I had similar thoughts when I read the summary. From reading the article, it seems the plan would be to do some robotic mining in order to prepare to create a moon base, so this is not purely about mining. If someone has more knowledge of this topic, feel free to correct me here, but it seems it would be much cheaper to do mining in the asteroid belt rather than to go back to the moon, because you avoid the cost of launch out of the moon gravity well. Of course, going to the asteroid belt requires solving a different set of problems, since the journey is longer and farther from the Earth.

Whoa there. The OP may have worded his opinion poorly, but there is no need to take his comments personally. He did not insult you. And he is not dropping support for WebM, as he probably never had any for it in the first place. How about you tell us instead how you're going to spend the next week ripping again all the videos hosted onto your super popular website to make sure it's ready when WebM will be widely supported?

I don't think the argument that people won't want to switch because they spent time building their profile on Facebook is a good one. It would be trivial for a competing website to create some sort of import tool, allowing new users to create a copy of his profile on a new website with the click of a button. Facebook is already doing the same thing to some extent by parsing contact lists directly from webmail accounts.

As many other posters have pointed out, selling internet access is not a type of business which lends itself well to capitalism, because I cannot simply go to another provider. My choices are Bell (DSL) and Videotron (cable), and a slew of small ISPs which need to lease lines from Bell. These small ISPs are being forced by Bell through the CRTC, which is basically the government, to charge the outrageous fees it charges on its own customers, making them uncompetitive. I'm not sure what this is supposed to be, but I can tell you the free hand of the market has very little to do with the price for internet access in Canada. I don't know what line of business you're in, as you have not said it, but I think it is unlikely that the comparison you make applies.

Also, I can't help but wonder if they can make the tree produce enough light to be useful yet avoid making it painful to look at; they may have to use only tall trees with few leaves at human height to avoid blinding drivers. I thought at first the idea to use trees as light sources was just spin from the journalist, but a researcher seems to suggest this very use on the second page of the article.

Are you a shill, or some sort of moron? I live in Canada. I am directly affected by this. In France for the price I pay monthly, I could get a line which is 10 times faster than mine is along with unlimited phone calls to a bunch of places and HDTV. The speed of my internet line, 3 Mbps, has not increased in the past 7 years I have lived in downtown Montreal, which is about as urban as it gets in Canada. The price I pay for that same service, though, has increased quite significantly (at least 20%). Why was Bell able to offer unlimited access plans 5 years ago, and now they can't? Should they not have upgraded their lines since then? Everyone I know that uses the services of Bell hates their guts because they are complete scumbags.

Usage based billing means more people can afford internet service,

Have you bothered checking the pricing schemes Bell offers? Check their lowest offering. It says it's 20$/month in Quebec, but it's 25 if you don't have a phone or satellite service deal with them already. Oh, and the speed is 500 kbps with a 1G data cap. They were able to offer unlimited at 3 Mbps 6 or 7 years ago for 30$ a month. I guess poor people don't do much but change their status on Facebook.

Please go back under the rock you came from. For same money that I pay, people in Europe and Asia are getting unlimited data plans with speeds that approach the speed of my LAN.

Yeah, but the blog post does not spin his work as "the future of interface design", so it's not nearly as exciting.

Your car analogy is terrible (and irrelevant). Nobody is trying to remotely control your car, which is not the case with your computer. The software used in a car is of a very limited scope, so it is much easier to make sure it is running properly. Meanwhile, an operating system is vastly more complicated, with code produced by a number of developers which is probably several orders of magnitude greater and done on a much smaller budget for the code size. Furthermore, if you think that software which doesn't get any updates is stable, you're deluding yourself. Your car firmware probably contains its share of bugs, but they're not considered worthy of making a costly recall.

I agree with everything you said. However, I don't see any other government putting OMG on its front page and calling the old website "unworthy". Maybe the old site were bad, but I don't think you have any more authority than I do to say so, and I think the whole thing could have been done in a much more proper way, saying the sites are down for maintenance and such, instead of implying the previous administration was incompetent and making them look bad. The takeover was supposedly today, it seems unlikely there was much time to look at the infrastructure in place and take such a strong stand, saying everything that was done before is garbage.

Honestly, this is ridiculous. A new administration takes over, and suddenly half of the web infrastructure of Hungary is "unworthy"? So they're going to spend gazillions of dollars to change something that worked, to make the previous administration look incompetent? This kind of pettiness hurts the very people it is supposed to serve. Whoever took this decision has clearly been promoted far beyond what his skill and intelligence will ever deserve.

Could you please elaborate? Tell me why it would be "insane" to choose Windows?

While I completely agree that Windows security record is a train wreck, they do have some useful administration tools which allow you to build security policies to lock down your computers and largely automate the process of keeping the network operational. You don't have these tools on Macs, or on Linux. You're not even making an argument here, as you give no explanation as to *why* you think running Windows is a bad idea.

You think they'll have no work to do if they run a 5000 Windows computers network? With 7 or 8 people on staff? That they'll have tons of time to support 3 or 4 alternate builds with different OSes, different patching cycles, just because "there is no reason in the world to go monoculture"? I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.

No. But it is likely that researchers have an idea of the results they will obtain. If the results are unexpected, they can use another software package to perform the same operations (and any other laboratory can do the same thing too). Furthermore, what extra guarantee do you have that the results are good if you don't take time to read the code compared to a black box system? There's certainly few, if any, researchers who spend time confirming the software package they use are doing as advertised, so I fail to see how using open source makes the data obtained from a study more valid.

Given the shortage of manpower the OP mentions, I think he could use the administration tools that come with Windows, and therefore should buy licenses for it. I'll even go as far as to say that to base such an important business decision on some idealistic views of how a computer science lab should be ran would be irresponsible, and worthy of being fired.

The validity of any research is confirmed by the ability to independently reproduce its results, not because you can check the code which is used to generate the research data.

The article you point to about the Texan market states "Energy prices in Texas have increased substantially since deregulation.", so it doesn't seem a shining example of the free market driving competitive prices for electricity. I can't really speak for the Alberta market, as the article is sparse on details, but allow me to present you another Canadian example, Hydro-Quebec, which is government owned, yet offers "power rates among the lowest in North America". (I don't think it is a good example because it benefits from local conditions which are not available elsewhere, but it still a counter example.) As for the part of your post about regulating offshore oil, I already elaborated my point of view in another post in this thread, so feel free to read it if you're interested.

I'll elaborate my point about regulating drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, since I did not say much about that in my previous post. The wikipedia article on this topic mentions that

The BP well did not have any remote-control or acoustically-activated shut-off switch for use in case of an emergency such as the rig sinking. The countries of Norway and Brazil require them on all offshore rigs, but oil companies persuaded U.S. regulators that such backup devices were unnecessary due to their expense

Another measure which could have helped is the requirement to build a relief well as part of the original design. Coincidentally, Canada requires that and BP has been lobbying to get that requirement dropped.

TLDR: The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could have been largely mitigated had BP been required to take extra precautions required by law in foreign countries.