Maybe, but if you want a 100W equivalent, you're out close to $50. And the thing is hideous to boot.

If I'm reading the article right, that entire supply of fuel-grade uranium set us back a total of $17B. If we can produce 10% of our nation's power for 20 years (i.e. supply 2 years' worth of our country's TOTAL electricity needs) on half of what Apple brings in per quarter, why on earth are we bothering with wind farms and solar arrays?

The skeeziest part of that deal actually wasn't Microsoft's attack on Netscape - it was their raw screwing of Spyglass. For those who don't remember this history, Microsoft licensed Mosaic (which they re-branded as Internet Explorer) from Spyglass for a minimal quarterly licensing fee plus a cut of the revenue from every copy of the browser that they sold. They then proceeded to give the browser away for free** with every copy of Windows, thereby not owing Spyglass any of the commission. Spyglass threatened legal action but apparently never took any, opting to settle for an $8M payout for a piece of technology that made Microsoft hundreds of billions.

** I never understood why Spyglass didn't sue Microsoft on the basis that (by Microsoft's own declaration, as AC pointed out) Internet Explorer was an integral part of Windows, and thus some share of the sales revenue for every copy of Windows was de facto revenue from the sale of Internet Explorer. Maybe someone more familiar with the back-story can fill in this blank?

By this definition of "help", the only way that the US can help even a small portion of the "bottom billion" is by becoming part of them, which isn't in the world's interests and certainly isn't in ours. This video explains it very succinctly. At current immigration levels, the US population is slated to reach half a billion people by 2070, and top 625M by 2100.

Forget what this will do to our domestic standard of living -- consider what it will do to our ability to continue helping ANYONE in the developing world. With any luck, we will barely be able to maintain a poverty level here at home above that of today's banana republics.

What the hell is so wrong with having a meritocratic immigration system, i.e. an "open door for the talented"? It gives those people who are genuinely pushing the boundaries of opportunity in their native countries a chance to realize their potential, while also enabling them to contribute to developments that will almost certainly benefit those same native countries. Symbiotically, it gives the US an influx of talent that is somewhat less expensive, enabling those developments to take place more rapidly and thus driving commerce both here and abroad.

We can't take in the "bottom billion", and we won't do anyone any favors by killing ourselves trying. They have to, as the saying goes, bloom where they're planted. The best that we can do to help them is continue to contribute to the global economy, which we can do better with an increased talent pool that's achievable in part by being judicious about whom we take in.

So that those of us who go to "mainstream" websites for geopolitical news rather than scouring them for science/tech developments, and therefore might have missed this (as I did), can learn about it?

...opening up their research to the public BEFORE submitting it for publication to a publisher like Elsevier? I know this is a naive question, and I'm not posing it to make a point.

As I understand it, study authors generally don't make a profit from selling the results of their studies (they've been paid for their time in doing the research), so it seems to me they would have nothing to lose from making those results publicly available for free (i.e. public domain) prior to journal publication. In this way, an author would render the "copyright transfer" mentioned in this article meaningless, since the work is no longer copyrightable; as such, they could subsequently re-post it wherever they liked. No?

Not trolling here...I know this is the most common criticism: "Your password is only X characters long / doesn't have enough case diversity / has no special characters / contains dictionary words", etc.

But -- in general, someone either has your password because they stole it (in which case it really doesn't matter what the password is), or they don't, in which case they have to guess or brute-force it on the website.

Most sites won't give you more than a handful of attempts at logging in before they lock you out and force two-step authentication by making you change your password via an email/text or by asking security questions. And even if they somehow didn't, every failed attempt on a live website takes time; realistically, trying more than a few combinations isn't really worth the trouble in the vast majority of cases.

So, in the realm of security considerations, why is a "secure" password considered so critical? It seems to me that, practically speaking, someone guessing your password is about the LEAST likely way to get compromised. What am I missing here?

Show that the level of false positives/negatives is higher with genetic testing than with conventional testing, and you might have a point. Otherwise, alarmist "OMG MY BREASTS!" scare mongering.

Correct, but -- again -- irrelevant unless the error rate is higher than in hands-on testing that's currently being used.

Ahh...THERE it is. We can't have patients going around getting informed about what's in their own bodies and making decisions based on that information. That's the purview of PROFESSIONALS.

Kind of like auto mechanics telling you they're the only ones that should be allowed to read the OBD messages from your car.

No, GIMP was doing that by itself without any help from Sourceforge. I've used some good OSS/FOSS alternatives to commercial software, but GIMP is a clunky, counter-intuitive mess.

I gave GIMP a solid college try -- I tried to use it for a VERY straightforward project: create a banner image out of several photos faded and alpha-blended together on the sides (something like this or this).

Starting from scratch, I downloaded GIMP and, using included help and any external tutorials I could find, got 1-1/2 hours into the project having accomplished precisely nothing of value and getting frustrated to the point of literally screaming at my screen.

Before you deride me for blaming someone else for my incompetence -- when I then fired up a computer with Photoshop (CS4 or 5, I believe it was) and started from exactly the same scratch (I had never done this sort of thing before), I had the entire project finished in under an hour, and actually understood the logic behind what the application wanted from me. It wasn't without its frustrations, but it enabled me to get my work done. Which is what a program needs to do in order to be a "legitimate piece of professional software". GIMP is a legitimate piece of something else -- SF or no SF.

The problem here is you (well, us) as consumers. We not only want FOSS, we want delivery to be free, too -- without regard for the fact that the infrastructure to facilitate that delivery actually takes tangible resources (i.e. money, not just developer time) to operate.

So, in effect, we the consumer base are CHOOSING this advertising model. If you were willing to pay $0.25 to Sourceforge every time you downloaded a program or code tree from them, you could make a reasonable demand for SF to do away with the stupid ad shenanigans. But you're not. Even if you personally are, the user base as a whole has gotten accustomed to delivery being "free" and now demands it. And since it's not actually free, sites like SF have to find a way to stay solvent.

The "bad actors" here are consumers of free stuff who get their panties in a bunch whenever the silver platter that their free stuff is served on is even the slightest bit tarnished.

Except how many gasoline-powered cars have actually caught fire through the mechanism you describe? Would be an interesting comparison. If the sort of debris impact we're talking about has happened to 3 Teslas out of a mere 21,500 in just a couple of years, you can bet it happens to conventional cars pretty regularly.

My guess is that gasoline-powered cars are more likely than Teslas to catch fire under different kinds of circumstances, but that a Tesla is more likely to catch fire by being hit by roadway debris because the batteries cover much more surface area under the car than the profile of the gas tank and the thin fuel lines on a conventional vehicle

Because ISPs can't charge you $X/month for easy-to-deliver service in the city while charging your uncle in Glasgow, Montana $20X/month because his is harder and more expensive to provide.

Kind of like the USPS - it costs them less than $0.46 to deliver a letter from New York to Chicago, but a lot more than $0.46 to deliver one from Corona, NM to Reedsburg, WI. Since they can't (either by law or by popular acceptability) charge more for the more expensive service, the lower-cost markets subsidize the higher-cost ones to make up the difference in cost-of-delivery. Same thing with ISPs - there's a lot more miles of cable to lay and maintain to connect rural areas. In contrast, France, Britain, South Korea, etc. don't have to wire rural areas to nearly the extent the US does.

Actually, a lot of C172s are ILS-equipped. Most pilots do their IFR training in this or a similar plane.

It's not like Tesla has become a profitable company and paid off this loan with the spoils of its success. To date the company has had one profitable quarter, to the tune of $11.2M -- made *entirely* from the sale of ZEV credits (a freebie from the government), not cars.

The only reason that Tesla feels it can afford to sink its investment capital into this PR move is because it learned form the 2008 crash that when car companies say "jump", Washington says "how high?", so it knows it's a safe bet -- i.e. if/when Tesla finds itself in trouble because it overextended to pay off the loan, Uncle Sam will bail it out.

Only if people who belong to that group have actually been shown to be "more likely to try to dodge taxes". Do you have proof of that, or at least legitimate evidence?