You must be one of those Gall-Peters "lets make Africa look like a limp dong" map proponents.

Mercator was not made and is not used for political purposes. When it's used in publishing, it's because the square format of the projection fits nicely on a single vertical-formatted book page. If the publisher is opting for something across 2 pages, they'll typically use a reference map such as Robinson or Winkel-Tripel.

Mercator IS used in places like Google maps, because it's great for navigation.

The big boss types usually show up in a suit. The rest of us are anywhere from jeans and t-shirt to buisness casual depending on personal tastes.

Try Starbucks Seattle. Turns out there are a bunch of them. Yeah, not even close to as nice as defaulting to finding things right nearby your location, but not completely useless, either.

Uhh, hello? Each occupied prison place is income for politicians' corporate overlords/future lobbying customers. FTFY.

Oh, right, I forget that people actually use the web without an ad blocker.

Maybe the "kitty-litter like" substance is a clue?

Relax, people. It's a small asteroid in an orbit beyond the moon. We'll have hundreds of thousands of kilometers between us and a smallish rock in space.

There are a few reasons it's being done with ground stations right now. This current project we're discussing is a "Demonstration", meaning that the technology has to be proven over several missions, and this is only the first. It's freaking hard to hit a 40 cm spot on the earth, not to mention a 10 cm telescope on a satellite orbiting the moon. My guess is they'll do a TDRS style constellation of satellites when the tech is proven (which I think it will be)

Replying to undo accidentally modding 'redundant'. In fact, I totally agree. It sounds like a way to get people excited that they're doing something for a hip new company, not for some cynical rich guy.

So let's just throw our hands up in the air and do nothing, eh?

Um, they have yet to spend a trillion of today's dollars since NASA started.

Erm, isn't a backup a copy by definition?

Because everyone in corporate IT wants to marshal the forces of FOSS every time some functionality found in a stock install of $MS_PRODUCT is non-existant in $FOSS_PRODUCT.

While you have a point, the FOSS world would do better to have useful functionality in place before the world asks for it. To be truly successful, FOSS needs to be ahead of what the proprietary world is doing, not implementing some idea that somebody else invented.

In some projects, this definitely is the case. For instance, Dolphin file manager is pretty damn good, while Finder and Windows Explorer feel like toys.

In others, work needs to be done. Is the email client a truly finished product? Can nothing be improved upon? I've used Thunderbird for the past 8 or so years, and while it works quite nicely, surely more could be done.

Eh, the entire world only has 83.7% literacy rate overall. Must be a shithole :)

Going back to the cited source, there is no mention of a particular study either way, though that speculation does pass the laugh test. After all, Gaza and the West Bank are supposed to be Palestine.

Also going back to that source, only 17% of the population of the West Bank is Jewish, and 8% Chrisitian. Responding to the GP's assertion that literacy is near 0% for Arabs, even if they have 100% literacy rates in the Jewish and Christian communities (which is quite likely) the math doesn't work out. You can't have 3/4 the West Bank population illiterate and 25% literate and have 92% literacy overall. Adding in the fact that 99% of the population in Gaza is Muslim makes the assertion even more ridiculous.

My main point is that using unrealistic numbers pulled out of your ass doesn't win arguments. I chose to use the CIA's numbers because they're relatively neutral, if not somewhat biased against the Palestinian population.