"a task that requires the power and thrust contained in a huge rocket"

You actually don't need a big rocket to escape Moon's gravity. You know, as proved by the Apollo program. If we are talking about the situation after we colonize Moon, at that point we will obviously have the technology needed to send a rock back to Earth from Moon. It will be needed for the colonization. So she is not scientifically wrong, although worrying about people throwing rocks from Moon to Earth has got to be in the top 10 least important problems humanity needs to solve.

Apple and Google have decided to throw away any compatibility with computers when they developed their mobile OS. You can't run the same application on your iPhone or an Android phone and on your computer.

Microsoft has decided to go the other way, sacrifice usability but maintain the compatibility. You could technically take an application from your computer and run it on your tablet or phone. They own most of the desktop OS market, so why throw it all away and make a completely incompatible device? Let's make the desktop OS more mobile-like and the phone OS more desktop-like, and we will meet in the middle and end up with just one OS to rule them all.

And then they found out that this does not make much sense. You don't need the application that's optimized for a 24" screen with a mouse and a keyboard to run on your phone. You also don't need the application that's optimized for a 7" touch screen to run on your desktop. So they disabled the support for Win32 on Windows RT, never even supported Win32 on mobiles, and the Metro applications for Windows 8 never really took off.

They ended up with a less usable mobile OS that is theoretically able to run desktop apps but nobody cares, and a less usable Windows 8 that is theoretically able to run mobile apps but also nobody cares. To save their business, they had to step back with Windows 10 because people did not want to upgrade from Windows 7, and they seem to have completely abandoned the idea of Windows running on phones.

And Steve Ballmer is proud of his achievements. LOL.

Would you buy a gun that is as reliable as the fingerprint unlock on your phone? I don't know about you, but I have like 1 in 3 chance of not unlocking at first try. That's a gun that will not fire 1 out of 3 times when you need it.

And have you ever tried to unlock your phone while being just a bit nervous? And can you imagine how nervous you will be if you are in a life-or-death situation?

The Stable Workers of America (SWA) union asked the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to put a stop to the forced horse-to-car conversions. The motorized transportation service is not a proper replacement for horse transport because it does not work with grass and water. In addition, it cannot be bred at home and instead has to be bought in dealerships, which gives the dealerships too much power over human transportation.

Let's write software in some esoteric language that nobody is using. There are less than 10 applications written in it in productive use, and they were all written by the same people who wrote the compiler, but SURELY it will be better than C which is used in everything from your watch to the space probes we send to Jupiter.

You can't fix bad programming by tools. You can only fix bad programming by not hiring bad programmers.

Oxygen levels can't go up, where would the oxygen come from? It's very improbable that oxygen levels stay the same, over time nothing stays the same in nature. The only remaining option is that oxygen levels go down. Problem solved.

That's just showing a complete lack of understanding how Uber works. In case of emergency like this one, would you rather pay more for your fare, or wait indefinitely because there are not enough drivers? Those are the only two options. I personally would prefer pay more.

The way of getting more Uber drivers is to pay them more to incentivize them to come to work. If there is a sudden rise in demand, there will be a sudden increase in price.

This whole discussion is absurd for someone who has lived in a socialist country. If you keep the prices constant no matter what is the demand, it only results in empty shops. You can't cheat the market forces.

There are multiple reasons why I wouldn't want to use my phone to pay for stuff. The three most important ones for me are:
1. Paying with the phone is cumbersome when compared to paying with a contactless card
2. My phone battery sometimes dies, and I would hate to lose access to my money when it happens.
3. I use my phone for two factor authentication with my bank, and having the phone also have access to my bank account defeats the purpose of two factor authentication.

Of course, if I lived in the States, where they are just now implementing chip-and-pin and don't have contactless cards at all, paying by phone might look like an improvement. But it's just not the way to go. If you insist on paying with your phone, you can just get a contactless card in the form of a small sticker that you can stick on your phone or on anything else that you carry with you always. It will never run out of battery, and a hacker will never be able to access it through your phone.

Government contracts are still the opposite of capitalism, even if the government orders services from a private company. It's still public spending.

What TF has this got to do with capitalism? If it happens, it will be a huge regulatory intervention, done by governments and inter-governmental organizations. It will not be done for profit. That's like the exact opposite of capitalism.

Do you realize how much testing must go in to checking that all possible combinations of patches work correctly together? This is clearly just cutting the costs of supporting older systems. Now there are no combinations, since each patch gets Windows to the same state, so they only have to test one thing a month. This also means they can test it properly, so you have lower probability that installing a patch breaks your system, which means lower support costs as well.

This is consistent with their effort to move everyone to the latest Windows version, so they don't have to support Windows 7 for 15 years like they had to with Windows XP. They have clearly checked their accounting and found how much money is being spent because of the complicated way they support old versions, and now they are decreasing those costs.

Also, this is the exact same way most other companies release updates. You don't see Adobe giving you the option of selecting which individual DLLs you want to patch in Photoshop. Microsoft is just moving towards the same patching plan other companies already use.

Sometimes I wonder if any Slashdot readers work in actual software companies. Because if you have real world experience with software development, you understand why this is done.

(I am not assiciated with Microsoft in any way)

It's the same shit all over again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And it will be just as funny in 50 years as the flag laws are today. People seem to never learn. You can't stop progress, the "best" you can do is to postpone it.

I am not really sure, but I think it's a small off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden.

Ah, Wayland. The Hurd of windowing systems. I'm sure it will be amazing once finished.

"consumers should be driving the market"

In a country where a limited number of internet providers have a virtual monopoly? How well did it work when it was tried with the phone companies in last century? I'm all for free market, when it works, but in this case it clearly does not. Just look at the prices and compare them with any country with a real internet provider competition if you don't believe.