Minor failures, sure, but I don't think I've ever heard of a shuttle performing an abort. In fact, I don't recall any successfully recovered in-flight catastrophe since Apollo 13. That said, that's probably because the crews do a good enough job that minor problems on the ground don't translate into major problems in flight.

Are you fucking retarded?

No, some cops might argue that. Lazy cops, incompetent cops. In this case, probably made-up strawman cops. But certainly not all cops. If that were true, then thefts would never be investigated. But we know that's just not true, because thefts are investigated daily.

But what are you trying to say, anyway? That cops should ignore all crime, because you've claimed that they've ignored some crimes related to you and your friends?

And then you've got places like Suffolk, VA which is the largest city in Virginia by area, but has only 80,000 people. It's almost all farmland, that happens to be incorporated.

I think the large sale figures are because they are trying (and perhaps succeeding) to engage the completely non-technical crowd that still has to/would like to use at least the Web in their lives.

Like my mom who has first seen PC at the age of 45 and never needed it, but now would want to Skype with me, being 2000km away. And no one around her can support (without payment) a PC. Add to that girlfriends/wives (some of them), posers, fan boys, uber consumers....I am damn sure the hype will not die out in a hurry.

I would still not buy it for my mom because it will be some time (if ever) until the OS is translated into my language (mom does not speak English). I hope they do it for Russian though - that will solve it for her.

I offered my wife to consider the iPad, but she disagrees with Apple about the pr0n thing and Steve's high moral horse (she reads /. sometimes).

I would love to be able to browse while in the sofa though, so I hope there will be many more and suited to every taste devices like this. And I hope the whole DRM thing will not spoil the book reading, music listening and movie watching experiences on said devices.

Netbook sales tend to go up around September, spike at December (Christmas), and then decline again until the next September. Most of this is due to people who use it for school (a useful purpose) rather than ones who rush out to buy a netbook just because it's brand-new.

Because the "lol Apples are for people that HAVE A LIFE" mentality is the most obnoxious thing to come out of the Apple vs. Everything else dichotomy.

You're missing a distinction. We're trying to make the point that Apple products are crap and Apple supremacy is wrong, we're not saying it's impossible or even improbable. We just wish people didn't fall for their bullshit.

Not a right bozo, merely a possibility. You are not constrained from doing anything with your property, program it with anything you like in any way you like. But if you want to sell it to others in their store you have to play by their rules. Get over it. Go play with YOUR property and stop bothering the rest of us that actually live in reality.

could get a little hairy.

Instead they belong in federal courts.

How ironic that you would make an accusation of tribalism.

Good for you for speaking eight languages, but that doesn't add any authority to your ridiculous statement. Just why would you expect everybody to use English? Move on, you're irrelevant.

"rule number 1 of slashdot: ANY thread can be twisted into a bash of microsoft. no exceptions."

Well, if you insist.

This is another case of egregious anti-competitive collusion - the furry animal (but not quite sweaty) version of Microsoft. Nuke'em from the orbit.

"Beaver - damn; visible from space!" :P

Who said anything about there needing to be a grand conspiracy? Isn't it bad enough that they performed non-transparent manipulations on data - and then blocked attempts at transparency - at all?

The issue for me isn't deliberate deception but the potential for self-deception and groupthink - and that academia seems to flirt heavily with operations and methods which assume that the general public has no need to know or critique work which will affect public resources.

Some of the best scientists who were also writers, who got their education in the pre-WW2 era, such as Isaac Asimov, didn't have this view. They believed that the public needed to understand what science is about and that they could be trusted with that knowledge. But today's scientists seem to often prefer to work in the dark, in small clusters, and avoid even interdisciplinary communication, believe that science naturally is split into multiple specialties and that generalism is the same thing as ignorance, and seem to believe that releasing 'trade secret' knowledge to the public is bad and scary, because who knows what that ignorant generalist public might do with the knowledge? The public might stampede! The horror! Only we specialists understand the truth! We must protect it from the knowlessmen!

This seems like a dangerously anti-democratic trend to me. In fact, it seems downright anti-scientific, frankly. It resembles more the old days of alchemy: small groups zealously guarding their secret ideas and methods.

I don't know what the solution is - the sheer volume of scientific data makes some kind of abstraction and summarising essential, and gives huge power to the gatekeepers of those abstractions - but it does seem a problem.

There are potholes in the roads near my house that are visible from space (on Google).