If we are going to have China-bashing comments, could we at least have intelligent ones? That is, based on any kind of knowledge and not just xenophobia.

In the corporate word, lending money and buying stock are just two different ways to invest in a company. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages for the investor and the company, but they fundamentally fill the same purpose.

I always thought the main point of VLC is that it does not rely on the often broken collection of installed codecs. It "just works" even if the rest of the system is messed up in all kinds of ways.

THX probably knew they were losing credibility and decided to cash in quickly.

I used to have NoScript with default to not run scripts, but I have given up. It is doable as long as you just browse the web, though you will have to whitelist a lot of sites to get them to work and embedded video will often just not play. The real problems come when you want to use travel booking sites, corporate career sites, banking and many online shopping sites. Those require a lot of JavaScript and will send you around between different domains and servers in ways that appear to be indistinguishable from XSS attacks. You cannot know before you start either, there will just be a blank page in the middle.

I still use NoScript, but in the blacklist mode. It stops some common attacks and lets me block annoying scripts such as in the article here.

I am honestly curious: What advantage is a "modern RISC architecture" if you are not writing in Assembly anyway?

Just to be clear: There are several launch systems capable of sending "things" into space, just not people. Things like Mars rovers and probes to other planets and comets don't use man-rated launchers.

Why would that be a good idea? Just private good m'kay?

Not even a hardline anti-government libertarian should want to just give tax money to a private corporation.

This is a common mental mistake of Slashdotters. Of course there is a scale of various levels of knowledge. Perhaps even more importantly, a person can be an expert in some subjects and an idiot in others.

We know how to land in vacuum with little gravity. Mars has too strong gravity to use rockets all the way. Both parachutes and breaking rockets are still useful for landing on Mars, but it is very different from both Earth and the Moon.

Do you know anything about tree rings? Why was this modded up?

If said work of "skeptics" was crap, then criticizing a journal for publishing crap is completely reasonable.

Wasn't this some stacks of punch cards that was thrown out in the mid-80s sometime?

How is that going to help you when they refuse to let you in at the border check?