I had some HP printer drivers that I couldn't get rid of on a Windows 7 machine, no matter what I did (well, I didn't boot into recovery console and delete the files that way, but that's dangerous territory), so yes, there are ill-behaved applications that can still leave their rotting remnants around the system.

I remember in the transition between INI files and the registry (how I miss the days when applications had their own discrete text-based configuration files... oh wait, *nix still does!), and Microsoft sent out countless missives all but ordering developers to move to the registry. The registry was the approved place to store configurations, likely, I'm sure, because sticking all user settings in a single hive that could be passed around from workstation to workstation for roaming profiles.

Of course, the down side has always been that the registry just becomes cluttered with crap, particularly on a system that sees a lot of software installed, updated, reinstalled and uninstalled. Throw in there nearly two decades' worth of COM objects being incremented and decremented unsuccessfully, and a computer that's been running for five or six years, and fragmentation of the file system, and it can lead to just awful response times.

That piece is kind of crap. The main reason is that the summer holidays are over. The kids are in school (and busy with clubs, homework and so on on the weekends) and the parents are working. And as most bathers are gone, so are the drink vendors, the equipment renters and so on.You'll still find people on beaches, just not many.

Democrats: The New GOP.

Hey, come on, now. That's not fair. The old GOP was not nearly as militaristic and bankster owned as the current Democrats.

I was kind of hoping for some sort of creature deciding to try to crawl out onto dry land, finding no actual land, saying "screw it", and crawling back under the ice.

No, 1:16:9. Our entire solar system moved to high-def monoliths shortly after 2001.

There are only two hard things in computer science: caching, naming, and off-by-1 errors

You're naïvely assuming that Windows 10 will have working caching.

I would imagine that this will be the kind of a movie that will be in the five dollar bin at Walmart's within a month of release. And there will be a lot of them that simply stay in that bin.

At least they'll be neatly packed.

Pong: The future is in your hands.
A cross genre action-scifi-romcom with human drama and real meaning.

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I'd feel better if some smart people from the CDC or WHO or USAMRIID were trying to figure out what us different this time.

Good post and all, but on this specific point: Go ahead and feel better. All three are. The people there with the right expertise are probably working extensive overtime, owing both to the vigor of their superiors and their own intense desire to beat this thing. We know they are; we intentionally imported two victims early on, so we could get more data to work with.

the term "collection" as redefined by Executive Order 12333 to allow basically every information dragnet, provided no-one looks at it. "Collection" is now defined as "collection plus action." ... This leads to the question of aging off collected data/communications:

No it does not. Do not go gentle into that good night. There is no reason whatsoever for us to accept the giant leap into unconstitutional territory and debate the fine points left to us, settling for scraps of liberty from dictators who have derived no just power from the consent of the governed. Rage against this machine until you die or it does.

Ok. You are obviously much better informed than I am, and I guess you are quite pessimistic about the total amount of oil that would ever be found. But as prices rise, things which are hopelessly uneconomic become more plausible.

Mind you, I consider this totally the wrong way to go. But when prices rise enough there will be a lot more oil available. But there are lots of reasons that that it only becomes available when the prices rise dramatically. Small fields, difficult access, expensive construction, dangerous conditions, etc. Not to mention continuing CO2 pollution.

We *need* to develop renewable energy resources. I'm not really sure that we should be moving into full scale deployment now...except for cases where there isn't much downside, or whether the technology is already mature. (Hydro comes to mind.) But we need significant investment in developing renewable technologies to the "demonstration project" stage. (I.e., one step past the pilot project.) Some of the investment should continue to be in basic research, but more needs to be invested in moving from research result to useful plant. (Don't take that too literally. Rooftop solar isn't exactly a plant, but it falls within the pervue of what I mean.)

I'm not clear as to why every single person flying into an airport from the hot spots isn't put in quarantine upon landing.

You are suggesting that every single one of a multitude of completely independent temperature records are all wrong. You are trying to dismiss them on the irrational basis that they all point in the same direction by slightly different amounts.

Furthermore you are assuming that every single one of a multitude of completely independent temperature records are all wrong in the same direction, imposing your pre-determined bias upon them.

You are baselessly filtering out any satellite data that doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

You are baselessly filtering out ocean temperatures, which account for 90% of climate heating, because it doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

You are engaging in wild conspiracy-theoryism claiming (or implying) that some hundredthousand scientists are ALL too stupid to account for novice-level obvious measurement difficulties, or that they are ALL conspiring to deliberately lie.

And most of all you're denying THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.
CO2 lets sunlight in and blocks the escape of thermal radiation. There is no possible dispute there. End of argument. The science is utterly and unarguably settled. All that's left at that point is determining the size of the effect.

It's astounding that it somehow doesn't make it into your conscious awareness that you are baselessly ignoring anything and everything that doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

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