Congratulations on fucking up a once great product, as you once did with Crashscape. Die now please.

Will happen, eventually. But it will not solve the underlying problem of encryption technology being widely available. That stable door has been open for so long that the horse has bolted, galloped, cantered and eventually settled down to raise a family somewhere in Wyoming.

Slashdot has become a desolate wasteland, just like much of the general interest part of the internet. Specialist forums are still fine.

Wait. Slashdot has always been a desolate wasteland, it was just a much more enjoyable wasteland.

"Reasonable arguments beget angry screeching" - Plague of Gripes

LISA was cancelled because JWST was eating the NASA astrophysics budget; ditto IXO cancellation. LISA survived in a much reduced form as NGO, and IXO as ATHENA.

There wasn't any real chance of LISA scooping LIGO/E-LIGO if gravitational waves were really detectable, but the sensitivity of LISA will open up detection of many more classes of GW emitters.

Because the technology involved will take some time to develop. You have to have 2 spacecraft pointing a laser at another spacecraft 2,500,000 kilometers away, and measure the change in distance between the two arms to an incredible precision. That's... not easy.

Or:

        Now the world has gone to bed,
        Darkness won't engulf my head,
        I can see by infra-red,
        How I hate the night,
        Now I lay me down to sleep,
        Try to count electric sheep,
        Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
        How I hate the night.

Java has a robust and widely used and robust frameworks for applications so in many cases the developer can focus on the business code; several mature development environments which hook into the reflection capabilities of the language to make coding quite pleasant; a rich set of tools useful for program qa and developer support; a massive developer pool. As a language it's OK, but language wars are so 90s.

For a business that needs to get stuff done that's pretty important. For projects with lifetimes potentially in decades Java is an easy choice. A good programmer is a good programmer in any language; Java can make mediocre programmers productive. That might sound deeply unsexy to the slashdot crowd, but I think that's the reality of an awful lot of SW development, which is internal or contracted development for businesses.

I suggest they build three arks.

And it always will be.

Reality Distortion Field in full effect, but you're no Steve Jobs, fool.

I think I more than doubled the useful life of my phone by being able to replace the battery easily but probably would not have benefited from waterproofing. I really think there is a market for both types of devices, even if some companies would prefer that one of those markets disappears.

I have trouble understanding why MS even want to try to get back into the smartphone market at this stage, except wounded pride. Investors demanding growth, pissed that they have seen their stock stagnate compared to Apple?

They have failed utterly to execute on any strategy they had, they looked indecisive and uncommitted. It's such a huge bag of fail.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

with Ken, Preventer of IT Services, then it would be pretty realistic and quite gender-unspecific.

It was looked at and rejected in favour of high efficiency solar cells. At the time of the design of Philae (early-mod 90s?) there were no European designs for an RTG nor any expertise in building them. If the Philae consortium wanted an RTG they would:

- Source it through the US -- you couldn't exact buy them off the shelf and have all the attendant ITAR baggage that would go with it. Since it would practically work as a US contribution to Philae there would be some science exchange in return. Not impossible, but at that time was there any US money to fund a further contribution to Rosetta from the US on what was quite a high-risk project? Not clear... It also goes right against one of the core principles of ESA which is to invest in/support European technology development.

- ... or fund the development of a European RTG; high risk and probably prohibitively costly for the money available to support the mission and meet the mass budget available for Philae. No doubt that mature designs probably do not have a huge mass penalty, but a new design? Who knows, or would want to take the risk?

- There was at the time quite considerable political resistance in certain European countries to RTGs in space. IIRC Germany was one of them and this would have put a big obstacle in the way. Development of solar panel technology was and still is considered an important goal and improved solar cell technology would be an important spin off.

In the end it really does come down to politics; the safety issues could have been mitigated (at some cost), but there was no political will to go in the direction of RTGs. It will be interesting what will be selected for JUICE...

Incidentally Rosetta itself suffers to a certain extent from choosing solar panels - the long array is turning Rosetta into a windmill that is quite difficult to steer. RTGS would have allowed a smaller array.