We're making fun of you right now, but to be honest it isn't dumb to be worried.

Spacecraft and aircraft are highly computerized, and have redundant systems because accidents are either very deadly or very expensive and likely both. What you're talking about sounds like a scenario in which federal regulations have failed to force car makers to introduce this level of safety. Depending on the automaker, even if an engineer is aware of the risks, it may be out of his control and his employer could ultimately decide to cut corners in areas where the engineer wishes they'd rather not.

If what I've read on the quality of car software is any indication, the aerospace level of quality assurance (or anything approaching it) is not required by any government just yet. So while it would make sense that "engineers would think of that", but engineers aren't the only player there is to worry about.

Correct. you can do this in Orbiter Space Flight Simulator by playing with the Camera settings and speeding up the time dilation.

Far Side "Earth Liberation" Instructions:

• - Hit F4 to bring up the Main Menu
• - Click Camera
• - Set Target to Moon
• - Click Apply
• - Hold Z to reduce the FoV down to the lowest degree, then pan out with the mouse wheel
• - Make sure View Mode is set to "target-relative" (indication in the upper left) if not, hit F2 until it does
• - Rotate your view around to the far side of the moon until you see the Earth.
• - Speed up time dilation by hitting T

Near Side "Moon Liberation" instructions are similar:

• - Hit F4 to bring up the Main Menu
• - Click Camera
• - Set Target to Earth
• - Click Apply
• - Click Track
• - Set Target to Moon (click Target to...)
• - Scroll mouse wheel until the camera pans all the way into the Earth and you see the other side (you should see the moon)
• - Make sure View Mode is set to "absolute-direction"
• - Speed up time dilation by hitting T

Their presentation is much better though, especially for the Moon Liberation because the FoV in Orbiter is limited to 10 degrees as a minimum. Saving your scenario and editing the file (it's all text files), might work around that.

The simulator uses mathematical models that are true to life, I forget the names of them but they're well known models that are used to predict things like eclipses and planet locations in planetarium software.

Depends on what you're doing. I found it helpful for dealing with trees. But counting 1 to 6? Nah...

Coding is hard. A girl may take it as an elective when they might not have otherwise, but that doesn't mean she'll make a career out of it. There are some careers that require a real interest to cultivate and grow in... and I think computer science is one of them.

Conversely, Billy might be rejected from a course for a year, to keep an arbitrary percentage of diversity or whatever, and that's not great. But chances are if he's really interested, he's doing stuff on his own already. A good parent would buy him an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, coding books, and stuff like that to help him cultivate his computer interests outside of school.

K12 is bad at teaching everything as it is... so it doesn't mean much when Billy can't take a half-assed computer elective that will likely be taught by an art teacher or the coach.

You have so many avenues to argue against this kind of thing, and you pick the one least likely to garner any sympathy.

I doubt there's much fear. Not yet anyway.

That's weird. She must be freaking out about the direction Microsoft is headed under Nadella.

I hear Google is going to do some fiber magic in North Carolina. I have some friends there, including a special friend, all of whom I met online. Good luck in your travels. One day we'll be free of all the dinosaurs, people and company alike.

It DOES have annoying nags. That's why I stopped using it. It used to never nag, and I've used it almost as long as you have... but these days it'll show a popup asking you to upgrade every few hours or so. I just use Windows Defender now, and reserve Avast for occasional boot time disk scans when I get suspicious (comes clean every time).

I remember this too. Wasn't compatibility the main reason for sticking to 32 bit Windows XP on a 64 bit system? A big reason I remember is that if you didn't have more than 4 GB of ram you wouldn't see a benefit, and at the time, 2 GB was still huge. Actually, 2 GB was the limitation most 32 bit software had because you needed to flip the /3GB switch in boot.ini, and even then the software had to be compiled a certain way to be large address aware.

At the time, AMD was known for having the faster processor at a lower price. 64 bit version or not, people and businesses were buying these things like crazy back then.

It's not like it was the only probe to use parachutes. Besides, it also used airbags. I'm inclined to think that the engineers knew what they were doing.

You'll get tired of the Start Screen. In the update, either 8.1, or 8.1 Update 1, the Start Screen no-longer adds newly installed programs to the screen by default. This is to avoid clutter, because people would install programs, and every executable that came with each program would end up on the start screen. I thought that was great, and initially I manually moved my most used programs onto the screen and made it all nice and neat and organized as though I cared. But what I ended up doing was searching for my programs by name. This habit came with me to work, where I use Windows 7 and it behaves in the same way (hit start button on the keyboard, and just start typing. I honestly didn't have this specific habit before Windows 8. I would search, but not always). Then, on my Windows 7 work computer, I noticed that the start menu was faster than my start screen. Sometimes it was much faster. So much so, that I began to view the Start Screen as slow. I installed a free start menu replacement app and have only needed the screen on rare occasions. Windows 8.1 lets you dock your Surface apps to the task bar like a regular application, and I put my most used surface apps there (Mail, Calendar, IHeartRadio).

I was somewhat of a shill for Microsoft when Windows 8 came out. I even have an early Windows Phone 8. People hated it, and I thought they were all wrong. Well, they were right about the Start Screen on desktops. It sucks. I only use it on my Surface Pro tablet, where it belongs. Windows 10 gives users a choice between using a start screen and a menu. The menu as seen in screenshots isn't that different from what we see in Windows 7. Another known feature will be Surface apps in windows. These are fine... but that could have just come to us in an update or something. The experiment is over. I paid to be a guinea pig, and I'll have to pay again to get the final product.

Interesting. I live in a medium sized city, and other than a subreddit on Reddit I don't really bother with community forums. But I have noticed the negative impact online chatter can have with my large family. Perhaps there's a perfect size for this sort of thing. Too small, and people are too closely tied. Too big, and people are too anonymous. But at just the right size, you know everyone just enough to snipe at them, and not enough to feel bad about it.

People obsess over this idea that North Koreans must be hacking from within North Korea, and that there's no way they could realistically do it because their connection bandwidth is so puny. They forget that North Korean government is really an organized criminal syndicate with a huge military and slave labor base. They likely have vast criminal connections. All they have to do is hire sympathetic South Korean hackers on the condition that they do their work under the North Korean banner. When all is said and done, the North Koreans come out looking like bad asses you don't want to mess with, when in reality they just farmed the work out using basic email, a courier, and a satellite phone.

We could break their internet access forever, with a never ending DDOS, and it wouldn't matter one bit.

Not defending it or anything but... how are they going to find out? Are they combing your internet accounts for this sort of thing, or is it based on medical records? Does anyone go to the hospital for their high-heel fetish? What about patient-doctor confidentiality? If I were Russian, and confided in my shrink that I had a fetish that was bothering me because I was otherwise an upstanding, hard working, God-fearing, citizen who paid taxes... would the government eventually find out about that? Are your psychiatrists compromised? Do they have to report this sort of thing?

There's a lot of unanswered questions... even the article says the thing is vague. But the purpose of the thing is pretty clear. I imagine everyone is more or less safe provided they stop talking about politics and at least try to conform. The measure's purpose is to punish the outspoken activists. If you don't cause any fuss and you at least pretend to be a Christian and straight, and act hateful towards gays and the West, you'll be okay. Your reputation will go untarnished, provided you continue to pretend to fit in with, and possibly support the status-quo. Obedience will be rewarded by granting you permission to continue living an uncontroversial, uninterrupted, life. In that way, the measure is genius. The vagueness promotes fear, and fear promotes compliance. You don't know where you might trip up.

I honestly have no idea how one would combat that sort of thing. It seems like your only choice is to wait for Putin to die of old age, to move, or to get violent. My condolences for your trouble. It makes any issues I worry about in America pale in comparison.

That sounds vaguely threatening. I think he should arrest himself.

Woah that was dumb, I replied to the wrong comment or something. NVM.