Try telling that to my wife who would get exactly 0 days involving romance without V day. As much as I hate V day, it does force me to do something completely out of character to make my wife happy.

real women like flowers, chocolate, and other mushy stuff. Though a well thought-out stunt may work on a rare occasion, they are much more likely to backfire than a traditional gift. Have flowers and chocolate on hand just in case.

Hmm... you don't see how it can work, so it must not work.

Perhaps they are using multiple light frequencies with multiple transmitters and receivers, each capable of only 100MB? Perhaps they simply know more than you do.

I would wager that they are doing something relatively new, or the technology would have existed already... so it's not all that surprising that you don't understand it.

Perhaps it is Google's vision to move people away from flash to H.264, then to something open and free. They have always seemed to move things in that direction over time.

HTML5 offers the flexibility, and AFAIK Theora is supported in the same browsers listed, so perhaps this is simply a step in that direction.

I started to do the calculations, and the numbers became so huge that I decided just to put it this way...

Such an enormous amount of solar energy strikes the earth already, that you could beam our entire energy supply in and it would be absorbed by a rounding error when calculating the increase in solar energy caused by the technology. And it would be easily offset by the reduction in energy released by fossil fuel use.

Unlike the Digital Television Transition, VOIP based telephony can be done in pieces, there is no need to force a consumer to upgrade, nor does there need to be a concrete deadline as there is no "future use" like there was with the freed TV bandwidth.

Also, the technology is well understood and requires little investment in R&D for anyone migrating to it... while I can only imagine the demands put on broadcaster's engineers during the digital transition. Not to mention that many (most?) businesses have stopped buying traditional switches in favor of VOIP.

Saying this will be MORE difficult than the Digital Television Transition is like saying it was difficult to transition from horse and buggy to the automobile. Sure, the transition took time, and the infrastructure had to be upgraded to allow the automobile's advantages to really shine, but it didn't need to happen overnight as the two technologies could co-exist quite nicely.

that they continue to battle for the lowest price until both of them go broke?

I especially hope to see Walmart suffer a long agonizing death. I live in suburban Detroit, and the amount of vacant retail space that was generated by the growth of Walmart and Meijer is staggering... and I know its much worse in rural towns.

I used to be able to choose from several stores, each with a unique selection of reasonably priced goods, and usually exceptional customer service.

Now I walk a quarter mile to get in the front door, to be greeted by some old lady who probably owned one of the shops that closed and shes still bitter about it, and walk another half mile to get the few things I need, and finally I stand in a long line to pay another bitter minimum wage worker so I can walk back out to my car. In all I probably saved 2-3% over what the old stores would have charged me.

Meanwhile, Walmart has forced its suppliers to cut prices so much that even companies that used to be proud to produce their product with US labor have outsourced it to try and retain some of their profit margin... because without Walmart they don't exist to most consumers anymore.

I am just thankful that there are a couple of smaller grocers, and a few decent malls nearby with stores that are very responsive to their customers. To be in a rural community where its Walmart or nothing would be a form of torture.

people start saying "just bing for foo and its in the first couple of pages".

I actually hear people saying "I Googled it but couldn't find..." when they used Bing to perform the search.

Google has the mindshare... even if Bing picks up marketshare, it will be a long time before anyone considers anything but Google to be the standard in internet search.

Considering that most programs can have separation between the UI and the actual program, I don't think it unreasonable at all to promote the inclusion of a command line interface.

Though I will default to a GUI in nearly all cases, being able to automate a task using a sequence of commands is immeasurably valuable.

Most of my time these days is spent developing or using scripts to do something that is prone to error, time consuming, or otherwise doesn't make sense to do manually. As soon as a developer makes the decision to NOT have a command line interface, hes made his product less appealing.

There are significant advantages to developing a CLI to your app that many developers fail to recognize. For example, being able to script test cases, or being able to quickly add and test features without coding a UI to utilize them.

Though I am no CLI junky... and spend much of my script writing time reading documentation... i always favor applications with strong cli interfaces, even if I don't use the cli now its good to know it's there for the future.

That was packaged as news... this is a big budget motion picture that these quacks paid to see. No comparison

Acceleration with ION drive is really really slow. having a large solar farm on the moon producing liquid H and O for use in an early stage booster for deep space missions could save a lot of time on such missions.

Actually thats exactly what I was thinking... sure you need to supply O to the equation to burn the H... but thats exactly what they do in rockets to get things into space in the first place.

If they can use solar energy on the moon to create liquid H and O to refuel spacecraft it could provide a much needed boost into the outer solar system. Using solar energy directly doesn't yet give a lot of thrust (as far as I understand it) so it can take a long time for a spacecraft to accelerate.

Not to mention storing energy for further surface exploration, heating and cooling during extreme temp situations, etc.

Perhaps they could even build structures from the water by melting it into panel molds, and then assembling the panels, finally sealing seams with sprays of liquid water... it would make an airtight structure that may be habitable.

Better yet... H2O has a great O element... and you can breathe it!

So, suppose you could drill down and hit a well of ice. A bit of solar energy pumped into that frozen mass yields liquid water, a bit more gives hydrogen and oxygen. Now you have fuel (fire) and air and water. Earth will be the tough element to obtain. I don't imagine that moon soil is all that good for planting, and most plants need nitrogen that may not be easy to come by on the moon.

Either way... water far more valuable when you realize that its not just water but O and H too.

I always tell my kids that "so-and-so made me do it" is no defense. And I'm sure nearly every parent has taught their children that for generations. I hope these guys roast for not listening to their parents!

Not gonna solve every problem, but a properly configured proxy server will prevent a tremendous number of issues. Couple it with OpenDNS's filters and a minimal amount of training and you can stop most of the routine malware.

Of course, I switched my family to Linux years ago... but if I absolutely had to run windows, I would use OpenDNS and some sort of proxy that will scan downloads for viruses(squid w/ clamAV?).