Exactly the feeling I got. We don't even have an Federal Internet Commission, and don't seem to need one.

We do need to have the Consumer Product Safety Commission setting safety standards for the Internet of Things. They're properly the lead agency of safety issues. That will probably happen after the first few deaths due to cloud-based control of home devices.

That "design milestone" by Boeing comment is completely unsupported & is in all probability false.

Boeing has yet to exit the design phase & has no hardware at present, while Dragon 1 has made multiple flights to ISS & Dragon II flight hardware is being assembled NOW.

Again, NO! Automatic downloads are NOT the default! YOU may not have had the willpower to resist the suggestion that you turn it on, but it is only a suggestion, not a default setting one has to change to off. This is not subject to debate, your statements to the effect that automatic downloads are the default are WRONG.

You can stop it with the "apparently" and the "technically" bullcrap, you are factually wrong.

Clueless users are legion, that changes nothing. Idiots run red lights all the time but that is no defense when one of these idiots runs a light & T-bones a mother & her kids. Neither is complaining that "Duh iTunes did it widdout mah consent" when that too is patently false.

Yeah, you didn't pay attention when setting up your iDevice & never bothered to look at "Preferences>iTunes & App Store", now accept the consequences for those acts of inattention & your consequent ignorance without complaint. Do NOT attempt to contradict those who do know what we are talking about. The two words Automatic Downloads followed by on/off controls for Music, Books, Apps & Updates are clearly beyond your comprehension level.

Apple haven't said that they will open-source Swift. The only thing they've said so far is that they've been concentrating on getting it to 1.0 first and haven't made a decision about open-sourcing it yet.

You can set a bit such that the phone will only download new purchases over wifi.

And how many users do you think knew that they needed to do this prior to the album being released?

FFS, I wish people would at least attempt to avail themselves of the facts before spouting off like this.

You don't have to switch off automatic downloads of new purchases over cellular connections because it's switched off by default.

What apple stuff? I'm willing to bet that most of the people claiming to be outraged don't even have an iDevice & are just piling on in order to rag on apple &/or U2.

No, Apple made the album available to be downloaded. People needed to change their configuration for the album to be auto-downloaded. As removing the album is trivial (swipe each song to the left), what I am rightfully upset about is the people falsely pretending that the album is on their device without any action on their part & that that this is supposed to be some kind of hardship.

"Settings>iTunes & App Store". Configuring auto-downloads of Music, Apps, Books & Updates is front & center. It isn't hard to find -- except in all probability for the people who don't have an iDevice but are falsely claiming to be "outraged" by having the album auto-downloaded to their inexistent device.

Fortunately, auto-downloading music is NOT the default configuration, and even for those that changed their configuration to autodownload it, removing the album is trivial: swipe each song to the left.

So, clearly the problem isn't that the album was auto downloaded because it's sooo hard to prevent or get rid of.

No, it's an opportunity for those who want to rag on U2 or Apple to do so & reading the comments of those to are posturing "outrage" shows that this is the case.

No. Automatic Downloads are turned Off by default. If it is setup otherwise on your devices, you turned it on. Getting even this basic fact wrong turns your credibility to dust.

And look! It caught you!

has a Ph.D. in 17th century English literature. Admittedly we do work at a college, but you might be surprised at what humanists are doing these days: he got into the computer side of things while building databases of who was sending who letters around then. Digital Humanities is a growing field, and one that has some interesting CS applications- you've got things like Mallet chewing through vast swathes of literature looking for correlations, you have folks building high end digital maps to look into questions of how sight lines affected historical battles, etc.

That's like wearing shoes with golf spikes all the time.

Traction control for feet does roughly the same thing as automotive traction control for cars. The basic idea is to keep the sideways force below the break-loose point. This is the down force on the wheel times the coefficient of friction.

For car wheels, the down force is mostly constant. For a legged robot, it changes throughout the ground contact phase So the side force has to be actively controlled and changed throughout the ground contact. It's also necessary to compensate for leg angle.

Legs have an additional option. If a leg has three joints, you can adjust the angle at which the contact force is applied. This is a big win on hills.

I used to work on this stuff in the mid-1990s, but nobody was interested in building legged robots back then. It could be used for animation, but it was overkill for games. I never expected that DARPA would spend $120 million on BigDog. Robotics projects in the 1990s were tiny.

Demand for privately-built spacecraft drops by what, 33%? Ouch.

I've had Lynx on my phone for a long time now...I would like a text-only browser that's more user-friendly (as in, more "normal") and maybe tries to make the layout match the rendered HTML more closely than Lynx though. For example Lynx shows a lot of menus as trees with different levels of indentation. There's no reason a pop-up menu system couldn't work in a CLI.