There's now an entire generation of IS/IT managers, directors, and CIOs who not only prefer Microsoft technology but have an active dislike of anything related to Unix(tm)

I don't know how much the "actively dislike Unix" part is true, but yes, there are a lot of IT people that prefer Windows. And there are very good reasons for that. Microsoft makes some exceptionally good products in a number of areas. Here are some examples:

• Visual Studio, probably the best IDE known to exist. I've used it and competitors like Eclipse, and it is MUCH BETTER than Eclipse. This alone makes a lot of devs prefer Microsoft. And as of the announcement last week, is now going Open Source.
• .Net and ASP .Net, which are better than PHP (which is like classic ASP) and WAY better than Java, which needs a security patch daily and performs like a turtle. And as of the announcement last week, .Net and ASP .Net are going fully open source and multi-platform.
• Powershell, which for management is really, really good. It's gotten to the point now where it is better than competitors like Bash. Objects in the pipeline, rather than just text, is just so much better than any other shell.
• SQL Server, which is finally reaching performance/feature parity with Oracle, but has better management tools and is generally preferred by a lot of devs.
• IIS, which in it's latest incarnation has better performance than Apache, is easier to manage and is easier to get security isolation of websites out of (I do web hosting for a living, and I can easily stack 350 sites onto IIS and have them all be completely isolated in different processes with different security accounts as well, and it's REALLY easy.
• Windows Server, which admittedly is a tossup but depending on what you want may cause IT people to prefer it. It admittedly doesn't run on as much variety of hardware as Linux or scale up to supercomputers like Linux, but really is a very competent OS that is simple to manage and has probably the largest ecosystem of software written for it.

In summary, I don't get the bashing of Windows or all the "My Linux is teh best!" kind of comments. Linux has it's strong points as an OS, but Microsoft does too, and they have some fantastic products out there that can handily beat some open source equivalents. Depending on your workload, it can be very appropriate to prefer Microsoft products. (Of course, I'll be the first to say Microsoft has it's terrible products too... Network Load Balancer anyone? Linux based load balancers like F5 beat the pants off that thing.)

The OP said this:

500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

Airliners routinely cruise at 550 mph, which is nearly 900 kph. So I guess trains are moving towards the speed of an airliner in a strictly technical sense, but in reality, even this one, which is not representative of the norm, is still only just passing 50%, so not even close yet.

The OP also said this:

The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train.

It should be noted that there are almost no US express passenger trains anywhere in the country, except within a few large east cost cities. In the rest of the country, there are none city to city or coast to coast, except for one, maybe two Amtrak routes that appear to exist only for nostalgia reasons, not for routine travel.

Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

Nope, not really. It only looks stronger if your cities are very densely populated AND very close together. Neither of those are true of the average US city. If I'm going from the city center of Minneapolis to the city center of Atlanta, that's 1815 km, and I'm not going to sit around for a whole day on a train getting there. And since the majority of the US population lives on the East and West coasts, what about going from the city center of New York to Los Angeles, a common route? That is about 4,500 km. So yeah, rail travel in the US continues to be a pipe dream that makes no sense. I don't understand why people are so hot on bringing the premier travel method of the 19th century back into the 21st century in the US, when we now have airliners for city to city travel and cars and buses for intra-city travel, both of which make far more sense and are far faster than rail. Rail in the US continues to be an expensive, money losing boondoggle almost everywhere.

The problem with North American rail travel has never been a technology barrier, it's always been about having any interest in doing better.

Or more precisely, the problem with North America is that it's a country where most people would never even benefit from having high speed rail.

The root cause of the lack of interest is that our nation's population is so spread out, you can't get rail to move you to your destination faster than a car, no matter how fast the train runs. It's not like densely populated areas of Europe or Japan where a million people all want to go from the same point A to the same point B. Americans are so spread out that you have many tiny groups wanting to go from many thousands of different point As to different point Bs. You'd have to make hundreds of thousands of train lines, traveled by only a handful of people, and even then you'd have to switch lines so many times as you travel the sprawling cities and suburbs that you'd never beat the car anyway.

That's why most large American cities have bus lines instead of subways as well. Americans built their cities out, not up, and you can cheaply throw tons of small capacity buses on the roads going all kinds of different directions to move people about. It's really the only kind of transit other than a car that makes any sense in American cities like Houston, Minneapolis, Kansas City, etc. And even then, your car is going to easily beat the bus unless it's during rush hour when the bus drives in a dedicated lane. But at least the bus can go anywhere in any direction, so they still will easily beat rail in almost all scenarios, with the exception of a few densely populated East Coast cities like New York. They also do much more to relieve congestion, since more people can get where they want to go via bus than train, and are therefore more likely to take it.

That's a bizarre attitude. Christians are peaceful, Muslims are not. Christians will debate origin theory with you. Muslims will behead or stone you for even discussing it. When children go missing, Christians search and put up wanted posters. Muslims like Boko Haram are the ones who did the kidnapping. Christians run next to you in the Boston Marathon. Muslims blow the people next to you up. Jesus went without protest to an execution on the cross. Mohammed raided caravans, kidnapped the woman, raised and army and conquered and killed everyone who disagreed with him.

Clearly not every Muslim is totally violent, but there are tens of millions in the Middle East who support these things and are trying to bring every back under 6th century Sharia law. You are completely irrational if you are more scared of Christians than that.

There is no place for PSEUDOCIENCE in universities. Not for Homeopathy, not for creationism, not for astrology. They can be discussed as curiosities or historical analysis (like when you analyse Greek mythology), but can not be presented as scientifically proven facts. If you want to promote irrational beliefs, the place is in the church, not in the university.

Then prepare to say goodbye to the following:

• Sociology
• Philosophy
• African American Studies
• Political Science
• Keynesian Economics
• The list could go on and on...

Point being, there's a lot of so called psuedo-science going on at universities already. Don't be a bigot about religions; if you are going to demand only things that can be experimented on in a test tube be taught, then a whole lot of other stuff should be leading the way out the door.

Sorry, but nobody wants your miniature space shuttle, Sierra Nevada. Probably should have thought a little harder before copying one of the most expensive and unreliable space systems used in recent times. Heat-shield > Everything. Now SpaceX/Boeing have to bite the bullet and stop work? Something very wrong with this way of doing things.

Actually, the Dream Chaser is 900 million cheaper than Boeing's system, with equal or more features, and Sierra Nevada also argues compellingly that their delivery track record is at least as good as Boeings (anyone remember Boeing's Dreamliner delays)? Since the selection was supposed to be based on three factors: price, suitability and track record, with price weighted as heavily as the other two metrics combined, it seems very odd that Boeing was selected. Both competitors are far, far cheaper, so unless Boeing is massively better on the other metrics (and again, there isn't much evidence of that), it doesn't look fair that they were awarded the contract.

Personally, I hope they reverse the decision, because I think it will save the taxpayer a lot of money over Boeing, and it would be nice to have a refined version of the landable spaceplane that can improve on the shuttle. I still don't think the shuttle was a totally bad idea (ie - an idea that can never work)... it just needed improvements. Capsules aren't the only way to go, despite what people in some circles say.

Weather modeling and forecasts are very good, boasting >95% accuracy over the first 3-4 days, with accuracy decreasing the further ahead you go.

Not a chance. Bring some data before I will believe that accuracy rate. I don't even believe 95% is accurate for forecasting on the day of, let alone 3-4 days out, since our forecasts here in Minnesota have predicted sunny skies in the morning when I go to work, and we later get storms that drop four inches of rain. And I'm not using the "main on TV", but forecasts that are based on NOAA, which does have actual meteorologists working there. So again, bring data... I think your accuracy ratings are hugely inflated, especially for 3-4 days out.

What? Your weather forecasts are wrong every day? And in every conceivable way (Temperature, Cloud cover, Humidity, Rainfall, Windspeed, etc.)?

No one claimed they are wrong every day, just that they aren't nearly 80% as the grandparent claimed. They seem to be wrong about 50% of the time (at least) here in Minnesota too. We are talking major, predicted sunny skies and got one of the worst storms of the summer with four inches of rain kind of wrong. And when I say wrong 50% of the time, I'm talking about major wrong. I'm not talking about "predicted 83 degrees but it ended up being 85" kind of wrong (in which case the models would approach 100% wrong). They are wrong in some more major way, such as predicted temp off five degrees or more, wind off by several mph, heavy rains when sun was predicted, snowfall either doesn't arrive or has way more inches than predicted, etc. I know that's anecdotal to you, but I'd have to see some very good data to concede that they are correct 80% of the time. My observations make me believe it's probably otherwise (although maybe other parts of the nation are more accurate and bring the average up).

The thing that's really broken is that we have government involved in this at all. Why, exactly, should only one cable company have been allowed to run wires to the houses in my area? Why shouldn't two or three of them have been allowed to do it? Why did the government mandate that there will be monopolies in cable, telephone, etc? That's ultimately the real problem: government took away my choice, so I can't vote with my wallet now. Now I have to plead to unelected FCC bureaucrats in DC to force my local monopoly provider not to throttle my service, when I could have simply voted with my wallet like I do with everything else.

It's probably too late to get to get the cable mess fixed now, but hopefully this can at least be a good cautionary tale moving forward: never, EVER let the government mandate monopolies in anything, whether it be public schools, post office letter delivery, utilities, media companies, mass transit bus service, healthcare, etc. It NEVER turns out better for the consumer, and you end up having to grovel to government employees that could not care less about you personally. Every area should be open to any company that wants to participate, and may the best one win.

A recent success story would probably be the opening of space exploration to private companies: what did NASA do in the last 30 years when it had a monopoly? What are private companies already doing in the 5-10 years they've been developing their technology? Look how far SpaceX has come with it's rocket technology. It will shortly have better, safer, more cost effective options than NASA ever did.

I still don't understand why we care about this. Water occurs naturally all over the solar system, from moons to planets to asteroids. One would assume that it's a safe bet it's common in most other systems as well, just like other basic chemicals are. And, that water will be in vapor form any time it is close enough to a star to be above 0 C, so again, one would assume that's common.

Unless we are commenting about water va-pour , as I'm pretty sure this is the first time in the universe that that's ever been mentioned. :)

The economics still aren't there. A clear sky isn't enough. You won't get the sun's max in North America due to angle of the sun, especially in fall or winter. Even in summer, the angle in most parts of the country is such that you wouldn't get the max. And, in most parts of the country you also have a lot of clouds and rain (desert southwest being the exception), and you also have a fair amount of severe weather that could damage the thing. I'd be surprised if you get half of your $2k per year figure.

So figure this thing can be built for 20k. And you manage to save $1k a year. It will take 20 years to pay off, and it probably won't last that long. So it's certainly interesting and might even be applicable in select places in New Mexico or Arizona, but in places like Minnesota, it has minimal practicality from a financial perspective.

It's more valid than your position, which pre-supposes that there isn't a purpose. Science can't claim there is a purpose, and it can't claim there isn't one. Therefore why is a valid question, since it is at least possible there is a purpose. Saying, with no evidence, that "Science says there is no purpose" just proves the author's point that people are abusing science.

I think that's misleading at best, because at best we can only say that it occurred, not how/why it occurred. We don't know the cause behind it. Nor are we likely to ever know for sure, because we can't experimentally test it. And I think that's the point of the article: science makes very narrow claims in this area, and clearly defines parts of the origin as untestable and unknowable to science, yet people walk around acting like science has given us every answer: truth with a capital T, as the author puts it.

If you a referring to Christians, I think you may misunderstand what we are having faith in. When we talk about "having faith in Jesus", we aren't saying we believe without evidence. Jesus himself didn't withhold evidence... his ministry was confirmed by a huge number of public miracles, and we have a bunch of written eyewitness accounts that testify to that fact. The men who wrote them were beheaded, sawed in half, flogged, tortured, and crucified upside down, yet still they wouldn't take back their claims that they witnessed God in the flesh, and that all these things were true. If this was a lie, some of them would have recanted, but they truly, earnestly held it forth as truth, even though they gained nothing but pain and death during their lifetimes. Not one gained political power, armies, wives, or wealth from their stand; only beatings (at best).

But even though you may know for a fact Jesus existed, you still have to trust his promises. You have to have faith that his word is true, that he will keep his word, forgive sins and give salvation. And I don't think that's 100% without evidence either, but that's more along the lines of what specifically we have to have faith about. We can be pretty certain he lived from material historical evidence, but forgiveness of sins is not something you can show materialist evidence for. You have to step beyond the materialist philosophy and take that by faith, trusting in Jesus' word.

Hopefully that's at least somewhat helpful. I know this issue often gets confused, especially in discussions like these.