The USSR was launching nuclear-powered RORSAT satellites as late as 1988 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A). I don't *think* there's any treaty that prohibits doing so again, and the only difference between a satellite and a spaceship is the ability to maneuver within and/or leave orbit. Orion (nuclear pulse rocket) is prohibited by treaty, because it involves intentionally detonating nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, but there's no reason you couldn't launch a contained reactor.

As for VASIMR, it's a very cool idea and one that may eventually see use either supplementing or replacing current ion engines, but it's not really a replacement for an NTR. 100x the thrust of an ion engine is somewhere in the neighborhood of what you might get from, for example, an Estes model rocket solid fuel engine. Sure, it'll run a lot longer, but its absolute thrust (never mind its thrust to weight ratio) is still minimal ("abysmal" might be more accurate) for spacecraft purposes. It's fine for long missions where you don't need any quick vector changes or a particular rapid voyage, but it would take one a ludicrously long time just to break out of Earth's gravity well if it started from LEO.

How the fuck are you still able to post at a default score of two when you are both blatantly talking about things you don't begin to understand (looking at only the change in gravitational potential energy but not the change in kinetic energy, saying shit like "So the efficiency of the Saturn V was 0.184%, not because it was a "bad" rocket, but because it was a rocket.", etc.) and also accusing *other* people of being stupid? Nathanbp, among others, posted a very clear rebuttal to your bullshit, and you not only didn't address it you insulted them for it. Go learn even the basics of orbital mechanics, and the basics of rocketry (specific impulse, the rocket equation, what delta-V really means, etc.), then come back.

As of this writing and with the way I have my account set up (close to default), your original post is at -1, none of your others in the thread are at higher than your default level of +2, and people pointing out how utterly wrong you are have hit +5 at least twice. Your response to such well-reasoned line-by-line rebuttals as that of brambus is, I quote, "Bloody moron." To that, I can only say: yep, you really are.

Yes yes yes but PARTY POLITICS! SOLIDARITY!

Seriously, people are *IDIOTS* when politics come out. One of the forums I hang out in refers to the phenomenon as "politics is the mind-killer". It turns normally rational people into raving lunatics at a sport competition, except with less cheering and (somehow) even more bullshit.

Yeah, I wouldn't take this to anybody who came up through the force. Go *RIGHT* over their heads, even if you have to take it to the state capitol.

Eh, biggest objection to XP post-SP2 was that it hung around for too long, while the rest of the world moved on. 32-bit only (the 64-bit version is actually Server 2003 without the Server-y bits, and not fully compatible with 32-bit XP even aside from driver issues), no ASLR (at the time XP launched, DEP support was pretty cool; by the time it went out of support an OS without ASLR couldn't be called "secure" with a straight face), one-way firewall (Vista added bi-directional filtering and a lot more control, though at least XP had *a* firewall), running as a daily user was a total pain if you weren't an Administrator (I know, I did it for months), and so on. Yes, these are mostly security concerns, but that's a pretty critical aspect of an OS for me. With that said, in the spectrum of Windows releases, XP SP0 was pretty much a bad skin on top of 2000 (which had plenty of its own issues, but XP SP0 didn't really *fix* most of them). SP1 helped a little but SP2 was really where the difference was made. Unfortunately, SP3 was little more than a roll-up of previous updates, and Vista was delayed again and again, then shipped as a reasonably secure but pretty buggy OS. There really needed to be an SP4 (or a real SP3) for XP that back-ported some of the important stuff from work on Vista, or an earlier and less-ambitious Vista (or at least NT5.3) release to fill the gap.

There's a program (free, though you may have to sign in with a Microsoft account) for getting OS updates on Windows Phone direct from Microsoft, without waiting for OEM or MO updates. It's called Preview for Developers, and has been available for well over a year. Despite the name, it's release software - same version that people on the normal upgrade path eventually get - and available to anybody who bothers to set it up. There's already a new version of the program for WP10, though it's not active (i.e. you can't actually use it to install WP10) yet.

"run the OS on top of DOS like Windows was previously doing" - you're aware that there were Windows versions between 3.11 and XP, right? None of them ran on top of DOS. Hell, I'll even ignore the fact that the GPP explicitly called out Windows 2000, which (being NT-based) was *exactly* as DOS-based as XP.

The 9x family (95, 98, ME, and their various releases/service packs) booted up through some DOS code, but DOS was basically no more than a bootloader for them. This OS family ran 32-bit protected-mode kernels (DOS was 16-bit Real Mode; no virtual memory, user/kernel separation, or process address space isolation). 9x ran on the FAT filesystem, like DOS, but supported long file names and Unicode, whereas DOS was limited to 8.3 names and 8-bit characters. 9x had a preemptive multitasking scheduler, unlike DOS which had no multitasking support at all (some previous software, such as Windows 1.x-3.x, had a cooperative multitasking scheduler on top of DOS but could not pre-empt a long-running process). 9x could and did run background processes (what a Unix user would call daemons), which was impossible on DOS. 9x had a hardware abstraction layer, allowing processes to share access to hardware such as mice and sound cards without requiring each program to have its own hardware drivers and take total control over the hardware the way DOS programs did.

Claiming that Windows pre-XP ran on top of DOS is just false. It used some DOS code in a few places and used DOS to bootstrap itself, much like a modern bootloader, but that's it. All of the core functions of an OS - the hardware interface, task management, memory management, and file management - were handled by Windows-specific code. The UI was 32-bit and Windows-specific. The 16-bit APIs were still present but the system call interface (kernel32.dll) was 32-bit and Windows-specific. It's true that you couldn't start 9x without DOS, but DOS was not running in any meaningful sense once 9x was.

It does install a service on Windows that runs with elevated privileges, allowing Steam to do admin-y stuff at will, though. Not a rootkit because it isn't hidden and doesn't resist removal, but still sketchy. I disable this service; it means I have to put up with a UAC prompt on the rare occasion I need to run a Steam game for the first time, but I'm OK with that.

I haven't tried it on Linux, yet. Due to the DRM nature of Steam, I avoid buying from them. The DRM-free games from Humble Bundle and GOG work fine on Linux without requiring that I install Valve's crap.

Wouldn't help. This commend (see the * on the end?) deletes everything in root, but doesn't delete root itself. Just as dangerous, but harder to detect. Use this coding pattern today!

First of all, this command doesn't remove the root directory, just everything inside it.
Second, you need root privileges to remove the root directory. However, you don't need root privileges to enumerate the root directory, find all children of it that you can delete, and delete them.

SELinux lets you specify what folders an application is allowed to access. The Steam software would have access to its own folders, but not to the rest of the user's directory or anywhere else that the user can write to (such as his mounted drive).

First of all, you seem very confused about the causes of age-related mortality. They are, in large part, the same things that make old age unpleasant. If your body went on aging "like normal" except for the things that could kill you, it would have to stop aging pretty young.

Second, the very concept of living a thousand years without arresting aging is so amazingly stupid, it sounds like satire. Oh wait, it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... Nobody would seriously suggest such a thing. Mind you, I'd still take it if it were offered. Why? Because I would *still have the option* to "eat a bullet". I would have more choices in what to do with my life than if I didn't take it, so why would I choose not to?

Probably true; if nothing else, there's always the heat death of the universe. But hey, if I can outlive everybody who has such a useless outlook on life as yourself, I will consider it a life well-lived! (You're actually opposed to life-extension research? Do you respond the same way to, say, cancer treatment research, or Alzheimer's prevention research?)

Maybe I should move to silicon valley and/or become a millionaire. (For context, at the moment I'm close enough to the upper end of middle-class that I could afford to live in SV, but I'd be in the lower end of the income range there.)

Oh, please. That's pure bullshit. Would you call it "panicking" if the people involved were middle-class? Because there have been lots of people involved in anti-aging research and most of them are nothing extraordinary, wealth-wise, by the standards of the US (especially by the standards of doctors in the US, though they weren't all doctors). Sounds more like jealousy on your part than panic on theirs. Some people spend their money on fancy cars and huge yachts. Some spend it on charity. Some spend on building a (continuously growing) commercial empire. Some spend it on politics. Some spend it on art collections. Some spend it on medical research. Really, it's not so different.

As for the hoarding of resources, I have no respect for those who accumulate resources for no better purposes than to accumulate. But if people who have lots of resources want to use them to extend lifespans, that's fantastic! Yes, initially it will be expensive. The first person to crack the problem will make a shitload of money, and probably be able to enjoy it for a very long time. But the costs will come down over time, and what was once a perk of the ultra-rich will eventually become a standard part of healthcare. Somebody has to get there first, though, and it's only logical to permit those who have lots of resources to commit those resources to the goal.

The "anybody who wants to prevent/stave off death is just 'scared shitless' " meme is one I've seen before from a wide range of sources, and I can't for the life of me understand how so many people can be so stupid. Fighting death is the logical thing to do, the *obvious* thing to do, whether you're rich or poor. Fighting death has given us life expectancies better than any other point in history. It has given us medical advances that seemed impossible just a few decades ago. It has improved quality of life across all ages. It has vastly reduced infant and childhood mortality.

It doesn't even seem to make sense as a religious objection. Biblical characters had vastly longer lifespans than we do - the concept of "Methuselah" as relating to longevity is fairly common, yet Methuselah's lifespan was merely the longest, rather than being exceptionally long compared to others of the same generation and lineage - and while some people are focused on ending death entirely (via things like brain uploading or cryopreservation with later revival), that doesn't apply to this project. It's not exclusive to the rich; rejuvenation and clinical immortality memes have been widespread in science fiction for decades, and most SF authors aren't exactly Scrooge McDuck. It is most common in the developed world (in many third-world nations, the fact that life expectancy can be higher is completely obvious, as their developed neighbors demonstrate) but certainly isn't exclusive to California.

The "found something you can't buy?" meme is also a stupid one. The vast majority of things people can imagine today - never mind things we'll be able to imagine in the future - are things you can't buy. People work constantly to bring new things to market. Prior to Tesla Motors, you couldn't buy a pure-electric car with a multi-hundred-mile range. Prior to Iridium, you couldn't buy a telephone usable anywhere in the world. Prior to the medical development of penicillin, you couldn't buy a cure for most bacterial infections. Prior to... you get the idea. Technology marches on. Today, you can't buy a life expectancy of 100, but that's no reason to avoid working on it!