If it isn't profitable, the market can't do it. Not won't, can't.

Fifty-six years after Sputnik, there's profit to be found in building, launching and operating satellites. As a result, the market has built and sustains businesses that do that. Aside from the Russians pay-to-be-a-space-tourist gimmickry (which exists thanks to state-funded infrastructure) no one has built a business putting people into space.

If the market is going to send people out to explore the Solar System, someone will need to tell it how to turn a profit doing that.

Sure, you may run a mail server next to the dryer, but who knows where your mail is, or how it got there.

The internet is not about point-to-point communication. It's a *publishing* technology. The reason I can see this Slashdot page is because it was published on some servers, not sent over some secure wire to me. I click on a URL and somewhere a server sends the data comprising that page out into the net, broken up in itty-bit packets with my IP address embedded in them, and eventually they all get to me, where they are reconstructed and displayed in my browser.

Email is no different. Sure, you can use encryption. But, that's self-limiting unless the entire world knows everyone else's key, and then what good would encryption be?

Just as criminals rely on "social engineering" to get access to data, it's been used for centuries by governments and others to get access to data other people do not want them to see. No matter how anyone uses technology to secure their internet "privacy" (quotes because it's an oxymoron), you are really just depending that the folks who create the technology have not been "socially engineered".

So... if you don't want someone to find out something, don't publish it, on the net or elsewhere.

Says more about you than them

Besdies, how do you know it's such a great resource if this is the first you've heard of it?

It's all about power.

Our notions of right and wrong tend to adapt to fit our notions of what we want.

Someday, users will use software to create the software they want. When that happens, 95 percent of software developers will be redundant and they will belatedly learn that unions multiply their individual power.

Let's get them to volunteer to be the first to go: "Republicans on Mars!"

The fewer of the miscreants on this planet, the better.

I don't need to read feeds from multiple devices. That means I don't need to synchronize. And, that mean I don't need Google Reader, or Feedly, or the hassle of Tiny Tiny RSS, or whatever.

What I need is a local RSS reader, a client. I already have that, and I had it before Google invented Reader.

The problem is not XP. The problem is speciality software vendors charging ten grand for a software update.

This kind of stuff is why it costs the rest of us $2120.14 to have a hangnail treated at our MD.

People like me, singleton users, don't really care about things that make your professional life a tad more complicated. That's what you're paid for. Sorry.

At heart, you are reflecting the same corporate make-things-easy notions that underpin the adoption of Windows.

The more alternatives in Linux, the better. Fork away, people!

Everyone who knows anything knows Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A.

We just haven't found it, yet.

Python-the-language was never registered as a mark in Europe. If the guy backs off, Python geeks out to consider themselves lucky. Be a change from considering themselves exempt from the house rules.

I don't suppose the hate mail and venomous phone calls he got from idiots helped either. Class act, that.

You can run RHEL/CentOS with current Chome, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, the usual multimedia apps, etc., etc., These programs are not in the official RHEL/CentOS repositories but they are available in reliable independent repos. I know because I've done it.

What "proprietary components"?

Yes, its stats. That's not the point. The study illustrates the racism that is endemic in society. Not just the U.S., but in every human society.

When a business targets African-Americans by buying names associated with African-Americans, that's textbook racism. Why? Because it's making assumptions about individuals based on their membership in a group.

Ditto the self-serving argument that "Racism is denying the fact that many blacks in the US have been disadvantaged and largely as a result are more likely to commit crimes and get arrested". Applying perceived generalizations about a group to individuals you do not know is textbook racism.

Racism wasn't some passing phase of American history.

Thoroughly current Mountain Lion on a Macbook Pro here. When I enter "file:///" into apps, I get directory listings, not crashes.

At first glance, I thought this was about Bank of America's day-long outage yesterday. On the first of the month, phone, ATM and online access was gone until late in the evening Eastern time.