i think technically that's more difficult than it sounds, especially for physics faculty (ie, not cs faculty....)

but this is probably the best solution.

"you can use whatever device you want as long as you don't use the cell network, and you declare you mac address"

i thought they'd were gamifying for their employees. earn achievements to boost your salary, that kind of thing. they should do that.

the value in palm is more in their existing relationships to us cell companies than anything else. How many hardware companies are there that can boast a foothold in the market? Seriously you can count them on one hand.

i know that they read the washing instructions before they launder them for you, that's for sure. They won't do the dry-clean only stuff for you tho, you have to wait till you get to your destination for that.

web apps aren't compiled

that's a good point, however, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Authority_(New_York) the MTA is a "public benefit corporation" and not, therefore, a direct agency of the US gov't, per se.

whether or not it's still affected by your citation, I do not know, however, I would imagine the agency would not have extended legal action without consultation first, and this section of the law would have been a very clear obstacle, if it happens to be relevant, and it's the lawyer who then should be sacked

wth is that? are you guys annotating your comments in RTF?

that *would* be cool. don't think the Martian sky has a sight like that tho

Put this in perspective, our moon, which is a fairly large night-sky (or daytime) feature, is about 1800km mean radius, (which is about a quarter the size of Earth, mind you, and we posses the largest natural satellite, relative to the planet, in the solar system), and, by the way it's about 385,000 km from earth on average, which is not very close, but it still appears quite large.

However, Phobos, and Deimos, the two small moons possessed by Mars, are a paltry 11km and 6km in mean radius, respectively. The smaller moon, Deimos, is also farther away, and would appear no more than a small dot in the sky (day or night as it would happen to be). Phobos, by virtue of it's very close orbital distance, would have a shot at actually being recognized by a lay-Martian to be something special in the sky, but it would still appear quite small when compared to the grandeur of Luna.

The photos from these pages depicting a solar transit ("eclipse") from the the surface of Mars, help provide a good metric for comprehending these relative sizes. Notice that neither moon is large enough to actually create an eclipse. Of course, on the surface of Mars, the Sun is slightly smaller than on the surface of Earth, but not by very much. Phobos' transit, Deimos' transit

Finally, both of these on first glance appear to be nothing more than lumps of rock drifting through space, hardly anything to cherish on a romantic skyline like we do the way our perfectly curved Luna hangs. But maybe I'm just being ethnocentric....

i prayed to the spaghetti monster, and i don't have the flu. ergo, it does work

calm down.

These things don't run on short term timescales. This project completed it's design review phase (suggesting many months of design prior to that) in February '06, see the citations on the project's wikipedia page

The economy was doing just fine, in fact very well, until about halloween of 2008. We're not just going to dump this mission b/c the banks are having a rough spot. The money is spent, the project has inertia too.

i believe that would result in having a wrinkle in space-time

i'd tend to agree that 1800 miles is more than a thin skin

but where the hell do you pull 1800 from? Some quick wikipedia'ing shows the earth has a mean radius of 6371km, or nearly 4000 miles, that's radius, so the Earth is about 8000 miles in diameter on average. That's the "body", our "skin", what OP calls the ocean is described as having an average depth of 3790 meters (not km), which is roughly 2.3 miles.

A 2.3 mile thick "skin" is 0.029% of the "body's" total 8000-mile thickness. That, imo, is a thin skin.

Gratis vs. Libre

Before you continue with your article utilizing an ambiguous term to which too much meaning has been attached, please familiarize yourself with this distinction that is a prerequisite to becoming a member of slashdot.

from TFA's blip.tv link, this takes place at 11:09

You're right but you've got it backwards. Today it will be 250GB, tomorrow it will still be 250 and also maybe a year from now, then they'll bump it to 500 but it won't be enough of a bump, because general web usage by then will use so much more data, what with Video+VOIP ubiquitous, collaborative working environments, many more societies depending on bandwidth donations from users to support their operations (ubuntu seeding for example), the list goes on, bitflation will never cease, just as this metaphor's counterpart, currency inflation, will never cease. We keep printing more money, and minting more bits (to an outside observer, it may look as though this is our purpose on the planet)

    But, the bits, like the cash, are inherently worthless, it's what they represent that matters, the collections of them, and in what permutations, and as Moore's Law continues to increase the number of bits we can process per second, we will inevitably use more bits in our endeavors. By setting tangible quantifiable limits on this moving target, you're building a damn far down stream, the reservoir will take some time to build at the bottleneck