Do you want the society of China or Mexico here? The dramatic air pollution and water pollution of China, or the slums and crime of Mexico?

You DO realize that with our taxes, we buy civilization, right? We buy clean air and water, peaceful neighborhoods, and other basic quality of life.

What we really need to get rid of (after fixing the tax code so that the wealthy are returned to paying their fair share) is all the corporate welfare and tax-breaks for highly profitable businesses, as well as trimming some of the excessive military spending we engage in.

...but the crashiest apps on my iPhone have always been the apps included with the OS. The AppStore crashes on me the most. The Mail app is second. It's very rare that any app that I've downloaded actually crashes on me. Maybe I'm just lucky.

Not a trend, just a data point.

Well, except that over that same time period, we'll be experiencing a reversal of the poles, and the accompaning period of magnetic flux that would make magnetic compasses rather useless.

That's not really the problem. The problem is that one side is claiming there's no data or no agreement, when the objective fact is that there is TONS of data and TONS of agreement.

The side that is on the side of science is tired of having last decades debates over and over and over again because the side against the side of science is just pushing an agenda (protecting the status quo).

Legitimate: Questioning and verifying the science, making sure results are duplicated, etc.

Legitimate: Questinging what policies or procedures should result from the scientific finding (aka "what do do about it" if anything)

Illegitimate: Smearing valid scientific results through ignorant half-understanding or misperceptions, simply because you're a paid lacky of an organization that feels "threatened" by the findings and is scared of what possible formt he solutions might take.

Recently one of the biggest climate-change skeptics, backed with massive funding from climate change denialsts with a huge investment in the status quo and a huge political agenda to push (aka The Koch Brothers) went over all the existing data, brought in new data, and put the entire thing through the scientific wringer (everything from the hockeystick graph, to "heat-island" theories, to solar influence, etc)... and this Climate Change Skeptic came out of it a convert, admitting that Climate Change is REAL.

We need to move beyond constantly questioning whether it's real or not, and get to the "okay, given the scientific findings in this area, what if anything should we do about it, and what are the consequences, pros-and-cons, of any given course of action, including complete inaction?"

There is a legitimate debate to be had there.

But to continue to question whether climate change is "real" is like those continuing to question whether "evolution" is real. Sure, some details almost certainly have yet to be discovered. But you know what? That's science.

Newtonion physics wasn't WRONG. Ensteinian/Relativistic theory just expands what was there and fleshes it out. It didn't throw it in the garbage. For many real-world approximations, Newtonian physics works just fine. For others, Relativity must be taken into account.

Similarly, I'm sure we'll continue to discover more and more about evolution and about climate change and humanity's influence on it. But it's not, at this point, going to completely invalidate all that has come before.

Datacenters mostly. I know our company (a MS shop) will certainly make use of these features whenever they make the move to Windows 8 Server. Which isn't likely for years, but still.

Ultimately they'll release it for boot devices and such. But for the next few years it'll only be really useful in large storage scenarios. I don't know if they're going to release it on "Windows Home Server", but they should: Mirrored Storage Spaces plus the ReFS improvements would be VERY useful in that area. Joe Blow can just plug in a new 1TB drive, and ReFS and Storage Spaces will make use of it, replicating data across drives. A drive goes bad? Just unplug it, and plug in a new one. Hot-swappable, uninterrupted... self-healing.

I've heard anecdotal evidence (so take with a grain of salt) that doing stuff on ReFS is much faster.

Keep in mind this initial release is for servers only, and NOT for boot volumes, so it'll be a while (half a decade or more) before it trickles down into most desktops/laptops.

But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.

Let's see: 32K file name and path limits (instad of 255), on-line recovery from corruption (no more "Check Disk" or offline recovery-rebuild), faster performance, built in recovery of data on failed disks (via Storage Spaces), hot-adding-more-storage to volumes, better control of allocation and localization on the drive, attribute checksums (and auto detection and recovery from "bitrot")....

Did you RTFA at all?

You need to RTFA. The grandparent was a spoof. ReFS doesn't support compression. Or short-names. etc.

You and I are on different ends then... I honestly can't stand Objective-C. I can't even really tell you why. It just grates everytime I see it.

In this case, I think it's solely driven by iDevices. If the iPhone and iPad were to suddenly tank in the market, I believe you'd see Objective-C usage tank right along with it. Objective-C isn't the reason they're popular. It's just the only choice developers have to code for a popular platform.

Meanwhile, something like C# is actually pleasurable, and I think would see increasing usage even if WP7 tanks (heck, it's barely a blip in usage as it is right now). C# in some form or another is available on non-MS platforms too, and is used there. Obviously MS drives C# adoption with the popularity of their Windows platform, but I think there's a subtle difference in that C# is really nice... (you have MANY options when coding for Windows). Objective-C is just the only choice.