Presumably they would use sunlight gathered by solar panels for power to spit the H2O. I don't think the challenge here is to find the most efficient (in terms of using the least amount of energy) way to power the spacecraft- but rather to provide fuel the spacecraft can use in its rockets.

One could be much more purely efficient with a solar sail or the like, no conversion, but they don't accelerate very quickly and have some problems tacking.

I like large projects to have their own business plan- with resource costs (staff, office, etc.), and budget, and expected operating margin for the project as the resulting product/products are sold. Ideally inclide marketing and sales commission costs. This is a big deal to developer, but one of the benefits is that one can show to upper mgt. The effects of overstaffing on the margins. Also a good business plan would include the reason for all project roles, for all the people on the project (since their salaries all subtract from the profit margin). Then with a formal plan its much harder for an inexperienced manager to pad the resources for some pointy haired reason of his/her own as he/she should need to justify the reduced margins, etc.

It's important to remember that Blackboard bought 2 of 52 Moodle Partners. Others, like the company I work for, are completely independent of this deal. The Partner program gives good insulation to customers - if they don't like the Partner they are contracting with, they can switch to another one, or bring their Moodle site in house.

Some of the other LMS companies have an open source option, however none have a Partner program, so you have to choose between DIY or the commercial company that also owns the code. With Moodle, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder, focuses on core development and his team is funded by contributions from the Partners. This means there are many choices for Moodle customers and the purchase of one or several of the many hosting/support companies in the Moodle Partner program won't change that.

More: http://info.remote-learner.net/blog-0/

To improve Windows, MS should make it stabler, make it faster, and more exploit proof, and for goodness sake actually implement W3C standards in IE.
Otherwise the UI of XP/Win7 is adequate, thats not the problem - the problems are:
1. It crashes frequently (compared to other modern OSs like MacOS and Linux),
2. IE is a huge timesink because of lack of full standards support (though in my last big web project, IE8 was almost not a problem).
3. It is tragically vulnerable to exploits
4. It requires an incredible amount of processor and ram to run - and doesn't seem to really do much more with all that hardware than NT did with much less.

I hope it doesn't make the cut. A simplified interface can be oversimplified.

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

It's also a good example of a successful FOSS project, with an active and growing user community, used by more than 38 million students in 212 countries, translated into 81 languages, and with thriving commercial support community.

Rosetta Stone (my kid is using it right now through her school:-)) is a pretty simple application with some very good content. If you had the content you could do it as a SCORM or even a Lesson module in Moodle, but the content (and the marketing;-)) is mostly what you are paying $500 for. The content, it would take some time to write/record and take/locate supporting images & audio, once you had that done, a few days to a few weeks to put it in Moodle (depending on how far you were taking the user in the second language).

What is the ultra niche?

Second language teaching is pretty big, some estimates run to 1 billion learning English alone, and the UK alone estimates that generates 1.3 billion pounds/year in revenue.

Moodle, is by most estimates the most widely used online learning software with 49,000 registered sites in 211 countries and is also an example of a successful open source project ecosystem with commercial support partners in many countries.

Basically it's open source software for creating an education institutions own 'Facebook' social networking site. It was created by a consortium of institutions in New Zealand - which by the way has made a national commitment to FOSS- with many of the island's Universities and Schools running Linux on the desktop, Moodle for their Learning Management System (online quizzes, discussions, assignments, gradebooks, etc.) and Mahara for their social networking/eportfolio.

When an institution installs Mahara, each user gets their own site where they can post files, have a blog, post photos, etc. and then invite people to view different parts of their site based on access roles, e.g. guest can see some things, teachers can see other things, employers can see yet other things, etc.

Students use it to build resumes, weblogs, create their own learner communities, etc. When it's integrated with an LMS like Moodle, assignments can be pushed from Moodle to Mahara - say a particularly good paper, photo, video, etc. and you can also send views from Mahara to Moodle for grading - say a blog assignment, etc.

Mahara, means 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Mori- overall its very cool software and a very cool project- nice to see it getting recognition!

Full Disclosure - my company provides commercial support for Mahara and contributes financial and code support as one of the network of Mahara partners- we have more information about it here.

It showed up after a software update, and for some reason doesn't have an entry in the Applications menu (where I can easily remove Google and other 3rd party apps if I want).

What is really interesting about Bing on the Blackberry anyway if I accidently select it it (after a long time) loads a screen asking me if I agree to the EULA. I click the "I do not agree" button.

It loads anyway.

It's like a shoe that fits so tightly that I can't get it off my foot (maybe that was what Jerry was talking to Bill about?).