Has no one noticed in this thread that the revenue model of WhatsApp is to charge after the first year of use? It's not surprising that it would be popular while it is free, especially with no advertising. How many of these young users will start to pay after the first year of use?

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/ --> https://developers.google.com/apps-script/ or directly to script.google.com (Full-disclosure: not affiliated - just a user.)

... We need to make that part true.

Yes - not even the new Apple maps are *quite* that bad! ;-) Not sure about the Nokia ones, though, without direct experience...

I'd be dead without mine. Picture this: me moving about 30 miles per hour down a long straight hill in the Bay area, pedaling hard, and misjudging the light I see changing on the side street, I plow my bike full-on into the side of a car turning right in front of me. The 100+ feet of skid marks I left on the asphalt before correctly determining that I would not be able to stop were not enough to avoid the collision. About 30 feet before my bike slammed into the side of the vehicle, I stood up on the left side pedal, timed my departure, and pushed off, jumping from it in time to fly through the air just behind the car as my bike proceeded ahead. It was a cool day, and I had a jacket on. I sailed upside down, face up past the car and landed on my back and head, sliding along the ground on my jacket and helmet for a good 20 or 30 feet farther down the slope. I remember coming to rest and laying there for a while, then getting up to check the car and the accident site. I was fine, though a little shaken up. Traffic had stopped in each direction and people were swarming around the car. The driver got out, completely white. I looked at the dent and my bike, crumpled and considerably shorter than it had ever been from one end to the other. People said they had seen sparks when the collision happened. I told the driver, looking at the dent, "I'm sorry about your car." He said in a high voice, "Never mind about the car! Are you all right?" I said I was fine. I felt pretty wobbly, though, and someone took me the rest of the way home. Later, I took the bike into our local shop, which was a good one. The guy behind the counter turned around from the bike he was working on, and when he saw what I had carried in, he put down the wrench, came around the counter, put his hand on my shoulder and said firmly but gently, "My friend, that bike is history." I would be dead without my helmet. Bikes are not just for tooling around parks slowly, looking at the scenery. And even when you think they are, or just vehicles for ambling gently from place to place, things can turn ugly in an unexpected way very, very fast. *Wear your helmet.*

Darn browser! Went to the wrong thread!

I'd be dead without mine. Picture this: me moving about 30 miles per hour down a long straight hill in the Bay area, pedaling hard, and misjudging the light I see changing on the side street, I plow my bike full-on into the side of a car turning right in front of me. The 100+ feet of skid marks I left on the asphalt before correctly determining that I would not be able to stop were not enough to avoid the collision. About 30 feet before my bike slammed into the side of the vehicle, I stood up on the left side pedal, timed my departure, and pushed off, jumping from it in time to fly through the air just behind the car as my bike proceeded ahead. It was a cool day, and I had a jacket on. I sailed upside down, face up past the car and landed on my back and head, sliding along the ground on my jacket and helmet for a good 20 or 30 feet farther down the slope. I remember coming to rest and laying there for a while, then getting up to check the car and the accident site. I was fine, though a little shaken up. Traffic had stopped in each direction and people were swarming around the car. The driver got out, completely white. I looked at the dent and my bike, crumpled and considerably shorter than it had ever been from one end to the other. People said they had seen sparks when the collision happened. I told the driver, looking at the dent, "I'm sorry about your car." He said in a high voice, "Never mind about the car! Are you all right?" I said I was fine. I felt pretty wobbly, though, and someone took me the rest of the way home. Later, I took the bike into our local shop, which was a good one. The guy behind the counter turned around from the bike he was working on, and when he saw what I had carried in, he put down the wrench, came around the counter, put his hand on my shoulder and said firmly but gently, "My friend, that bike is history." I would be dead without my helmet. Bikes are not just for tooling around parks slowly, looking at the scenery. And even when you think they are, or just vehicles for ambling gently from place to place, things can turn ugly in an unexpected way very, very fast. Wear your helmet.

Apart from the visual clutter that advertising produces, which I find distracting, the cpu load from flash and animated or script-enabled ads is simply not worth the performance impact that it has on my (fairly new, modern) machines. This applies to both laptops, where there is also an impact on battery life, as well as desktops. I don't say this out of speculation; anyone with a small computer with a fan that responds to cpu load can verify it on their own, and I have also measured the effect of turning on various levels of ad-blocking on cpu and disk I/O real-time when making my decisions. Overall, my message to advertisers is: less is more. If you stray too far into technologies that consume resources on the user side of the equation, you will be blocked.

From teh article: "it remains unclear whether caffeine is a ubiquitous contaminant of marine systems and if there is any trend in the distribution of caffeine relative to anthropogenic sources of caffeine contamination." There could be natural sources of caffeine washed into bays and coastal waters. Making the leap from caffeine to coffee contamination is, according to the authors, not justified.

Equipped with lasers, no less, on MARS -- and you want to claim copyright to their video of it? Very anti-Darwinian of you, Scripps, very anti-Darwinian. I wouldn't want to be standing next to you when the next one lands in your vicinity!

Great article. One quick correction from a practitioner in the field: there is plenty of open source software in use in and developed by science. Care for a useful example? The Scientific Linux distribution of Fermilab and CERN is a good example, very accessible to everyone. (And there is that whole World Wide Web thing - not exclusively open source, but still pretty darn useful!)

I already block Flash automatically, as it drags down performance and rarely adds any content.

There are a few cases in which useful content has been designed in Flash, but most of the time it is useless eye candy - and more often than not, just pure advertising. A great way to block most advertising that you do not want is to block Flash. Why would you not want to do that?