This is only second hand, but from what I've read the noise can carry quite a ways. And one of the problems is that if you *can* hear it, its as consistent as the wind is -- which, unfortunately, is likely to be pretty consistent or why else put up one of these turbines?

Heh, thanks for filling in the rest. I knew there were more, but I was just throwing down what I could remember off the top of my head. I was watching Bjarne talk about C++11 at Going Native and now I'm anxiously awaiting our (long overdue) transition to VS2010 (from 2005). I know it doesn't cover all the good stuff, but it has a lot of the goodness in there. Though, I'm writing cross platform code with a Mac team that refuses to use Clang, so God knows when I'll be allowed to use anything from C++11 :(

I mean, it's not, but it makes it sound like C++11 is a minor update. Lambdas, auto, concurrency, are these minor updates? There's a lot of interesting stuff in C++11!

You're missing the point. The 'religious lunatics' part is irrelevant. Powerful person's hurt feelings is the relevant part. If he'd been imprisoned by the King of France for the same thing, no one would be saying the French are against science today.

True, but despite what the Wikipedia says about 'most historians', I've read several accounts that he was actually kind of an asshole (I think, for example, he refused to acknowledge some of Kepler's stuff? Something like that, whoever it was, it was mostly out of jealousy) and the Simplicio thing was on purpose. If so, while he didn't deserve the result (it was overkill), he certainly provoked the response. If it was an innocent mistake, sure, but there's some dispute about whether an 'innocent mistake' is in keeping with his character.

At any rate, the upshot is that the whole "Galileo is a great example of the church & science being on opposite sides" is a misleading interpretation of the events.

Okay, I know its not fun to hear, but what you think you know about Galileo & the church is more complicated and less fun. From Wikipedia:

So while, yes, the Church did lock him up and heliocentrism was at the center of it, it was more about Galileo being stupid in how he wrote his book & the hurt feelings of a powerful man (the Pope). Frankly, no one looked good in that mess. The church was actually one of the biggest sponsors of science back then, something that rarely gets recognized because its so much more fun to set it up as religion vs. science, as if they've been in a death struggle since the beginning of time.

You're not entirely wrong, but its always easy to say that about someone ELSE'S culture & religion :) All I was trying to say is that the perception we have of AIDS here -- that its caused by unprotected sex and/or dirty needle use -- isn't the same over there. My father's involved with an international charity that does a lot of work in Africa & Asia trying to reduce AIDS incidence, so I get to hear a lot about the problems they encounter. They're slowly winning, but there are a lot of factors that make it slow going. I'm sure there's a tipping point, but they aren't anywhere near there yet. So any help that's given is greatly appreciated, and definitely not wasted.

A thousand children are born every day with HIV. There 2.5 million children with AIDS at the end of 2009. How easy was it for them to avoid it?

Your attitude isn't far wrong as a Western perspective, but the truth is AIDS is pretty rampant in other parts of the world (particularly Africa). Over there, culture & religion are huge roadblocks to stopping the spread, which means there is a great deal of 'collateral damage' to people who you'd think would be safe (children, spouses, etc.).

Whatever you think, 1.9 million people died in 2009 from AIDS, while 1.7 million died from tuberculosis. Not that tuberculosis isn't a fine target for money too, I just think its too facile to dismiss AIDS as 'easy to avoid' and therefore not worth pursuing.