But at the moment we have cable data only ($53/month or some-such) and upgrading to cable with HBO would be the better part of another $100 per month.

I seriously look forward to a time when the last-mile people can GTFO and allow me to pay for the specific content that I want to buy.

G.

I mean, isn't it going to be both a bit creepy and scary?

You've got the memories of all the people who died next door, and if there's one thing that would get a terrorist excited it would be the idea of knocking down the tower *again* after we went to the trouble to rebuild the thing.

You're going to need one heck of an immunity to superstition and a lot of faith to not at least consider these things.

I'm really curious to know how much occupancy they have lined up and whether the rates reflect any of this.

G.

Actually we are landing on Mars during the London Olympics!

The nuclear-powered Mars rover Curiosity should arrive there around August 6th, smack in the middle of the Olympics.

And I expect the coverage of that event to be WAAAAY more exciting than any of the Olympic events.

G.

P.S. Unless the new Rover ends up following the Simplified Planetary Landing Approach Trajectory that was so popular with some other Mars missions in the past.

I would put all the money into some sort of foundation / trust which would exist to pay for all my expenses in life, as well as make worthwhile charitable donations to worthy causes.

The foundation rules would be set up so that anyone soliciting for a donation/contribution/charity would be forever banned from receiving anything.

Problems solved.

G.

Assuming that it's not going to be powered by a Cell processor, then it would probably be impractical to emulate the Cell's exotic architecture on anything else. Assuming Sony do not want to keep paying to produce Cell chips just to include one in every next-gen console for backwards compatibility (which probably would not be cheap to do) then it makes perfect sense that the new generation console would not be able to play PS3 games.

Ironically it may well be able to play PS1 and PS2 titles which can be emulated on pretty much anything faster than a toaster these days.

This is a big risk of going with any exotic processor architecture, that not only do you have to migrate TO it at the beginning, but that at some point if you abandon it for something diffferent, you may be forced to introduce a compatibility discontinuity at that point too.

Maybe the PS 5 will be fast enough in ten years to emulate a PS 3.

This may be a huge advantage for Microsoft who stuck with a traditional architecture for the 360 and will likely be able to provide full forward compatibility if the choose to do so.

G.

...but people forget that "scientists" are not "science", they are simply people using the tools of science to seek the kind of knowledge that the scientific method and process can produce. As such they are subject to all of the same pressures, hopes, dreams, failures, etc. that the rest of us are.

But the process of science itself will always move forward, since science is only about reproducible experiments, so no matter how much bad (human) behavior might get involved, eventually the "truth" will win out. But the bad behavior can of course be extremely damaging to the process.

So there's nothing wrong with "science" or even its application I think. There are probably economic incentives that are promoting behaviors that affect the short-term reliability and the long-term costs of gaining useful scientific knowledge though, and hopefully we can come up with ways of improving the meta-processes.

G.