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Comment Re:Version number confusion (Score 1) 194

It's really not that complicated. Firefox releases work like this: 6 weeks of development, 12 weeks of testing and stabilization (split up into two 6-week phases called "aurora" and "beta"; the former corresponds more or less to feature freeze and the latter more or less to "code freeze unless we discover a stop-ship issue"), then release.

So right now 31 is released, 32 is beta, 33 is aurora, and development is happening on 34.

Comment Re:NASA has become small indeed... (Score 1) 108

It's a matter of funding.

Looking at the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and in particular the inflation-adjusted line there tells you pretty much what the story was: at the peak of the Apollo program NASA's budget was about $40 billion/year in today's dollars (the red line in that graph is in 1996 dollars). NASA's budget today is less than $18 billion/year.

Or to put it in relative-to-the-economy terms, in 1966 NASA was 4% of Federal budget expenditures. 4% of the 2013 US expenditures (actual, not requested) would be $138 billion, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

I bet if you funded NASA at that level (even just the inflation-adjusted one; I understand that the overall budget structure is quite different now from what it was in 1966, so the $138 billion number is pretty much meaningless), I bet it could produce results a lot quicker than it can at current funding levels...

Comment I want a faux smart watch (Score 1) 381

Smart watches are misnomer, really. They can't do much on their own because of the form factor. Typing? No way. In reality, smart watches are dumber than dumb terminals.

What I do want is a nice looking, not too big, watch with a full color LCD matrix screen, maybe touch enabled, where I am able to customize the interface and make my own "themes". This, and being able to sync the time via NTP, would be the only reason for it to have WiFi or BlueTooth (unless a micro SD card could be squeezed in, then it could sync via WWVB or equivalent).

For context, I've owned several Casio DataBank watches, all digital/analog hybrids. My favorite of them was the one where the LCD displayed a fill month calendar. The Wave Ceptor was a neat gimmick, but watches don't generally need that much precision on a daily basis.

The Pebble comes close, except for the lack of color screen. It's been a while since I looked at what's out there. So far it seems the manufacturers are using smart watches as an excuse to tether users to their walled gardens (I'm looking at you Samsung).

Comment Re:PHP is a very solid choice (Score 1) 536

PHP of old used to make it very easy to write applications with large security holes, but newer versions do a much better job of preventing developer's tendancies to shoot themselves in the foot.

If that were true, then fetid garbage like WordPress wouldn't even run on PHP 5.3+, being as its code hasn't changed at all since the days of PHP4.

Globals... globals everywhere...

Comment Re:I've got a great idea! (Score 1) 89

Mac OS supports shipping both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries in a single executable. That's what Firefox on Mac does.

That _is_ a viable solution on Windows, albeit with multiple executables, but it about doubles the size of the download. Unfortunately, Windows users are very sensitive to the download size for their web browsers; past experiments have shown uptake dropping rapidly as the download size increases.

Comment Re:Key Point Missing (Score 2) 34

The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

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