This is true, but a lot of researchers play it to the other extreme. The metric of importance is still very dependent on the quantity of papers.

Yes, in the same way even the programmers of the 80's didn't usually build their own computer out of ICs, let alone build the logic out of discrete transistors... and very few people ever made their own transistors :)

The only thing that concerns me about this is, the pool of people working on those lower levels becomes ever smaller to the point where there can't be much diversity, so you get (e.g.) the Intel, AMD and ARM CPU teams doing 99% of the CPU design in the world and they can't talk to each other...

Here's a quick lesson in economics: if something costs more than you make, don't get it. If a house costs 10 times what you make in a year, you will never repay it (does not apply to extreme income levels). And don't ever, ever sign anything you don't understand. If you can't parse a mortgage agreement, keep renting. There's absolutely nothing wrong with renting.

If you're advocating that we abandon manned spaceflight, I have to disagree. Unmanned missions are valuable, but I still think we need people in space.

Given that manned space exploration is colossally more expensive than unmanned, the burden is on you to justify why it should be done at all, and why the far cheaper and far more ambitious unmanned alternatives need to be displaced for it. The budget is finite, and cannot accommodate everything.

Malcom Reynolds is so deeply scarred that he cannot form normal attachments to humans. War gave him severe Aspergers, basically, alongside damaging the logic part of his brain, making him roughly an idiot. Occasionally he tears up about it. His strength is carried to a fault, even when his being weak would make a better story.

Okay, what?

That is easily the weirdest take on that character I've ever read.

I left Firefox for Chrome because they are no longer user-focussed. Despite their millions of Google dollars, they choose to fritter time and money away on playing with things that don't really matter while leaving their most important products (Firefox, Thunderbird) largely unattended.

To me, those millions should go to funding developers to fix all the nasty problems and design issues that free contributors don't want to work on, NOT to playing with cool new tech that free contributors would love to play with and will do anyway.

Specifically, they are still much slower to startup, the awesome bar is still slow and clunky, there are still basic bugs that aren't fixed (not crashing ones, but things like printing fixed position pages). Chrome also uses screen space more efficiently, which matters to me on a netbook.

Interesting, it looks like the USAF is finally getting free of the shuttle boondoggle they got caught up in. Also interesting, it seems like they still want return from orbit capabilities (which vastly complicated the shuttle in many ways).
More rationally they are making it unmanned instead of shackling it with people.
Unfortunately being purely military we will hear a lot less about it's real capabilities....

To answer this question, it's best to understand some of how the webhosting world works. There are many tiers of them.

At the bottom, where it sounds like you want to be, are the aggressive, overselling bulk hosters. They make only basic efforts to keep things running, offer little or no support, but if you know what you're doing you'll get good value... until something goes wrong or you reach their invisible limits.
These guys are really cheap but the chances are you will have problems or have to change away some time. Example: bluehost, dreamhost etc. They tend to have boom-bust cycles.

Next up is the semi-professional companies. For more money than most individuals would want to pay (like US$50-100 per month) they make a serious effort to provide a good service, will offer some personal support, and overall have a professional operation. Example: servint, other VPS providers.

Above that are the serious hosters, like rackspace, who provide a full service with dedicated servers. Most people and small companies won't justify this unless they are doing transactions or webb apps. You pay appropriately.

The point is, at the bottom, there is no sensible reason to choose between the budget hosting services. Whatever they say in their marketing, they are trying to offer a rock-bottom service with no support and limited capabilities; taking a punt that most customers won't use the claimed abilities.

Ah you are right .. except that Amazon music store isn't accessible to me (outside the US). Keep waiting for that :( so basically for me the only decent music store is iTunes.
Thanks for the thoughts.

No the requirements were to use the iTunes store, seamlessly work with all the variations of iPods, and get the benefits of being in the mainstream. If something else can do this, rock on.

Not if you want to use the iTunes store, and know that it will seamlessly work with all the variations of iPods, and get the benefits of being in the mainstream.

Which is millions of users, hardly something insignificant to ignore.

What primary machine?

Of course. Nobody would want to do that. Instead, they would use their game console for that.

Bingo. The vast majority of games are console games, and casual games of various lightweight flavours, most commonly flash games on Facebook, or on the general web, or on mobile phones. PC FPS and "old games available on Steam" are niches. So excluding them is hardly a problem.

I do use an XP Netbook, and I do find that I use less software on it than I did on my old desktop; e.g. webmail. But I still use my Windows software, some that I had already, such as iTunes, graphics programs, Nokia PC Suite, etc. So being Windows is still a significant benefit.

We had this debate at my work, and the conclusion I came to was that neither tabs nor spaces usefully allowed changing the tab-size. The reason is that code is often indented, not in whole tabs:

if ( AThing )
    MyFunction( parameter1,
                            parameter2 );

Making this appear correct with a varying tab size requires using tabs to indent for block level, but spaces to indent for formatting. This is very tedious, but might be managable, except that the editors we mostly use (VS6 at the time) are not clever enough to remember that combination of indenting for the next line. So not only do you have to remember "tab space space space space space space" but you ALSO have to go back and delete the "tab tab tab tab space" that the IDE added for the next line, and instead type "space space space space space" again ...
I tried it briefly, and it did work; but it was pretty maddening.
I would be a bit surprised if there were many editors out there that were smart enough to copy the indenting in terms of combined tabs and spaces...

Anyway, I accepted that we would use tabs to finish the useless argument, but we also agreed on a fixed tab size, so it was completely pointless either way ;)

A huge new market? More like a small but significant niche.

Why are browsers so horribly unfriendly for uploads?

Perhaps Google could put some money into fixing Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
or improving it
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468

Does Chrome have a decent upload UI? I can't recall ...

Fortunately, Jaycar is picking up the slack and taking all that business off them nicely. Dick Smith themselves don't seem to care and even once told me to go to Jaycar instead.