I think we pretty much established that there's nothing but rocks on Mars.

Yes the rover flight and landing are marvels of engineering. There's no denying that. But can't we go somewhere new?

In all seriousness, I feel like geologists have taken over NASA and these rovers are their way of bringing fame and power to the discipline of studying rocks.

Let's take the first steps to go drilling into a subsurface ocean instead, shall we not?

Funny, then now after the GNOME 3 and Windows 8 disasters, Max OS X offers the most "classic" desktop experience of all.

On Max OS X You can still right-click on things, you still have a launcher, a trash icon, etc. You can display live system statistics in the launcher, you can have as many freaking windows as you like tiled however you want them, and CHOICE of whether you want an old-school launcher or the "overview/LaunchControl" style. You can move the taskbar around etc...

Need I go on?

How did this happen? How did APPLE of all people remain faithful to the classic desktop while the Linux and MS devs are ditching it.

Feel free to accuse me of lying, but my data usage is actually dramatically LOWER on iPhone 5 than it was on the iPhone4. I am now able to use Pandora, whereas I couldn't before on iPhone4/iOS5. I have also had no problems with iOS6 Maps---in fact iOS6 Maps uses WAY less data than the intentionally crippled Google Maps, which would download bitmap instead of vector graphics and chomp through my data usage like a monster.

I don't mean to argue that Apple isn't an evil company and I recognize that iOS6 has some glaring problems that affect a significant minority of people. But, the truth is, for a vast majority of people, all is well in iOS land.

The disconnect between the reality of the experience for actual iPhone users and the way it gets reported online is massive---it's like two different universes. Walled garden aside, the actual experience with the iPhone is quite good. Whether you buy into the walled garden or not depends on whether there are iOS-exclusive apps you value over your right to tweak and pirate (which, let's be frank, that's what the "freedom" of Android is all about in the USA---sideloading pirated apps and futzing with widgets. In China and other freedom-restricted places, I agree sideloading could have real freedom-related importance).

I learned the hard way that non-LTS Ubuntu releases are alpha software. LTS releases are beta software on release day. Wait for the .1 release of LTS and you've got a good stable system.

The biggest problem with installing non-LTS is that any bug reports are fixed in the NEXT version and they don't give a damn about the the version you're actually reporting from. THEY treat it as alpha, therefore you should not be surprised.

-Written from 12.04.1

Why would anyone ever want to user WhatsApp over google voice is something I don't get.

Except is pretty damn hard to get rid of ads after jailbreaking (the iDevices at least). It would appear the jailbreak developers also make money off ads and they really try hard to stop you from blocking them. One iOS app for jailbroken phones (SBSettings) refuses to have its settings changed if you have messed with your hosts file. Bastards. At least they don't rm -rf the device like some android developers have threatened to do.

All that's being said in this whole article (and despite numerous confusing explanations below) is that you couldn't transmit quantum bits the same way you can transmit normal bits. This seemed to be an essential barrier to quantum computing, until this "teleportation" mechanism of transmitting bits was created.

HOWEVER

This "quantum teleportation" has a PREREQUISITE that for every quantum bit you send you also need to send some REGULAR bits via regular slower-than-light communication. Therefore

***Quantum teleportation just means sending quantum data at regular slower-or-equal-to-light speeds***

Your boycotting EA is not going to change the fact that the always-connected DRM model is going to be significantly more financially successful than the securerom one.

Put all the code on the servers, ship only the art, watch the money flow in. That is what Blizzard taught everyone.

The closer you travel to light speed, the more that distance will shrink for you, so that given sufficient energy you will be able to make the trip in an arbitrarily small amount of time as viewed by yourself.

This message brought to you by special relativity. It's the LAW

7 year old: (grabs phone off the kitchen counter) "Hey Daddy!"

Me (slicing raw pork): "Yes?"

7 year old: (phone unlocked, Runs off to play angry birds on it)

I am actually quite amazed that iOS piracy is so unchecked and that no servers have been seized. Once jailbroken, any app is available malware free off one site that self-polices and pretty much everyone trusts.

What's happening is that 1) in general apple users are willing to pay for stuff; 2) jailbreaking is a greater hurdle to overcome than sideloading; and as a result there is a lower iOS piracy rate and more profit for developers.

DRM is so old school my friend. Diablo 3 showed us that people will pay for a single-player game where only the art is on the client and the code runs on the server. Fast forward ten years: computing and bandwidth will be much cheaper and more powerful and the whole thing will be transparent to nearly everyone.

Diablo 3 will be the model for making people buy games.

We could do a similar mission to Europa for $4B. Not unlikely given that JWST alone is 6B.

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.