What's unethical about volunteering for a one-way trip? It's not like they're suggesting that people be forced to abandon their lives and homes to colonize a ball of dust millions of kilometers away. If you're willing to sacrifice everything to be one of these pioneers, power to you!

And to be completely honest, it's something I would gladly consider depending on who came along with me for the ride. Who wouldn't like to be the first one to get some action on an alien world?

Not any more. During the big E&D shakeup earlier this year (during which Robbie Bach, the leader of E&D, left the company), the MacBU was moved into the greater Office group.

They do, however, continue to operate as a separate and semi-autonomous group therein.

Google Wave didn't fail because it was "too innovative" or "too radical." History is jam packed full of inventions and technologies that succeeded precisely because they were drastically better than what came before them (lightbulb versus candle, car versus horse, calculator versus abacus, GUI versus CLI). Google Wave failed for a combination of reasons. It wasn't marketed well, it didn't really solve any problems, and it just wasn't "better" enough over the standard ways of browsing the web.

Google Wave was a cool engineering project, but never should have been taken to market.

Because that doesn't work. Cheapskates are cheapskates, and nothing will change that.

Example: The good folks responsible for World of Goo ran a special "Pay What You Want" promotion for a little while. And you know what? The largest single datapoint was one penny, with the vast majority of people paying less than two dollars for a fantastic game. And of course, since the game was distributed DRM-free, an untold number of copies were downloaded via TPB and never went through this channel.

No matter how good a game is, if you offer people a choice to get it for free (or nearly for free), they'll take it.

Fair enough, but at the same time, Xcode and the iPhone SDK are 100% as well: http://developer.apple.com/

Again, you don't have to pay to use Apple's developer stack. You only pay when you're ready to have Apple host and distribute your app.

But that's the point. That might NOT be true in all cases (at least at the quantum level), according to this paper.

Remember, 1g is empirically measured to be 9.81 m/s^2. That means that, according to Einstein, a person in a spaceship accelerating at a constant 9.81 m/s^2 will feel the same pull to the back of the ship as they would feel standing on the surface of the earth.

This paper postulates that, in certain situations and at the quantum level, those two feelings would NOT match up. The practical uses for such a deviation are endless -- spaceships with lower inertial mass than gravitational mass could be accelerated to near the speed of light with far less energy. Of course, whether that's possible or not (even if the paper turns out to be correct) is anyone's guess.

Lots of people care about managing photos, and I absolutely agree that a solid photo manager is crucial in any consumer-oriented OS, including Ubuntu. A powerful image editor, like the GIMP, is a nice bonus, but less important to most end-users. All most people need is an app that can create albums, crop, and remove red-eye.

Does Shotwell meet these criteria? A quick look at their website seems to indicate yes. I'll probably download it tonight and see if their claims stand up.

The problem with using Apple's private APIs is that they tend to be unstable, and there are no guarantees that they won't change. Apple would very much rather that half the apps in their store didn't break because of an OS update that changes an undocumented API. And they've always been good about making private APIs public once they stabilize, so it's not as big a deal as this guy makes it sound.

(Disclaimer: I am not a physicist.)

I've wondered about this seeming inconsistency before, but I came up with an analogy that seems to rectify the problem.

Regarding the instant-deformation: Imagine that we can represent space-time as a mattress, and your random mass as a bowling ball. When the bowling ball is already resting on the mattress, you can see the deformation plain as day. But place the ball onto an otherwise unperturbed mattress, and you can see how this deformation spreads over time. And if you could watch it with a high-speed camera, you would see that there's a bit of lag in the system: even after the ball has come to rest at its lowest point, portions of the mattress that are farther away will still be actively deforming, much like ripples in a pond.

I'll need someone with more knowledge than me to resolve this with the inflation theory, however.