Don't vote for this kind of garbage with your money.

And nobody has...

Whatever happens with the Surface Pro series (and I'd say the odds are stacked against it), RT is dead in the water. It's sitting in the same dark, dank purgatory that the Blackberry Playbook is, and largely for the same reasons.

You do have actual evidence of this, right? I mean, you wouldn't simply be lying to bolster *your* agenda.

Sounds like scientists complaining that they're research has been misused.

Out here on the West Coast, all it takes to get a good dinoflagellate bloom going is ocean water temperature a bit higher than normal. A variety of factors can contribute to this, including El Nino, lower than normal winter rainfall, increased air temperature, weakening of the longshore current. Of course in the Southeast, consideration of climate change is illegal in many states. In Florida, it's probably easiest to blame it on Cuban Communists.

And you don't think Microsoft is trying to do the same with cod services being turned on by default in Windows 8?

Dark energy is needed to explain the rapid inflation of the universe. Dark matter is matter we know is out there but can't yet identify because it so weakly interacts with normal matter. One is extremely important to explaining big bang cosmology as we currently understand it. The other in certainly is part of the big bang story, but is as much an interest to particle physicist as cosmologists because it represents the possibility of physics beyond the Standard Model.

First of all, aspects of big bang cosmology were predicted before observation, and second of all, WTF? Theories have to fit observation or they are, by definition, wrong.

I _could_ care less, but I don't care enough to try to not care that hard :-)

H1Bs from New Jersey get a lot of grief.

I read the Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal during the anniversary back on July 20th, and one of the entries that stood out to me was a section called "Trying to Rest," which detailed a time between the end of the astronauts' moonwalk, but prior to when they needed to make preparations to liftoff from the Moon. A period of about 7 hours was scheduled for the astronauts to sleep, but

[Armstrong - "(The quality of the rest) was poor in my case."]

[Aldrin - "I'd say the same thing."]

In their technical debrief, Armstrong and Aldrin detailed some problems with their sleep environment- too cold, too bright, too noisy, but yeah, that they were also just too excited to sleep. (It does mention that most of the technical problems were worked out by Apollo 15, and the last few crews got decent sleep on the lunar surface. I'm still convinced that if it were me, I would have responded to planned rest periods with "HOUSTON, I CAN SLEEP WHEN I GET BACK FROM THE MOON, OVER.")

If someone were to come up with a ARM-based board with at least the capability of three or four NICs and a WiFi access, and could run a decent distro like Debian, even if it cost a couple of hundred bucks, I'd snap up three right now. I've built Linux-based routers/VPN appliances using Debian, iptables and OpenVPN, and I can't complain, but they still suck a lot of electricity, and quite frankly, are rather large. I have three Asus RT-N12 routers with TomatoOS on them, and they work great but I've never been able to get the onboard ethernet switch to reliably work as two routed network segments, and they are getting a bit long in the tooth WiFi-wise.

There's a helluva lot of C code being written and maintained out there, so no, not even C has been replaced.

From an executable (if I can use the word for byte code) point of view, yes Java is the most portable. I compile once, run in many places. That doesn't really apply to Android or iOS, of course, but since I don't write mobile apps, I don't fret. But I do write apps that run on Windows boxes, Macs and *nix machines, and, as I said, as long as I'm careful to keep things version and platform neutral, my jar file can run on all these platforms. Code portability and executable portability are two different things.

Jesus. I'm running the Kepler version of Eclipse on a five year old Windows 7 box with 4gb of RAM and I'm not experiencing anything like that kind of slowdown.

Java is becoming the new COBOL. It may not get much respect with the hip young cats, but it's ubiquitous and those that know how to code well in it will always have employment.

To me, it's just a programming language and library ecosystem. There are aspects I don't like, but, providing I don't get too damned clever, I can run my code on all the major platforms, which makes it better than just about anything else out there. For portability, it remains the king.