefit of a doubt that you meant to say
.
What you wrote initially is completely false. Windows is entirely capable of loading two DLLs with the same name but different paths at the same time, across different processes.
NT was designed from the beginning to support essentially a union of the system calls from a bunch of OS standards, which it implemented as "subsystems". Win32 is the *default* subsystem, but it's still a subsystem; calling the Win32 "system call" CreateFile goes into a user-mode library that translates it into the actual NT syscall NtCreateFile. NtCreateFile also implements all the functionality needed for POSIX open. Similarly, NtCreateProcess has several options never used by the Win32 call CreateProcess, but that facilitate syscalls such as POSIX fork.
I'm very skeptical that the POSIX subsystem "can't be added without breaking way too many other things" since it was available in Win8.0 (NT 6.2) and removed in Win8.1 (NT 6.3), and there's really not *that* big a difference under the covers between those versions. Maybe MS took the opportunity of Win10 to make a bunch more changes that they couldn't make without breaking POSIX compatibility, but I'm skeptical.
While what you say was roughly true (though MS themselves used it internally to do things like host Hotmail for years) for the early versions, Interix (the name of the runtime environment - or pseudo-OS - that ran in the POSIX subsystem) versions 3.5 (XP) through 6.1 (Win7) were all quite usable. They added features that made it a lot more capable than most people seem to realize. I'm not claiming it didn't still have limitations (mostly in the forms of APIs that are common on modern *nix-like systems being missing) or bugs (though the 6.1 release quashed most of the worst of those), but it was quite usable and in many ways (speed, user account management, file system conventions, etc.) better than Cygwin.
The most obviously missing thing, in terms of day-to-day usability, was software package support; you could build your own (after getting and building all the dependencies) but it wasn't usually very pretty. There were a number of attempts to solve this, of which the two most notable were InteropSystems/SUACommunity (a now basically defunct site; Microsoft was funding it and stopped when Win8 deprecated the Unix subsystem) and NetBSD pkgsrc. SUACommunity offered a fairly-usable collection of pre-built binaries (including useful things like newer compilers than MS provided and compatibility shims to implement functions missing from the official Interix SDK), while pkgsrc offered a *huge* collection of software (comparable to a typical Linux distro) in source form, with scripts to build and install it in Interix.
I used Interix, with great success, for years. I used it on school projects (faster and needing less HD footprint than dual-booting or virtualizing Linux on Windows), I used it (bash, from SUACommunity) as my everyday shell, I used its tools (everything from sed to git) for everyday operations (even piping output between Win32 and POSIX programs) both at home and at work, I used its openssh server to remotely access my Windows box (and of course used its client too, including for X forwarding, though I had to use the Win32 "Xming" server), and I used it to compile programs that would only build on *nix but that I wanted to run on Windows. It was one of the first things I installed on any new Windows machine (helped that I had MSDN access so I could get the supported Windows versions).
I was really pissed when Microsoft deprecated that subsystem. It was still usable for a while, of course, but with the SUACommunity site losing funding, its repo became dangerously outdated and then went offline entirely. I wasn't willing to run code (especially stuff like git and ssh/sshd) with known vulnerabilities, wasn't interested in maintaining the packages from source, and knew I'd eventually want to move to Windows versions that didn't support Interix at all.
MSYS helps provide the stuff I need, like git. Cygwin has gotten better than it used to be, though (last I checked) it still fails on some things that Interix could handle (like case-insensitive file system behavior and sudo). PowerShell is, once you learn it, actually preferable to a Unix shell for most purposes. Hardware is now cheap/powerful enough that virtualizing is no longer a significant burden on most machines. In the end, though, I still find myself really missing the easy power and interoperability of Interix.
Well, WP does have pretty strict limits on how much OEMs and carriers are allowed to screw with the devices, or at least did for WP7.x and 8.x. Not sure what the policies for W10M will be yet. Among those limitations is a requirement that carrier-installed apps be removable (though in practice the apps may simply be UI for carrier stuff that is included in the firmware and stays when the app is removed, like T-Mobile's WiFi Calling), and that the primary shell UI not be modified. WP app compatibility is also much better between devices than Android app compatibility, though some very-low-end phones are still unable to run some of the most demanding games. As for updates, there's the Preview for Developers program (get OS updates the moment that MS releases them, without waiting for OEM and carrier approval) and the Windows Insider program (get pre-release OS updates to help test), both of which are free and are available for all phones (though Windows Insider builds aren't always available for all phones initially). Those factors avoid a lot of the Android fragmentation.
Sorry, yes, should have been more clear. You can disable Flash entirely, but there's no way to do per-site or per-applet blocking.