Its a security nightmare. Sun/Oracle haven't been able to secure their VM. End users never upgrade. You'll see people casually running java versions that are months or even years old. The little notifier in the tray is just ignored. Crimepack stats released by Brian Krebs shows that it is the number 1 vector for malware.

Considering how infrequently java is needed by end users, the idea that its sitting there ready to run any applet is crazy irresponsible. FF and the rest should refuse to let it run if its not the newest version and/or throw up a warning about java apps and maintain a java whitelist.

Or we can live in the status quo of massive malware infections.

>You can get 100GB drives for ~$150. How much cheaper does it have to be?

I wish SSD enthusiasts would accept this simple fact: SSDs are not that reliable yet. RAM is reliable, barring a power outage.

If you want reliability, you at the very least need to buy Intel. Now your "cheap" drive isn't so cheap. We can't cheaply RAID them either so because the storage industry is so set in its way, they still haven't released much in the way of TRIM enabled RAID cards.

So lets say I wanted to do this in any way that was remotely reliable. I'd have to pay for a TRIM enabled RAID1 card and two 160gb SSDs, preferably intel. Now your $150 solution is more like $1500 solution.

Depending on garbage like OCZ is really asking for a fall. Business as well as consumers have been burned by the current crop of "fast but highly unreliable SSDs."

Unfortunately, we're probably years away from a cheap AND reliable SSD storage solution that can run for 5 years with the fail rate of a spinning disk. In the meantime I'm running expensive Intel SSDs and not worrying. I can't imagine selling OCZ to Joe or Jan consumer, inflating the price of their computers $200 for a mild speed boost. Not to mention laptops don't usually have a second slot for another drive. Either SSD all the way or spinning disk. Half-assed caching solutions have historically been big failures.

No one needs calendar that isnt integrated with their email client. Yes, I'm sure there are edge cases, but for the most part, this whole project is odd. It should just be rolled up into Thunderbird and cancelled. Instead its a stand-alone with a thunderbird plugin.

Moonlight is the Silverlight client for Linux. MS contributes and has donated licensed media codecs for it. Oh, that's right this is slashdot, so facts don't matter.

Netflix doesnt work with moonlight? That's a problem with netflix. Bring it up to them.

>It was an Obama appointee to head NASA who said that his number one priority as head of NASA was outreach to Muslims.

An appointee was talking about something about Muslims you say!?!

Show me the change in the mission statement, show me the change in the missions. Oh you can't. You're just parroting Hannity, Rush, and O'Reilly with your meaningless drivel.

>Well, that combined with the fact that most NASA employees are in Texas and Florida, states that most likely will vote against Obama next year.

Florida is a swing state. The big problem I see is that pork barrel GOP Senators "design rockets by commiteee" to keep the pork flowing in their states, but of course you're free to believe conspiracy theories about Muslims and elections. There's no shortage on conservatives on Slashdot to vote you up. No wonder this site is shedding users to quickly. Its "Fox News" chat for morons here.

> but the reality is that part of recovering from this unfathomly huge deficit is cutting spending.

What? NASA is 17 billion annually, or less than 2 months in Iraq. Our defense budget is 600billion not counting our wars. Or war spending during Bush is in the TRILLIONS.

I hate fuckers who want to cut science or education or medicare because they voted GOP and wanted to go to war but now refuse to make rational cuts in defense and war spending. We're spending ourselves stupid because all the proposed cuts are for everything EXCEPT the military and the wars.

People used to ask me what iPhone I had about 3 years ago or so. Now everyone asks me what kind of phone it is and when I mention Android they understand. So, no, the battle is never over.

Regardless, the retail world of tablets is bigger than what the ill-informed lowest common denominator think. I mean, these are the people who call our Canon "the xerox machine" and when they want to know your email address ask for your "aol." They're not the cutting edge trendsetters you think they are.

I thought it was some magic spaceage pen or something. I can see sex toy. Maybe even robot dog penis.

Wow, that's really the worst icon I've ever seen. I had no idea what it was until I moused-over. The red really conflicts with the green too.

>About as sad as the fact that a sizable chunk of the population needs proof

Sizable chunk? Citation please.

Moon denial is a very minority position, like 9/11 truther (most of whom I've only seen on slashdot)

Whats sad is attitudes like yours. The moon landing was a 150 billion dollar expense that didn't do much other than to show the Soviets that we could burn money faster.

For a TINY, TINY fraction of that money we are funding COTS which is funding all these private companies who will be tomorrow's leaders.

That's ignoring all the space science that's going on and the incredible missions NASA casually puts out. Hell, look at the NASA launch calendar from this year and last. Pretty amazing stuff that won't be on slashdot or "news for dummies" because it doesn't involve the Apollo missions or some other lowest common denominator low hang fruit.

Heck, GRAIL launches on Thursday and its a moon mission, but I'm pretty sure people like you don't give two shits about that. DAWN just took a closeup shot of Vesta.There's a whole lot more going on than launching a super explosive shuttle that can barely do LEO. Funny how the ISS went from an expensive boondoggle of questionable utility to "humanity's last hope" and the shuttle went from "we should replace this monster" to "we need this to work forever and ever and never get past LEO!!!"

If you and I go to space it won't be on a rocket with NASA on the side, it'll be on a rocket with some private company's name of the side

>Funny enough the increase in population has mostly come during one of the most peaceful times in human history.

That's self-explanatory isn't it? If we're under wartime then we're seeing loss of numbers from casualties (both civillian and military) disruption in social norms this less kids, etc.

The point is more population means more fighting for resources. Shits expensive now, now imagine water shortages or food shortages in nations that are unstable to begin with. It could, as usually is, the tipping point to war. Bush tried it with Iraq regarding oil. Israel controls a lot of water some Arab states need. India and Pakistan are always at defcon 5 and have farming/water shortages.

Hey, you know what? Maybe Paul Ehrlich was right. The Earth isn't a magical machine. Its fucking finite and adding more angry hairless apes can't always be good. Heck, 7 billion and the world is fighting a war on terrorism, religious extremism is up, economies are down, global warming is happening, basic needs are more expensive, etc. Welcome to your post population boom Earth. The question is how long is it sustainable? Things aren't looking too good now.

So wait, $250 is a good price now? For $150 more you can get a full blown 10 inch Honeycomb tablet - the Transformer that gives you google apps, google market, both nook and amazon stores, a tablet experience, etc.

Kindles big market penetrations happened when they started getting cheap. Now everyone has one. This "me too" Color Nook isn't that appealing. Techies will want real tablets and non-techies are happy with their e-ink devices.

Amazon could have released a Honycomb tablet with the google apps and google market, but instead went with the lock-down device. I'd be surprised if people jump on this. A honeycomb or even ipad isn't that much more.

>The only thing you can blame Wikileaks

How about that they know fuck-all of propery using crypto? It blows my mind that such an incompetent organization is in charge of such valuable information.

Anyone who knows shit about dealing with information knows that journalists are extremely tech unsavy and not giving them their own archive and hand holding when it comes to passwords, crypto, etc.

Assange saved 5 minutes and fucked this up. Sorry, but you need to learn the basics of how to deal with people, non-techies, the media, etc if you want to be taken seriously. Not that I take this joker seriously at all. He just confirms my suspicions.

How the hell is he being made fun of? Clearly he is talking about how tablets at that time were terrible. The cult of Steve is so powerful that you're seeing oppression and mocking where there is none. Relax Francis, no one is taking your precious iphone away.