You either completely missed the point, or didn't pay much attention to the ridiculous statements that came out of NASA when the rovers were being prepped (and thus missed the point anyway, oh well).

It was quite clear at the time that NASA was creating a very expensive self-fulfilling prophecy (panels will last three months without cleaning system, so we'll make the mission three months long, oh hey, the panels will last for the duration of the mission, so we don't need a cleaning system! yay! oh, and we're going to spend over 2x the cost of Pioneer 10 while chanting "smaller cheaper better"), and it is now equally clear that they couldn't even get that right.

I applaud the hardware engineering skills that went into the construction of what's there. I curse and ridicule the absurd thought processes that led to such an insane disconnect between the stated goals and the final results. As I said in the first place, even when NASA gets it right, it's wrong.

Except they never said six months. They said three months, insisted the solar panels would be too covered by dust to get enough power after that, and refused to consider any sort of cleaning system. Even when NASA gets something right, they get it completely wrong.

An exception (and a much more narrow one than most people think) proving the rule. Attorneys must be able to maintain confidentiality in certain matters for our present legal system to function, and they require a special exception to do so -- one no other profession has such an exception (and no, not even medical doctors in most jurisdictions, despite widely-held misconceptions). Furthermore, there are no criminal penalties for an attorney violating confidentiality, whereas attempting to conceal a crime in any other context is itself a crime.

Not in the US. You cannot contractually forbid someone from reporting illegal activity.

The cases are lost in the US for one of two reasons. Either because the smoker should have known the danger (it's been printed on every pack for decades), or because the issues presented have been foreclosed by a combination of past judgements (e.g. the massive every-attorney-general-in-the-country vs every-major-tobacco-company case) and federal legislation.

The cases are not being lost on the merits, but on gating issues.

Tabs came about because nobody would fix the "proper layer". You understand it was over TEN YEARS before the first tabbed browsers started becoming popular, right?

WTF? Just click on "Always Show Bookmarks Bar". You don't have to do anything else. Ever. Your bookmarks bar will be there permanently.

Any particular reason for this "strong" suspicion? Java and JavaScript both eventually end up as native code. The dynamic nature poses interesting challenges, but shouldn't constitute a fundamental barrier to development of an JavaScript engine that's competitive with top JVMs.

You've proven the point. The tools you mentioned are poorly designed pieces of overpriced shit. The jobs pay well because non-technical management decides on the technology based on what slimy salesmen and bribed outside consultants tell them, then goes looking for people qualified to deal with it, and finds them in extremely short supply, because everyone else had the brains to avoid it like the plague.

You can't just "dump" Java for Python (or any other language). There are actual features _written in Java_. Those have to be re-written in another language.

That said, for the end-user, OOo hasn't had a mandatory dependency on Java in a long time, you can use it just fine without a JRE. There are a handful of features still dependent on Java, but most people would use them rarely, if at all. The build process is a different matter and depends heavily on Java.

LibreOffice is working on further reducing the dependencies, but it will take time.

uh, you thought wrong.

The split was over longstanding governance issues. Java really had no particular role.

Sure there is, it just costs a bundle right now (see Hubble). There's a possible middle ground where if you can design relatively inexpensive robotic units to perform generic repair tasks, and design the expensive satellites with reparability in mind, you might be able to sacrifice some reliability to reduce overall costs in the knowledge that anything likely to break can be swapped out later.

If you think NAT and DHCP solve the myriad problems associated with IPv4, you're not qualified to be speaking on the subject.

That would be a relevant statement if artists made any money off music sales.

What's table?

(Seriously, Cassandra doesn't have tables. It's not an RDBMS, and doesn't use SQL.)