I'm sorry, but the Lenovo Miix 2 is nowhere NEAR similarly speced to the Surface Pro 3. I'm having a hard time seeing any way in which they are similar rather than how they're different.

What made Microsoft so successful and ubiquitous was their cut-rate deals with OEMs to integration their OS and Office software in to every desktop on the planet. Now, when I walked in to the Microsoft Store to buy my wife a Surface Pro 3 i5 model, I discovered much to my dismay that they don't bundle Office in to their own product! Since she is a writer, Office was critical so we had to shell out an additional $150 on top of an already expensive device that doesn't even come with a keyboard you have to pay extra for, and things quickly add up. I think Microsoft is pricing themselves out of the market except for the rare people like me who is willing to pay a premium for performance and mind boggling light weight.

My explanation is that the public has ALWAYS suspected and we expect the CIA to do morally and legally questionable things, and now we don't really care that our suspicions have been confirmed.

What your CIO should be doing is bringing together two (or more) separate proposals to the executives who then mandate that all department heads provide cost estimation and risk analysis for each of the two scenarios. Once all those are compiled together, cost and risk can then be used to help the CIO and other executives make a choice. Then they can once again mandate a conformance of all departments to the chosen solution and give the department heads X amount of time to convert N percentage of their business processes to the chosen solution. Iterate until all legacy systems and processes are sunset.

Choosing one technical solution over another or choosing to pay a cost here versus there makes absolutely no sense until you completely understand the needs, resources, timelines, and risks.

The NSA is already proactively doing this for me.

Kind of like the afterlife of the slide-out keyboard. Sure it will make your phone a little bulkier, but as a slide-out keyboard user you should be used to that.

Build more than one on different faces retard.

It's much easier to deploy countermeasures from a large body of land than a relatively small satellite in orbit. It takes much longer for a missile to get there so there's a longer opportunity to respond. Different international regulations on bombing the moon. Redundancy for emergency failure. We can continue to target our nukes at them while the closer satellites are taken out. I could keep going on but either you'll understand or fail to see the motivations. "Better" is probably not the precise word to use here.

I apologize for the possible mis-use of the word telecommunications.

All kidding aside, I think this illustrates how important it is that we establish permanent moon telecommunications infrastructure.

This puts a new spin on the phrase "sitting duck".

We all know most top tier network providers are running over multiple bands of fiber just sitting there idle. What Verizon is saying is Level 3 has not worked out an agreement with Verizon to upgrade capacity. The physical part is the easy part; it's just about upgrading port usage. Now, if Level3 is paying for X bandwidth and they're not getting X bandwidth because Verizon hasn't upgraded their equipment, I'm sure Level3's lawyers would be all over that.

It would be nice to see in the article where the enthusiasts intend on dropping their probes. With Mars's landmass being equivalent to the Earth's, that's a lot of ground to cover. It's my understanding that the poles are more likely to harbor life from trapped H2O and CO2 and by their location should receive less solar radiation.

Thank you so much for pointing out relevant history. I think the key distinction here will be whether or not the ultimately responsible party will end up paying reparations to the country and family members like the US did (and yes I saw the part about the US not publicly acknowledging actual responsibility).

How easily people forget and get in to a comfort zone. When Microsoft first announced switching to a patch Tuesday email, everybody on /. criticized them for waiting up to a week to announce 0-day vulnerabilities and patch information.

A once a week email is close to worthless. It's better to leave vulnerability notification to people who are serious about it and stop wasting Internet bandwidth, cycles. and storage.