Can someone comment on this? I'd like to hear an opinion on whether it's as good an idea as I think it is...

I feel strongly that the next step to our advancement is to build an artificial ring around the Earth. It would serve multiple purposes: First, build a thin ring - like the thickness of a pipe that extends around the equator of the planet somewhere up in orbit. Then you can make 'nodes' at points around the ring - space stations, satellites, etc - the advantage being that they're held in place by the ring itself. Then you can pave the exterior of the ring with solar panels for the constant generation of power. Then you can drop these space elevators from the nodes. Spacecraft would no longer be designed to have to escape the gravity of the earth - they'd begin their flights from the ring, and you could easily hoist supplies/fuel up to the spacecraft via the space elevators. This could completely revolutionize the way we design and build our spacecraft - spacecraft would stay in space, and never deal with escaping gravity wells. I feel that this would be a significant game changer.

I get what you're saying, but educate me - because I don't completely understand. You open up the NetBIOS ports and then everything is controlled by Windows NT authentication - which is a highly reliable and secure system. Where it breaks down is when people use weak passwords, or don't set the proper administrative privileges on resources. Joe domain user can't just modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE on the domain server unless he's specifically given the rights to do so. File shares are the same way - the shares themselves are protected, as well as the underlying filesystem (assuming NTFS), right down to each individual file or folder.

IMO, most of the problems people have with windows are self inflicted. A firewall (unpopular opinion coming) is a useless piece of garbage. We design IP to have "ports", and then we use a firewall to block all of these ports. So then we run software on the firewalled machine and either open the ports allowing the software to function or we don't. When we open the ports, the machine is only as vulnerable as the faulty software that we're running on it that communicate on these ports. As for blocking the DCOM ports, Microsoft is fairly good at patching security holes in their packaged products as they're discovered. As long as a machine is "windows updated" every Tuesday, I don't see the point in crippling it's functionality. Don't even get me started on Antivirus software.

Well, not necessarily. There are a couple of options. First, you can use remote debugging. Second, you can easily install the free version of the IDE on the target machine. Third, you can use command line tools to compile (the stuff in the bin directory - you don't really NEED the IDE to compile/link). I know that remote debugging is sort of a pain, but it's effective once you set it up. Also, it's generally simple to set up visual studio express on any machine. I know the problem, because my most recent job was developing software that ran on VMs... I did the development on my desktop, but then would run on the VM. Most commonly, I'd just set up express on the VM. Though, I wish I was more familiar with the remote debugging client, because it's probably the 'right' way to do it.

Seems like people are hung up on autocomplete and the intellisense... The greatest part of an IDE is the built in debugger (IMO, of course)... It's much less time consuming and error prone to have all things configured in one place - compile, run, debug, repeat.

I was thinking they should build a ring around the earth. It could serve multiple purposes... The outside of it could be covered in solar panels, and there could be nodes along the ring where space stations are built - they could be launching points for interplanetary missions. The ring could also contain attachment points for space elevators - to facilitate getting cargo/fuel out of earth's gravity.

I can't help but see this as a horrible injustice that should be treated as such, and should land those responsible in jail. If someone taught me in school that Santa Claus created the world, and somehow I became smart enough to snap out of it someday, I would be furious that my education involved any sort of nonsense like religion. This is the problem. You stand back and give people their space, instead of telling them how stupid they are and this is what happens eventually. I've had enough. God and religion are truly for the stupid and ignorant.

Damn, I wanted them to enhance the feature. Search nearby was "search from a point". A common use that I had was to search for a particular store along a route. For example, I'm driving home from the white mountains back to Boston - find me a home depot that is somewhere close to the route that I'm going to take, doesn't matter if it's up north or closer to Boston, just want it to be as close to the highway as possible.

I respectfully disagree - at least, in my experience I've noticed the opposite. Asians who are difficult to understand appear to be given the benefit of the doubt simply because non-technical management are confused by them. This confusion leads to an assumption that they know what they're talking about - ie. "since I don't understand what the hell this guy is talking about, it must be some sort of technical wizardry that is way over my head".

This sort of thing has actually made me miserable several times in my career. I don't necessarily 'look the part' of a programmer. It's very frustrating when dorky looking people who don't really know what they're talking about get promoted to the point where they're dictating the technical direction of what we're doing - when I could actually do it much better. It happens all the time. Lots of these people learn how to play the part and 'geek speak' instead of learning how to actually code or design functional software. The management - who generally don't understand technical subjects - are more easily impressed and convinced by such people. This is how and why we produce a lot of crap in America.

I've always been into having the maximum real estate I a monitor. That's why I hated when most of the monitors started coming out at 1920x1080 versus 1920x1200. I still love my dell 24" 1920x1200, but i'll be looking forward to getting something with even more pixels.

Yeah, but I'm betting that lots of molten radioactive stuff is worse than smaller pools of radioactive stuff. Also, I didn't mean to blow the rods to bits (as in a dirty bomb), but instead to eject them whole. Point taken - in that you've explained well how they will continue to heat even though they are not reacting with each other. My thought is that it would just be easier and quicker to clean up a bunch of rods than it would a molten blob.

Nuclear reactions happen when you enough radioactive stuff close enough to itself so that it begins a chain reaction, right? So why don't they just make some mechanical failsafe device that pulls the chunks apart to a distance where the reaction doesn't occur? Even if the bars had explosive bottom caps that would go off at a certain (high) temperature - blasting the bars away from each other like bullets is better than the situation where they all melt together and create a runaway reaction... I would think...

The previous phone that I had bought for my parents had this very feature. It had a prominent "911" button right on the phone. During setup, you program the phone to take a certain action when that button is pressed. In this case, I set it up to send a generic "Help - I'm in need of assistance" message to me and both of my sisters. A year later, we naturally forgot about this. One morning, around 2AM I got this strange message from my parents with that message. My sister called me soon after but no one could reach my parents - we feared the worst and called the police. Long story short - my mother had received a "wrong number" phone call late that night. In fumbling around in the dark, she had inadvertently sent the 911 distress. It took us a few days to piece together what actually happened, as we (at that point) had completely forgotten about the feature and it's function. So - morale of the story is I guess it can be a good thing, but the ease of use of sending a distress can also make it easy to send a false alarm and get a lot of people very worried and upset.