Yes, but if you drop a physical book into the bathtub, you don't lose your entire library, just one book. It'll probably cost between $5 and $20 to replace the physical book, compared to $200+ to replace a digital reader.

Yes, I'm sure they found it easy to create a standardized and unbiased IQ test for an extinct family based solely on their postulated brain size. *snicker*

I've always felt that without the 'Google attitude' that focused attention on design, simplicity and functionality, a business like Apple wouldn't have made it.

I've noticed a lot of these kinds of outages lately, not just with RIM but with other network providers. They usually seem to follow a failed routine-maintenance cycle. Do carriers really not design their networks and systems to support rolling upgrades and the like? More importantly, has there been a breakdown of the test-and-release cycle that's supposed to catch these things before service dies for everyone?

I guess the other thing might be all the third-party hosting and outsourcing that goes on in IT...how many people want to bet that half the outage time was trying to figure out where exactly the fault was? From experience, that gets a billion times harder when your system is hosted by a third party who won't say a word to you so they can avoid taking blame (and SLA hits) for it.

Makes me wonder about cloud computing...the technology concept is great, but how many large organizations will trust all their data to machines they don't directly control? These days it doesn't make sense to host everything yourself, but companies really have to be careful to choose competent service providers!!

That's it. I didn't really care about climate change before, and whether or not it was anthropogenic, but THIS MUST END NOW!

WE MUST SAVE THE COFFEE! SAVE THE COFFEE!

No, all countries can't do that. In Sweden for instance you can't get a law tried in court if you think it violates the constitution. We actually have several laws in effect now where "lagrådet" (which is more or less the supreme court members who are giving opinions about new laws and if they violates the constitution) has said that the law is in conflict and the law have been passed anyway. However, we can't get these laws overturned because it violates the constitution. However, the law will be more or less useless since all courts will follows the supreme courts ruling off the first case that goes that far, so in practice it can't be upheld.

When it comes to complain to EU - a law has to violate some EU charter to be able to do that. Or it has to violate human rights.
If the EU court finds that a law is wrong, the law has to be changed or the member state will gets fines until they change the law.

Don't expect a particular version of FF to get entrenched and pose an obstruction in the way of newer versions that will follow. The notorious lock-in around IE6 is a microsoft-only disease.

Because FF is so emphatically standard-conforming, whatever works in version X is bound to work in version X+1. Yes, extensions need to be kept up-to-date with every new release, but no site (well, except quakelive.com :) relies on a particular extension installed.

Wrt plugins, Mozilla plugin API is fairly stable and well-rounded. The same Flash plugin works with FF 1.5 all through 3.5.

Note how (relatively) abrupt was the decline of FF2.0 neatly matched by the increase in version 3.0 share, and, later, 3.0 promptly giving way to 3.5. That's just people upgrading, and most of the time, automatically either through built-in Firefox updater or via general distro upgrade.

I think that java had the momentum, and the quality, so ultimately there was something structurally wrong with it that caused the decline in marketshare. The webapp share was taken over by flash, which is far slower than the java vm, because actionscript was easier to program in. If sun had made a ligthweight version of the vm for the browser and simpler language like visual basic, things might have been very different.

Saying that Huygens "wasn't much" and "was just a part of the larger Cassini mission" is pretty misguided thinking and borders on insulting the scientists and engineers who put this amazing probe together, IMHO.

Are you saying that designing a probe that survives, dormant, for almost 7 years in interplanetary space and then turns on perfectly "isn't much"? Are you saying that making a fully-autonomous descent and soft landing on an outer planet's moon and sending back a stunning image of the surface "isn't much"? Are you saying that providing essentially real-time (light travel delay notwithstanding) imaging of lakes and drainage gullies during the descent, along with atmospheric sampling, "isn't much"? Are you saying that getting all these signals back from 1.2 billion kilometres with just a 10 watt transmitter "isn't much"? Good grief.

It was also much more than "just" a part of the Cassini mission: it was an integral part of it, all the way back to the early 1980s when the joint mission was first proposed. The US-European collaboration had its political moments, but it worked. Yes, Cassini is still returning great data (including the Titan sea glint image), but Huygens was never going to survive long with just batteries to power it under Titan's atmospheric murk. It shouldn't be dismissed as a consequence.

As for TSSM, it's a massive overstatement to say that it's "scheduled": nowhere near. TSSM (or more properly, its TandDEM predecessor) was proposed to ESA as a large (L) mission as part of the Cosmic Vision process in 2007 and did go through to the beginning of the second round along with the (also joint ESA-NASA) LAPLACE mission to Jupiter. The latter was however chosen for study by ESA and NASA to pursue first and is now the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM). EJSM, if selected as the first CV L-mission, would fly (probably) no earlier than 2020, thus pushing TSSM back to the mid-2020's at the earliest, with arrival at Saturn and Titan in the mid-2030's.

So, exciting as it would be scientifically, don't hold your breath.

If the content is fantastic, there will be large scale contributors.

http://mises.org/ has no advertising that I've noticed. They have some million-dollar contributors.

I have a newsletter site that is free, with no ads, and I have some contributors that offer me a few hundred a year. I don't even openly ask for it (there's a link to contributing that just says "Contribute."). If the content is good, the money will still come in.

Evolution is a messy business all right. I know some about cystic fibrosis though because both of my brothers children were born with it. The CF gene is carried by about 1 person in 29 but it affects only those that have 2 CF genes. It's a double recessive so it only effects a much smaller percentage of the population.

I don't know a lot about genetics though beyond what you read in mainstream media so I can't say for sure why it doesn't evolve out of our species. My guess though would be that there isn't very much of that kind of evolutionary pressure on humans. We can coddle the sickly with our communities and doctors. Somehow I don't think most nearsighted (like me) neandrathals lasted too long yet we still have nearsighted people. Introduce a lot of chaotic violence and war into a society though and the sick , elderly and handicapped sure are at a disadvantage. I agree with you though that there is a lot more to be learned about genetics and why things have evolved the way they have.

VirtualBox is fine for what it is, but I don't have the time to struggle with it.

"some really far out edge cases" - welcome to my life.

But VMware is BETTER. And $189 approaches zero compared to the cost of the time I spend with it.

No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the fora, and no matter what, I think that Freedom of Speech is to be protected. Any attempt at stifling it with whatever justification is the first step towards a slippery slope leading to authoritarian rule and erosion of all kinds of privacy and freedoms...albeit this could take many decades to actually happen.

If the erosion of freedoms starts now, I fear that by the time I die, the world will be much, much different from the heydays of the internet when everything was open and without restrictions...I fear that we will have a very strict and monitored society where your every move will be logged and your every thought will be scrutinized for compliance with the dominant peoples' satisfaction.

Indeed. Provide a socialist with a service, and in a week he'll be calling it a human right.

The key difference between broadband and health care being that with health care, some people absolutely need it to continue to live. I know this is going to be a very unpopular statement on Slashdot but you can live without broadband. It's possible. Some of us old timers did it for many years back in the day. I'm all for my taxpayers helping out people to an extent but there's a line that will be crossed sometime. Your sentiment could be expanded to everyone needing a car so let's setup a plan to make sure everyone has a car via our tax dollars. I mean, we're all buying one anyway, right?