Just try to stick to making updates that DO NOT (and I mean it!) break old features. Then each new desktop will be slightly better than the previous one by simple continuity, no need for rocket science...

This doesn't really make much sense - it either works both on family level and national scale or it doesn't at both - if you can make it work for small groups of families, you can use the same tricks for the bigger society -- what are the real differences there really? If in a communist society people can decide to ride it off on the backs of the others, then same can happen at a small community level. If small community settings provide something in a way of a sufficient deterrent to such behavior, then you can figure it out and implement it on the larger scale. The truth of the matter is that no one really wants to - as with any "old-vs-new" crisis, the people who are in control and who can make things happen typically are the ones who benefit from the system and are the least interested in the change...

You should say "prior aNt"

... well, there is a thing for that -- it's called research papers and reviews, and there is just about a ton of them everywhere for any one to read ...

Wrong! Science is as much about cataloging facts as explaining things. Any good science begins with cataloging - how the hell will you know what to explain otherwise??? ... and so respectively most if not all branches of modern science began and some times for hundreds of years existed as catalogs! This goes for biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and even Math, even if cataloging took place during Pythagoras and Archimedes!

Happy to say - in some fields of science memorization of certain things and ability to recall them are integral part of any work performed in there. So is most of the flavors of biology - if you want to work out certain kinds of biological processes you need to have the grasp of a certain list of enzymes. If you don't, it's like trying to write a code without knowing the language's operators and functions -- if that makes for an easier analogy for you.

In some fields you just need to learn a dozen programming language operators; in some fields it takes a score of enzyme names. The purpose of requiring the students to learn those things is not for them to remember all the digestive enzymes, but to work out an approach and habit that they will need to pursue this kind of work, biology or medicine.

Imagine if your doctor had no clue about the list of medicines and their properties available on the market (and that is _vast_); that'd be a disaster for you.

This is just bulls^%t so please go ahead and stick it up ur arss where it came from... charging in absentia is old as the world itself and if I just don't show up for interview in Sweden then they can't charge me ... what a laughable joke ... and stop posting all over this thread --- everyone got what you have to say and vomiting your garbage all over this place won't make the sh%t that's going on look any different than what it is

NASA had been doing "spectacular landings" and "terrifying software upgrades" their entire existence; not to detract from the awesomeness of it all, the recent spin-offs are just a publicity stunt! -- doesn't it strike you how all this got suddenly so-o-o-o-o-o terrifying and spectacular just about the time of NASA's budget cuts and the NASA's declaration of the fight for "hearts and minds" of its fellow american citizens? This is all fine and cool, of course, but /. should know better duh...

While it is interesting to know what the area of a bit is, it is probably also interesting to know that not one thing has ever been sucked into the event horizon, and so "lost", in the history of the universe -- and never will be -- meet the general relativistic time dilation...

Every time you vote republican a kitten is dying...

If you have N-way entanglement you need to measure all N-1 particles to determine if the one you caught is fast or not, it works the other way around, not #particles/N but #particles*(N-1)/N. The two way split is the optimal in this sense.

And moreover there was a nice analogy here about a pair of billiard balls being hit by an incoming ball of unknown energy and broken into a pair, one billiard balls is then measured and the other is "caught" by the Demon; by the conservation of energy/momentum you can still tell if the caught ball is fast or not from what you get out of your measured ball. However, just as this system is completely classical and so presumably obeys the laws of thermodynamics, there is nothing new in the mentioned paper other than a fancy word "entanglement".

So, have a bigger brain and prefrontal lobe and more connections and you are 25% intelligent... nice !!!

FULLY SUBSCRIBE TO THAT... and btw, historically, the only effect of "focusing research on the problems that will benefit economy" was to hurt the economy but what would you expect from politicians, knowledge of history?

... a nice synchronous kick in the but by 8 referees would be THE optimal solution ... why no one thought about that before?

That's how you keep other people under without having to fire a shot... in the end --- it comes out to be a lot cheaper than shooting. It's not 1955 anymore!