Also, Cheetos & mechanical keyboards should be a worse combination, hygenically speaking and reliability speaking, given how many crevices there are in a keyboard. So if Cheetos is supposed to be a problem with touch screen, then why doesn't anyone backtrack that thinking to the keyboards?

Goofy naming doesn't seem to prevent a product or service from getting popular, witness Wii and iPad. I think DDG is a better name than those of web services that add or drop vowels.

That is a long tail kind of market, and brick and mortar retail is generally incompatible with filling long tail demand, unless you have a very large, dense city where you can find a customer base for niche items.

Clearly, the term "lifetime" should be abandoned. As you say, it's too vague to be of use, and frankly, I ignore that, it's not a selling point for that reason. Along similar lines, in practice, I generally find that a lifetime warranty to be of less value than a warranty of specifically defined duration.

Under no circumstances is it realistic to assign a lifetime warranty of an electronic device to the life of the owner. It's clearly a hyperbolic stretch, but I'd almost be concerned that it would give a perverse incentive to rig the device to kill the owner in the case of failure.

I have a laser engraver and I've tried to cut what I think is run of the mill MDO. It really doesn't go very well, but it didn't seem dangerous either. I think you probably need to pump pure oxygen to get a flame.

I don't know about the temperature stability issue, I don't expect to use a laser engraver in extreme temperatures.

That's what I was thinking. Technically, the copyright owner owns the rights to derivative works. I don't see this as hypocrisy on the part of Netflix, Netflix owns very little content. If the studios did it, then OK, I see that as hypocrisy in a way. But people complaining that someone stole something from thieves? That's a different kind of special right there.

I'll go with "not all Netflix devices use Silverlight". I would bet that Silverlight is a minority of Netflix's traffic. I'm pretty sure the set-top boxes, game consoles and optical disc players with Netflix aren't using Silverlight. Wii and PS3 doesn't use it. I know Netflix iOS doesn't use Silverlight in a conventional sense, if at all. I don't even use my computers to watch Netflix, it's a console or a set-top box.

You don't have to use IE on the Internet, so it shouldn't matter whether IE is on your computer.

I gave up on Windows 2000 two or three years ago when most developers stopped supporting it and compatibility quality gradually degraded as a result.

Good user habits are important, but it's not a comprehensive solution. For one, even reputable sites get hacked.

People use Silverlight?

Sometimes the shoe fits. That said, Google and their lawyers would never say that, they'll have a much more diplomatic way of explaining how the technology works.

We do get too many powerful people that legislate or litigate on technology issues despite not understanding anything about the technology, yet they feel plenty qualified to make such decisions.

The 747 is still being made, 43 years after its first flight in 1969, the year of the first Moon rocket. The 737 is still being made, first flight, 1967. Sure, they're different now, but the fundamental design is still there. They're still competitive with much newer designs, otherwise they wouldn't be offered anymore.

I'm not sure where the DC-3 comparison comes in, is there a new regime of rocket engine that compares with going from rotary piston prop to jet engine? Even SpaceX's home-built Merlin engine isn't some fancy design that supersedes all engines before it, at least not in the manner from piston to jet.

I'm not sure where the leap from 40 years difference and 60 years in your comment.

There's more to that though. NASA previously had difficulties making strong progress on the next manned system while still operating the current one. Nixon cancelled Apollo to spend that operational money to develop the Space Shuttle (even though there were several Saturn Vs to spare), which the US had about 6 or so years between manned programs, exactly like the inter-program lull we have now. The good news is that the unmanned exploration program has still done exceedingly well in those years, and the same right now.

Soyuz has been handing US astronauts bound for ISS duty since 2005-ish. The commission on Columbia released a finding that the Space Shuttle was an unsafe platform, so the President decided that it was only to be used to complete the ISS according to existing commitments, flying the Space Shuttle to rotate inhabitants didn't make the cut.

There is a FAQ on their site:

http://gooseberry.atspace.co.uk/

They acknowledge they don't really fully know what they have, it's a circuit board they've found and are offering.

The WiFi is something I've been hoping for. But I'm having a hard time finding a spec on the dimensions, it looks like 2x or so larger than RPi.

Talk about an impossible standard, and another moved goalpost. Once you get to "growing wheat in Greenland", it's far too late to even try to prevent it. We do know that the rate of glacial ice thaw has been increasing rapidly, more quickly than predicted.

Sure, there is a natural global climate cycle, but this acceleration of change is outside the usual range of typical climate cycles. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are twice that of any period in the last 400,000 years.