Nope, it was a cost cutting measure pure and simple. There's plenty the voyager's can still do that absolutely nothing else can or will be able to do for the next 40 years - measure the heliopause.

They haven't reached the end...hence why NASA stood in pretty heavy lockstep to protect them.

When they find it takes a hour to print? not so much.

5-10 minutes tops before people are going to accept it. And that's if you can completely remove any user interaction with the technical side.

It's a 'printer' and they will expect it to work (and likewise the user not work) like one from 2010, not 1980.

Nope. George Bush tried to cancel the Voyager programs (for a paltry 4 million in savings). He was informed there would be a human shield preventing anyone trying to turn them off.

You know what's 'very unlikely'? A /. poster having any clue about Europa that NASA doesn't already know in it's sleep.

how do you think volcanoes work? melting rock only near the surface?

Besides, with ice formation it doesn't destroy evidence of organisms that were in the water.

We'll never be able to fly
We'll never be able to go into space
We'll never be able to land on the moon
We'll never be able to have civil and informative political discussions....

Ok, the 4th might be true, but 'never' and human ingenuity shouldn't be lumped together very often.

Sorry, messed up links - I hate posting to Slashdot from a touch device.

http://xamarin.com/pr/xamarin-...

http://blog.xamarin.com/xamari...

Here is the official press release.

Here is the official press release.">Here is the continuation of that story from the Build conference two days ago.

I feel your pain, but I'm not sure the people complaining in this thread understand the sheer size of YouTube. It's literally the entire worlds video repository. There are over 100 hours of video uploaded every minute. Over 100 hours! Even if YouTube employed an entire army of specialised copyright lawyers trained in the international nuances of fair use, there's no possible way the enormous number of disputes could ever be mediated in a fair way.

When you upload to YouTube, you get a lot of stuff for free, but you don't have to use them. You could host the video yourself and then the disputes would come to you directly instead of being auto-resolved by a machine. If you aren't willing to pay the costs of doing that, then you need to accept the consequences of YouTube's razor-thin profit margins and vast economies of scale.

F# officially supports Mono.

Try writing a compiler in it, and you'll quickly see what it is good for.

The main thing of interest there is actually ADTs and pattern matching on them. For some tasks (often ones involving trees), this leads to very concise yet natural code.

Did you miss the major announcement about official partnership with Xamarin a month ago or so?

This can only work with precompilation if dynamic assembly loading is disabled (so that the complete set of instantiations is known in advance). This may be feasible for Store apps, but many desktop apps need extensibility.

Castro wasn't even a communist when he started. He went that way because US was supporting Batista, and soviets were the only ones who'd give him support.

In this case, US didn't tell them anything. Rather, it gave them a tool to discuss it between themselves. What's your beef with that?

Dynamically compiling code has some advantages unrelated to security or portability. For example, try efficiently implementing generic virtual methods without a JIT.

(Coincidentally, .NET Native doesn't support this feature of C#)