For a flight that doesn't reach orbit and stay there with the environment in 0G for at least a few orbits, I wouldn't pay anything. Heck, I won't pay a commercial airline to fly because the ratio of inconvenience to convenience+enjoyment is too high between the (id|patr)iot act's enforced paranoia and the seating designed by one-legged, one-armed engineers. Now an oceangoing cruise liner, that's something else again. I loves me a nice cruise. It's even worth going first class, which it definitely isn't in a commercial airliner.

However, for a flight that *does* go to orbit and stays a few turns, and doesn't require a spacesuit, and for which I could have a very private cubby with a view for two for the orbital duration, I might part with as much as five thousand for two seats, just for those few hours. They'd have to let me take my camera, though.

Which means I'm not going to get to go. :) Unless they build a space elevator or several in my lifetime. And apparently the materials science there is either too difficult, or nearly so. Oh well. There's always Firefly reruns.

That's, to me, a new example of the problems with systemd.

So far the only one that's sounded serious is the "won't fix" reply to a report of logfile corruption. But there have been a humongous number of complaints about different small problems.

To me systemd sounds like a bad idea. I don't really know. The problem appears that it's going to be hard to avoid, and with so many small problems, it's quite likely that there are some serious one.

A question in my mind is "What problem does it fix?" The only answer I've heard is that you can boot faster. This doesn't impress me, as I rarely boot my computer, and when I do I often want many of the steps to happen slowly enough that I can tell what is going on.

My suspicion is that systemd is a very bad direction to go. I'm remembering that mono was also sponsered by Red Hat. And even if I grant the best of intentions, big chunks of code tend to break more often and be harder to fix.

My interpretation is fully deterministic in the same sense that their was. Probabilistic is meant in the "sum over histories" sense that multiple histories yield the same present, so you can't reasonably pick just one and say "That's what came earlier", but you instead have a spread of probabilities of linkage. I interpret that probability as the strength (weight) of the link. From each past the probabilities to all the futures it links to sum to 1. Similarly from each present the probabilities of all the pasts it links to sum to 1.

The difference between out models is that EWG, at least in the presentation that I read, only considered forwards (toward the future) links. I see no reason to believe that this is a correct interpretation. (I'm not sure about chronology, but I believe the EWG model was created prior to Feynman's Sum over Histories approach being derived. This difference is probably the result of that.)

2- Safety concerns: with baby and/or young children I felt I would rather not add RF generator inside my home. I know we are immersed in RF from everywhere, making some a few meters away is another level. I didn't want to add that. Just in case.

Ham radio operators -- of which I am one -- spend their lives immersed in more RF at various frequencies from kHz to GHz than you can possibly compare to unless you work at a broadcast radio or television station. And hams are one of the oldest demographics in the USA. So many 80 and 90 year olds, it's really kind of amusing. RF is not your enemy at wifi router and cellphone levels. Not even close.

I've been pretty much bathed in RF for the last forty years. I'm very healthy other than a few allergies I've had since I was a kid. Of course, I'm active, too -- but if RF at these levels was a problem, I'd *have* a problem by now.

Baloo, at least, needs to be sufficiently visible that you can turn it off. It eats up an incredible amount of CPU time to, for me, no benefit. KWallet has it's points, but it's not THAT great. In my use case sticky-notes would be quite reasonable for passwords. Just don't make them accessible over the net (i.e., to other programs running on the same machine). I'm not worried about shoulder surfers. As for Akonadi...I had no idea what it was until I just now looked at the web page, and I still don't know if it is of *ANY* value to me. But if it doesn't take up CPU time when I'm not using it, I guess it doesn't do much harm.

OTOH, I find Gnome3 unusable. Gnome2 was decent...I preferred it to KDE4, but then I preferred KDE3 to Gnome2. xfce would be a good system, but when I tried it, it got confused about which window was on top of which (more specifically, windows tended to get stuck under the menubar at the top of the screen). It's usable, but with several misfeatures, so currently I'm using KDE4. I'm also wondering about razorQT, but I don't want my window manager to be flakey, and the last I heard razorQT was in very late alpha. I've also heard about LXQT recently. Don't know what it's status is, but it isn't in the system repository, and this makes me dubious.

There were (and are) people who like MSWind. Agreed.

MSWind became dominant because the people who made the purchasing decisions trusted IBM. Not because people who used the computers liked it. Most of them didn't. Now most of them do, because they've become habituated, and the thought of putting in that much effort again terrifies them.

If you want to pick a company that became dominant because people liked it, pick Apple. I, personally, don't use or want to use Apple, but those who do use it like it. (When I used it, I liked it...but they made a change in the EULA that I found unacceptable. Now I no longer know it, though I don't actively dislike it the way I do MSWind.)

IIUC, this is not a survey of the *level* of sexual assault, but of the rate. And if the sample questions quoted above are typical, then I'm surprised that it isn't higher.

OTOH, the questions that were listed above (in the discussion about poorly worded questions) don't distinguish between a bit of uncomfortable humor and forcible rape. One presumes that actual criminal activity is rare, but this isn't evidence of that.

That said, in groups that are predominantly male and relatively isolated from external contact, one might expect that undesireably agressive sexual behavior would be relatively common. The real question to me is how moderate is the degree of undesireably agressive sexual behavior. (The rate would be interested *IF* coupled with the degree.)

... like the Russian populace becoming too educated to put up with him any more.

Ah. You're talking about an unsupported, undocumented trick that appears to be an exploit of a bug. Have you thought about the potential consequences when/if Apple writes this functionality out of the system?

So, no, this won't do.

Under IOS, apps aren't kept in an ordered system collection the way they are in Android. If they're on the device at all, they're somewhere on a page or within a folder, either where you put them, or where the system put them (always on a page) if you have not interfered. And finding them, if you don't know where they are, is a matter of typing the name into the search.

But -- just like Android -- you can have a lot of pages, a lot of folders, and you may or may not remember where a particular app or shortcut is located in your own personal folder/page setup. But then there is IOS search, which can find anything.

Under either OS, if you can't remember where they are, and you can't remember the name, it's down to looking around until you find them.

One of the arguments for folder organization is that if you even know the type of app it is -- for instance, if it is a photography app -- then if you're consistent at install time, you can look just in there, and it will be there, leaving you a lot fewer apps to check through until you find it.

But IOS has low limits on how many apps can be in a folder, and it doesn't allow subfolders, which seriously impacts how well you can really use them for that kind of organization. In my case, IOS's folder paradigm is insufficient to my needs. Android isn't significantly better, either.

I believe that there are theoretical designs for computers (using reversible computation) that can compute without using any energy in computation. What I'm not sure about is that there's anyway to retrieve the results of the computation. (I've also got no idea of the speed of the computation. It might depend on random motions for all I can remember.)

Whatever, that's merely a theoretical quibble about your point. But then your point itself was a theoretical quibble.

The real weakness of 256 bit keys is poor implementation (of something). And you can't know that everything is properly implemented.

Weeel....sort of. Depends on what you mean. I looked at a lot of (well, several) computers before the Apple ][ was released. They were all interesting, but not quite interesting enough. Then the Apple ][+ was released with a Pascal card, and I bought it. A lot of other people made about the same choice at about the same time. That was when the PC bacame notable. A few years later IBM released the IBM PC with no significant advantage over the current Apple product...but that was when it boomed.

This is sort of like Apple releasing the Apple ][. Not the ][+. OTOH, Dremel is a much bigger name now than Apple was then. Perhaps that will be a big enough kick...but my expectation is that there will turn out to be the need for much fine-tuning of the design. Then Dremel will release a greatly improved model. And then someone who's the darling of a business segment will release a different, probably incompatible, model with some useful differences, and many user drawbacks...but it will sell into businesses, and Dremel will be edged out of the market...though not completely, and they may continue to dominate among home users and certain niche segments.
But THAT will be the boom.

Makerbot, etc. is just like the S-100 computers that predated Apple.

N.B.: This is all reasoning from analogy, and therefore not to be trusted. But it's still a good guess.

You're assuming that the universe is deterministic, or at least that the past is. I don't believe that to be correct. I believe the past to be as probabilistic as the future. Granted, it's probably that every backwards simulation will end up at the big bang, but in between now and then it's an uncollapsed wave function.

OTOH, I also believe in the Everett-Graham-Wheeler interpretation of quantum mechanics...but not in quite the same way that they did, as I'm considering branching to be essentially symmetric between the past and the future, so that not only does the present lead to multiple futures, but there are multiple presents connected to multiple pasts in a probabilistically branching net in both directions. Each present has multiple pasts, and each past has multiple presents (futures?). In a connected lattice that (perhaps) teminates in one single instant in the past where all the lattice links join (called the big bang) and less probably terminates in on single instant in the future where all lattice links join (called the big crunch). The big crunch, however, doesn't seem to be extremely plausible at the moment, given current knowledge and theories. And neither join is required by the theory.

FWIW, as far as I can tell this model is consistent with everything known about physics, but I'm neither a cosmologist nor a quantum mechanic.

Now that's just not true. Brainfuck is worse than PHP. So, for that matter, is whitespace.

Yeah, but are they ever going to fix the filters they broke with one of those updates? Doesn't appear so. If there were a decent and maintained email program I'd switch to it immediately. Unfortunately the others all seem worse...so far...until they break more stuff and decline to fix it.