The Fomalhaut comparison is one being made by a journalist in the article and then the submitter. To scientists studying or looking for exoplanets it's an interesting thing to note but comparing press images is not the same as comparing scientific images. This article doesnt specify the simulated parallax measurements of the images, the spectrographic data, or anything else of scientific importance. I suspect the actual data includes these things but a cool looking amalgam of that data was chosen for a press release. Just as the Fomalhaut images is a press-ready amalgam of different bits of scientific data. No one is going to cite this YouTube video in an article about solar system dynamics in a scientific journal article.

Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. They got to tour PARC with permission from Xerox's upper management and compensated Xerox with pre-IPO shares. What the Mac did with the ideas from PARC was very different from what Xerox did with the ideas out of PARC. This is also very different from Microsoft sending an employee to copy implementation details from Apple. Do go waving some out of context quote around without knowing the actual history of the situation.

The $450-range Toshibas are pieces of shit. The 15" laptops have horrible ergonomics and build quality. They feel like they're going to fall apart if you move them around too much and the keyboards are off-center from the screen which makes them horribly uncomfortable to type on. The number pad they so "thoughtfully" include isn't used nearly enough to make up for the ridiculous ergonomics. Even the smaller laptops are bulky and don't fit well in backpacks or messenger bags. The power supplies are monsters and have very fragile feeling DC connectors. If you tilt your laptop back a little too far you're likely to snap the damn thing off in the plug. They're also really unbalanced so tilting your screen back too far will cause your laptop to topple backwards.

You can (and obviously will) naysay Mac laptops but at least some thought went into their industrial design. They fit neatly into bags because they don't have oddly shaped bottom panels that catch on things. The MagSafe adapter has saved me from destroying my computer on a number of occasions, and they go to sleep and then wake up from sleep very quickly. I'll spend the extra money to get a laptop with features that actually make it nice to use. Bullet point features like a faster CPU or RAM don't mean a whole lot when I'm putting it into or pulling it out of a bag a hundred times a week.

The justification would be the same as for the nicer car, if the car feels nice and has better fit and finish it's probably worth the extra money. You interact with the fit and finish every single second you're using the thing. If it's build cheaply you feel it every time you touch it. I'll get a car with power windows and locks so I don't have to check every door handle when I get out like a rube to make sure they're all locked. I can roll all the windows down at once when it's been sitting in the sun so I don't need to crank the AC when I get in it. I'll get the more comfortable seat that's easier to adjust because I sit in it every single day.

At the beginning of June when AT&T's new data plans were announced I was a little miffed as an iPhone owner but curious what my actual usage was. I had gotten used to the idea of "unlimited" data and wondered how close to the 5GB soft cap I was getting. I figured the new 2GB cap for "unlimited" would really screw me over. On June 2nd I reset the data counter on my iPhone and checked it against at the end of the month and reading this story I checked it again. I'm only averaging about 170MB of cellular data a month. If this trend bears out I may go crazy and drop down to the 200MB plan and save myself $60 a year.

I've got WiFi at work and at home so there's a lot of browsing and e-mail checking I do that never goes over the cell network. While I'm out and not around a WiFi connection I tend to browse mobile versions of blogs and new sites. I really appreciate sites adding mobile-friendly stylesheets and such. Even over 3G browsing on a cellular connection is slow going and the full blown versions of even simple pages are between 1-2MB anymore. For instance Engadget's mobile page is only about 300K worth of resources while their normal page is between 1.5-2MB. That's a ridiculous amount of superfluous shit you've got to download to read a web page that's mostly text. It's not just the size of resources but the number of separate files (and therefore separate HTTP connections) that cause problems. Even the fastest 3G has latency of at least a quarter of a second, every separate file is a separate HTTP connection that needs to be negotiated and with everyone using CDNs and advertising affiliates often a dozen or so DNS lookups.

As an aside: if you administer a website please optimize your resources. It's not the most difficult thing in the world and it benefits everyone, not just people with smart phones. I've got a 10Mbps DSL connection and while it's not the fastest connection in the world pages don't load any faster than my 512Kbps connection from ten years ago.

Southwest is my BFF airline. I use them all the time to fly back home from the Bay Area and the prices for the service are fantastic. Last year I was able to find round-trip tickets for under $100 and even this past year I found some really cheap fares when I booked far enough in advance. I appreciate no baggage fees but when I go home to visit my family I try to pack as much as possible in my backpack. When I print my boarding pass from home I just get a ride to the airport and walk right up to the security line. I think Southwest has done about as much as they can to remove normal flying inconveniences which means I keep giving them money.

While it existed I had similar praise for United's Ted brand. I only flew on them a few times but they had good prices and no first-class section so the space savings was distributed to coach. I don't recall being more comfortable on an airplane than on my Ted flights. I'm built like a brick shithouse so normal airline seats are really cramped and I've usually got no leg room at all. Southwest's flights can be a bit cramped unless you check in early enough and snag a front row or exit row seat.

Most FOMA and Au phones in Japan run Symbian on the backend. They're not running Nokia's S60 environment but their own custom environments ad defined by DoCoMo and KDDI. There's also a handful of UIQ phones which are a Symbian base system with the UIQ environment on top. The Symbian parts of the phone are like the Linux base OS or DOS, they run the hardware and basic functionality of the phone with some other environment sitting on top.

It's not possible to solve all the world's problems. Most major problems are societal or political, not technological or financial. There's lots of food and water in the world yet people starve every day. There's a lot of roadblocks between that food and people's mouths. Those roadblocks won't magically go away because we throw money at them or postpone some other task. Putting any sort of scientific endeavor behind "solving the world's problems" will just mean those endeavors will never be accomplished.

I do follow game developers twitters like http://twitter.com/OfficialBFBC2 [twitter.com] to get almost realtime news, and you can even ask something directly to them and get an answer sometimes, things like this were unthinkable just a few years ago

Uh...how few is a few? People have been interacting with software developers directly for years. We used to use BBSes, Usenet, mailing lists or sometimes direct emails. Maybe vie finally hit some "old fogey" point but I refuse to be awed by communicating via 140 character messages. The only reason we kept BBS postings short is we were charged by the minute and had slow modems.

What the fuck are you complaining about? Content that goes through Apple's media framework gets hardware acceleration. The same content going through entirely different (non-QuickTime) code paths isn't hardware accelerated. Hardware acceleration isn't disabled for non-QuickTime containers, the plugins or apps that handle these containers aren't using QuickTime's H.264 decoders and therefore aren't getting any hardware acceleration. Do you think Perian and VLC get magic hardware decoding somehow?

Your comment can best be summarized as "I don't know what the shit I'm talking about but I'm cool because I'm complaining about Apple!"

I would say the juiciest targets for botnets are not the big high bandwidth server class machines but the overpowered home desktops. Part of a botnet's power comes from its distributed nature, a big multi-CPU behemoth connected to a T3 would concentrate a lot of power and bandwidth in a single place but if it is ever removed from the botnet it makes for a serious blow to the overall power of the botnet. While a handful of desktop PCs wouldn't be singularly more powerful than the behemoth combined they have a fair amount of power and the loss of any one of them doesn't meaningfully reduce the overall power of the botnet. Also being that the desktop PCs are low hanging fruit security wise it makes way more sense to concentrate more effort on them since you'll get a much better return. There's a hojillion unsecured Windows PCs connected to always-on internet connections in the world.

T-Mobile is a GSM carrier but they don't offer 3G service on the same frequency bands as AT&T and in fact a totally different band. In order to support T-Mobile's 3G a phone has to have a baseband radio that supports it. You can't just take a random phone from AT&T and use 3G on T-Mobile's network. Ask anyone with a SIM unlocked iPhone, they're stuck on EDGE with T-Mobile. So in the US you really only have the option of AT&T if you want to put a commonly available baseband in your phone.

While Macs comprise a small percentage of the overall PC market they have much larger representation in segments of the market. They're popular consumer machines and have much higher penetration in the consumer market than they have in say the business market. You'll see very few Macs used as POS terminals or in office drone cubicles. If you sell light duty consumer ink jet printers a good percentage of your target market has a Mac at home. You'll damn well be obliged to support them and even offer them unique products. When the original iMac was released several printer manufacturers released printers not only with USB ports and Mac drivers but even styled similarly to the casing of iMacs.

That doesn't make him omniscient nor immune to logic. It is entirely too late for the human race to hide. It's not our radio emissions that will give us away to advanced aliens but the natural radiation the Earth is currently reflecting into space. With our current technology we've found (and confirmed) 452 exoplanets and managed to image several. A new generation of planet hunting telescopes is beginning to come online (they're largely funding limited and not technologically limited) and they'll find and image even more exoplanets. It won't be too long before we're able to detect and get spectra from terrestrial planets around stars.

Any species with the means and desire to fly around the galaxy is going to do a survey of exoplanets before they leave home. If they're out there they've seen us already. They know what the Earth's atmosphere is like, they have a good idea of what its made of, and they know something lives here. They may not know specifically that humans live here and are armed to the teeth but they know something lives here. Damn near every inch of the Earth is covered in living organisms, the chlorophyll in spectra will make that abundantly clear. Check out NASA's Earth Observatory page. We can gather that sort of data with dedicated instruments in orbit but it's all being broadcast to the rest of the galaxy. A sufficiently advanced and large enough interferometry telescope would be able to gather the same data about the Earth from the aliens' home system.

Hiding from advanced alien species that want to pay us a visit is impossible. Radio emissions won't make any difference at all. If anything radio emissions would likely be a deterrent for a resource gathering alien species. Why bother coming here and fighting us for our resources when they can head over to the uninhabited system next door and take what the want without a fight? Even if our radio emissions aren't a deterrent they're hyper advanced aliens that can travel interstellar distances. They know the Earth is here and if they want it there's not a lot we can do besides becoming hyper advanced ourselves providing our current technology wouldn't be adequate for our defense.

The only Ares V that will fly in the next decade will be miniature hobby rockets. The Ares V exists only on paper at this point. Worse it doesn't even have a real design specced out at this point so if you said "build an Ares V starting tomorrow" it couldn't be done.

I want to see these networks unwittingly replay some of these "promoted Tweets". I want to hear Wolf Blitzer read something like the following: "and here we go to DoritosRGr8 - America is #1 LOL n I hear Obama luvs new Peppermint Ranch Doritos!" It would make my day to have a vacuous twat read some marketroid tweet on live TV.