I have an IPhone 4S, and it's about the right size for me. Most days, I wear jeans to work, and anything bigger than the IPhone would be uncomfortable to carry around in my front pocket (not to mention cumbersome to take out when I need to answer it). I can see the benefits to having a larger screen with a higher resolution, but the bottom line is you have to drag it around with you.

There's always the option of using a belt clip, which would make it easier to carry around a phone with a larger form factor, but I just don't like that from an aesthetic perspective. To me, it's a compromise between screen size/resolution and convenience, and I'm perfectly happy with the 3.5" screen.

If it's a boy, you could name him Kim (after Kim Stanley Robinson).

And if it's a girl, you could name her Kim (after Kim Stanley Robinson).

One of the biggest impediments to long-term settlement of Mars is the fact that it lacks an Earth-like magnetosphere to protect surface dwellers from solar flares/CMEs and other forms of energetic particle radiation. Similarly, the very thin Martian atmosphere provides little of the protection that the Earth has from photon-based radiation (e.g., UV/X-rays, etc.)

How much of a problem is space-based radiation for future Martian settlers, and what would be the best way to deal with it?

Slashdot died the day that Jon Katz left.

Please, for the love of everything that is good and holy, bring back Jon Katz! /runs and hides

...and even a high-tech economy needs ditch diggers.

Do I feel sorry for kids in Tennessee? Sure, I suppose. They didn't really have anything to do with this. But at the same time, it's not like this happened by accident.

You're making a joke, but in many ways, gravity is much less understood than biological evolution is.

I was planning on reading Romeo and Juliet this winter.

Now it looks like I don't have to.

Assholes.

By the way, Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, and Bruce Willis was dead for the whole movie.

I hate to say it, because it's horribly unpopular from a political perspective, but this payroll tax "holiday" is just disastrous policy. Depending on what numbers and what year you're looking at, anywhere from 81 to 89 percent of the entire U.S. budget goes to two things: defense and entitlements. And of those entitlements, the biggest long-term liabilities and problems that we have are Social Security and Medicare.

When you hear these Presidential candidates talk about how they would fix the budget deficits by getting rid of things like the EPA, the IRS, the Departments of Commerce / Energy / Education, etc., then you know should know that they are not making any sort of good-faith effort at solving the problem, and that they cannot be taken seriously. The dirty little secret is that you could cut out 100% of the discretionary non-defense spending (i.e., everything except for the military and entitlements) and you would have barely made a dent in the problem as a whole.

The whole purpose of the payroll/FICA tax is to provide funds for Social Security and Medicate. Again, these are the two biggest problems that the U.S. has from a budget perspective -- biggest by leaps and bounds. So not only does this policy make the deficit problem worse, it makes it worse in the worst possible way. Politicians can claim that these tax cuts are "paid for", but everybody knows that these types of Washington claims are usually just shell games for political purposes.

For what it's worth, I like the fact that the payroll tax holiday disproportionally benefits those towards the lower end of the income scale. But there has to be a better way to do this, especially at this critical time in history when the Boomers are retiring and we're going to need these trust funds more than at any time in our history.

I don't disagree with this at all, but the cynical side of me fears that there would be a slew of special-interest groups (everybody from law enforcement agencies who are reliant on traffic ticket income to MADD) who would move heaven and Earth to prevent something like this from ever seeing the light of day.

I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."

But you should realize that this technique has been used throughout the entire history of modern science, and its track record is actually quite good.

Back in the late 1700s, after the discovery of the planet Uranus, astronomers made careful calculations of its orbital elements and published a table the position of the planet in the sky over the years (and decades). As the years (and decades) wore on, they discovered a curious thing: the actual position of the planet was beginning to diverge from what had been predicted.

At this point, there were a few different explanations:

1) Perhaps the initial orbital elements were incorrect.
2) Perhaps our fundamental laws of gravity and motion were incorrect.
3) Perhaps there was a massive, as-yet-undetected eighth planet whose gravity was influencing the orbit of Uranus.

Most astronomers fell into the third camp; after all, the observations of Uranus's orbit had been made with considerable precision (for the time) and there was little reason to believe that the fundamental laws of physics would start to break down as you move further away from the sun. And so they made their calculations and narrowed down the location of this hypothetical planet to a fairly small window in the sky. After that, it was just a matter of pointing a telescope there and looking.

This is the story of the discovery of the planet Neptune.

Astronomers did not find this planet by accident. It was not discovered by a kid in the backyard with a streak of cosmic good luck. (In fact, many observers from antiquity had seen it, but had not realized what they were looking at.) They found it because they knew it had to be there.

Now, you might think that this comparison is a bit of a stretch. But it's just one example; there are countless more. Back in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli was studying beta decay in atomic nuclei. He realized that the process, as he was seeing it, could not possibly be happening unless there were (again, hypothetical) particles being emitted as a consequence. If there were not, then all sorts of fundamental principles of physics were being violated (e.g., conservation of matter / angular momentum / etc.)

This particle, eventually named the "neutrino", remained hypothetical and undetected for more than a quarter of a century until it was finally detected -- in 1956.

I could go on, but the point is that postulating the existence of something hypothetical in order to explain deviations between theory and observed results is part of the best traditions of natural science. It's not hand-waving or charlatanism. And it works more often than most people might think.

When I was 17...
I downloaded very good tunes...
I downloaded very good tunes that I got through P2P
My name was Chuck D...
I stayed up downloading Queen...
When I was 17

Of course, spreading the idea that it is a mainstream Christian belief that the entire universe is 6000 years old does help to make Christianity look silly, which is why this argument is always propped up by non-Christians.

Are you aware that a Gallup poll taken less than a year ago (December 2010) shows that 40% of Americans believe that the Universe and humans in their present form were created by God in the very recent past (less than 10,000 years ago)?

You and I may both wish that this were not the case, but the Young-Earth viewpoint is not a fringe idea that is held by a small number of zealots.

3) We need better trolls. The trolls right now are lame.

The decreased quality of trolls in recent years is directly proportional to the increased presence of the Linux infestation on the Internet. Back in the 1990s, most high-end Internet servers were running some form of proprietary UNIX or Windows NT. (You may recall the Netcraft study that showed that NT far outperformed the popular Linux distributions of the day.) They were respectable pieces of hardware running respectable operating systems. Furthermore, they were administered by intelligent engineers, full of independent thought and imbued with a lust for creativity and self-expression.

In the intervening years, the landscape has been polluted with low-cost commodity Intel boxes running some damnable variant of the Linux virus. With cute names like "Gentoo", "Ubuntu", and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", this operating system has hijacked the once-vibrant Internet community. The afore-mentioned Windows and UNIX administrators have been sent packing and replaced with soulless, hive-minded drones from the Linux gulags. And once this happened, the high-quality trolls were nowhere to be found.

Let's be perfectly clear about one thing: The Linux "community" is a liberal slaughterhouse of the mind. The goal of this community (rarely stated out loud but none the less obvious) is complete totalitarian Communism and an end to Western civilization. They see our dreams of prosperity and a high standard of living for our children and our grandchildren. They want to replace these dreams with a nightmarish reality: burning trash barrels on every corner, mile-long government bread lines, and children in burlap sacks drinking water out of discarded automobile tires.

This is what Linux has wrought. This is where they intend to bring us.

While we're on the subject of trolls, why do modern trolls utterly suck? In the 90's, trolling was high art.

The decreased quality of trolls in recent years is directly proportional to the increased presence of the Linux infestation on the Internet. Back in the timeframe that you mention (the 1990s), most high-end Internet servers were running some form of proprietary UNIX or Windows NT. (You may recall the Netcraft study that showed that NT far outperformed the popular Linux distributions of the day.) They were respectable pieces of hardware running respectable operating systems. Furthermore, they were administered by intelligent engineers, full of independent thought and imbued with a lust for creativity and self-expression.

In the intervening years, the landscape has been polluted with low-cost commodity Intel boxes running some damnable variant of the Linux virus. With cute names like "Gentoo", "Ubuntu", and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", this operating system has hijacked the once-vibrant Internet community. The afore-mentioned Windows and UNIX administrators have been sent packing and replaced with soulless, hive-minded drones from the Linux gulags.

Let's be perfectly clear about one thing: The Linux "community" is a liberal slaughterhouse of the mind. The goal of this community (rarely stated out loud but none the less obvious) is complete totalitarian Communism and an end to Western civilization. They see our dreams of prosperity and a high standard of living for our children and our grandchildren. They want to replace these dreams with a nightmarish reality: burning trash barrels on every corner, mile-long government bread lines, and children in burlap sacks drinking water out of discarded automobile tires.

This is what Linux has wrought. This is where they intend to bring us.

I hope this answers your question.

For what it's worth, I've used Norton 360 on my Windows machines since mid-2010 and am quite satisfied with it. I've never tried to uninstall it, so I can't speak to how well that works (if at all) but my experience has been that it's very unobtrusive.