Valve over the years has gotten a large foothold in Windows gaming, now working on Linux gaming and set-top gaming. All they will be missing is smartphone (and mac?) presence before they can start having a google-like influence and presence.

Government is itself good but the people in it are not always worth our trust. Whats important here is that people in greater power are doing something that seems to be in the best interest of citizens and regardless if some people were abusing the system or not steps are being taken to resolve that.

I must be doing something wrong or missed a very important memo. I find it hard enough to get people using my open source software let alone paying for it, and this guy is clearly under the impression he is entitled to a steady instantly large flow of income from his first platform release.

I'm sure NASA would be going to the moon every month if they had all the funding they needed but sadly they no longer can. With that in mind I'm really glad that private companies are still pushing for space exploration and that governments aren't preventing them from doing so. I hope there are enough rich people interested in this to properly fund companies like this.

Most people here constantly posts their opinions on people and companies relating to every article that passes through. While alot of us back up our posts with facts (as we know them) and links, but we're all basically doing the exact same thing she is. My opinion is that she falls in the same category as any of us. That being said what she posted I think should be protected by law unless perhaps she knowingly made up some of her claims. As long as she believed her claims to be true (regardless of wether they were or not) I think she should be allowed (by law) to post all she wants.

According to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_are_modern_space_probes modern probes can travel roughly 39000 miles per hour, or 341640000 (39000*24*365) miles per year. 1 light year = 5.87849981 × 10^2 miles, so it would take about 17206 years (5.87849981 × 10^12 / 341640000) for a probe to get there, and another 25 years for it to send a light signal pattern back to us for us to process. Assuming once at the solar system the probe would be able to determine atmospheric compositions of some of the planets in the solar system, and possibly drop some rovers on a planet and send back some additional data. Might as well send a probe out and write down somewhere that we sent it out. Hopefully in 17k years we remember to look for an answer.

from what I'm reading the privilege elevation bug requires that you as a non root user be able to write files to a /var/lib/mysql// directory. I dont remember ever seeing a setup where those directories are world writable or where normal non-root users would be added to the mysql group.

Sounds just like how the UV Sterilizer Lights kill surrounding bacteria. Depending on how much this costs I could see it becoming a standard issue item in most households.

What about the paper cash only vending machines? I see this being a big problem with them when people are going to be forced to always put in $5+ just to get a small item. They will run out of spare money really fast.

The article seems to be more about embedding electronic sensors in flexible rubber-like plastic. The examples even show them printing out a modern version of the Nintendo PowerGlove(tm). I could see these being used to print out custom-fit full body suits serving the same basic functions.

The article leads me to believe they are 3d printers using paper. That seriously limits the possibilities of what you can print, but at least nobody will (hopefully) be making working paper guns with it. If they would switch to some type of plastic I could see this having a lot more uses.

Yes MSSE is not the best anti-virus software out there, but it is one of the only ones i feel safe that it will never ask me to install other promotional products, it will never try to load weird webpages or install spyware. It has no upgrades to a better paid for version that it frequently bugs you to upgrade to. It is probably the last offensive, least obtrusive, least annoying anti-virus software out there. Coupled with being behind a firewall and intelligence enough not to open binaries from questionable sources it works well enough.

Its good to see the focus of this release being an attempt to increase javascript speed by leaps and bounds. Modern webpages often use JS that goes way beyond anything people did 10 years ago (Jquery for example) and the complexities of what people do with javascript noticably slow down most webpages considerably.

I imagine the people that pirate movies from theaters are releasing pretty crappy quality versions of the movies. If you were to see a movie with alot of detail in it and then forced to watch it in a low quality format where the detail (video and audio) take away from the movie in any significant amount, I imagine many people would then want to go pay for an actual copy or viewing of the movie. In that regard I can see how pirating could help movie sales of GOOD movies, and at the same time possibly hurt sales of bad movies (why pay to see a good quality version of a movie you know sucks). With that in mind we know that most movies do in fact suck, so most of the time I can see how pirating would hurt sales.

Computers crash/fail when overheating and in a datacenter that can happen very fast. You absolutely must keep the temperatures from getting too hot. Some datacenters can get away with minimal cooling. Some datacenters need chillers and tons of money invested in keeping things at a low enough temperature where computers wont randomly lock up on you from the heat. There must be some datacenters who have too much cooling but to say that datacenters in general dont need them demonstrates a lack of understanding what a datacenter is, that they are not all the same size nor is the hardware in them the same or all generating the same predictable temperatures.