What the GP is talking about is Windows 7 Starter's 2GB RAM limit. You can stuff more RAM into a machine running Starter (which is most netbooks) but it will only actually use 2GB. To be able to use more than 2GB with your netbook you need to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium which is about $80, in addition to the cost to upgrade the RAM. This means the average $200 netbook ends up costing $400 to have a decent amount of RAM available.

I've seen very few netbooks that ship with Home Basic or Home Premium out of the box, most I've ever seen have Starter. Not only is the RAM limit a problem but it also gimps a lot of basic OS features like the ability to use multiple monitors, DVD playback, and fast user switching. Microsoft has put a lot of work into making sure the average netbook is just a crippled web terminal.

the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation

What? It doesn't matter if we can have a direct conversation with alien life forms. The important discovery would be the simple fact that they exist. As of this moment our own planet is the only one in the whole of the universe that we know life exists on. Just finding a second one would be one of the great discoveries in our species' history. It's a bit silly on your part to suggest that such a discovery wouldn't in fact have a significant effect on our civilization.

No they had to use the API provided for USB file sharing. Like every other app that uses this functionality. Stanza was originally using a hack (IIRC pretending to be a PTP device) to do USB sync because there was no API. Now the API exists and is used by a number of apps.

Wow Apple killed Stanza? You better tell that to my copy of Stanza for which I get regular updates. Better yet, maybe you should shut the fuck up if you're not going to fact check things you say.

Several years ago Stanza had a problem because used an unsupported interface in order to load books onto it from the computer. Apple then added an API to allow apps to transfer files from iTunes. Stanza adopted this API and has since had no problems.

Your conjecture about B&N and Kindle doesn't even fucking make sense since Apple has their own eBook store. You're just talking out of your ass. I suspect maybe you've suffered from some sort of severe head trauma recently. You should maybe head to the nearest hospital and get that checked out. You wouldn't want permanent brain damage to occur.

With no Mac support they guaranteed that number was zero.

Also a lot of words to say "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about".

Very interesting. If the mass is low enough, we may see yet another "anomaly" shaking the main stream science community, who still believes in Einstein's relativity theory, which is so obviously wrong that it is almost beyond believe it has survived for more than 100 years.

You certainly typed a lot of words to say "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about". As far as scientific theories go relativity has a lot of very strong experimental support. Though I suppose if you want to say it's "obviously wrong" you might want to include some actual experimental verification or even peer reviewed papers of such a claim, you know, to enlighten us bozos.

You should educate yourself on history. Steve Jobs complained about iTunes' inability to offer DRM free tracks back in February of 2007, with the first DRM-free tracks (from EMI) appearing in April of that year. It wasn't until January of 2008 that Amazon's MP3 store debuted with a DRM-free catalog. iTunes was hardly "following the leader".

Record industry executives openly admitted they were pitting Amazon's DRM-free offerings vs iTunes to see if they would end up pirated with any greater frequency than music from CD. They strung iTunes along for a year before allowing them to sell DRM-free tracks.

Don't you try to rewrite history.

The sustained data rate is not the heavyweight part, it's the heaviness of building a session. With most web services it's the transaction throughput that's important. The problem is magnified by the number of transactions needed for a single page load on modern sites.

Deleting your Facebook and Twitter accounts is one thing, setting every website you've ever worked on to return HTTP 410 errors is something different entirely. Mark decided to take all his balls and go home and made damn sure you knew he was going.

Even the Falcon Heavy is unlikely to be capable of a Moon, NEA, or Mars mission. However the Falcon will very likely be used for ISS resupply and other in-orbit operations, a mission profile at which the Falcon is to likely excel. The only way the Falcon would be able to do a deep space mission would be to have in-orbit refueling in place. While not impossible it's impractical at this point. Building this themselves would be far too expensive and they would definitely need some subsidies. SpaceX needs a nice reliability record they can bring to the table before the ESA or NASA gives them money for an in-orbit fuel depot. Assuming they can deliver reliable and cheap personnel and cargo launches to the ISS for the next decade I don't think it would be impossible for them to get the funding/connections needed to build a depot. However I don't think NASA should just sit idly by waiting for SpaceX to prove themselves.

The current four segment SRBs work reliably. The SLS is going to use five segment SRBs which means the new ones will be a completely different design. Solid rocket motors need a very specific geometry in order to burn correctly and provide the amount of power they need to help lift a rocket. Increasing the length by another segment means the geometry is complete altered so too are the methods of pouring and curing the propellant. Every single manufacturing process Thiokol had working for the Shuttle's SRBs needs to be revamped or thrown out completely and rebuilt from the ground up. The new SRBs will start no safety rating whatsoever.

Looking at ads is not the problem with Google's policies. They're not just showing you ads but tracking every move you make on the Internet. They not only have the ability but correlate that data with search history and browsing patterns. They scan through all of your email and correlate all of that data with the search and traffic data.

So you're not just looking at ads but having your behavior and history analyzed. Google is a publicly traded company and has been charged by their investors to maximize profit. They will eventually sell your personalized data. Insurance companies, credit rating agencies, and employee vetting companies would love to have that data. Searching for information about diabetes or browsing WebMD? Your health insurance rates shoot up. Search for porn a little too often? You fail a background check.

A tablet lets me read your dumbshit comment very comfortably from my couch...wait now my kitchen...now back to the couch. I don't have a keyboard at an odd angle so typing is fairly comfortable.

I've got a netbook but I ended up really disappointed by the user experience. The trackpad was microscopic and didn't have multitouch capabilities. The keyboard is very flimsy so typing is a pain. Worst is the UI is completely unfriendly on such a small screen. Even running Ubuntu instead on Windows didn't help on the UI front. This is fairly amusing to me since my Netbook has the same resolution screen (and CPU power) as laptops from the turn of the century so the UIs have regressed significantly in the intervening decade.

My tablet has the same size screen as my netbook but has a UI much better suited to the size. Theres no space wasted on window titles, menu bars, or any other extraneous clutter. Browsing the web the ARM CPU feels faster than the Atom in the netbook.

I'm not going to write a book on my tablet but I won't write one on my netbook either. However it is great for browsing, sending email, looking through photos, and playing games. Saying there are "no benefits" to tablets is ridiculous hyperbole. Current tablets come through on the broken promises of last decade's MIDs.

The problem with a second hand optical telescope in this situation is in order to use it effectively you need infrastructure to process your samples. Even if those facilities exist somewhere in-country they may not be local. If a sample needs to be preserved, transported, prepared, imaged, and then finally examined by a doctor it may not do any good since the process has taken days or weeks.

A microscope that doesn't need to have samples prepared and can potentially image something in situ is a big win. It's even better if this can be plugged into a cell phone so data can be send directly to a doctor. There's millions or remote villages in Africa and Asia that lack running water but have basic cellular phone service. A traveling doctor or aid worker could be in a remote village, immediately image something with a microscope, and have a specialist look at it in hours if not minutes.

The goal of many of these types of projects is to build medical technologies that are practical for the environments in which they'll operate. A delicate surgical light might be fine for a suburban hospital but is completely inappropriate for a field hospital in a refugee camp. A microscope that needs prepared samples isn't appropriate for a traveling doctor days away from the nearest hospital.