Art critics are the zealots of a religion. They look for some spark of divinity in the product of man's efforts but like all other religions fail to substantively prove their point. What is divine and what is not? What is ART and what is not? I suppose our unelected clergy might be able to tell us!

It is up to every human on the planet to decide for themselves what they consider to be art. To believe otherwise is to become sheep bound mindlessly to a misguided flock.

Makes perfect sense to me. In general, larger universities have larger pipes to the Internet and in some cases disproportionately more bandwidth.

Sounds like a rational reason for bandwidth throttling. In itself, throttling traffic based on legitimate concerns (e.g. "Students need more bandwidth for research purposes") is not a bad thing. Schools do have limited bandwidth after all and I doubt they made any promises otherwise. What is problematic is when a company like Comcast promises unlimited bandwidth and ends up screwing over its customers based on ambiguous moral grounds like "Torrents are bad" or because they (again, the service provider) were flat-out caught lying. Unlimited bandwidth means that you get unlimited data at the speed promised, not unlimited data based on whatever speed they decide you require AFTER you've paid for it.

Thank you node 3. That is exactly what I meant, in fact, you said it even better.

I might actually develop a website that takes advantage of what the IE9 has to offer, until then I'll be stuck developing for the lowest common denominator between IE/Firefox/Webkit/Opera.

"I don't know how you missed the launch last year."

Thanks. I was very busy...under my rock.

In principle, yes. In practicality, probably not.

If the politics can be put aside (always the gotcha with international bodies) it could work but I doubt will happen unless there is a clear unifying goal that adds some level of urgency (i.e. "some impending disaster that necessitates us going to space").

"NASA has efforts underway to develop an American-made commercial capability for crew transportation and rescue services to the station following this year's retirement of the space shuttle fleet."

Seems like a lot of people missed this part, but is there any real information on these efforts? I know there have been private-sector developments in space flight (Virgin for example), but are there any examples, prototypes, or even a rough napkin-sketches on what these new "crew transportation and rescue services" will look like?

That is a lot to pay for economy class. Do they at least get an in-flight movie or a boxed lunch?

Because that level of circular logic may eventually lead to a paradox that destroys the universe? Okay, maybe not, but when the DHS helps prosecute a case against the DHS I'll be really confused on who to root for.

Actually, my generalization (and yes, like almost all generalizations there will be edge cases) may hold true, thought not quite yet, which is why I didn't slam the door shut unequivocally. It is interesting to me that my comment triggered such emotional responses in a few people here. While being a little trollish, I really wanted to see where a lot of people would run with my admittedly obtuse statement. To many people Moore's Law is an unalterable universal truth but many of the current projections have it falling apart soon, if it hasn't been dis-proven already. I feel the same way about the hard drive issue. In general, the majority of computer users today are not saddled with a need that demands steadily larger and larger storage mediums. People who compress large movie libraries to a single hard drive or store vast amounts of astronomical or scientific data are not the norm. With the advent of cloud computing and increasing bandwidth across the states, I just feel that eventually client-side data may even go into decline for the majority of users. There are a lot of maintenance and risk associated with storing everything locally without good fail-safes or a clear backup plan that cloud-based services will eventually offload from many users as well. Certainly, this is a long-term theory that will be played out over the next ten years or more, but to say that we will continue to expand the need for hard drive space infinitely seems to be more obtuse (at least to me) than even my original provocative thought.

I'm sure this will be a big help in identifying and prosecuting copyright infringements.