"the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. was higher in 2012 than in any year before it"

Huh? The average price for just about anything in the U.S. was higher in 2012 than in any year before it...

The Reuters article referred to 2.1 trillion rubles:

"Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($68.71 billion) on developing Russia's space industry from 2013 to 2020, state-run RIA news agency reported."

A lot of money in any case.

Steve Ballmer. You have some work to do. Get Windows 7 back on track. Happy New Year.

WT?

We need oxygen-producing bacteria, like cyanobacteria.

We don't need meat-eating microbes on Mars. Good to see they found out this before-hand. Hmmm... Or did they? How do we know the little rover bugger wasn't filled with them?! Maybe it is already too late!

When the US surpassed Europe - How dare they?
When the China surpasses US - How dare they?

Of course they dare. It is their 'obligation' to try. And if they win out big we won't hear about those embarrassing inbreds from Alabama and Kentucky discussing evolution any more. From what I have understood, Chinese are more pragmatic than any Bible reader, or?

Metro ruined my face

"was it running windows 8 ?"

Bad question. You are not allowed to defile people with disabilities, in most countries.

For me, running Wndows 8 equates you have some retardation. This is my understanding of it.

I may be wrong, but no-one has ever contested that with any medical proof.

"Well, it isn't ready for desktops either! :D"

Well, Windows 8 sucks even more on desktops. The ENTIRE WORLD KNOWS that...

KDE is cool with touch-based devices, not perfect, yet better than Win 8! :)

KDE is probably the best option for anyone using mouse and keyboard.

If not, forget it as a temporary workaround.

"By dying of starvation and brutality."

But not in the countries where the robots are common.

"With More Disabilities Than Ever"?

That is not necessarily so. There may just be more diagnosed and reported than ever, at least in releative terms.

In absolute numbers, yes. But that is due to Earth's population growth...

This debate emerged many decades ago. Here is one example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASEA_IRB

"The ASEA IRB is an industrial robot series for material handling, packing, transportation, polishing, welding, and grading. Built in 1975, the robot allowed movement in 5 axes with a lift capacity of 6 kg. It was the world's first fully electrically driven and microprocessor-controlled robot, using Intel's first chipset."

What is reported now was also reported then, for fear of losing jobs. Robots fears are nothing new.

Isn't Metropolis from 1927 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)) and Frankenstein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein) from 1818 about this too in a way.

Technophobia.

Humans tend to work around these issues.

"Presumably, you are allowed to take your calculator to exams, but not your Linux box."

Nokia N900...

That http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop should get another job.

"Matlab is more mature"

That is not even close to being true. R surpasses but not outclasses Matlab in many instances and vice versa. It all depends on what you're doing.

R has an unknown userbase (http://bigcomputing.blogspot.se/2011/07/figuring-out-number-of-r-users-in.html) but an impressive, free codebase (www.r-project.org)

whereas Matlab has some 300,000 users (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/lnt/multimatlab.html) and an equally impressive codebase ( http://www.google.com/search?q=matlab+code).

R is an excellent piece of software, but so is Matlab.

As for simplicity, I find them equally easy to learn.

That said I dumped Matlab years ago for R.