I own a mac, and have three obsolete macs in my "museum". I own a Pentium IV computer, but it runs Linux. Work provides me with a PC. But that's only for work.

Microsoft is a corporation that knew exactly how far across the legal line it could go before it would be punished. How many times were investigations into its business practices settled with "we promise we won't do it again", which they then did?

The critique of "Cold Equations" on the web is also useful.

I was in High School when Star Wars came out. The first one, before it got retitled "A New Hope" and "Episode 4".

Joseph Campbell's _The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces_ or the PBS Series (with its accompanying book) The Power of Myth both talk about the archtype Epic. Read wikipedia for more.

I saw the Dune movie before I read the book. It worked for me.
 

I am quite fond of Roger Zelazny's short story "The Game of Blood and Dust". It didn't resonate at all with my daughter, who never really lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. It's included in _The_Last_Defender_of_Camelot_, and only 5 pages long.

I don't believe you can run an .exe file on Linux or MacOSX. You can only do that in Windows.

MacOSX tells me whenever I ask it to run a file downloaded from the net for the first time. The OS needs to get in the user's face a little, because downloaded executables carry risks that executables installed from local media do not.

No, the voters chose Gore over Bush. Even in Florida. Somehow, the greater evil took power anyway.

Incorrect on so many points.

Malware does not go where the users are in other environments, it goes where the ease of exploiting vulnerabilities and the size of the market make it worthwhile. Apache is more popular than IIS, yet IIS has more discovered and exploited vulnerabilities.

A secure OS would make sure that all code downloaded from the net is identified to the user as code downloaded from the net and its source/publisher, and a secure OS does not allow the downloaded code to execute until after the user has acknowledged that it is a downloaded program and given explicit permission.

If you exclude all malware/exploits on Microsoft operating systems, Microsoft makes the most secure operating systems, because there are, by definition, no malware/exploits.

US Oil production peaked in 1970, at around 9 1/2 million barrels per day. Current US Oil production is down to 5 million barrels per day, and is dropping at an average around 150,000 barrels per day per year. Ten years out, if we're lucky, the US will produce 3 1/5 million barrels per day. Oh, and US demand for oil is at 10 million barrels per day and rising.

That's what I get for posting before whipping out the calculator. The acceleration needed to go 200 AUs in 2.5 years is only 9.5 E-3 meters/second. Or around .001g. I don't trust my calculus any more, but integrating the acceleration over that time is in the ballpark.

The article sounds like it's extrapolating the peak 0.6g acceleration for the entire length of the flight. Seems to me that acceleration is proportional to the light flux trapped and/or reflected by the sail, which will fall off with the square of the distance from the sun. So you can't get to the Oort cloud in just a couple of years.

What am I missing?

I was fixing the lights in my basement. Circuit was live, switch was open, and I still got a "tickle" when working on the socket. Pulled the breaker, and found out that the home handyman who wired that part of the basement had put the switch on the white (return) wire. Grrrrr!

Now, do I pay an electrician to find out all the places where the wiring is screwed up? Or just double-check when I need to work on a circuit?

The neighbors can recover damages if the company has any assets left.

Many firms polluted, and then went belly up. Nobody to sue. Many of the former executives, of course, were richly compensated in spite of their failure.

Also, in high level languages, the developer has easy access to powerful abstractions with well-tested implementations. If I know I'm going to need access to a lot of data, it's trivial to say "Map myMap = new HashMap(); while ( ...) { ... ; myMap.add( key, value); }" It's a lot more work to build the structures in assembly language to do the same thing. So the developer takes a shortcut and writes a simple linked list. In cases like these, high-level implementations that use the appropriate algorithms will beat the pants off assembly-language implementations that use simpler algorithms because coding the complex algorithm is not practical.

why would it not be a commercially viable product?

Tiny User Base. So there's no incentive to be a developer for the platform. Doesn't support UNIX/POSIX standards, so it's not easy to port existing software to the platform. Freely available OSs have orders of magnitudes more users and developers, and far more reference material making them easier to learn. Who cares about fitting on a 1.4 MB floppy when 1 GB USB drives are practically free?