It's great to hear that both of these companies are getting some needed funding! Armadillo has said outright that they have a goal of putting tourists into space and Masten has hinted at it. I for one look forward to lighting a rocket under my butt and launching myself out of the atmosphere.

Obviously, too much time spent playing Facebook games.

Couldn't be much worse than poo coffee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak

Ha ha, awesome.

Did I just read an article that had the terms "virtual women", "steamed buns", and "fish sausages" in the same paragraph?

I'm not saying that the inflationary phase of the universe is a false concept, but I've always thought that the way the theory came about is a bit sketchy.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken with any of this, but this is my understanding of its history. Earlier versions of the Big Bang theory did not include this rapid inflation in the earlier universe; the universe was said to expand at a more constant rate. However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model. So physicists decided to plunk down a mysterious inflationary phase into their models of the early universe, a concept with no known cause or explanation, but which made the CMBR fit with the Big Bang theory. However, it's a concept that to this day they're still trying to reconcile with the rest of observed physics, as this article shows.

Could the theory be true? Sure. But if it is, it's because those physicists got lucky with their educated guess on the matter. Other theories with much more solid backing have in the past been roundly disproven.

Oh yeah?? Well my SSD is smaller than a pinhead, weighs less than a flea, and can hold 1.21 jigabytes!

I don't think so. The particular political party the aligned themselves with was one that formed, among other reasons, to protect the uptime of legally-questionable and constantly-threatened servers. Sound familiar? This makes a lot of sense to me.

I'd like to see one with MythTV built into it. Plug it into the wall, give it a coax cable in, HDMI and USB out for monitor and keyboard, and off you go. Take your DVR anywhere.

Sure, the technology isn't quite there to do that cheaply, but it certainly wouldn't be expensive currently to build one that just connects to a wireless network and outputs Hulu.

Agreed. It has always been super-slow, a memory hog, and poorly-written Flash elements crash web browsers. I wouldn't mind at all if it went away. As it is, I'm a lot less likely to frequent websites that use it.

I agree. I would be much more apt to use the 7" device rather than the current model. But I still can't see myself using it enough to warrant the expense.

And if rockets can be used to solve this stinky problem, what can't they do?

Can't get into the pickle jar? Rockets!

Neighbor's cat keeps leaving presents in your yard? Rockets!

Excessive cell phone charges on your bill? Lasers! Then rockets!

Notice that they're careful to say they're tracking "equipment that can access the Internet". I have 1 IP address, but I have 4 internet-capable devices using it, 5 if you count my phone. I would imagine that they have ways of estimating how many devices on average use the same IP based on surveys and studies and the like.

Makes sense to me, at least for certain things. If you lose your bank card, a thief has access to your bank account anyway, so what's the harm in putting your online banking password in the same place?

An even better game... rig your machine up to an explosive device and program it so that if you get the same error message three times, BOOM!

That's exciting, right?

Not to mention people using their kid to cheat the system. Believe it or not, it happens.