Given the present environment on Capitol Hill, I think it would be news if they launched at all. At the end of the day, I think that of the successes NASA will have had, it will be best known for their incubation of commercial launch and infrastructure services. Not the Moon, not Mars, not earth sciences, ..., but rather their work wresting control of the rockets upon which crew and cargo are sent heavenward as well as their habitation from Congress and the MIC.

Forgive me but what law or regulation defines that as a requirement?

That is a nice idea--for the customer. However, this anti-capitalistic idea doesn't have a leg to stand on, especially in the US. Neither is it routinely and commonly practiced nor is it enforced. In practice a business first serves its shareholders, the scraps and trimmings go to the customers.

That was the EU not the US. To my knowledge the only major FTC action against Microsoft was United States vs. Microsoft which ended with a settlement to disclose their APIs. That case however, presumed Microsoft to be a monopoly and was prosecuted accordingly. It is a bit harder to argue that Google is a monopoly. They have plenty of competitors both large and small in both their aggregate services as well as individual services.

I think you need to work on your abstraction skills. "Search" is a product just as much as a "PC" is a product.

The FTC is seeming to suggest that it would be more proper for the Apple store to introduce customers looking to buy an office PC to Microsoft offerings first because they have a larger market share. Or Verizon to show plans from TMobile ahead of their own because they're more economical.

Just because Google happens to offer services that incorporate non-Google offerings doesn't mean they don't have a right to serve their own interests. If I'm using Google I expect to be shown Google offerings. If I'm using Travelocity I expect to be shown Travelocity services. It's nice that they incorporate their competitors offerings as an option but I certainly don't expect them to say, "we suck, why not check out this offer from Expedia".

You have a position you're trying to defend and logic and rational thinking might be the last thing on your mind. I get it. However, for your own benefit you might want to re-evaluate the latest crop of notebooks. I'm sure there are some crap ones, always are. There are also some very good ones. Not everyone plays the non-sense games such as Dell wherein you have to bust your wallet to get away from certain junk components, or certain unreasonably low specs. Asus' G751 series is such an example. It can run for hours under full CPU + GPU load with little demonstration of the fact. The case is as cool as at idle, a quiet, warm stream of air flows out the back. Performance is as I said peer with my development workstation.

This is also for a student, in case you missed it. Portable and inexpensive is key. What makes you think this student is willing/able to tether their notebook to a "big iron" back at home. Campus IT doesn't always take kindly to nor facilitate personal servers. You're also advocating two purchases which kind of defeats the point of inexpensive.

PC components are getting small enough, efficient enough and often equivalent/identical between laptop and desktop such that that advise is becoming somewhat dated. In most respects the $1800 Asus gaming notebook I recently bought is equal to the $2000, development workstation I built a year ago but with one key difference. I can take my notebook with me.

Link to entry level. You can choose an upgraded version with SSD, or save some money and add your own. Either way, it's a solid system, ample power, excellent cooling. Web browsing and basic office software will get about 4 hours on the battery, under full (gaming, presumably physics sim) load you'll get just under two hours.

Except there aren't. There are incentive for NOT hiring them. Nobody wants the liability, it doesn't matter what the profession. Nobody wants to be in the same room with a criminal. They want them locked up and never exposed to such elements.

It makes people feel good. Who cares if it or other job training programs work. If we actually gave a sh*t then criminal record consideration for employment would illegal. The reality is that there are only a handful of states with such laws, many that do only apply to public employment. Given this environment, recidivism is all but guaranteed. We just want to keep these people locked up, out of site, out of mind. Sure it's expensive, but it's also a great way to manage minority populations. After all not everyone can be deported.

Consoles were perpetuated by the game industry's want of money. They decided that the only way they'd get cash from tweens, teens and twenty-somethings was to lock down the hardware. To bait them, they offered kit that rivaled mid-spec PCs (at least in some metrics) at a price that meant they be taking a loss on each sale. They figured they could play Lexmark's game--cheap kit, absurdly expensive ink--and make up for it selling games. Evidently their plan worked.

Console owners of course are now realizing the true nature of the trap which has been laid for them. The hardware actually isn't all that great--it is just a low-spec PC that happens to have a decent GPU after all. The ink costs a fortune. Hardware refreshes don't happen very that often, and when they do the old titles often won't run on them.

For PC gamers who didn't drink the Kool-aid, we've gotten a mixed bag from it all. The big game houses treat us the wayward step-child. They cater to the consoles, and occasionally throw us a few console ports complete with all the compromises necessitated by its heritage. This however opened a vacuum that indie dev-houses are filling reasonably well. The graphics generally aren't meriting the high-spec card(s) in our rigs, but we get to reclaim notions like novelty, plots, sophisticated play, user-created features and content, and most importantly the price-value proposition.

Well given the nature of the conference... Perhaps someone was wandering around sniffing for radio emissions, or, the fellow took his car to the shop for maintenance.

I'm certain Minecraft will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. The implied idea behind a v2.0 (a reinterpretation of v1.x) however, is unlikely to happen. It doesn't seem compatible with Minecraft culture. The stereotypical, bigger, better doesn't exactly apply to Minecraft. It's blocky, low-res on purpose and that's a huge component of its charm.

Minecraft, the Java version at least, is for all practical purposes open-source. The plethora of mods out there are all built off of decompiled bytecode.

If you're playing with heuristics then, you're probably not playing with the toys that'll make the classic self-aware AI.