Unfortunately, the public will be allowed only half that image quality, the best being reserved for the U.S. military.

This is somewhat to be expected for things like GPS (at least if you ignore that the taxpayers are the ones paying for it). But why is this the case when the instruments are being financed by a private company. Or, to look at it another way, the photos fall into two general categories: those outside the U.S.A. and those inside the U.S.A. It is hard to understand that our military would have many problems with us getting the best images available for locations outside the U.S.A. But it is even harder to understand that the military should get better images of the U.S.A. through Google than we can get ourselves. At least in times of peace and while they claim to not be at war with their own citizens. They have their own spy satellites for the super high resolution images (and don't kid yourself that they don't use them). So how and why has it been decided that we are to get degraded images from a private company when we could get better?

See. They sized it at 27 kilometers. If the had made it 27 miles instead it would be much more powerfuler.

Lets just trust that the Feds would never abuse our help. That this isn't an effort on their part to examine malware in order to build better malware, or an effort to see what malware that we are able to detect to better help them build malware that we can't detect. After all, have they ever abused our trust in the past?

readers unable to buy DRMed ebooks

Sounds good. Adobe seems to be finally doing its part to kill DRM. I look forward to all the chumps who bought DRMed books no longer being able to read the library they purchased when their current reader dies.

Microsoft should stat using the Roman numeral for One for things like their services and devices. I can't imagine it would upset anyone using the lesser lowe case i for their products.

"Weatherley noted that the Bill does not currently match penalties for online infringement with...."

Are you talking about someone named William here? Or is there so much reverence to the idea of jailing someone who fights back against copyright abuse that this law is taking on god-like significance? Is there any reason at all that this reads "the Bill" rather than simply "the bill"?

No, it is real, but it might not be enough to save humanity from the next coming ice age. Some of us have been warming things up to try to prevent that disaster, but environmentalist wackos are fighting us.

Not only have the U.S. factories stopped production, but the equipment has been sold and shipped off-shore. The U.S. jobs for making these things are gone, they will not be coming back. We may end up shipping in foreign made bulbs, but since they were so inexpensive when U.S. made, expect to see the price increase and the balance of trade get worse.

Never give your Gmail account to anyone. Or any real final account. Get a free forwarding account at Spamgourmet.com and give every site that you want to sign up for a unique address. That way you can cut them off when they start to spam or when they get hacked and their database is stolen. And you can tell where spam from third parties came from if it comes through a spamgourmet address. Great people. Completely free anti-s[am service. And I can tell from the way that I structured the email address that I gave them that they have never abused the information that I gave them.

I've even had close friends get hacked and my email address harvested from them. So it is better if all of your friends send through their own unique spamgourmet addresses to reach you, that way you can change one address if an email gets harvested and not have to abandon your mail mail account and notify hundreds of contacts of the change.

As to the eight or more people that you are getting mail for, I doubt that you can do much to help them. They and/or their contacts are clearly clueless. Just remember the old saying: No good deed goes unpunished.

So if we do manage to send the ship with all of the bureaucrats and hair stylists and telephone sanitizers to Mars, what is the point of trying to maintain communications 24/7? After all, pretty much anything that you do without science fiction technology is going to have a round trip delay of up to 1/2 hour or so at some times. The "colony" has to be pretty damn independent. I don't see any real need to convince yourself that you have 24/7 communications with delays like they would experience. Even daily communication would need some sort of relay when the sun gets in the way, but trying for 24/7 is overkill and pointless.

Windows 8. 'nuff said.

If only they already had some kind of meltdown that had already happened that they could learn from.

I'm all for more privacy for social networking users

What part of "social network" does Bennett not understand? If you use these damn "services" then you should expect them to be doing shit like this. I'm much more concerned that almost every site that I visit lately sends traffic to Facebook and lets them track information about me, even though I have never and will never use facebook.

I absolutely hate trying to help friends or relatives resolve computer problems, only to find that the computer is infested with McAfee software that has to be dealt with first, or in some cases is the main problem. Sadly users have been brainwashed into thinking that they need this crap and is is somehow good for them. But John is far from innocent in all of this, there were serious problems even back when he had full control of what the software that bears his name did.

It would be a bargain at 1/10th the price.