Think what you want, but I tell you from a country other than the US: the US was definitely admired because all of that stuf fyou mention, and for being a beacon for democracies around the world. That was until the last decade. The US is now looked with disdain, some fear but zero respect. It is considered a bully that resolves all matters through force, and is willing to invest 10x more in maintaining that attitude than in continuing its historical path of exploration and invention. There's some hope at this moment that things will change, and the last few months look promising. Nobody is expecting Obama to apologize for anything, but there's the expectation that the bullying will slow down and become a last resort, and that the US will resume its old ways of leading the world with science, knowledge and good will. The world is watching with hope, but the odds don't look too good.

Even at this point, with all the money sunk into the program, there's no financial or technical reason to continue with it when there are less expensive, more efficient and more effective alternatives. Ares (and the whole constellation program) is a total failure even with the current schedule and if no further delays happen. It will be simply too late to be an effective continuation of the shuttle program, and it will imply that thousands of employees specialized in construction, launch management and everything that's not R&D will have to be laid off, just to be rehired and retrained five years later when the program is approacing realization. The schedule gap between Shuttle and Ares is simply not admissible, and the future capabilities of the program ate too limited. At the same time, the DIRECT proposal offers a much more seamless continuation to the shuttle program, allowing the factories, equipment and, especially, people to continue working with minimal changes, and to be launching rockets with only a minimal interruption after the decomissioning of the Shuttle. And in fact, since the vast majority of the expendable components of the shuttle are shared by the Orion rocket, if it were necessary to extend the shuttle program by one or two launches, the cost would be much, much smaller than with Ares. Why go with a more expensive, more limited, late, untested and technically inferior program when the alternative is there?

Yes, and going back to the caves to die a painful death. I'm not a particularly ill person, but I still consume two drugs that improve my health every day. They were developed by companies that definitely wouldn't have done it if it weren't for the IP rewards. Your car uses technology that would have never been developed if it weren't for patents. So does the computer you are using, and almost everything else around you. Those opposing patents and IP in general often claim that inventions would still be generated in the absence of IP protection, and that might be true for some inventions, while most require hughe amounts of R&D that simply wouldn't happen if the money wasn't there. There's absolutely zero evidence that the rate of inventions would continue at a similar rate in the absence of patents, and there's plenty of indication of the opposite. The patent system is seriously flawed, as the obviousnless requirement for an invention is generally ignored. Let's fix this and only award patents to creations that actually required serious effort, and not to every troll that wants a patent on how to scratch your butt with both hands.

Huh? At what point does MS propose to apply the US system to other countries? I read the note (and other articles) and all it says is that MS is proposing a global system, it doesn't say anywhere that they want the US to be the model. Based on their experiences, I would seriously doubt they like the US system too much.

By the way, they also make their calculations considering that roads last seven years, but they neglect the fact that after seven years they have to be resurfaced, not rebuilt. Typically roads last more than fifty years, so their comparisons are off by an extra factor of 10x. A real scam.

The idea is feasible indeed, just not economically viable. These guys make their calculations based on one big error: they assume that the cost of making roads is 100% laying down asphalt. That is, that their solar panels (even if they could be built according to the specs and there were no other costs such as electricity transmission, monitoring or all that) can replace the whole cost of building a road. But the only part their panels can replace is the upper layer (and only partially, as they don't seem to be counting paint). All the digging, the leveling, the compression, the fences, the lighting and other components, plus design, layout, management and the like are perhaps 90% of the cost. So basically their project would double the cost of making highways. Or you could put it another way. If making a road with solar panels cost X, making it with similar materials to the solar panel's protective layer would cost a fraction of X (and a small fraction, as the expensive part in a solar panel is not precisely the protective layer). So calculating that the cost is zero is simply a scam attempt. And considering the headlines, a successful one.

I understand even less. PAE is only useful for applications that do use it explicitly to handle mass amounts of data in a batch form. It is not useful for real time applications and I know of not a single desktop application that uses PAE. So even if Microsof enabled PAE in 32 bit Windows, no one would be able to use it. And if you are doing a custom application to use PAE on a desktop, shouldn't you be using a real 64bit OS?

Why can't the kernel detect it is running on battery and dynamically adjust that behavior? Windows XP does that since 2001, and Windows 7 gets even better mileage on my notebook than XP, so apparently it is not only in security that the Linux kernel is lagging by a few years.

Mr. Spammer, you swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. P.S. You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine,conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good. In other words, go away. Your mother is a whore and the daughter of a whore. Your father was likely her brother, but could have been any of her cousins. I'd have a second deliver a card on a silver platter, but your kind generally wouldn't understand it, and doesn't deserve much more than a dog-whipping anyway. You havn't got a clue. You couldn't get a clue if you smeared yourself with clue musk and danced the clue mating dance in a field full of horny clues in clue mating season. Your eyebrows meet in the middle, your forehead slopes, your pet gerbil wants you dead. Your mother would dress you funny if she could afford clothes. You're the primary reason bigots hate your ethnic group. You were obviously not toilet-trained correctly, which explains the stains on the floor of your cardboard box. Your webbed feet go well with the pointy forehead. Your manners are hideous, your brain minute, and your body odor could fell an ox. You would fit in on a short bus to a convention of Fundies. You are a living, breathing poster-child for birth-control and abortion. I hope you go away painfully.

The privacy issues are actually trivial to solve: make the cameras automatically encrypt data before shipping them in protected form to an archive. No one sees the direct feed, no one is able to access that data. In order to access data, a judge has to issue an order (if the system is well designed, that should be possible to do in a few hours at most), and the order allows a group of isolated people with specific instruction as to what to look for, to view in a closed room the unencrypted feed. Then, once those have made the observations and passed them to law enforcement, the unencrypted feed is discarded. Whenever the feed has to be used in court, it can be unencrypted permanently with a proper judicial order, for the time span that is relevant. The chances that you are doing something you would like not to be disclosed in the same camera and at the same time a crime is being comitted is low enough to make it a non issue compared to the benefits. The problem is that this is not being done. Recordings are being done unencrypted, ans monitored in real time by people that could be re recording for whatever purposes they have. That's unacceptable especially compared to the limited benefits.

By that criteria, strong men shouldn't be able to compete with other men as that would give them an unfair advantage. If a female (XX) has a condition that makes her stronger, then she has the right to compete with other women, even if there are physiological traits that make her much stronger than other women. Male sea horses give birth to their child. But we still define them as male because of the XY chromosomes. That's the only absolute definition of male and female. An XY dressed as a woman is not a woman. An XX that looks masculine is not a man. Yes, there might be some XY that do not conform to the usual physical stereotype. But that doesn't make them anything but an unusual female.

The author first claims, based on nothing at all, that the sole purpose of Word was to create documents for print, and then he claims that now we don't need to print stuff, ergo we don't need word. THere are so many fallacies in this argument that I won't go into detail in listing them. Enough to say that what is going down is this author's reputation.

> This makes Ubuntu the first OS that doesn't need to be rebooted for security updates I'm pretty sure there are some types of patches that migth need a reboot (such as some updates to the thread scheduler or memory manager). There might not have been any of those since the last release, but there are likely to be some in the future. And Windows Server 2008 already provides hot patching capabilities for most types of updates. The reason why most patches cannot be applied hot is because making a fix a hot patch takes more developing and testing and thus many patches are released without this capability. If you want to find out which OS was the first one that could be deployed without reboots to get patched, any Linux or Windows OS at the time of its release was like that (as no patches were available then). If you watn to know which one was the first OS that provided hot patching capabilities for critical components that were active, Windows Server 2008 was that. What I think can be claimed about Ubuntu now is that it is the first OS that has a hot patching capability that covers all available patches at this time. Which is different.

Not that I like Google a bit, but this is all a red herring. Drilling does not cause quakes. It just advances the occurrence of quakes waiting to happen, reducing their potential strenght. It is not a coincidence that the quake in Basil occurred in the same place as a devastating quake 650 years before. Drilling released part of the accumulated energy since, in the form of a smaller quake. If the energy had not been released, in a few hundred years another devastating quake might have taken place. And even if the drills in northern CA cause another quake, it is exactly the same thing: a quake in the area is bound to happen, releasing the energy early will simply reduce the energy of the quake. A hundred minor quakes are much better than a single big one. Just as with forest fires, we will learn that with time.

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