How do you intend to elect a politician if they lie to you? Shouldn't you know how your elected representative feels about certain issues so you can vote for the person who will represent you properly? If politicians can just lie to get elected, not do anything beneficial to you while in office, and then cover up everything they do or so or vote on in the name of protecting security or some other bs, won't you just vote for them the next time when they lie to you? Politicians need to be accountable for EVERYTHING they do while representing you. If they communicate in any way in an official capacity, you as their electorate have a right to know what they are doing and saying for YOU.

Don't know why you said "Capitalist" America at the end there. In a pure capitalist environment, the cheapest design that met all requirements (performance, safety, etc.) would win, there would be no other consideration.

I'm no EE, so I don't know if the impact is significant or not, but wouldn't "wired" RAM that is actively storing bits require additional juice. Volatile RAM, like that used in smartphones, doesn't work like flash. There is a power penalty for apps that are storing stuff in RAM. If you are literally doing nothing with the phone, it doesn't make sense to keep the whole 512MB of ram wired just because you happened to use applications before, especially if the OS has functions for the app to essentially be put to sleep. Again I'm not an EE or CE so in reality the power usage may not even be relevant but it's something to think about.

Well if you are going to get into semantics, technically none of that stuff is part of the "OS". The OS is just the linux kernel itself, just the part that handles I/O, the filesystem (disk access), memory access, and process scheduling. What you are talking about are software distributions, that in this case happen to be built and packaged with a linux kernel.

How dare you call out the forking failures? Fork You!

"They're takin our jerbs!"

-The Spider Goats

That formula requires knowing the initial spin rate (or current spin rate if you just want to calculate from now until a body is tidally locked). Although I guess given it's mass there is probably some sort of maximum initial spin rate, and even given that rate the planet might be guaranteed to be tidally locked at this point.

I would think any advanced creatures would live on the border of light and dark, like a giant ring world. This way they could migrate throughout the day for various different cycles (feeding, sleeping, mating, etc.). I guess something could probably survive in the complete sun side as well.

Oh and free flashlight apps for iPhone 4 are another great example.

If it does function X much better it's not really duplicating, it's improving. I think they are trying to avoid for example, 10 people who took an iPhone programming class and then submitted identical versions of the class project twitter client.

This creates a paradox. Imagine in your A and B scenario that B is stationary and A flies to B faster than the speed of light using some as of yet undetermined method. When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?

Do you think a true sentient artificial intelligence would be comfortable with simply being shutdown until they happen into an area with enough solar energy?

-kap

Even at relativistic speeds, what are the odds of hitting an asteroid in interstellar space? They have to be pretty slim.

Obviously you've never heard of FPGA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array While you can't add new connections in the strictest sense, you could could conceivably create a chip with a whole bunch of generic unused hardware and in the rest of the hardware program an algorithm that allows new connections to be made with that raw material.

Whoever smelt it dealt it.