Iridium sats operate @200MHz. My, nearly obsolete, cell phone is 2.5x as powerful as an Iridium satelite. That's why microsatelites are the future. They're cheap enough to send dozens up at once, which allows you to update the network more easily.

It is my understanding that by seperating the detectors over large distances in space or time, it makes it easier to detect and correct for atmospheric abberations. Which is one of the reasons interferometers were built in the first place.

Why not get a couple thousand 10" reflecting telescopes on digital servo mounts (~$1,500 each), hook them up to HD web cams (~$1,500 each), and use netbooks (~$300 each) with unlimited data plans (~$500/yr) to connect to database that uses a volunteer-based distributed computing network to process the data using inteferometry? You'd effectively have a telescope with a mirror the size of the Earth for about the cost of a professional level telescope. It would be orders of magnitude more powerful than anything else we could build. I still have no idea why this hasn't been built yet.

With tethering and WiFi Hotspots, if my phone has unlimited data, every other device I have has unlimited data. The only question is how many hoops I have to jump through to bypass my carrier wanting to charge me for using my devices in the most obvious fashion.

My dad bought a 386 with 8MB of RAM in 1986. People told him he'd never need that much memory. (Fun fact, the RAM was actually soldered to the board!)

That was actually the (somewhat belaboured and clumsily executed) point of Ghost in The Shell. I've felt for a long time now that the older I get, the more the world looks like a mashup novel of George Orwell and Philip K. Dick. I guess I have to add Masamune Shirow to that list, now. OWS and Anonymous both bear a striking resemblance to the goings on in Stand-Alone Complex.

On another note, there is a lot written in the counter-insurgency (COIN) literature about the difficulty of fighting a decentralized, amourphous enemy and the inability of a traditional, rigidly structured military force to effectively combat it.

You beat me to this. After you pass iron, you can't get exothermic fusion reactions. You just can't. The Physics behinds this are well understood. This is just more snake oil.

Guess who I'm more inclined to believe: an anonymous supossed hacker or a certificate CA?

Apollo 12 brought back parts from a Probe that landed on the Moon two years earlier. On it were found bacterial spores. When those spores were added to a growth medium, they cultured. Considering a) the Moon has no atmosphere, b) the Moon receives 4x the solar radiation as Mars, and c) the spores had been there for two years, I don't think we can actually consider any space craft sent to Mars truly sterile.

...a mixture of urea, glycerol, and soap...

How did they find this formula? Did one of the researchers piss in a bottle of liquid soap?

I switched to Kubuntu from Ubuntu back at 9.10. I kept using Synaptic until just recently.

"Why Mozilla hasn't considered a Firefox OS?" They did. It's called "Google Chrome". Seriously, Google hired large numbers of people from Mozilla a few years back. They still work with Mozilla while simultaneously working for Google. Chrome is built on a base of Firefox. Chrome OS is the Chrome browser layered over a custom build of Linux. It's this reality that Microsoft is moving against with this development. Microsoft is playing catch-up, not leading the way.

Apple did the same thing with Cisco over the name "iPhone". Look how that turned out.

First you have to be able to generate more power with fusion than is consumed generating it. We haven't done that yet. Also, all current fusion generator designs generate low-level radioactive contamination. So fusion will have the same long-term radioactive waste disposal problems as fission power currently does. If you're going to mine the moon, mine the aluminum and magnesium and make orbital mirrors for an orbiting solar-thermal plant.