I thought it was some magic spaceage pen or something. I can see sex toy. Maybe even robot dog penis.

Wow, that's really the worst icon I've ever seen. I had no idea what it was until I moused-over. The red really conflicts with the green too.

>About as sad as the fact that a sizable chunk of the population needs proof

Sizable chunk? Citation please.

Moon denial is a very minority position, like 9/11 truther (most of whom I've only seen on slashdot)

Whats sad is attitudes like yours. The moon landing was a 150 billion dollar expense that didn't do much other than to show the Soviets that we could burn money faster.

For a TINY, TINY fraction of that money we are funding COTS which is funding all these private companies who will be tomorrow's leaders.

That's ignoring all the space science that's going on and the incredible missions NASA casually puts out. Hell, look at the NASA launch calendar from this year and last. Pretty amazing stuff that won't be on slashdot or "news for dummies" because it doesn't involve the Apollo missions or some other lowest common denominator low hang fruit.

Heck, GRAIL launches on Thursday and its a moon mission, but I'm pretty sure people like you don't give two shits about that. DAWN just took a closeup shot of Vesta.There's a whole lot more going on than launching a super explosive shuttle that can barely do LEO. Funny how the ISS went from an expensive boondoggle of questionable utility to "humanity's last hope" and the shuttle went from "we should replace this monster" to "we need this to work forever and ever and never get past LEO!!!"

If you and I go to space it won't be on a rocket with NASA on the side, it'll be on a rocket with some private company's name of the side

>Funny enough the increase in population has mostly come during one of the most peaceful times in human history.

That's self-explanatory isn't it? If we're under wartime then we're seeing loss of numbers from casualties (both civillian and military) disruption in social norms this less kids, etc.

The point is more population means more fighting for resources. Shits expensive now, now imagine water shortages or food shortages in nations that are unstable to begin with. It could, as usually is, the tipping point to war. Bush tried it with Iraq regarding oil. Israel controls a lot of water some Arab states need. India and Pakistan are always at defcon 5 and have farming/water shortages.

Hey, you know what? Maybe Paul Ehrlich was right. The Earth isn't a magical machine. Its fucking finite and adding more angry hairless apes can't always be good. Heck, 7 billion and the world is fighting a war on terrorism, religious extremism is up, economies are down, global warming is happening, basic needs are more expensive, etc. Welcome to your post population boom Earth. The question is how long is it sustainable? Things aren't looking too good now.

So wait, $250 is a good price now? For $150 more you can get a full blown 10 inch Honeycomb tablet - the Transformer that gives you google apps, google market, both nook and amazon stores, a tablet experience, etc.

Kindles big market penetrations happened when they started getting cheap. Now everyone has one. This "me too" Color Nook isn't that appealing. Techies will want real tablets and non-techies are happy with their e-ink devices.

Amazon could have released a Honycomb tablet with the google apps and google market, but instead went with the lock-down device. I'd be surprised if people jump on this. A honeycomb or even ipad isn't that much more.

>The only thing you can blame Wikileaks

How about that they know fuck-all of propery using crypto? It blows my mind that such an incompetent organization is in charge of such valuable information.

Anyone who knows shit about dealing with information knows that journalists are extremely tech unsavy and not giving them their own archive and hand holding when it comes to passwords, crypto, etc.

Assange saved 5 minutes and fucked this up. Sorry, but you need to learn the basics of how to deal with people, non-techies, the media, etc if you want to be taken seriously. Not that I take this joker seriously at all. He just confirms my suspicions.

How the hell is he being made fun of? Clearly he is talking about how tablets at that time were terrible. The cult of Steve is so powerful that you're seeing oppression and mocking where there is none. Relax Francis, no one is taking your precious iphone away.

>Do you think they didn't know that we had imposed sanctions on their country which meant many of them starved?

No country has a right to do business with the US or whomever. The reason they fought the US's troops after Saddam was caught was because WE INVADED THEIR COUNTRY AND KILLED A COUPLE THOUSAND CIVILIANS FOR THE FUN OF IT AND NO ONE WANTS TO BECOME A SERF IN A CLIENT STATE. See also Vietnam.

I'm so sick of George Bush getting a free pass for invading Iraq because "sanctions are bad mmm'kay." I wont even go into the millions of sanctions success stories. Sanctions do help keep foreign economies down, keep them with shitty old Soviet age weaponry, keep them uncompetitive, keep them from legitizing their rule with shiny western products etc.

Sorry, but if you want to know why Iraqis hate use, maybe it has more to do with the endless shower of munitions sent by GWB and the rest of the pro-war chickenhawks.

I think its a little late for that. Reddit is the defacto geek hangout and its technology and programming subreddits are a zillion more times interesting than the stuff that gets posted here, and the stuff here is usually 3-12 hours behind anyway. Hacker News is where I got for smart discussions anyway.

Slashdot is just nostalgia at this point. I visit but its back burner stuff at best.

Err, what are you guys basing the scale on? The photo is arbitrarily cropped with no other item in view to help you gauge scale.

Also, the moon landing is a pet peeve of mine. Its moon landings. There were several manned and unmanned as well.

For fun, the moon is 238k miles away. The circumference of the earth on the equator is 25k. So if you were to fly around around the earth on the equator you'd have to do this about 9 times to get to the moon. Far, yes, but not ridiculously far.

>If you have to buy customers perhaps it's time to change ones business strategy.

That's a problem only for organizations too poor to buy congressman and senators.

>That's not really what Google does, they're an advertising company whose primary inputs are words and human behaviours.

Really? Then explain google maps or google street view. Or the big google book scanning going on. Or android and all its sensors. Or how I can see local traffic (more sensors) on my google maps.

Google is a lot of things and I think the idea of using new sensors and new information to paint a new picture of reality is pretty high on their list. I imagine Gosling's big issue is the massive amounts of money needed to do this, the massive privacy issues, and defining what kind of sensors to put where. Hell, every Apsie nerd completely lost his shit over google's wifi sniffing. "ZOMG they are collecting our SSIDs!!!!!!!!!!!" Usually, its the geeks who are the biggest luddites.

Great explanation, thanks, but I disagree this is essentially about trust. Sure, my CA is trustworthy today, but if there's some exploit on our network and tomorrow the internet is flooded with fake certs.

You can't trust entities, you can only trust components. I think CA's in general are just security through obscurity and don't provide any real security. A determined attacker just finds a way to generate a SSL from a compromised CA or uses laws like the PATRIOT ACT to generate one from a CA.

Heh, good catch. .cn is what my 30-something brain meant.