Any chance we can just have a web browser which just does normal browsing, doesn't take hundreds of MB to run, and starts in under a couple of seconds ?

Next you'll be asking it to not leak memory like a sieve.

Do you support unilateral disarmament too?

Smallpox isn't a weapon. Smallpox is a disease. Should someone be stupid enough to re-introduce it to the world, it will circle back and hit them, too. So the only thing destroying live smallpox samples does is reduce the chances of a catastrophic screw-up.

Look at Windows CE stuff some time - I've seen two different systems, made by two different companies, running on CE 6 and WP7, where the media player doesn't work quite right playing from SD cards or USB flash drives (they cannot read files where a file with the same name had been written and then deleted, and they sort by file creation order, completely ignoring directories).

Perhaps it was just the same mistake made twice, but the simpler explanation is that Windows CE has shoddy FAT support, since both systems run CE kernels.

How about instead of spending a small fortune solving the handful of bugs caused by programmer typos, you spend that money on better requirements gathering, keeping specifications from changing constantly, and giving programmers time to actually unit-test and document their code?

If you want some fancy tech so you can write a paper on it, make an "electro-stimulus behavior moderation band", strap it onto clients/managers, and give them fifty thousand volts whenever they say or do something stupid.

If Communism never actually existed, then what the heck was the deal with USSR, China, E. Germany, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, et al.? There are a lot of nations that insist they are following some Communist ideal, why would the non-practiced version be any more valid than the one these countries actually implemented?

North Korea insists it's "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", does that mean it really is a democracy?

Propaganda and reality rarely have much to do with each other.

Considering I still encounter Microsoft products that have problems with FAT32, yeah, there probably are some that have problems with UDF.

I suppose I'm discussing with some ukrainian "patriot".

A Finn who saw the scars your attempt to conquer our country left on innocent people. And now you're doing the exact same thing again - you prop up a puppet regime and have it request help. Only your puppet got ousted, so now you're going with plan B: russian troops posing as rebels.

Uncle Sam wants to fight "bad russkies" and he wants to do this with your hands beacuse it's cheaper.

You're wasting your time. Everyone who has the bad luck to live next to Russia knows the truth about you.

I'm a Pole - that's why I'm freaking out.

And Otto Wille Kuusinen was a Finn and Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian. Good luck on your chosen career.

I want no part in this madness.

Then stop working for a madman.

No state income tax for businesses.

Really, this plant is building components for the cars built in California. There is actually no relation from the manufacturing side to the selling side here.

This decision should be made puerilely on balance sheet issues that allow Tesla to make batteries and cars as cost effectively as they can.

We have a minivan. We got it just before our first child was born 11 years ago. It was quite handy during the years when the kids required a ton of stuff for trips (stroller, seat to eat in, portable crib, ton of diapers, etc). Now it is overkill and the low mileage makes it expensive to drive on long trips. When the time comes to replace it, we're definitely getting something with better mpg.

I'm so glad to see they can now sit and accomplish nothing under a welfare system that pacifies them by providing their basic needs and no more, while providing a disincentive to actually bettering themselves.

But if they bettered themselves, they would not be picking produce for sub-subsistence wages, now would they? So those poor farmers would still have to ship in exploitable people so you could keep getting produce for below its actual cost of production. Which is what this is really about: you want stuff for below its actual cost, even if this means exploiting desperate people.

In other words, you are against minimum wage because it makes it harder to transfer wealth from poor people to you. Damn looter.

Should Putin want to invade Ukraine, he'd conquer it in a week or two.

Which is what he already did to Crimea, and is now trying to do to East Ukraine. Putin is an evil overlord, not an idiot; he'll gobble up what he can without drawing too much aggro, then wait for the next opportunity.

The problem, of course, is that sooner or later he'll miscalculate the reaction, like Germany did in 1939, and then another world war will start.

1. Who disabled the safety lock, and on what authority?
2. Who fired the missile, and on what authority?

Putin's servants on Putin's authority. The real question is whether this was an intentional revenge for the sanctions, or merely typical Russian lack of concern for human lives. Either way, the poor bastards on the plane are simply collateral damage in Putin's Soviet Empire Rebuilding Project.

Second, given amount of hate western media spewing against Russians and China right now, I see the great war coming.

Dunno what China has to do with any of this, but if you fear a war is coming, maybe you should tell Putin to stop? Because he's the one hell-bent on conquering his neighbours, which is what this is about.

NASA's vaunted "Asteroid Redirect Mission" is now widely regarded as crap. It doesn't give us any new knowledge, it's not a good intermediate step for human colonization of space, and it's been mismanaged so badly that you could tell me it had been infiltrated by Russians intent on destroying America, and I wouldn't much doubt it.

But it does have one saving grace: it's our best shot if we ever find an asteroid headed for Earth impact.

I found this out sort of by accident - I was playing Kerbal Space Program, which has a NASA-sponsored module for doing asteroid redirects. I had a ship designed for that in orbit, and was looking for a good target.

I found one. On a direct intercept course. About a week out.

To make things worse, it was at like 80 degrees inclination. To cut a very long story short, I managed to redirect it to aerobrake, then stabilized the orbit so it wouldn't eventually deorbit.

Now, I fully realize that was a game, and that rocket science is actually a lot more complex than strapping a shitload of boosters to everything (my standard design). But the basic principle remains - something that can redirect an asteroid to enter lunar orbit is also something that can redirect an asteroid off of an impact course.

I don't know if that fully justifies the program - it's an absurd expense for what we get. On the other hand, what price can we put on avoiding extinction?