Actually the Apollo missions did deploy a few UV telescopes on the lunar surface. They weren't much better than Earth-orbit telescopes, and so noone has bothered since. The radar is more interesting, but probably of limited utility given the power requirements to actually penetrate deep enough to see the layered mare deposits.

Where China is decades behind the US, Europe, and Japan is that they don't really release their science products. US missions legally must release all raw and processed data after a short proprietary period (typically a year). Europe and Japan take longer, but still do usually release all their raw data. China does not, and often waits until after the mission is over before releasing even highly processed versions of the data. The lack of raw data (and opacity of how it is processed) means that it is hard to compare to other sources, and belies any claim to actual scientific motivation.

Good. If it really easy to get a patent overthrown, only patents which are strongly defensible will be granted. And then everyone (but the patent trolls) wins.

Regardless if there was an official link, it is probably true that Bitcoin really took off when illegal/quasi-legal enterprises like Silk Road started using them. That's not to say Silk Road created Bitcoin or that all Bitcoin commerce is illegal, just that it would never have grown to real prominence without it.

Thanks Obama!

It doesn't come with Windows or OSX.

Not exactly hard to do, but still exceedingly rare for laptops in the US.

What precisely are you afraid of? And I'm being serious, what could the app access that you find worrying? It does grab your location, but that is trivial for any law enforcement agency these days.

If this app helps the FCC ensure that wireless companies are honest, I'm all for it.

Get it now, because no one in their right might is going to import electronics into Venezuela anytime soon.

Isn't vaguely socialist dictatorship great?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! It would be the slowest, worst cluster ever!

Don't get on too high of a horse; Microsoft is also looking at Netflix and saying "WTF? Even we don't use Silverlight anymore."

Yahoo's recent desperate moves (e.e. buying Tumblr) are hardly indicative of the industry, but rather one company that really shouldn't be as big as it is. Silicon Valley as a whole is a lot more healthy than Yahoo.

*word

The government of Switzerland may disagree that Geneva is an international city. Cosmopolitan might be the world you are looking for.

Also, it wasn't the web that prevented closed-garden internets, but rather universities. Until the mid 1990s, nearly everyone on the Internet (on any protocol) was at a university or research institute (like CERN). The universities weren't trying to make a profit, so they embraced an open architecture. It was US dominated, because then as now, most large research universities are in the US. Then, mainly US companies took that university network and popularized it. So, it's very much the fault of the US university system that the internet is so open.

This sounds like a perfect experiment for ISS. They mainly do biological experiments (it's not really a good platform for anything else), and this could be a neat result. CASIS (the ISS science institute) is always looking for new experiments and experimenters for the station.

They probably will, as it benefits the ecosystem (i.e. chips designed to a kernel, kernel designed for a chip). Like Android and ChromeOS, though, patches will be slower than ideal, but still there. Google does it because they are in the long game and have an interest in keeping Linux current. It sounds like Valve are thinking the same thing.

And I run Arch for a reason too, on an Arm Chromebook with Google's kernel patches.

'Cause y'know [b]Greenpeace[/b] are *totally* unbiased and *totally* free of preconceived political options.

There was a time when environmental organisations actually cared about science. Nowadays, they just blindly campaign against fossil fuels (and nuclear) and ignore any connections between their claims and actual science. Especially when there are things caused by human impacts other than greenhouse gases, like an area flooding because half of it is covered in parking lots, but knee-jerk "environmental activists" claiming it is due to climate change, despite have not actaul rigous scientific evidence.

Science is hard. Conspiracy theories and political defamation is easy. Thus Greenpeace and their ilk tend to favor that later...