Might have a little competition from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope

25m is a bit less than 30m. Just saying.

I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).

I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.

(Disclaimer, we have gmail for business here so if you open anything from the webmail client, it does it through Google Docs.)

Except that kids are much more likely to think nothing of wearing a helmet if the parents with them are also wearing helmets. My 2yo likes to wear hers, but only if we're wearing ours. It just becomes something you do as part of the activity. Just as much as wearing seat belts while in a car. If I put her in a normal car seat just to put her down to grab something while we're getting in the car, she starts saying "No, Dad! No, no, no, no..." until I put her in her seat and buckle her in. She's not used to a regular seat, and she's not used to biking without a helmet.

I was always brought up to wear a seat belt when I'm in a car, and if I don't now (like on a bus where there isn't one, or if I have to pull my car up the driveway a few feet to work on it) I just feel really weird not having it.

My 4S is definitely better than my 3G was, but then it was 3 years old when I traded up. I still get a days worth on either. The catch is that the 4S is so much faster and generally more useful that I end up doing more battery sucking things with it just because. It's smooth and does great transferring real time maps with GPS while streaming Pandora in the background, even over AT&T "4G".

If I leave both on the table and mostly ignore them for the day, the 4S gives me more battery life than the 3G ever did.
If I actually use them as I usually would have, the 4S loses... but I find I actually use it A LOT MORE. When I first got it I found myself thinking "Man, the battery life sucks on this" but then I realized I was bascially using it non-stop. Once I got over the "OMG NEW-SHINY" period, it's on par with what the 3G was.

In short, I think the batteries Have improved, but we now expect our phones to do more, and have found more and more ways to use them more on a more regular basis. We cram more powerful AND power hungry chips in the same package and then get annoied and act surprised when it doesn't last as long as the older ones did.

The same thing has happened to laptops... and because this is slashdot, cars. I mean, I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG. Why don't we have that now? because the civic is huge in comparison, weighs almost twice as much (the old 90 DX was literally 1 ton), has A/C, power everything, huge beams and airbags for safety, etc. And everyone thinks we should have more MPG by now. Yeah. We should, except you wanted all this other crap in there too.

I'd Tap that... Strateghttp://www.xkcd.com/398/

We have fingerprint readers here. Sometimes, they don't recognize my finger. It's still my finger, but there's nothing i can do to convince it it's me, so I'm stuck and can't do my job until it decides to let me in. Face recognition is the same way. There's no way I can change my face, or alter my fingerprint to make it work, so I basically am just screwed. If there's any chance of that with this, there's no way I want it.

Seriously, don't have a significant other or children at home. It's my biggest hurdle. I used to be all about working from home, but trying it after having a daughter means "Daddy's trying to do work" turns into "Yay! Daddy's Home!!! Let's bug him ALL DAY!".

If I got a job that required working from home, I'd probably build a small shed in the backyard with insulation, power, and ethernet and just work out there so they're less likely to bust in every 5 minutes or be screaming down the hall or whatever.

Why? I don't see a reason behind it. Sure it'd have been NICE if they spoke up sooner, but perhaps they didn't duplicate this glitch in the lab until now. I know personally I have no problem with the battery on my iPhone4S or iPad2 both running iOS5. You ever take your car to the dealer for a problem and have them not duplicate it, same deal.

DNS-and-BIND: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source

To quote the article: ASA's complete environmental impact study estimated that, in the worst case (with an acute angle of entry in which Cassini would gradually burn up), a significant fraction of the 32.7 kg[4] of plutonium-238 inside the RTGs would have been dispersed into the Earth's atmosphere so that up to five billion people (i.e. the entire terrestrial population) could have been exposed, causing up to an estimated 5,000 additional cancer deaths[21] (0.0005 per cent, i.e. a fraction 0.000005, of 1 billion cancer deaths expected anyway from other causes; the product is incorrectly calculated elsewhere[22] as 500,000 deaths), but the odds against that happening were more than 1 million to one.

In other words, there was a 1 million to 1 chance that the space craft might have caused an additional 5000 deaths due to radiation. NOT the 10% you came up with. iirc from the news at the time, a malfunction of the space craft in most probable consequences could have resulted in a small population receiving about what you'd get from one X-ray as the PU-238 ball would mostly just fall through the atmosphere.