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Comment Re:water vapor plumes != liquid water (Score 2) 66

Still interesting to know there's ice (solid water) on Ceres. Makes you wonder from where it came.

Oxygen may be a distant third in abundance in the Milky Way, but being after hydrogen and helium, it makes water one of the most abundant chemical cominations. H and He don't combine under normal circumstances. It doesn't take much for hydrogen and oxygen to make water. You may also notice carbon and nitrogen in the top ten. :)

Comment Re:In other Kiev news (Score 2) 233

It is not really young vs old. Language and geography are much bigger factors than age.

I think the perception of young vs old as a manifestation of age is real. I'm going to ramble with an idea a little bit...

Language and geography among other things can and do create barriers between populations. If at least by chance, these populations will have varying resources at their disposal. If wealth leads to health (and typically a lower birthrate) and longevity, a population that has wealth will appear older than one that doesn't. So, while the young may fight on both sides, it is likely, the side of those with money, will have a higher average lifespan and thus on average be older.

This has a reinforcing effect as well. As members of the wealthier society live longer, individuals hold power longer. As such, they will have more experience with the past. This has advantages and disadvantages that merits its own debate but reinforces the idea that old ways are good ways. The poorer population with a lower average age will not be as connected to the past. Again with its own pros and cons. The end result is that old ideas have wealth and these leads to an older population on average. New ideas lack wealth and leads to a younger population on average.

Please bear in mind that I don't mean to imply many in the Ukraine are wealthy by our standards. But I would guess that those that want to go back with old Russia are the ones with the current wealth and power under Russia. Power tends to have generals while rebels have teenagers. I think this perception manifests with conservatives and progressives as well. Politicians on both sides are old, but there is certainly a perception that those that have more and are older tend to be conservative while those that have less and are younger tend to be more progressive. Even though there is much more complexity to being conservative or progressive on any particular issue.

Well, there's my .02 on the young vs old.

Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 1) 417

It's not much of a stretch to say Win 9x was still based on DOS. Windows 95 was basically Windows 4.0 and DOS 7.0 bundled together. I'm not saying it wasn't an improvement over 3.1, but its foundation largely ran the same way. The transition from 9x to XP dropped a lot of legacy DOS support because DOS was no longer a part of windows with XP (and other NT kernel OSes).

Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a series of Microsoft Windows computer operating systems produced from 1995 to 2000, which were based on the Windows 95 kernel and its underlying foundation of MS-DOS

--emphasis mine

Windows 9x is a series of hybrid 16/32-bit operating systems.

You could even still boot straight to DOS (command not cmd) and type 'win' to start Windows just like under 3.1. If you still had 3.1 in a directory you could run 'win' from there and still go into win 3.1. Win 9x still had and used the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Win 9x didn't protect the first meg of memory so you could still reboot the computer by opening a DOS window and writing directly to memory. And there were more websites like this back in the day.

Comment Re:Naming releases (Score 1) 128

I didn't mean to imply that I wanted names to the exclusion of numbers. I still like version numbers. Although names like Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream and Jelly Bean aren't hard to figure out. Silly names aside, some of the others follow a similar convention.

Comment Re:9.1 (Score 1) 1009

and Windows 2003. And technically NT came in versions 3.1, 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0. I don't remember NT 3.1 and 3.5 well, but 3.51 was nice and snappy. You really felt the preemptive multitasking. I thought NT 4.0 was meh. It added the Win95 desktop and it sort of tried to do plug-n-play if you installed it through the CLI. NT 4.0 just seemed kludgy and the snappiness that 3.51 had with multitasking seemed gone. At any rate, none of these were considered consumer OSes. The good version/bad version meme is usually based on consumer versions of Windows.

Comment Re:i question the wisdom of this (Score 4, Interesting) 100

The main cost here is spare parts storage - something you need to have anyway. Replacting some storage space with a very expencive 3D printer (you really thought they want to use a 300$ one? think again) makes no sense, you get lower quality parts and making them takes longer than it would take for you to get the parts from storage.

The military is considering the logistics of access to storage in a battle. It may be considerably cheaper to take a 3D printer and some material to the front than backups of all your parts. I recall reading somewhere that warships tended to carry 3 replacement parts for everything. Since you never know what's going to break you have to carry much more than necessary. A 3D printer should require much less mass and storage since you only need material for the things that actually break, instead of material for everything that might break. The costs of moving backup lenses in hundreds of styles around a battlefield may make 3D printing them more economically viable.

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