So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators â" the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.'

They sound like teenagers.

Also, good job fucking up Unicode yet again, Slashdot. It's been how many years?

This is totally untrue. I can easily falsify by point out that it it WERE true that Slashdot would be filled with socially awkward men who don't know how to talk to women and live in their parents' basement.

Ummmmm.... no. I am disappointed how many folks don't get "free markets". Market forces are powerful but they are motivated by profit. Nothing wrong with this, but as intelligent citizens, we need to understand how this works and their limitations.

One limitation is that if profit cannot be privatized, then there is little if any incentive for market dollars to pursue R&D or other activities. Where is the profit in finding ET? Even if you come up with an answer, then how do you limit the profit to those who make the discovery. You can't. So, market dollars will not pursue this project. This means you are looking for a benefactor or a government entity to fund this. There is nothing wrong with government funding of projects that the free market would not undertake... as long as there is a public good to the investment.

So, no, the free market is not a magic bullet to solve every problem.

I find it funny that some dolt modded this troll. The post itself immediately got modded back up, so the person wasted a point.

What's an "invisible tab?" I don't want to read the article, but I don't understand how it inflates the actual number of chrome users

I think you said it all right there...

Ignore my sibling post, this is what I meant to grab:

"NOTE: StatCounter recently announced that they have updated their data as of May 1, 2012 to reflect prerendering in Chrome. However, there is no indication of either methodology or what percentage of Chrome share is being removed from StatCounter data."

This might be what you are referring to:

"Last month, Net Applications began removing Chrome prerendered browsing traffic from its statistics, noting that “prerendering in February 2012 accounted for 4.3% of Chrome's daily unique visitors.” In doing so Net Applications became the first company to adjust its data reports for websites"

0.77mm per year over 42 years. So the person who modded you up wasted a mod point.

You are very right in one sense. Consider, though, with how badly Facebook has done in ths regard that it still has $1B/year in earnings. If the business folks don't screw up FB and figure out how to make ads work, by your admission, there is a lot of room to improve :)

You don't know the exact dialogue between the journalist and the rep. I've been quoted in print in similarly stupid ways when what I said made absolute sense in context to what was asked. "Pressed if disks are accepted" could have been something like the rep telling them about a new CSV import tool they had built, the journalist saying "So if I mailed you a 5TB database on a disk, could you import that?", and the rep replying "Sure, but you'd need to export the data first...".