Since Netbeans doesn't have an off-shoot project caused by Oracle's famous Neglect(tm), this seems like it ought to be more successful than the OO.org fiasco. Maybe?

Thank you for putting this so well. I will refer to you if my post up the page requires me to clarify why I'm in support of this.

I feel like this is a good thing overall. But it's especially good compared to letting the abusive H1B Indentured Servant program continue.

To be fair, I was thinking of what it "could do" and not just the mission objectives. When I wrote it, I the Opportunity probe in mind, which far exceeded its mission objectives. On Mars, solar panels make pretty good sense. Would a RTG have made better sense here? As a poster below notes, they simply aren't considered in ESA missions.

I'm not automatically discounting what you say, but do you have a citation? I went looking (for a while, at that) for weights on a likely RTG vs. batteries and solar panels. The best I came up with was fuel mass for the Cassini mission - 4.8 kg producing 110 watts. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... - (and Plutonium 238 needs the least amount of shielding for any RTG fuel). Can you provide information on the weight of the solar and battery components?

After everything went so right, it sucks that the majority of the science it could do was lost due to the solar panels being pointed the wrong way. A quick wiki search confirms that a RTG would have had more than enough output to do the job.

But why in the FUCK are companies being granted effective monopolies on generic drugs?!?!

Nice to know our 'representatives' don't feel the need to hide it anymore. They've been in bed with the drug companies for a long time. But seriously, this takes it to the level of Muppets-style puppetry. No one believe that Kermit is a real frog; we all know that he's got an arm buried up his backside. Do you think Congress gets a bulk discount on shoulder length calving gloves and jugs of lube?

I routinely rent cars for the weekend for less than $30 per day. For that once-every-4-months trip where an electric wouldn't cut it, this seems like a viable solution.

If you left the house every morning with a full tank of gas, how often do you think you would need a refueling station on a typical day?

Every piece of HP kit we've had has been a lemon. We have a 100% failure rate within 5 years on whole classes of desktop machines that we've bought from them, and the servers I have of theirs (that are still around) are a constant headache to get a management session going to their ILO. Unless they're going to give me a batch of equipment FOR FREE to let me use for a year and see that it no longer sucks, my budget will be spent somewhere else. Forever.

Thank you for saying it first. I popped in to say much the same - that I would gratefully support investment in proper computer science education in schools, but not programming

Logic, applied mathematics, problem solving, etc. Please get this stuff back in our schools.

I don't want a movie theater to be a social experience. Consider:
* The rotten parents who bring their too-young children to adult films.
* That ridiculous moron in the row behind you who can't get off their cell phone for 5 minutes.
* The 10-year old who won't stop kicking your chair.
* The guffawing dimwit who laughs like a throat-cancer riddled donkey and does so incessantly.
* Paying $12 bucks for crappy popcorn covered in artificially flavored cottonseed oil.
* The gang-bangers who decided that the parking lot is a hugely entertaining place to spend some time ... people-watching (and yelling).

I've not been to a theater film in 8 years and I've no plans on changing that.

Indeed. I'd also like to hear how Mr. Chen proposes to follow his vision of the greater good, where he has access to everyone's data and will hand it over for any trumped-up warrant, without a backdoor in his soon-to-be-extinct Blackberry's.

Or is he going to do the politician thing and define "backdoor" to mean something conveniently different than what Blackberry has.

Seconded. For this to be true, the testing program must have been a) rigidly defined and b) unchanging. Also probably c) overly simplistic.

If he was handed all of that and did truly automate it, he didn't have much in the way of a skillset to begin with. Programming 201 level skills at best. Had those and didn't expand on them in the 6 years he had to make them better, I still have no sympathy.