I'm noticing that recently there has been a growing trend towards independent publication of books, music, movies, and other creative works.

I really hope this continues to take off (with enthusiastic support from our wallets and voices) because it weakens the influence of the *IAAs and various copyright consortia that have an annoying habit of lobbying governments for legislation in no one's favour (not even the artists) but their own.

Epic fail.

Sorry guys.

The article does not mention anywhere that the amount of water on is more than the great lakes system.

Firstly, the water is in the form of hydroxyl and the mineral apartite (article didn't go into more detail). Secondly, TFA states the amount of water is under 5ppm. Yes, parts per million. I can't see how anyone could arrive at the great lakes value unless they took the volume of the moon and took 5ppm of that, which is ridiculous.

Firstly, the moon's not a uniform material. Secondly, to get anywhere close to this amount of water, you'd need to mine and refine the majority of the moon. It's like saying we have 300 quintillion gallons of water on earth while neglecting to mention that 97% of it is salt water and some more of it in the ice caps.

The real takeaway from the article is that the previously estimated amount of water was 1 ppb and now it's around 5 ppm.

This development may actually be the worst thing possible for the people of Afghanistan.

The discovery of oil or abundant mineral wealth in many African states has caused severe corruption, wars, and generally speaking, bad times for those citizens. Specifically, Nigeria -> oil -> widespread government corruption and little development of general population. Congo -> diamonds -> civil war that's lasted for decades.

If those states are any hint of what happens when lots of valuables are discovered in a weakly governed state, then there's going to be trouble in Afghanistan.

That's true, but for smaller cities mass transit is terrible.

Having moved from a city of population 5 million to one of population 800 000 I have first hand experience of this. I went from 5 minute waits to 45 minute waits in -30C weather. Even bikes are a better choice than mass transit here.

Why can't it differentiate between mobile and fixed broadband speeds? The user agent string from a mobile browser should be different from a desktop one. The only exception is if the mobile connection is tethered.

I think the biggest surprise here is the update to Xen 4.

Xen 4.0 has barely been released for 3 months and they're moving to it for SLES? Insanity. There's barely any time to determine known bugs. What production environment would want to risk everything from downtime to data loss by using practically untested code?

That said, Xen 4.0 has some really nice features with regards to the Remus checkpointing project. It essentially provides instant failover (with persistent network connections) to commodity hardware. Definitely a feature to keep your eyes on for upcoming RHEL/SLES versions.

The biggest technical merit of the Nexus One over the Droid Incredible is the likelihood of continued updates to the android OS.

There's a huge hacker community right now that owns the Nexus One hardware. It's likely that we'll see continued support for a long time on this phone.

The majority of the complaints against Ubuntu that I have seen do not deal with the popularity or the user friendliness.

Instead, they focus on things like the poor signal to noise ratio in support forums, and the cowboy, flying by the seat of the pants approach they take towards to the X server. There's far too many critical Xorg bugs in most releases, and this usually stems from all the extra patches they apply to Xorg and their strict adherence to release dates.