Comment Windows has been a failure for considerably longer (Score 1) 551
But few have been willing to admit it. See Stockholm syndrome.
Comment Re:"Technically Challenged"? (Score 1) 185
"The obvious joke here is that if you're using Windows, you're clearly "Technically Challenged""
This is a joke?
Comment As an added attraction (Score 1) 56
Enjoy your strip-search!
Comment Two Masters? (Score 1) 188
Google continues its efforts to learn all that is known by MS.
Comment Whither privacy? (Score 5, Insightful) 305
Is this how far we've fallen? No more are we concerned with violations of an individual's privacy. Now we are more concerned with the rights of the violators.
Comment Hell Yes! (Score 5, Insightful) 449
Switch to Linux and the cool factor becomes very much alive.
Comment Beta Versions of Linux (Score 2) 151
Beta versions of Linux Mint and Neon are really not a problem. Risky, yes. Especially if you don't know what you're doing. But, with proper backups, disk partitioning, etc., neither Mint nor Neon has bit back.
I've never been able to say the same thing about Windows, even years after the release was "final".
Comment Re:Meaningless (Score 4, Informative) 249
And any data provided by the BSA is pure bunk. Hence, the study is meaningless for anything other than BSA marketing.
Online Poll-Based Party Seeks Election Win 117
schliz writes "Online poll-based political party Senator Online is looking for senate candidates to contest the next Australian Federal Election. The party does not have any policies or an official stance, and promises to conduct online votes on major issues and act in Parliament accordingly. It has already appointed its candidate for the state of New South Wales through an online recruitment campaign in which candidates had to receive a minimum of 100 endorsements — either via its website or Facebook 'fans' — and raise a minimum of $200. This will be Senator Online's second Federal Election. When it contested in 2007, it received between 0.05 and 0.09 percent of each state's votes."
Gigantic Air Gun To Blast Cargo Into Orbit 384
Hugh Pickens writes: "The New Scientist reports that with a hat tip to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon , physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of a gigantic gun that could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described the design for a 1.1-kilometer-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometers per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit. The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. 'We think it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else,' Hunter says. The gun is based on the SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) light gas gun Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 meters long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometers per second."
Ted Dziuba Says, "I Don't Code In My Free Time" 619
theodp writes "When he gets some free time away from his gigs at startup Milo and The Register, you won't catch Ted Dziuba doing any recreational programming. And he wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't hire those who don't code in their spare time. 'You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems?' asks Dziuba. 'F***, ANYTHING.'"
