You should educate yourself on history. Steve Jobs complained about iTunes' inability to offer DRM free tracks back in February of 2007, with the first DRM-free tracks (from EMI) appearing in April of that year. It wasn't until January of 2008 that Amazon's MP3 store debuted with a DRM-free catalog. iTunes was hardly "following the leader".

Record industry executives openly admitted they were pitting Amazon's DRM-free offerings vs iTunes to see if they would end up pirated with any greater frequency than music from CD. They strung iTunes along for a year before allowing them to sell DRM-free tracks.

Don't you try to rewrite history.

The sustained data rate is not the heavyweight part, it's the heaviness of building a session. With most web services it's the transaction throughput that's important. The problem is magnified by the number of transactions needed for a single page load on modern sites.

Deleting your Facebook and Twitter accounts is one thing, setting every website you've ever worked on to return HTTP 410 errors is something different entirely. Mark decided to take all his balls and go home and made damn sure you knew he was going.

Even the Falcon Heavy is unlikely to be capable of a Moon, NEA, or Mars mission. However the Falcon will very likely be used for ISS resupply and other in-orbit operations, a mission profile at which the Falcon is to likely excel. The only way the Falcon would be able to do a deep space mission would be to have in-orbit refueling in place. While not impossible it's impractical at this point. Building this themselves would be far too expensive and they would definitely need some subsidies. SpaceX needs a nice reliability record they can bring to the table before the ESA or NASA gives them money for an in-orbit fuel depot. Assuming they can deliver reliable and cheap personnel and cargo launches to the ISS for the next decade I don't think it would be impossible for them to get the funding/connections needed to build a depot. However I don't think NASA should just sit idly by waiting for SpaceX to prove themselves.

The current four segment SRBs work reliably. The SLS is going to use five segment SRBs which means the new ones will be a completely different design. Solid rocket motors need a very specific geometry in order to burn correctly and provide the amount of power they need to help lift a rocket. Increasing the length by another segment means the geometry is complete altered so too are the methods of pouring and curing the propellant. Every single manufacturing process Thiokol had working for the Shuttle's SRBs needs to be revamped or thrown out completely and rebuilt from the ground up. The new SRBs will start no safety rating whatsoever.

Looking at ads is not the problem with Google's policies. They're not just showing you ads but tracking every move you make on the Internet. They not only have the ability but correlate that data with search history and browsing patterns. They scan through all of your email and correlate all of that data with the search and traffic data.

So you're not just looking at ads but having your behavior and history analyzed. Google is a publicly traded company and has been charged by their investors to maximize profit. They will eventually sell your personalized data. Insurance companies, credit rating agencies, and employee vetting companies would love to have that data. Searching for information about diabetes or browsing WebMD? Your health insurance rates shoot up. Search for porn a little too often? You fail a background check.

A tablet lets me read your dumbshit comment very comfortably from my couch...wait now my kitchen...now back to the couch. I don't have a keyboard at an odd angle so typing is fairly comfortable.

I've got a netbook but I ended up really disappointed by the user experience. The trackpad was microscopic and didn't have multitouch capabilities. The keyboard is very flimsy so typing is a pain. Worst is the UI is completely unfriendly on such a small screen. Even running Ubuntu instead on Windows didn't help on the UI front. This is fairly amusing to me since my Netbook has the same resolution screen (and CPU power) as laptops from the turn of the century so the UIs have regressed significantly in the intervening decade.

My tablet has the same size screen as my netbook but has a UI much better suited to the size. Theres no space wasted on window titles, menu bars, or any other extraneous clutter. Browsing the web the ARM CPU feels faster than the Atom in the netbook.

I'm not going to write a book on my tablet but I won't write one on my netbook either. However it is great for browsing, sending email, looking through photos, and playing games. Saying there are "no benefits" to tablets is ridiculous hyperbole. Current tablets come through on the broken promises of last decade's MIDs.

The problem with a second hand optical telescope in this situation is in order to use it effectively you need infrastructure to process your samples. Even if those facilities exist somewhere in-country they may not be local. If a sample needs to be preserved, transported, prepared, imaged, and then finally examined by a doctor it may not do any good since the process has taken days or weeks.

A microscope that doesn't need to have samples prepared and can potentially image something in situ is a big win. It's even better if this can be plugged into a cell phone so data can be send directly to a doctor. There's millions or remote villages in Africa and Asia that lack running water but have basic cellular phone service. A traveling doctor or aid worker could be in a remote village, immediately image something with a microscope, and have a specialist look at it in hours if not minutes.

The goal of many of these types of projects is to build medical technologies that are practical for the environments in which they'll operate. A delicate surgical light might be fine for a suburban hospital but is completely inappropriate for a field hospital in a refugee camp. A microscope that needs prepared samples isn't appropriate for a traveling doctor days away from the nearest hospital.

You're off by a few years, PCs started becoming readily available and ubiquitous by about 1998-99. Not only did they appear in more homes but more and more businesses. By 2003 acceleration had begun to slow since the market was fairly well saturated. It wasn't price that allowed households to have secondary machines but saturation. It's not splurging when the needs increase to demand a second or third machine. Families grow and a single machine no longer suits everyone's needs. Businesses expand or just replace old equipment they were leasing anyways.

I don't think you're really correct about the market having changed to make room for tablets. I think people have always wanted something like the iPad even if they didn't envision the iPad itself. Something lightweight whose battery lasted all day and allowed them wireless network (internet, intranet, etc) access. Basically the desire has always been for something like what you'd see on Star Trek.

These desires have always been tempered by practicality and affordability. A $2k tablet was never going to sell and neither was one that just ran Windows or MacOS with a pen interface. Before the iPad was released everyone assumed it was going to be at least $1000. Had it cost that much I doubt it would have taken off. However at $500 it meets the affordability and practicality desires for a tablet along with the "oh shit I want a tablet" desire. It's not about slurging but the fact there's something worthwhile on which to spend the $500.

Pro tip: Learn to spell the word "secondary", typing 2ndary makes me assume you've got a learning disability.

I've been reading Slashdot for what seems like forever and it's definitely had a positive effect on my life. I doubt I'd have my current (awesome) job if it weren't for Slashdot supporting my inner geek. With you leaving it's the end of an era and I truly hope Slashdot doesn't go to complete shit. Despite the dupes, spelling problems, and outright retarded submissions Slashdot is still one of the best geek sites on the Internet.

So instead of a long sob story I'll just wish you the best in whatever you do. Thanks for all of your hard work and giving me a place to be a nerd. May Netcraft never confirm your death and may Natalie Portman show up on your door, naked and petrified. Of course covered in hot grits.

It kills me that the people five year ago that were exclaiming Web 2.0 and JavaScript web apps were the future are now decrying HTML5. Even the Web 2.0 stuff was an extension of ideas Netscape was espousing in the 90s. HTML5 has simply become the latest brand name for that same concept. Google could switch GMail to "HTML5" by changing a few of their document tags.

I think the only difference now is IE6 is finally a marginal statistic in terms of browser usage so babysitting it isn't absolutely necessary for web apps. There's also finally a focus on page scalability and accessibility as a huge portion of an app's users are on mobile/touch devices.

There were always classes of applications that were never going to replaced by Web 2.0/HTML5. What comprises that list has changed (and gotten smaller) as browsers and app writers get more sophisticated. Ten years ago you had rudimentary JavaScript and unsophisticated browsers so basic data entry with HTML forms was practical. As JavaScript engines improved and browsers became more capable the likes of GMail and Google Docs became practical. To do sophisticated apps in 2001 you needed to use a plug-in or Java while today the same functionality can be done entirely in JavaScript in the browser.

There's lots of LoB apps that really have no business being native apps (VB6, Delphi, etc.). These are slowly being transitioned to web apps not only their requirements have changed but the environments have changed. If the CEO decides they want to look up reports on their iPhone or Droid, the reporting app is going to see a quick transition from a clunky VB6 monstrosity to a web app. The same is true for consumer apps, if a large portion of your users switch to Macs or phones (or you've tapped out the Windows market) that native app (a glorified database front end) becomes a liability rather than an asset.

Why has the climate debate become such that even scientists are not allowed to investigate the matter without ridicule?

Opinion != science. Roy Spencer has broken models that have been critiqued by a number of his peers. Instead of publishing a paper in a journal he runs off to groups like the Heartland Institute (or is paid to write papers by said group) and gets a smear piece written in Forbes and carried on Yahoo!. Neither Forbes or Yahoo! are peer reviewed journals. There's no science going on when an asshole with an agenda is trying to end-run peer review and scientific rigor by going to the press and accusing his peers saying he's wrong with participating in some sort of conspiracy.

This is an article published by Forbes, carried by Yahoo! that was written by a hack at the Heartland Institute. It's an uninformed and agenda pushing OpEd piece posing as a news article. This guy is pushing an agenda and doesn't give a shit about truth.

The author of this fine piece is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank that seems to think global warming is some sort of fairy tale. This is the same group that worked with Phillip Morris to deny the link between second hand smoke and lung cancer. It would be fantastic for Forbes, Yahoo!, or maybe even Timothy make some effort to mention that this is essentially an OpEd posing as a news report. Instead we get this bullshit that's going to pull in the teenage libertarian "See global warming is made up!" short bus riders.

Slashdot: News for nerds, some of our editors are actually retarded.

Look more noise from Dr. Roy Spencer intelligent design proponent global warming denier. I would feel guilty if I was using this person's history on the subject and ignore the science but it looks again like he's ignoring the science to push an agenda. Who gave us this wonderful article? Why our own timothy, Slashdot's barely literate "editor". We need to buy him more paste to eat so he'll stop posting this bullshit.

The Saturn V rockets were all essentially custom builds. None of the Saturn models were really designed for mass production or much of anything outside of the needs of the Apollo program. The Apollo Applications Program was meant to find some use for the Apollo infrastructure past the cancellation of the Apollo program.

Skylab only existed because Apollos 18-20 were canceled and the Saturn Vs earmarked for those flights became available. The SL-1 launch also only launched the Skylab vehicle itself, not the crew. The first crew was launched separately using a Saturn IB rocket a little more than a week after Skylab was put in orbit.

The only thing to wonder about the Saturn V rockets would be what sort of LoC statistics the vehicle would have wound up having. If you only count launched Apollo missions (ignoring the ill-fated Apollo 1 loss) it had a 6.2% LoM (loss of mission) rate and counting Apollo 1 a 5.8% LoC rate (loss of crew). The Space Shuttle with 135 flights has had a LoC rate of 1.4%.