The subject sounds offtopic, but seriously, a clear, natural, everyday usage of the scientific method to solve problems would make your average user be capable of sending meaningful bug reports,because they would understand how problems are solved in the most general sense. They would realize that in order to diagnose where a problem is coming from, all of the possible sources of that problem must be independently tested in a controlled way. Doing that by nature makes for naturally good bug reports.

...or you could just permanently change the default search provider back to Google with three clicks. Firefox isn't going to take that ability away; they'd just change the DEFAULT search provider.

I'd say that the hardware for collecting data has substantially improved with time too (imaging sensors, etc.). Not to mention storage capacity, and I'm sure there is plenty of other stuff I can't think of right now, even if launching technology hasn't changed much. There could definitely be huge benefits.

It receives commands from Earth, and it's 34 years old. What's to keep enemies of the United States from sending it bad instructions, or from collecting all data it sends back to us? I realize that Voyager isn't of any military importance, but I guess this is more of a hypothetical question. Does it use some type of encryption? Is that encryption still unbreakable today? The keys haven't been compromised after all this time? Just curious.

Correction: solar system, not galaxy. D'oh!

Voyager has to be the coolest space probe ever. It's been operating for 34 years straight and is LEAVING OUR GALAXY, still receiving commands from Earth and still transmitting data back. If that's not marvelous, I don't know what is. Anyone interested should read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1

I tried it in a VirtualBox, and it hangs on both live boot and install. FroYo works fine in a VirtualBox for me.

The reason the companies won't sell you an unprotected AVI file isn't that they're afraid you'll put it on TPB (where they know it will be no matter what, as you pointed out). It's that they're afraid that people who have no idea what TPB is (ie most people) will be ble to share and copy those unprotected AVI files, and sales will go down because frankly, the people who don't know what TPB is are the HUGE majority of those people who are willing to pay for movies...Not people like you.

Take it from a professional photographer (http://facebook.com/keysphotography)...Buy a Canon PowerShot. Get the cheapest one you can buy with optical "IS" (image stabilization). I'd shoot for the $130-180 price range. From the sound of your post, you aren't interested in donating a HUGE portion of your time and effort into learning how to make a photograph, and you are concerned about price. That's fine, but because of the former of those two, you will not see ANY improvement in image quality with price past about $150. Photography is ~95% about your abilities and ~5% about your equipment in everyday scenarios. That extra 5% of goodness goes a long way for pros who have already maxed out the 95% that comes from skill, but you are not those people. The extra weight, price, and bulk of a DSLR will only be a bad thing for you, because it will make you do the worst thing you can possibly do: Not bring your camera somewhere (due to laziness, fear of destruction, or lack of space, respectively).

Thank you very much for all the great suggestions! Museums are definitely possibilities for the trip, especially since some of the ones you mentioned are so big, but I am a little more curious to know of places where science is actually done (or has been done), which can also be toured by the public, like the examples I listed in the original post. Thanks again!

Which kernel version from kernel.org contains the patch? 3.2-rc1? Or none yet? Please don't answer unless you're quite sure.

Doesn't look like this will fix the much larger power issue with the Sandy Bridge processors, which is related to the graphics driver :-/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/818830

Yeah...Almost the only reason I keep a Windows XP VirtualBox on my Linux machines is for Photoshop.

I think the author's point is that data sent today could be sniffed, stored, and cracked in 20 years. Some of that data may still be sensitive in 20 years, so we need to switch now.