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Comment Re:NASA hates successful designs (Score 2) 48

Mars is huge, compared to what the rovers are covering.

They could put a hundred identical rovers up there, and they'd all be finding different things, and the project would get some cost savings on the design side.

Of course, the main cost isn't in the design side, but in the heavy lift and ongoing operations.

Comment Re:Not much of a threat (Score 1) 97

It's interesting how many of the cables seem to be fairly precise, and others are clearly guesses or approximations.

Look at the three lines that terminate in Seattle. One of them is extremely precise, with weaving and meandering even at the nearest zoom levels. One of the others is so approximate that it crosses over islands as it goes from point to point.

Comment Re:You can stop them (Score 1) 220

Honestly they need to default to all this crap being blocked and you have to call to enable it.

You may think that, but the average consumer would find that enraging.

The same laziness that leads people to not check their bills, causes people to get irate when they have to jump through extra hoops to get something activated.

Comment Re:theme park rented "kid trackers" (Score 2) 92

Two words. Shit happens.

Even the most well-meaning parent can get overwhelmed in a crowd surge or the kid could decide to tear off suddenly. It's not a substitute for watchful parenting but it can be useful additional tool in the toolkit. It also allows the kid to have a modicum of self-control, since mom and dad don't have to be glued to their hand all day.

Comment Re:Tell the person (Score 1) 619

I ended up calling my namesake down in Arizona, who evidently just could not grasp that our shared firstname.lastname@gmail.com belonged to me, not him.

I got that phone number because he put my email in to receive his property assessment.

Never got the guy on the line, but the voicemail seemed to do the trick.

Comment Or you could just pay for your own services (Score 2) 686

If you sometimes find yourself needing an open wireless network in order to check your email from a car, a street corner, or a park, you may have noticed that they're getting harder to find.

No, actually, I haven't, because I just use the bloody cellphone I carry all the time in modem mode. I need the service, so I pay for the service. I don't leech and expect somebody else to foot the bill (note that I don't consider using a coffee shop's wifi either, unless I have purchased something from them).

Comment Until we get Personal Area Networks... (Score 2) 395

Until we get Personal Area Networks properly working (a la Shadowrun 4, where your phone is just a voice interface to the same uplink node that everything else you have is also using), I would go with tethering. It just makes more sense to me, instead of having to have two separate contracts for 3G connectivity... and isn't that one of the entire points behind Bluetooth anyways?

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