In retrospect, Apple should have kept Google maps in iOS for another year, and rolled out iOS maps first as an app. That way they would have had time to debug, and get a more graceful market introduction. I suspect that the problem is that Apple did not do enough iOS maps testing in advance, and was blindsided by all of the post-launch problems. Given that this is a safety issue, this is actually a pretty big fail.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires Java in order for outside users (such as patent agents and attorneys) to access their files on the USPTO servers. They have been warning for months that their systems are not compatible with Java 7, and only work with earlier versions of Java.

This is a big pain, since it forces you to keep your entire system at Java 6.X. Earlier I thought that this delay was mere bureaucratic foot dragging. Now I'm thinking that perhaps they had a "heads up" warning.

Mercury, not impossible to land on in certain regions -- Venus unlikely due to extreme heat and pressure, Mars a given, Jupiter no solid surface, Saturn no solid surface, Uranus no solid surface, Neptune no solid surface, Pluto -- not a planet.

So technically, assuming that no one wants to go to Mercury for some reason (unlikely), then outside of Mars, there are no other "planets" nearby anyway. If we call planets around other stars by a different name, and again assuming that Mercury is just to uninteresting to visit, then he might be right. Of course this still leaves lots of other real estate out there to visit.

The Russians had this idea first!

From personal experience, I can vouch that Apple II floppy disks hold up over 25 years!

Oh great, after years of grammar in er, grammar school, now I'll have to unlearn ending sentences with a period

The aliens are probably just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping their existence secret while they quietly download our valuable copyright material. However we Earth people are already implementing the perfect defense. Here all we have to do is to keep continuing our present policy of extending copyright terms every time "Mickey Mouse" is in danger of falling into the public domain. We keep doing this until we perfect our faster than life drive..

So you thought you could escape eh Zog? That's $150,000 per infringed song.

According to Wikipedia: Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth".[1] A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing

OK a valid if harsh form of management, but note the critical distinction that the Romans reserved this very harsh technique for unusual events. They were not dumb enough to do this to every unit on a routine basis!

I was in Rochester as a small boy in the 1950's, and knew about the reactor from about the age of 4 or so. As I recall, some of the cooling water drained into a small duck pond (surrounded about the fence). I was told that there was some small amount of radioactivity, although no one much was concerned at the time. At any rate, the main thing that got through my 4 year old mind was that for some reason it was not a good idea to try to climb the fence or get near the ducks. At any rate, it was generally known, and not a secret.

If NSA is not partnering with Google, then probably somebody needs to be fired. If I were them, I probably would have responded with a "well Duh!" comment.

Let's see: According to the DMCA, at $150,000 per offense, times 300,000 DVD's, this would be $4.5 x 10 to the 10th dollars, or roughly a $45 billion dollar penalty. Did I do my math right? Can he take it out of his social security check at $40 per month for roughly the next 100 million years or so?

There may be something to this. Certainly if I hear someone using the terms "liver", "fava beans" and "chianti" too often in a conversation, I start to get worried.

Pokemon Snap had a similar concept, minus the war setting of course...

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/judicialethics/ABA_MCJC_approved.authcheckdam.pdf

RULE 1.2

Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary. A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence,* integrity,* and impartiality* of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.

Nevile Shute, the author of books such as "On the Beach" and "A Town Like Alice" was a professional aeronautical engineer turned author. In the early 1930's, he worked a private company that was producing an airship. His company was in competition with a much better funded government effort. He wrote a novel about his experience, called "Slide Rule", that is still in print.

In it, he contrasts the private company style to the government effort, and made a lot of good observations that are worth thinking about even today. In the end, the government project went way over budget, and their airship crashed. By contrast, the well managed private effort worked great. Nevile felt that one of the main reasons why airships were abandoned in the 1930's was due to bad government designs.