Honestly, OSX is the worst offender of the lot.

I use my computer to do work, not surf the net and look at pictures of cats.

Working with OSX is like working on your car in your garage, and you've got all the tools you need spread out within arms reach so you can quickly grab them as you need them.

Only, you have an obsessive compulsive spouse who absolutely NEEDS everything to look clean and pretty in case some third party is watching, and every time you set down a tool and pick up another one, she picks it up off the floor and puts it away.

It's not a technical problem. It's a problem of faulty design. They let a bunch of graphic designers turn my goddamned hammer into a flower, and it's very pretty, but I can't drive a nail with it, and, somehow, they convinced EVERY manufacturer of hammers to follow in their footsteps, so I'm forced to look for a brick, because ALL the tools I relied on to do my job are BROKEN.

I just want my ugly, greasy toolbox back, but no one makes them any more.

Well, the auto makers have "fixed" that problem in their latest models. They now have those little "onboard computers" that constantly scan many of the controls and figure out how to map them to physical actions. This means that any "upgrade" to the software can change the functioning of all the controls. You can think you're just getting an upgrade to improve the mileage, but that upgrade can flip the meaning of the turn-signal controls.

Some of the latest models have wifi, so they can do upgrades while you're traveling. We'll probably soon be hearing of accidents caused by a sudden change in meaning of what the driver did with the controls. (Yes, they may say the upgrades won't happen while the car is moving. What that means is that if you stop at a stop sign or light, when you start moving again, the controls may have silently changed. And if you think they wouldn't do upgrades without your permission, you haven't been paying attention.)

If computer-industry history is any guide, it'll probably take decades for all this to settle down to an intuitive, reliable auto UI. And the security problems still won't be solved, so your car can be taken over at any moment by "hackers" - or the police - or your insurance company.

(I wish I were joking ... but I'll probably get a "funny" mod for this anyway. ;-)

I used to have a great deal of interest in my computers, but after Windows 8, OSX, Gnome 3 and Unity, I really don't like computers any more, so I just do what's necessary to pay the bills.

You must be a Ranger, and the OP a Paladin.

Me, I'm just a fighter, neutral and available as a mercenary (in case anyone's hiring)

I think the feathered reentry would still work at orbital speeds, it's just that the composite material from which SS2 is built can't withstand the heat. Putting heat tiles on SS2 would not work well as that would add too much weight, and they're still gonna have all kinds of problems with the tiles staying in place. So for all intents and purposes the feather reentry is strictly a suborbital design.

The most innovative orbital reentry design I saw was a proposal for using the rocket engine plume to deflect superheated air molecules away from the spacecraft. Yes you would need to use fuel for that but the weight of the fuel you would need compared favorably to the weight and complexity of a heat tile design. But then you have the problem of "what happens if the rocket engine fails to ignite", and the answer is that you melt. So it would be useful for unmanned vehicles that you can afford to lose to engine failure once in a while but not for manned reentry.

If I'm the one with the communications infrastructure and I let you use it to communicate, what you say reflects on me because I built your podium.

Free speech does not entitle you to someone elses podium.

Nah; if we do that, they'll all just agree with each other. (Haven't you been paying attention. ;-)

Cold weather sucks. I don't own costal property. I'm glad the world is getting warmer. I hope it continues. It will increase the carrying capacity of the planet by making food easier to grow. I see no downside.

Well,yeah, but that's balanced out by the large population of native English speakers with a poor command of the language. ;-)

We're seeing a bit of that here on /. these days ...

He gave you permission to copy his stuff if you like. He just doesn't feel right selling a music stream to you because he feels it's a rip off. For you. I doubt he needs your money at this point.

Thus starts another round of the old "Is Pluto a real planet?" fiasco. ;-)

The pseudo-argument is really based on a poor understanding of basic English grammar. The word "dwarf" in the phrase "dwarf planet" is being used as an adjective modifying the noun "planet". A fellow at NASA (whose name I didn't catch) explained the fallacy of saying this means that Pluto isn't a real planet, by giving a few examples of the usage. Thus, we have several "dwarf apple trees" in our yard. Nobody who understand English would say that this means they're not real apple trees; they are real apple trees that bear real apples, but are much smaller (3-4m tall) than most (full-size) apple trees. Similarly, our sun is classified as a "dwarf star". This means that it's a real star that fuses H atoms and gives off light, but it's smaller than most of the stars you can see in the sky. This is a good thing, because a "full-size" star 140 million km from our planet would totally vaporize all our water, and would burn out in a few hundred million years, destroying our planet at the end of its life. If there are other intelligent critters on planets around other stars, those will also be multi-billion-years-old dwarf stars like ours (to within an order of magnitude). Most of the galaxy's stars are dwarf stars.

Readers can probably think of lots of other common uses of "dwarf" or "pygmy" to mean a small version of something. This isn't mysterious; it's standard English syntax. (We have a potted "dwarf jade plant". It's a real jade plant, but its parts only grow to about 1/3 the size of the equivalent "standard" jade plant. It's a very easy sort of bonsai to grow. But when we bring it inside for the winter, we have to protect it from our cockatiels, who find it tasty.)

Other astronomers have pointed out the major problem with the term "planet": It's far too inclusive. It includes object as varied as Mercury and Jupiter, so it's an almost useless classification term. The long-term sensible approach is to prepend various modifiers to say which of a list of classes a given planet is filed under. We have a few of them, like "gas giant", and the more recent "ice giant", of which our solar systems contains two each. The classification "dwarf" was added a few years ago for the tiny planets that can't hold an atmosphere. We still don't seem to have a standard classification for the 3 intermediate-size planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. We also haven't figure out good terminology for the similar objects (Titan, Triton, etc) that also have things like an atmosphere with weather, but which share an orbit with a planet in a larger class. Pluto is an interesting borderline case, because at the recent perihelion, it has had a very thin but significant atmosphere, which is now condensing out as the sun gets more distant.

In the long run, we really should have a reliable set of classes for the sort of astronomical object that's big enough to be (roughly) spherical but too small for fusion to happen in its core. We've found that there are lots more of them in our solar system than we thought, at least 6 with atmospheres denser with ours, and several with thinner atmospheres. Pretty soon, we'll be getting good data on similar objects orbiting other stars.

Calling all the round-but-not-stars objects "planet" is a useful term. But such a vague term really shouldn't ever be used without a prefix. Maybe the astronomical community should get a committee together to come up with a better list of planet classes than the current mess. And try to get the media and general public to use it correctly. ;-)

Or maybe they should just officially declare "planet" to be a non-technical term, with no precise astronomical definition. But then they'd have to come up with some new technical terms, so they probably won't do that.

In any case, saying a "dwarf planet" isn't a planet merely shows ignorance of basic English grammar. Some astronomers have pointed this out. We just need to get the word out to all the people who misunderstand it due to their poor command of the English language.

Or just one day of funding to the illegal aliens with free stuff.

Hey, how about we cut BOTH, no more military occupations and no more free stuff to illegal aliens? Then we can fund NASA for TWO years!

I went through some effort to make myself as clear as possible, but let me go further since you're still not getting it.

Your point was that US Army is so overwhelmingly powerful that nobody has a chance to win against them and thus civilians should be disarmed. My rebuttal to that was, that's only true in conventional warfare. Then I cite Taliban as an example of how US Army is vulnerable to guerrilla tactics.

Then in a separate paragraph, with its own introductory sentence that starts with "And there's the question of loyalty in the military...", I point out that the army might not even fight at all. Robert E. Lee was mentioned in this paragraph as an example of a US Army officer deciding not to fight for the US Army. The citation of Robert E. Lee was in context of this paragraph only, not the entire post.

Get it now?

Heh. That would really baffle anyone in the 95% of the human population who's not a literate, native speaker of English. (Just imagine a tourist staring at their dictionary, trying to make sense of that set of three simple English words. ;-)

Of course, it's not at all unusual for people to put up signs with this level of clarity, nearly anywhere in the world. There's a nice web site, engrish.com, that has a large collection of similar signage, mostly from east Asia, but also from most of the rest of the world.

Not this tired old argument again.

There is no force on earth that can stand up to the US military in a conventional battle. Does that mean every other group or nation should stop buying weapons because that would be wasted money?

Taliban and others have shown that US military is quite vulnerable in unconventional warfare. And that was in places where US soldiers didn't care that much about the local population. How do you think it will go down when the guerrilla fighters are blending into the civilian population of Kansas and Virginia instead of Mosul and Kandahar?

And there's the question of loyalty in the military. If things got so bad and the federal gov't so hated that a large scale armed uprising took place, it's quite likely that many of soldiers will either refuse to fight or join the other side. (look up Robert E. Lee sometime, he was a guy in the US Army but quit when his hometown buddies rose up against the gov't)

If the army refused to fight, the Capitol police and Secret Service can still own any unarmed mob storming DC and mow them down. But an armed mob? Not so easy.