I bet the signal/noise ratio is pretty good right now since the spectrum just opened up. What would it look like once everyone starts broadcasting?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_bond#

makes life possible!

Hydrogen bonds for the win!

The world has a crisis of energy that we are currently throwing resources at, but eventually we will have to pay the piper. Cutting waste is a big part of it, but we will need a long term source of energy once fossil fuels become harder to extract.

Microsoft is so big that they couldn't slow down to give their phones enough time to mature. Big companies have a lot of inertia and they don't like to carry the dead weight. It's a shame they burned through Nokia, but maybe Nokia will make a return.

So how about explain how it's a fail instead of just throwing out condescension. Educate the poor guy/gal!

I understand how these control systems end up connected to the Internet. A few years ago in my process engineering job, I had the ability to VPN in and access our plant's control system. When someone calls at 2 in the morning, you don't want to come in to work to troubleshoot.

I know the difference between the energies of different ranges on the EM spectrum. I also know More than a little bit about oxidation and the effects of UV on plastics. The properties of the average plastics we use in daily life are usually a balance of desired performance and affordability. With this project being an important scientific endeavor, I don't think cost will be as important a factor. That's all I'm saying.

If the atmosphere really does offer good protection from radiation at that altitude, there should be plastics that can handle the UV. These wouldn't be the everyday plastics that make up your deck furniture, but there are lots of plastic additives that can modify the UV stability of a polymer without changing its performance.

I guess you completely missed the point that the habitat is only a small part of the entire structure.

Many plastics are resistant to sulfuric acid and for metals there are coatings and/or passivation techniques to reduce corrosion. Also "lightweight" is relative since the atmosphere is hundreds of times as dense as Earth's.

I guess you're right. Maybe I was just hoping a fork could right the wrong of Debian's name coming from "Deb + Ian".

The amount of fanfare given for this announcement is much more than is warranted, but in any case I wish the team well. Based on one thing though, I do believe they have already shown that this fork is more an ideological exercise than an effort to make a distro that is better for users. Picking a name is important and the team has failed miserably. If you have to explain how to pronounce it, you lose interest of potential users. Why not just pick a simple name?

Go for it! And when I'm a rockstar, I'll buy one--it would be very metal. Unfortunately for the time being, cloned mammoths and my rockstar dreams are equally unlikely.

Even in a probabilistic sense, I could argue that an atheist's strongly held belief would be matched by the religious observer's strongly held belief, and in that way would have the two would have the same probability to lie.

This poll, though probably just for light amusement and discussion, brings up many questions about the philosophy of science. Science is a human endeavor and as such is very much limited to how the world is perceived by humans. There will always be bias, not all of it intentional. Data has no bias, though, so reproducibility is very important before putting too much stock in an observation.

I see two fallacies in the statement: "So statistically one should be more careful about what religious people say." First, I don't see any statistics. Is that an omission or is it a bias? Also your comment seems to have gone from believing research results from these groups to just a general "what religious people say." That technically isn't what was asked, and the result is over generalized.

Please feel free to throw in statistics and maybe narrow down the focus just to the question at hand. You can't fight bullshit with bullshit.

-Scientists
-Politicians
-News Media
-Celebrities
-Pipedot Users

I would guess that the wobbles more easily explainable by the satellite's low mass. Less mass would mean less force to press the core into a spherical shape.

the bathroom

This isn't about hard drive space. The impressive thing is that it runs completely in RAM. I can appreciate the maintainer(s) effort in creating a usable distro with that small of a footprint. Great work!

I would suggest that environmental agencies are part of the problem. As someone who has worked with state and federal environmental agencies, they can be hard to deal with. Permitting any kind of new manufacturing or recycling operation is a tough process and the agencies aren't always reasonable or fair.

I value protecting the environment, but the bureaucracy that typifies these agencies has no value whatsoever.

Hotmail here. I used to tell people that it was "hotmale" because I thought that was funny.

A product doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to offer better value. A dual-screen Courier style tablet could work even if it's not as slick as the original Microsoft design. Just give me one surface mainly for handwriting and the other mainly for viewing documents/video/apps. No need to worry about lefties, as they can just rotate it 180 degrees.

AC, you should really log in because that was a good comment. I had forgotten about Courier, but now I remember how disappointed I was when they canned it. Chasing quarterly numbers makes a lot of these good, early-stage projects die on the vine.

I see the opportunity as having two parts.
Part One--
Without touching the command line, manually running post-install scripts, or even using an "App Store", I want to see a distro that:
-My dad can use to run his small business and to look at adult entertainment sites
-My aunt can use to get on Facebook, upload photos and videos from her phone, and watch YouTube
-A college kid can use to write their lab report on in a format that the professor accepts, view their online textbooks and coursework, and on which they can run the specialized app that they need for their Biochem final paper on protein misfolding.

I have made every single one of the above cases work, but it took searching forums, wikis, and man pages. And there are times when once everything is working, a single upgrade can screw it all up due to dependency issues. For this reason, the number of people I convert to Linux is limited by my ability to help them troubleshoot.

Part Two--
Applications that can be a drop-in replacement for what people use on their Windows box. Yes, I know that such-and-such can open .docx (most of the time) and that WINE is pretty good as long as you use the right settings, but the average person does not want to go from what works now on Windows to a land of busted dependencies, abandoned software projects, command line, and constant fiddling to make things work like they did on Windows. A better value would be something that requires less effort, not more.

I love freedom and I love free and open source software. I hate the thought that people who would otherwise support FOSS may give up and stick with Windows due to their inability to get a Linux distro working on the level they would expect from a Windows box. A technically superior product that is harder to use is not a compelling replacement for something that "just works."

Unfortunately, this is a trend. I know from my industry, R&D is being cut. As the summary points out, short-term this is great because you reduce the headcount and sales of your current products are unaffected, but what happens when someone else comes along with a better value? If only someone could package a nice GNU/Linux or BSD that offered the average consumer a better value than Windows...

These are are the home consoles, Generations 1-8:

-Atari/Intellivision
-NES/Sega Master System
-SNES/Sega Mega Drive/Genesis/Neo Geo
-N64/Sega Saturn/Playstation
-Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox
-Wii/PS3/Xbox 360
-Wii U/PS4/Xbox One

You forgot to include Hindi.

-Fahrenheit 451
-The Jetsons
-Lost in Space
-The Omega Man
-The Terminator Universe
-I, Robot
-Futurama
-Star Trek

Options include: AOL, Hotmail, yahoo, gmail, "work", "school"

Put a choice for each generation, Atari to PS4/Xbox One.

"Open Sesame"
"Mekka Lekka Hi Mekka Hiney Ho"
"Shazam"
"I Have the Power!"
"Beetlejuice" x3
"Bibidi Babadi Boo"
"Word to Your Mother"
etc.

I preferred the Thinkpad X series over netbooks. I've owned an x31, x41, and now an x61. I have wide hands and most netbooks made me feel like I had huge sausage fingers.

Distro Friday is my favorite pipedot feature. It's nice to see what is out there, and what other people think about when computing.

It's not just a tecnical problem--it's a spelling problem too!

Who knows what Microsoft is cooking up? I'm sure the plan is nebulous in all but a few of the Windows team leaders. One thing that has hurt Windows is that the world of computing has been changing faster than they can keep up. The original Windows fulfilled a serious need...providing a simple GUI was absolutely necessary in order to get a computer on everyone's desk in the office. Now, what is the need to be met? I believe, again, the interface is where the opportunity lies. Someone saw this as well, and that person or persons tried to think outside of the box when Metro was designed, but many of a computer's uses do not fit into the tile paradigm.

The announcement says it's not the final logo. That is a crappy name though.

Isn't that the point of a business as a profit-seeking venture?

Groceries

There's a false assumption that we couldn't work on all of these (as well as new smartphones) at the same time. Scientists should have the ability to work on things in their field that interest them.

It's not the speed that would make it hard to drink a cup of coffee on the train, it's the acceleration.

I've had real-time driving data streaming ever since I started driving. I look out the windows and I can read the gauge cluster. No hack required.

I miss the games from the '90s; 16-bit consoles and PC games. Simtower, Myst, Pilotwings, pretty much all the SNES Star Wars games. I am tired of Internet-connection-required, DLC, premium-service-required multiplayer. I just want simple games for my simple mind.