> If trek was real life (it isn't),

Thank you for clarifying that. ;)

And yet, XP, Win2K3, Win2K8, and Win7 are all far more accurate. . .

On the other hand, why should we, the American people, continually foot the bill for policing these skirmishes? The UN body has HOW many member states, and what do they do to help? Not a thing. Why should we be the ones to do it? We are tens of trillions in debt due in part to policing the world and it has got to stop. Yes, there is genocide, but where were we one, two, three years ago when Syria was already engaging in these atrocities? Napalm, concussion bombs, swords, and firing squads all this time and it has been a non-issue but now that they're using chemical weapons it's suddenly an issue. Why? I think it's just profiteering on the part of certain sponsors behind the politicians, and not a moral issue at all. Were it a moral issue, we would have already intervened long ago. They're just saying "ZOMG chemical weapons" to try to rally support of The People but we are so fed up with the runaway spending, sending OUR troops to die trying to defend people who are intent upon killing each other, benefiting a handful of companies to the tune of hundreds of billions in profits as we continue to bankrupt not only ourselves but many generations to come, and we have grown wise to it and are saying ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

Let them kill each other - we cannot be their babysitters. We have our own problems to deal with, and besides, every time we send aid or troops to help resolve these issues we accomplish nothing but earning more enemies, because we politicize these issues and restrain the military rather than let them do their work quickly and efficiently, costing us far more money and then having to engage in reduced freedom and increased security theater due to the terrorist cells which rise in response to our very politicized "police actions."

ENOUGH.

I program natively in more languages than you've had hot fixes. I've probably run more Linux kernel projects than you. And judging from your UID, I've roughly a thousand times the experience of software development.

By 99.5% the same, I do not mean implementation (which is immaterial and gets in the way of real work) but design. If you regard no function as a null function, then all OS' have a memory management API. It doesn't matter if it's the DOS idea of memory management (if it collides, it collides - survival of the fittest), the Linux idea (where there's compartmentalization, memory mapping and System V shares) or some other scheme. It's just an API for a black box.

And that's the whole point. Yes, there are modular OS' (Linux), monolithic OS' (OpenBSD), microkernels (L4) and even nanokernels, but that's architectural bullshit for the most part. For any given function in any given OS, there will be another OS in which you will need zero or more functions to perform the same task. But it will be performable.

The "ideal" is to write a pseudo OS - done these loads of times, they're fun - that performs all of the core operations you need in all OS'. (Games, for example, don't generally need to access the print spooler or OS-level password table much.) This pseudo OS can be written as a library and included by a compiler or cross compiler. (This is how Occam, Java and Smalltalk work, I'm not certain but am fairly sure it's how the Ada runtime works as well. Wine partially operates this way, as did the long-lamented IBCS2 module, but you're too young to remember that.)

The pseudo OS would have the same split as GCC - frontend that the user experiences and a backend that the machine experiences. In this case, the backend would be the ties from the pseudo OS to the actual OS you're running on. Which, again, is really how GCC works. I repeat myself. I need to. There are so many dumb users these days.

Anyways, that is how you make it possible to write one program for one environment and have it run everywhere. It is very very simple, it has been done many times, I would write another but I'm busy this weekend. Besides, you've not learned the ones that already exist, so why the hell should I write you another to prove the point?

Ideally, since a language IS just a virtual environment (it's not a real one, it's converted into a real environment) then your pseudo OS could be a programming language. Since libraries can be added to libraries, you can then build up the environment as far as you like, knowing that cross compiling to any supported OS will still work 100% of the time.

Thus, if you have a truly standard C compiler with true portability libraries for what you need but don't find in C, you achieve the precise result I describe. But, no, you'd rather whinge about how it can't be done, and how those who actually do this stuff can't really be programmers. Sorry, I learned programming before you learned how to subdivide your cells. The reason I consider coders these days to be complete wazzoks is that they don't understand any of the theory or how the theory applies to the practice.

Nuclear winter was a hoax perpetuated by Sagan, a man I respect, but a man who seemed to have an irrational fear of nuclear things, which corrupted his integrity on those matters.

Perhaps not so irrational when he probably anticipated that both the USA and the USSR would lob all 10,000+ weapons at each other in one round. Those 500 devices detonated were of varying sizes and spread out over decades, not thousands upon thousands all detonated within an hour of each other. Consider that a large explosive volcanic eruption (such as Mount St. Helens) - a localized event - can throw enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to cause widespread cooling for several seasons.

Now consider thousands of 10kt to 100mt devices being detonated all over three continents (central North America, northern Asia, and eastern Europe), all vaporizing and shattering all kinds of matter including silicates as well as creating a lot of soot and water vapor. I think in a MAD situation that his nuclear winter hypothesis is fairly plausible. It's fair to point out that only a few 100mt-design devices existed and that most were much smaller, but in 1982 between the USA and the USSR the actively deployed warheads (numbering 23,000 - with a stockpile of about 70,000!!) available for immediate launch was 12,300 megatons - so they averaged about 500kt each. As of today there is still about 25,000 nuclear weapons between the two nations (USA and Russia) plus an indeterminate number from other powers.

As far as North Korea is concerned - it seems they just want to talk without being threatened, and when they see us (the USA) lead by puppets who are bought and paid for by warmongering profiteers, why shouldn't they pursue a nuclear deterrent? Our government is very dangerous and are ignoring the will of the people with all of the sabre-rattling in the Middle East, and innuendos toward NK. Why should they not build weapons to deter what is perceived as imperialism? Besides, without talks, for all we know, NK is just trying to continue to industrialized and become a civilized society and may just be using the power plants which have already been bought and paid for since it makes good financial sense than to throw away a perfectly good generator and wait 5-10 years for new power plants to be completed.

No reason at all, as long as the kid won't freak out if, say, other participants build apps like teledildonics, or real time euthanasia dosage regulators, or a bad joke generator.
I'm all for not protecting children from any part of reality, but since exposure apparently was an issue for the kid (unless someone used the kid as a pretext for acting offended), the kid shouldn't have been there.

The UN Convention on Human Rights, as well as the Geneva War Time Convention would apply, I should think.

To MvDonalds, at least. I have no idea what Snooki is.

And either side would have not problem killing us.

Should we give them more reasons?

Yes. Ask someone in Nagasaki or Dresden whether they think of USA as a liberator or aggressor.

Killing as many civilians as possible from a safe distance seems to be modus operandi. When others do it, the US calls this terrorism.

Behold the unborn fetus, and
weep salt tears crocodilian.
All life is sacred (save, of course,
an enemy civilian).
-- Ogden Nash

NEVER trust the odd numbers. The even number patch releases are where they fix the problems with the odd number patch releases.

Basically, Microsoft is dealing with multiple Operating Systems for which no complete design document exists. For any of them. Microsoft is highly departmentalized and, in consequence, it is impossible for Microsoft to compile a single design for the entire system. They simply don't have the structure.

This is not necessarily a bad thing - things tend to be worse when unrelated subsystems start making assumptions about internal design that they shouldn't. It simply means the Windows environment is now too big for a corporation to manage. Microsoft has exceeded its maximum stable size, and has done for some time. (Based on quality of products, I'd say somewhere around the DOS 4.0 level, but that would be mean. Accurate but mean.)

The only reason I use MS products at all is that application developers go out of their way to be burdensome to non-MS users. Wine has a terrible time with many Windows applications and that's about the only way to run them at all. I would truly love developers to push platform-specifics into a library. It can be done. They can then either write libraries for other OS' or provide the API to that library so that others can write a porting library. It's not like it would hurt sales and it won't affect the game because it's purely a support module.

But, no, game companies and solo writers prefer their 1970s approach to coding - damn the portability, even if all OS' are 99.5% the same, and damn the sales, we want absolute totalitarian power! Bwahahahahahahahaha! Even if it'll eventually kill the product and the company. Who cares, when you're rich, powerful and utterly FUBAR!

if they would just allow/mandate the labeling of GMO vs natural foods it would solve a lot of the uproar. Why not give the consumer this information?

You don't mean "allow", it's already allowed. You want it mandated. Say what you mean.

The reasons why not would be additional cost for no benefit, because they wouldn't be allowed to sell the stuff at all if it were actually harmful.

What you're actually after is an opportunity for irrational scare-mongering, pushing what amounts to a mother nature knows best religion-- because if there were actually data that this stuff was bad for you that would be what the argument is about, right?

Myself I think it would be interesting if GMO labeling passed, because I suspect it might go the other way... people would find out that everything they've been eating is GMO, and might learn to shrug it off.

But you know, the voters turned down the opportunity to label GMO food. Got that? In CA it was put up for a vote, and it got voted down. The will of the people, you know? It sucks and all, but that's why you're not allowed to mandate whatever you feel like. Democracy and all.