They're doing different things, is the reason.

Most commercial sats these days are for broadcast, which need to be in GEO. It's no use putting something small into GEO, since it costs so much to get there anyway. They put something big that can last a while and serve a lot of customers (lots of transponders).

Government users (NASA and academic) are doing science, like remote sensing and atmospheric sampling and things. They don't care about having 100% coverage over the US, so they can put up tiny sats that fly over every few hours, or collections of 10s or 100s or small sats that can talk to each other.

This doesn't take into account spy sats of course, those apparently need to be both big and close.

They're different means to different ends, really.

Yeah, I can confirm that DEBUG.EXE exists in Win7 RC1 32-bit.

You might be trying to make a larger point here, but I'll respond to your specifics:

Here's the Google Earth browser plugin.

Shockwave can do 3D hardware-accelerated games.

I'm not a physicist, so bear with me here.

So why can't you have a protocol agreement and a clock?

We both agree that electrons 0-15 are for sending, electrons 16-31 are for receiving (for a single message only), on the x-axis. All electrons must be set to + or - to eliminate any default state.

Then you say that at clock time t, we assume the message has been sent.

Well, since the GP was talking about NYC, there's a rail option that feeds the city from up to 90 miles out (to the north):
http://www.mta.info/mnr/html/mnrmap.htm

And on a northeast-southwest line, there's Acela:
http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/am2Route/Vertical_Route_Page&c=am2Route&cid=1080772074490&ssid=134

These might not be the most convenient options, and may be more expensive than a fuel-efficient car, but it looks to me like if you can't find public transport within a 100-mile radius of NYC, you're not trying very hard.

It was done back in the early 2000s by people like Red Hat, SuSE, Corel, etc. I'm guessing they didn't sell.

What?

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cid=N00005906&cycle=Career

Seems like Google, Microsoft, etc. love him.

You want something like Stet, but with this controversy figure as the metric instead of user comments.

I always thought Stet would be great for a general-purpose user-annotation site, but like you never got around to building it.

I'm wondering if Microsoft could create a third party apps section to Microsoft Update. Companies feed their version updates to Microsoft, they show up in the normal Microsoft Update windows, and you download and install as usual.

Sorry, your review of the gun case.

Interesting. Did you ever post your review? What was the fallout?

I think you're right about there being a trend to rate high, but I don't think it's out of any embarrassment. I think you'll find that in most cases, if people are given the task of writing a review of something (even if they don't own it), they'll mostly rate it pretty high unless they see an obvious fatal flaw. Even if it's an average product (so earning a 2.5-star rating), I'm guessing you'll see it rated 4-5 stars.

SpiderOak has a free 2GB plan, multiple PCs supported, with Windows/Linux support.

I've never had to recover, but their automatic backup is fairly straightforward. They don't store your encryption pass, either.

That's a myth:
http://stason.org/TULARC/science-engineering/space/76-What-happened-to-the-saturn-v-plans.html