Given a finite pot of money (say $2.5B), we could have done truly new things.

Why did have to go back to Mars for the nth time with yet another rover when we could visit Europa instead which is COVERED IN WATER and probably liquid beneath.

The reason we didn't was (1) a bunch of vested interests and (2) fear that it would have been a harder sell to congress. This is the source of our stagnation.

Yay let's spend $2.5B on finding more rocks on Mars!!! Didn't we already do that 20 years ago?

Shouldn't we be drilling and landing on Europa or some such thing instead.

Diablo 3 shows that there is one area where piracy will lose substantially: games. All code will be run server side, and only art will be on the client. This doesn't kill piracy but it does prevent the majority of it as most people don't want to deal with pirate created servers.

Same for any other interactive content.

Open all bookmarks and links in a new tab, except those linking to the current domain.

It's a feature of Tab Mix Plus, FF-only extension. Amazing for auto-generating tabs usefully. Impossible on Chrome.

If Tab Mix Plus comes to Chrome, I'll be strongly tempted to move... only a feeling of loyalty of having used it as Mozilla as my browser for a decade will stop me from moving.

I thought the problem was that direct3d does sound too but OpenGL does not. Hence the attractiveness to developers.

Reliance on direct3d seems a huge obstacle to overcome.

Why is it that there are so many foul mouthed, rabid comments by detractors of iOS all over the interwebs? I would like to believe that these folks are paid shills; it would make more sense.

I love FOSS, I run Ubuntu Linux on a Mac Pro, and I own a jailbroken iPhone on which I can install whatever I want using dpkg and apt-get (yes, Debian tools are the jailbreakers' favorite ones).

I have tried Android, and while I love the fact that Android is based on Linux, I have found that a jailbroken iPhone offers me much of the same flexibility.

You don't know how wrong you are. There are so many things I think Slashdotters would appreciate knowing about the iOS jailbreak process:

1) The "Tethered" (easy) jailbreaks only work on pre-2011 devices.
2) 2011 and later device can only be freed using "untethered" jailbreaks.
3) "Untethered" jailbreaks using Apple's copyrighted code usually happen first, but are not distributed because they would be subject to DMCA takedown. The hackers want to do this legit.
3) Making the last untethered jailbreak (whether for the "tethered" pre-2011 devices or the other ones) actually involved what appears to me at least to be a spectacularly complicated process:

http://pod2g-ios.blogspot.com/2012/01/details-on-corona.html

TL;DR is that untethering iOS devices is spectacularly difficult, especially due to the fact that at least one of the best jailbreakers has been hired by apple.

If you do remove gadgets, there is only one true loss. The Pandora gadget is extremely useful because it provides the only ad-free frontend to pandora. If you disable Gadgets, you can still access it through this link:

http://internal-tuner.pandora.com/windowsgadget/gadget.jsp

I found the audio to be choppy for some reason under firefox when you navigate away from the tab that contains it... for that reason it should likely be spawned into its own window.

It's too bad. The author of the original research was totally hot.

I love Firefox, but it's still about 50% faster on Windows 7 than on Linux. Chrome wins clearly on Linux. I agree that on Windows they're comparable.

Joking aside, this is a big misconception many people have about cloud storage: that cloud storage is at the whim of the provider and if the provider goes poof then your data goes poof.

That is a gross misrepresentation of services like dropbox. These services mirror locally stored files on your own hard drive.

Therefore, you retain the local storage that you always wanted, but at the same time get syncing to all your devices without having to write a separate sync client for each device.

Now if you'd like to argue against cloud storage based on security, that is fine. But if high-level security is not an issue, cloud storage provides an added benefit to, rather than a replacement of, local storage.

For me the Linux desktops were competitive with windows and Mac until 2005 or so when spotlight desktop search came along (followed by its windows counterpart). In GNOME (and hence in Ubuntu) there was never* a stable, solid search function that would search inside all file types and index the results for instant retrieval. For me that is now the primary way I navigate the OS, and it wasn't until 2012 that Ubuntu had anything even remotely similar (and I don't think that searches inside files instantly yet).

So yes, Desktop search was the killer function that Linux could never get working quite right. I could have totally put up with a lack of prettiness, but the desktop search mess was what made it clear to me that windows and Mac had surpassed the Linux desktops in terms of relevancy of goals for the non-immature power user. Yes the kernel rocks but GNOME and KDE lack a philosophically mature developer base.

*yes yes I know about beagle tracker google desktop and all that. These have always been in various states of disfunction or non-support and are frankly a mess.

I'd put money on the likelihood that there is a GPL violation in their driver code that they'd have to own up to if they actually released the source.

Activate turbo mode.
Done.

Nobody wants to admit it but slashing funding for postdocs is the right answer. Right now it's so easy to get a postdoc job that professors consider themselves a success if their students get a postdoc position. meanwhile, if you're supervising a postdoc who can't get a tenure-track appointment, it's considered "moving on to the industry" and no big deal.

If we cut funding for postdocs, this has several benefits. 1) the bottleneck is moved to the grad student level, and fewer grad students will apply; 2) those who would have left academia after their 3rd postdoc wind up wasting less of their life at low pay; 3) the lack of slave labor will cause us professors to actually do the fucking research ourselves rather than being remote grant writing machines as some of my esteemed colleagues have become; 4) more tenure-track jobs will be created from the savings if the grant system adapts by turning into UK style block grants which fund entire departments rather than (often competing) individuals.