Yep, it must be terrible to live in a land where Big Government can high-handedly and arbitrarily restrict the Freedoms of large corporations. It's a shame that the serfs living under such repressive regimes don't have skilled and benevolent lobbyists to help them rise up and throw off their shackles.

At least, that's what the corporate news outlets here in the US are leading us to believe.

Yup. Usable once you surmount the learning curve, and ergonomic.

I had wrist problems occasionally when I was using keyboard-only UIs, but all I ever had to do was rearrange keyboard and chair to the right positions. (Okay, WordStar on a TRS-80 Mod I was killing me, until I hacked in foot-pedals to use for Shift and up-arrow, er, Control). "Modern" pretty-much-need-the-mouse IDEs pained me enough that I went to a Fingerworks Touchstream keyboard for a number of years, even though it slowed my typing by almost half.

It may not have been wise for me to spend years training vi into my muscle memory, but it's done now, and I'm not especially interested in giving up that advantage.

I'm just about the spaciest space-nutter around, but why the hell are they spending precious money and opportunity to fly a freaking demonstration instead of another actual observational tool?

Look, we know the composition of Mars' atmosphere. We know how much sunlight falls there, what the temperature range is, and so on. It's dead simple to set up a testbed here on Earth, in a jar, and run the oxygen-production process in the testbed. Better yet, you get to measure its output, tweak its operating parameters, and even do an autopsy on it if something goes wrong.

The only thing I can see us getting out of "make oxygen just like we did before, but ON MARS" is PR, and I don't really see the PR upside. All the science packages that were accepted, and a lot of them that didn't make the cut, would've given us new knowledge about the planet. Why in either world are we sending this package instead?

I had been wondering about this. A FOAF was a curator at a museum on the West Coast, and when I talked to him about the idea of online displays, he was completely dismissive -- it seemed like anything other than "Maximum Lockdown" didn't even register with him. Then again, this was probably 15 years ago. Was Maximum Lockdown the usual stance before the Internet explosion, or do all three approaches have a well-established history?

If you really want to sell it for parts, disassemble it and destroy the main circuit board, or at least grind or pry off the chips with nonvolatile storage.

Any general treatment (heat, overvoltage, etc.) will surely destroy the rest of the phone before you can be sure it's cleared the nonvolatile storage.

It makes perfect sense to use lithium metal as an anode, as a way to minimize weight and maximize specific energy.

The problem is, it's an alkali metal, useful in a number of chemical processes -- including processes used to make meth. And so far, regulators in the US (and many other areas) have demonstrated that they'll do whatever they can to Fight the Meth Menace, no matter how much collateral damage they cause to industries, economies, and human well-being.

What kind of ridiculous regulations do you think they'll try to impose on devices that contain a multi-kilogram slab of Widely-Known Drug Precursor? Will we get cars that would have 500-mile range, but for the extra 500 pounds and two kilowatts of DEA/HSA-mandated security shielding and monitoring around the battery pack?

Yep, real men would never be happy with today's battery technology. That's why I still use a two-cycle engine in my phone.

You know that light delivery trucks will soon be replaced by drones. That's why we really need the improved batteries.

At least, that's what Amazon seems to want us to think...

So you're saying that the trains run on time?

No, actually, I'm fortunate enough not to have that option. Still, it's good to see this happening for the people who do.

Epsilon Lyrae, and the vast number of amateur astronomers who've known about it for ages, would beg to differ. Two components that are naked-eye visible, one a double, one a triple. All gravitationally bound, and apparently quite dynamically stable. Five other nearby stars may be gravitationally bound to the system as well.

Castor (Alpha Geminorum) is a sextuple system.

But, of course:

"It's simply not possible for a system like this to exist. If you point out that systems like this do exist, it doesn't mean that my statement is wrong, it means that you're a wack job, so just shut up."

Bravo, good AC. Bravo.

I've never heard of such a thing. Thank goodness Slashdot is here to challenge our preconceptions.

1) Arrogance. You know that average developers have a hard time with some kinds of code, but you're a superprogrammer, and you don't have those problems. If someone decides later that there's something wrong with your code, well, they should've gotten their requirements straightened out before they told you to go and build it. The only time you lose your cool is when you have to deal with idiot managers, analysts, or users.

1) Complacency. You've been pounding on this code forever, and you just don't care any more. Yeah, there'll be bugs, people will yell, they'll get fixed. That's just the way development goes. Why get worked up about it?

It's possible to connect a controller to an antenna that vastly extends its range. Is your property extensive enough to give you a 2-kilometer perimeter around your house?