If anything, increase the information density a bit. Instead, you put a circus on my screen, and removed all the stuff that matters (the text).

I actually sometimes want to read something that I didn't know yet. In order to do so, I need some text on my screen.

On my giant screen, I now get barely 2 articles.. and in the comment section, I see no more than 5 replies at one time. In other words, the information density on my screen has dropped below that of my kindergarten books, where I sometimes got as many as 6 sentences one one page!

-- Information density matters!

Totally agree. All the options are the most practical at some point.

The evil will be used to buy Cowboy Neal's hat when he appears again.

I think that the female cycle is close to the lunar cycle, but not exactly synchronized with it. It would be similar to people having a 22 hour day cycle instead of 24.

The menstrual cycle can be anywhere from 25-35 days, with an average of 28 days.
The lunar cycle is 29.5 days.

On a sidenote, imagine the horror if all women of the world would have their period exactly synchronized!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase#Overview

Yes. The BBC may not be as good as people want them to be, but they are certainly better than all the other channels.

All commercial channels first of all broadcast around 30-35% advertisements. Pure garbage.
Secondly, many commercial shows repeat fragments throughout their shows - especially around the commercial breaks. More garbage.
But most importantly, the BBC have a primary task to inform the public, whereas most other channels have a primary task to earn money.

And I really like it that they allow quite some of their shows to be put on Youtube for the whole world to watch.

But 99% of this planet's population are nitwits, so that is where you can grow your market share. Maybe Ubuntu wanted to be the Linux for nitwits? Its approach surely made me (I'm also a nitwit) switch from Windows to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu used to appeal to me because it worked (to my liking) straight out of the box. If I have to start testing multiple desktop environments before I can start enjoying it, that selling point is gone. In Mint, I haven't had to adjust any settings.

To your average uninformed user, there is the operating system, and there are apps. A desktop is not an app, so it must be the operating system. I kinda agree with that simplification. I didn't like Ubuntu with Unity, so I went for Mint, with whatever desktop I got with that (don't even know the name).

This article is about why Ubuntu is losing popularity, and that is certainly not because its user-base is so well-informed about work-arounds for the crap they don't like. Now get off my lawn.

Ubuntu got popular because the ordinary people who cannot figure out how a command line works could use it. It looked quite a bit like Windows, which was a good thing. A task bar at the bottom, and a menu with a lot of functionality. Unity is too different, and made it slower too. So, many people seem to switch to Linux Mint.

I mean, even the close/minimize/maximize buttons had to be switched around to the top left... WHY?

If I want unnecessary bling-bling and a lack of functionality, I'll get a Windows computer. If I want to be a hipster, I'll get an Apple. I use Linux because I like simplicity and functionality. As soon as Ubuntu stopped delivering that, I switched to Mint.

Yeah, they could just as well have written about the next village where the fish factory closed. Or about the boom times in tiny villages in North Dakota where they've found oil.

At least that link shows an artist impression of the creatures, which is the only thing most people care about. Thanks for posting. :-)

That just says that the movies and beer in pubs are way too expensive.

Their data is obviously 100% secure so I don't really see any problems. Cleaning companies are famous for their rigid IT infrastructure, since their operational margin is huge and they have tons of cash to spend. There is also no market for hundreds (thousands?) of fingerprints with matching names and other personal data on a black market. So what could possibly go wrong?

Isn't that exactly what the nerds of NASA suck at: getting enough funding? NASA only get 17 billion per year (approx.). The global media advertising business is approx. worth 500 billion $ per year (source: http://www.plunkettresearch.com/entertainment-media-publishing-market-research/industry-and-business-data).

Do you have any idea of the value of such a Mars mission in terms of advertising? It would be insane. I do not think it is unrealistic to assume you can get 10% of that global advertising money (50 billion per year) if you do a reality show of such a mission. That would mean you have triple the budget of NASA.

I'd say this may actually work. As long as the guys at Mars One admit that they need a little help in building and designing their rocket and space station.

But we do not even mitigate the biggest risk first. Arguably the biggest risk right now to us is cancer. However, in the US, the budget for cancer research is a pitiful 5 billion $/yr, which is rather small in comparison to the 79 billion $/yr for military research and testing.

Sources for budgets:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/NCI/research-funding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#By_title

The Dutch East Indies Company had established trading colonies in the Indies before the Netherlands had even gained its independence from Spain. The first permanent trading post was established in 1603, by the company, not by the government. Going to the other side of the globe was dangerous. It was expensive. And there were unquantified risks.

If there is profit, a company can pull it off. I can certainly see SpaceX mine some asteroid for some valuable minerals, if they are worth the fuel to go there and back. But the real question is what Mars has to offer for any company. It's just another gravity well, and it will be a pain to export anything from Mars to where any market is... so it'd better better be some kind of information that they export.