"It's my mouth, I can say what I want to."

Maybe Matt and his brigade should write a letter to Miley and tell her that, no, she can't, and it's offensive to suggest otherwise.

*shouldn't..

Damn, that typo always sucks.

If you have a negative opinion about a person, which OP finds offensive, your opinion should be allowed to be voiced. Riiight..

By all means, physical threats should not be tolerated, but everything else is freedom of expression, even if we dislike it or find it in bad taste.

By the way, it's a little sexist to suggest that only women need to be worried about death threats and harrassment. I've received more than a few myself in my time. What - because I'm a guy I should just ignore it? It's not a problem? I think you'll find this is something which can be an issue for 100% of the population, not just your favorite gender. GG bigotry.

The law. In fact, even if your first child dies, you're still not allowed a second child. Doesn't stop people doing it, but those couples who lose a child early on to a medical condition, or being run over by a drunk driver, etc, and try to follow the law, aren't allowed a second child.

Their security record is generally pretty good. In most cases where a celebrity claims their account was "hacked" after a ridiculously stupid or insensitive tweet is posted is just PR covering their ass.

>>You loons haven't even built an upper atmosphere elevator
Right, because an "upper atmosphere elevator" is completely infeasible. A space elevator would have to be taken into space in pieces, constructed there, and the cables rolled "down" to earth from an anchor point a hundred thousand miles out. The science behind it is perfectly sound - unfortunately we lack the material necessary for the "cables", at least in any manufacturable form.

But an "upper atmosphere elevator"? The science behind that is not sound. Besides making a pyramid with a base of 10,000 square miles, there's no way to stabilize a structure at that height without something anchoring it in place from the space end.. you'd need... a space elevator to do that. :p

I just re-read The Forever War this past week. As the quote on the cover says -

"To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise."

But can it clean my HOSTS file?

Posting to undo accidental de-moderation. :(

I kinda have to disagree. You're quite correct in your analysis, except the whole bit about your terabyte-years being the cheapest which was the point if your post.

More accurate may be that your "terabyte-warranteed years" rate is the cheapest, but in terms of actual usage, many people may disagree with you. I haven't had a Seagate drive fail since 2001. I think the oldest I have in a system somewhere is 2004, but that's besides the point - that drive is priced out "terabyte-years" where years = 10. I have at least a dozen drives with 2-year warranties that are still running error-free after 5 years.

Therefore, I can't agree with your conclusion that paying 50% more for a longer warranty is worth any more at all. Most consumer drives simply don't fail very often anymore,

No.

An operating system should be just that. If you want a version of Windows bundled with Office, great, but the OS should be exactly the same in both cases.

As for "useless services running in the background", while many might not be necessary, most users won't know which usage cases would require which services. You can open up a list of all services and decide which you don't want to start, already, but presenting users with this choice is pointless. If you're thinking "for the games, just remove all the ones that gamers don't need", then just stop. Gamers use a lot of services, even ones you'd never think games would use.

Do you know which services are used by all game DRMs out there? Which services are required by emulators? Which services are required by virtualisation? Which services are required for syncing all this with your 3D TV? Which services are required to handle the decryption of your blu-ray movies? Which services are used to handle the authentication of that? I could go on and on, but I'm working so must cut this short.

Thinking that a "gaming OS" would just be "OpenGL drivers and something to let you add hardware" is very short-sighted. Our modern systems are fairly complex as are our modern games. The tools used by developers require far more of the OS than you can imagine, and if you think Windows loads a bunch of useless services, then I suggest firing up SteamOSwhich *is* a dedicated gaming OS and look at just how many processes it requires.

If the 'oblivious' drivers are driving at the speed limit, however, the cars wouldn't tell each other to "move over", and you'd still be behind them. You reek of self-importance.

No, not really - and as I was writing it I thought "I bet someone's gonna bring Moore's Law into this and then I'm going to have to explain". So I'll explain - the 50,000 years was a figure thrown out there. Really, as long at time taken > life expectancy, OP won't be able to find a result. The actual time to perform that many encryption cycles would be in the millions of years. If Moore's Law progresses over time that would certainly be brought down, but not within OPs lifetime. Then you've got to compare the data set. Nevermind that physically storing that many 32-bit strings would take more atoms than exist on our planet. The point was simply that OPs suggestion was ridiculous.

And when you're done in 50000 years with our current supercomputers, let us know the results. The number of possible combinations is a bit over 170141183460469231731687303715884105728. Good luck with your bubble-sort.

Yeah, my thoughts entirely. Was a little surprised this was making "news" since I've been using sat-based wifi whilst flying over the Pacific for a few years now on several carriers.