You know that birth rates are highest in areas where mortality rates are highest, right? It's not the stable, healthy, wealthy nations that are producing huge numbers of humans. It's the struggling, starving and poor nations that are breeding in excess. Part of longevity assumes appropriate availability of heath and nourishment resources. There's a strong reason to suspect that if we were effectively immortal, our birth rates would drop to sustainable rates, or less.

And then there's the simple fact that it frequently DOESN'T WORK. I frequently - as an administrator - use command prompts. So I press the Start button and type "cmd". Maybe three times out of ten on various systems owned by my customers, if I do this too quickly, Win7 simply gives up. It displays nothing. It looks like it's maybe thinking about it, but meanwhile I'm waiting. And waiting. And it doesn't work. So I hit backspace to go back to "cm". That usually doesn't help. So I add the "d" again and usually I get the search to find CMD.

Yay.

Just a guess, but if Columbia itself had less than 4% of the delta-V required to match orbits, I'd think another ship with about 4% of the delta-V required nets you nowhere anywhere even remotely near "meet half way". Worse, once you've met half way, what's your next move? You've burned at least ten times as much fuel as you actually have just to get there. You've got (up to) twice the crew chewing up consumables in an orbit that's nowhere near anything else.

I don't think so. Regulated fund-raising might not be such a bad thing. Certainly it'd reduce fraud if folks had to demonstrate a legitimate need accountability structure.

On an unrelated note, since I don't live in Finland I was wondering if you'd like to donate to my cause? It's called:

Prevent Children From Getting Sick, Ever BBMAH*
Insert a bunch of statistics here about how kids get sick all the time, from all sorts of preventable causes. Seriously, a big wall of text going on and on about the needless suffering of children throughout the world. Add a bunch of pictures of kids with sores on them, maybe flies crawling around. Basically National Geographic meets Apocalypse Now.
*By Buying Me A House

Now if the new improvement was that you only needed half of the detergent to get your whites whiter and therefore you'd spend half as much per load, sure, there'd be an argument.

This isn't that. This is the digital equivalent of "the box now has toxic printing on it, and the detergent inside has each granule conveniently packaged in concrete. But we provide you a small hammer."

Look, this is unpleasant to look at in at least four ways. The horizontal layout wastes a massive amount of screen space. The vertical layout wastes a massive amount of screen space. The background colour together with the default font reduce readability. And despite all of this, less information is shown at any given time.

Would you like us to disable UAC, DEP, and our antivirus software in order to use this too? Do we need root/administrator rights to view your site? Perhaps we need the latest beta of .NET or JRE?

My point is that this is a huge step backwards in usability. The point behind Chrome, Firefox, and IE reducing the amount of UX is to make it possible to display more content. Don't take the increased screen space created by making the status bar, menu bar, URL bar, title bar, tabs, buttons, and in fact UI of the browser and then show me reduced content.

You. Are. Doing. It. Wrong.

I. WILL. Leave.

Am I in some way unclear here? I'm not threatening. I'm calmly explaining. The content value of this site is not so high that I will tolerate this reduction in functionality. I know, I know. You've got some assclown marketing guy who tells you that we'll all just... give it one try, because we can't go without our fix. And we'll get used to it.

I'm informing you that I won't. On principle. Because if you're willing to say "fuck you" this loudly to me, I'm willing to say the same right back.

You're missing that people do want their product. Avoiding the product altogether sends a false message that the product isn't wanted. What we don't want is the packaging.

The closest equivalent to buying a physical product and throwing its packaging away is buying a DRM product and pirating the content. Once I've paid for the content, it's mine morally, ethically, and logically. It's just the law that needs work.

Throw away the packaging and tell the manufacturer why.

Two things:
1} Healthcare is truly important while this TSA nonsense isn't. So yeah, that'd be good.
2} Just because one project authorized by a group is done improperly doesn't mean that all - or even any - other project will be done improperly.

Not a chance. I predict there will be relatively few sales because of the "too little, too late" status, and EA will simply conclude that they were right all along... offline mode doesn't matter.

I thought we evolved that way so that Reebok could sell us new shoes. Huh.

We're not talking about the accent lighting. We're talking about primary lighting, where LED is very, very rare as it's only the last 24 months or so that LED clusters with high enough output have started to come to market. Incidentally, I am your boss, so I'm in a super-perfect position to know this.

Personal? You want to get personal? I wouldn't do that. Because that'd be the bit where I drop the simple fact that I'm running a 100% OEM factory install from one of the Big Three. My totally-against DOT regulations lights? Standard for a vehicle chassis that is pumped out in quantities of 100k a year. Of course, the HID option has only been available for the last seven model years, but the point remains. Your alleged expertise in the matter has just been made questionable to the point of oblivion.

"What, what? Making stuff up are we? HIDs are available at a very, very wide color temperature range. Mine for instance are a nice 4300K; a nice crisp white light."

4300K has more blue than STANDARD 3,000K. Try again.

By definition yes, 4300K has more blue than 3000K, which is very yellow. In any practical measurement, it isn't until you exceed 5000K that blue creeps into the visible spectrum. Headlights between 4300K and 4500K are considered white. 3000K isn't normal for this application. But given you're a lighting engineer for God or something, I'm guessing that you can't handle every color temperature chart and sample on the planet disagreeing with you.

"Again, your mirrors are evidently below typical bumper level. Weird. You might want to fix that."

Ignorant of how physics, light, and mirrors work, I see.

Yeah, I've always had trouble with the idea that things above lines where light is not permitted to travel somehow reflect blinding light at someone. It's a failing, to be sure. Dude, we're not talking about passive reflected scatter photons bouncing off pavement. We're talking about shooting people in the face with headlights. Do yourself a favor and Google a few dozen images of "HID cut off" and take a gander at how the only area where anything is thrown more than about 2ft above the ground is the extreme right edge, if even there. It may save your job.

If you do have a job in automotive lighting, you shouldn't.

One: modern lights are HID, not LED. Totally different technology.
Two: what are you driving? I've got a... car. With the cut-offs in my HID projectors, 100% of my light emission is at or below the bumper level of a car in front of me. Even were I in an SUV, I'd be getting your trunk deck. Excluding anyone driving a monster truck, proper HID projectors aren't causing your problem. Unless you're driving a skateboard. Laying down.

What, what? Making stuff up are we? HIDs are available at a very, very wide color temperature range. Mine for instance are a nice 4300K; a nice crisp white light. Not as yellow as typical but no blue tinting like an 8000K bulb or purple like a 12000K kit. OEMs actually use bulbs in the vicinity of 4500K for that precise reason.

Again, your mirrors are evidently below typical bumper level. Weird. You might want to fix that.

As has been stated - repeatedly - the problem you have is with people who are not using proper projectors. It's not an issue with OEM installs.

Bullshit indeed, Captain Clueless AC.

HID-equipped cars don't use traditional aiming lenses. They use a projector ball in front of the bulb which shapes the light emitted. Additionally, between the bulb and the projector there's a metal cut-off plate that prevents light from being thrown upwards. While HIDs typically emit about three times as many lumens, virtually none of it is permitted to aim towards oncoming traffic.

The point Lumpy was making is that proper projector housings cost serious money while a set of HID bulbs and inverters cost in the realm of $50. Yes, many, many ricer idiots retrofit HIDs into their cars unsafely by keeping their lens-based housings. Which means... three times as much light in oncoming traffic.

Now you know, which should help you to stop being uneducated. Or you WOULD know if you'd not posted AC and got a nice notification someone replied to you.

At the very least, blanket metadata capture means the answer is absolutely, positively, unrepentantly YES.

Maybe it's been using Dual_EC_DRBG and the NSA hacked him?

Wait. That means that during the early hours they should be facing West and during the late hours they should be facing East. At high noon it doesn't matter what they do. There's no sun-related time that would put bias on North/South axis alignment and the data shows a bias against East/West alignment.

As for the assertion that the alignment of streets and walls are involved, I accidentally RTFA and found this curious line. "The magnetic consciousness was observed only in dogs off leash, in the middle of a field."

Better yet, there's variation in behaviour that reflected magnetic fluctuations.

So it turns out dogshit science isn't as easy as you thought.