History lesson: the QWERTY keyboard was adobted as the English-language standard keyboard on typwriters. This was because, with most words, including most common words, you alternate which side of the keyboad your stroke lands. This helps reduce the amount of times the hammers in mechanical typewritters will jam. This sped up typing time considerably. DVORAK isn't a faster keyboard layout. It's simply more ergonomic, which carries more weight once you get rid of hammers in typewritters. Fast-forward to today: QWERTY keyboards are standard on almost all smartphones. But, as smartphones lack hammers, what are they most pressing criteria for a mobile keyboard? What are the greatest limitation to using mobile keyboards? The size of the keys are a major obstacle, but QWERTY is actually a rather efficient layout to use with auto-correct. The other major limitation is the fact that you only have two digits available for input, the two thumbs. Thus the most optimal keyboard is one where you alternate the sides of the keyboard between strokes as often as possible. So what's the most efficient layout for smartphones? One that's easy to use auto-correct with. One that alternates the side of keyboard used as frequently as possible. In other words the one we just happened to already use. So, upon consideration, QWERTY should be standard on all smartphones.

Most hydrogen today is made from natural gas. CO2 is a byproduct of the process. Electrolysis of water is a really expensive way to generate hydrogen. Just the electricity it takes to generate the hydrogen from water makes it more poluting than hydrogen from natural gas. First the natural gas or, more likely, coal is converted to electricity at 40% efficiency. Then the electricity is transmitted with 3-7% loss. Then the electrolysis is only ~80% efficient with electrolytes that are economic on an industrial scale. You might as well just turn the coal or natural gas into liquid fuel. The problem with this system is that mining and refining zinc would be more poluting than just using the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn the fuel used to refine the zinc to make liquid fuels. That way you wouldn't have to even replace any infrastructure.

Vacuum isn't cold. It's a vacuum. Like in a thermas. You need a shiny structure with a large surface area facing away from the ship to cool things in space. That's why the shuttle kept the bay doors open in space. It's also why the ISS has those shiny panels near their solar arrays. Also energy input from the sun dies off with the square of the distance. So once you're out about 12-15 AU, you can cool a fluid below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen easily.

Actually, we're still Apes. Just like we're still monkeys. Just like we're still placentals. Just like we're still mammals. Just like we're still tetrapods. Just like we're still vertebrates. Just like we're still animals. Just like we're still eukaryotes. Evolution produces nested hierarchies. We never stop being any group. We simply add new taxonomic levels as time goes on. That's one of the reasons modern biology is moving away from Linnaean taxonomy and towards genetic cladistics.

Iridium sats operate @200MHz. My, nearly obsolete, cell phone is 2.5x as powerful as an Iridium satelite. That's why microsatelites are the future. They're cheap enough to send dozens up at once, which allows you to update the network more easily.

It is my understanding that by seperating the detectors over large distances in space or time, it makes it easier to detect and correct for atmospheric abberations. Which is one of the reasons interferometers were built in the first place.

Why not get a couple thousand 10" reflecting telescopes on digital servo mounts (~$1,500 each), hook them up to HD web cams (~$1,500 each), and use netbooks (~$300 each) with unlimited data plans (~$500/yr) to connect to database that uses a volunteer-based distributed computing network to process the data using inteferometry? You'd effectively have a telescope with a mirror the size of the Earth for about the cost of a professional level telescope. It would be orders of magnitude more powerful than anything else we could build. I still have no idea why this hasn't been built yet.

With tethering and WiFi Hotspots, if my phone has unlimited data, every other device I have has unlimited data. The only question is how many hoops I have to jump through to bypass my carrier wanting to charge me for using my devices in the most obvious fashion.

My dad bought a 386 with 8MB of RAM in 1986. People told him he'd never need that much memory. (Fun fact, the RAM was actually soldered to the board!)

That was actually the (somewhat belaboured and clumsily executed) point of Ghost in The Shell. I've felt for a long time now that the older I get, the more the world looks like a mashup novel of George Orwell and Philip K. Dick. I guess I have to add Masamune Shirow to that list, now. OWS and Anonymous both bear a striking resemblance to the goings on in Stand-Alone Complex.

On another note, there is a lot written in the counter-insurgency (COIN) literature about the difficulty of fighting a decentralized, amourphous enemy and the inability of a traditional, rigidly structured military force to effectively combat it.

You beat me to this. After you pass iron, you can't get exothermic fusion reactions. You just can't. The Physics behinds this are well understood. This is just more snake oil.

Guess who I'm more inclined to believe: an anonymous supossed hacker or a certificate CA?

Apollo 12 brought back parts from a Probe that landed on the Moon two years earlier. On it were found bacterial spores. When those spores were added to a growth medium, they cultured. Considering a) the Moon has no atmosphere, b) the Moon receives 4x the solar radiation as Mars, and c) the spores had been there for two years, I don't think we can actually consider any space craft sent to Mars truly sterile.

...a mixture of urea, glycerol, and soap...

How did they find this formula? Did one of the researchers piss in a bottle of liquid soap?

I switched to Kubuntu from Ubuntu back at 9.10. I kept using Synaptic until just recently.