Every time the electric car comes up, people come out of the woodwork to declare it a failure because it won't go more than 100 miles without a long recharge, but that's the only real gripe I've seen. You say there are others, I'm curious to know what they are. Every time the web appliance comes up, people come out of the woodwork to declare it a failure because it won't do anything besides surf the web, but that's the only real gripe I've seen. You say there are others, I'm curious to know what they are. Every time the Segway comes up, people come out of the woodwork to declare it a failure because it's too expensive and can't actually live up to the promises of changing urban design, but that's the only real gripe I've seen. You say there are others, I'm curious to know what they are. Do the words "deal-breaking deficiency" mean anything?

You are obviously neither a programmer nor a true user of information technology. Also, plenty of Mac users install X11 on their Macs specifically so that they can run stuff on Unix/Linux servers in X11 sessions.

It's native to the windowing system on both the local and remote machine and there is absolutely nothing I need to do to either system to pop up a remote display other than insert a 'DISPLAY=remote-host:0.0' in front of the command line.

Arafat wasn't George W Bush either. So it fits.

I'm pretty sure you could build yourself a whole bunch of ground-based dishes, or even a few geo-stationary relay stations, for the cost of a moon base and relay infrastructure to get the data from the far side to the near side. There are reasons to put stuff on the far side of the moon, but handling comm traffic from the dozen or so probes we've put out there isn't one of them.

Words are funny things. One can be educated in school ("formal education"), educated by life ("practical experience"), educated by self-directed scholarship, and a half-dozen other ways. Formal Education is not the same thing as Education in "An uneducated person is one easily controlled!". Perhaps it is better to say that an *ignorant* person is one easily controlled.

One idiot in government is all it takes sometimes.

In this day and age, rudimentary programming ability is as vital a skill as basic arithmetic. Even if you want to work a spreadsheet program, you need to do something pretty close to "programming". Just like not every 6 year old is a future Fields Medalist--or even a professional mathematician, engineer, or scientist--but still needs to be taught arithmetic in order to function, so too he should be taught programming, even though 99% of 6 year olds will not become professional programmers.

Throw in some pixie dust, good intentions, and some first order approximations where the math might work nicely, and magic should be a piece of cake.

Spoken like every scientist, and like no engineer, I've ever worked with.

...hehe...suckers!

Everyone agree to write in $DEAD_POLITICIAN_I_REVERE_AS_A_GOD against every unopposed incumbent next election day.

There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who understand that individual liberty are not dirty words, and those who like to put dirty words in other people's mouths.

One benefit is making you think "bitter" is tasty. The second, and more important one, is the prevention of lack-of-coffee headaches.

The Reverend Dr. Thomas Bayes tells us that we can't do worse than chance if we have data, and sometimes we can do better.

You, sir/madam/AC, have made a subtle but important distinction. This is the output of one guy who's been developing and testing it in a video game simulator and with a golf-cart in an empty field. Despite the hardware, this is very much abstract and does not appear to be backed up by the level of engineering effort that aircraft autopilots were when they were introduced. So nice idea, but still quite pie-in-the-sky.