It is clear that, soon, new PCs and laptops will come preinstalled with Windows 8. 95% or more of users will have no idea how to "stay with Windows 7". Some may be lucky to have friends who can do that for them. Or even luckier to have real friends who install some reasonable Linux on their old machines so they don't have to spend big money on new hardware right now.

As long as Microsoft "rules" the desktop market the way they do, with a quasi monopoly, ordinary users are more or less at their mercy. Bickering about the average user not being able or willing to accept change doesn't help anyone, except perhaps, MS and their droids.

What kind of protocol can be used for transmissions like that?

And, if anything goes wrong, and Curiosity throws up, eh, an exception, how can it fallback to a sane state? Someone further up this discussion suggested a mechanism where losing contact to base control for a certain period would trigger a revert to the previous version. But losing control may have totally different reasons.

Does anyone know how they do this stuff? Are they actually programming Curiosity in Python?