Heh... I'd mod you up but I don't have points, but here is something you might get a laugh out of: http://wumo.com/wumo/2013/01/3...

I agree, the future of visual entertainment is streaming, not selling people an obscenely expensive and bloated package of crappy TV cannels just so they can watch a handful of them to catch their favorate shows. If the Steve saw that coming over a decade ago thn swearing that "Apple will never make a TV again" sounds more like farsigtedness than an oversight. There is a reason people use bittorent and it's not that all bittorenters are cheapskates (althoug may motivate some of them) it's more that they like the convenience of the on-demand delivery mechanism.

Which is a development that is meeting with much approval in the headquarters of the CIS, NSA, FBI, MI5, MI6, BND, MAD, DGSE, DGSI, BRGE, .... and anywhere else where revelations about the government monitoring every move of the voting public are potentially damaging to the funding of the aforementioned organizations.

What amuses me about these conservatives is that they claim to be against what they call 'the nanny state' but then they turn around and want to ban Tor, ban strong encryption, put entire nations behind a net-nanny firewall they sourced from a company in Red China, ban hooded clothing, ban pocket knives, put CCTV all over the place ban things that obscure your face because the CCTV can't identify you, bug the telecommunications of the entire populace,..... but let me reiterate that they are still against the 'nanny state'.

You left out the last part: "...does not rely on either carbon or oxygen for respiration". I'm no chemist nor am I an expert in exobiology so somebody who is may feel free to educate me if I' wrong here. Having said that, the way I understand it a hypothetical methane based life form on Titan would use complex hydrocarbons as an energy source by reacting them with hydrogen like for example reducing ethane and acetylene to methane and it would consume i.e. respire (inhale) hydrogen for that purpose. So the statement is correct, these Titanian life forms would neither respire (inhale) Oxygen nor a carbon based gas like life forms on earth do, just the hydrogen that is disappearing when it hits the surface of Titan. What you would expect to seen if such life forms existed on Titan. would be an unexplained disappearance of hydrogen (check) and methane being produced (check) with fluctuations in both as populations of these life forms grew and shrank for whatever reasons (seasons, radiation, predators, ...???). Of course there are other ways of explaining such fluctuations which is why we must send a rover to Titan a.s.a.p to do some research.

Looking at the PC-BSD reviews on Youtube I'd have to agree. I moved to OS X partly to escape the Windows 98 UI and while Aqua isn't perfect it is IMHO (your milage may vary) a helluvalot better than any iteration of Windows up to and including version 7. I'm always interested in new ways to interact with computers and the thing that continually disappoints me about many attempts by the FOSS community to come up with desktop environments is that so many fall into the trap of copying Windows. Ubuntu with Unity deserves some credit for at least knocking off OS X's Aqua rather than Windows but they didn't do a good job. The most recent efforts at improving the desktop that I have tried are Gnome 3 and Windows 8 with Gnome 3 being IMHO the clear winner and one of the best takes on re-inventing the traditional desktop that I have seen recently (an opinion that inspires near religious indignation in some people) although Microsoft deserves some respect for at lest trying to come up with something different (again, an opinion that inspires near religious indignation in some people).

Yes, even humans. It may be a little know example of horizontal gene transfer but if you stay vegan for long enough you start to grow grass on your head instead of hair, thus acquiring the ability to photo synthesize.

As opposed to what? Giving a conservative a pile of money which he uses to start a totally unnecessary war in Iraq that cost 4488 soldiers their lives? Look at what a success that turned out to be!!

Does it really matter if the Republicans will approve of this? Perhaps Obama knows that every single Republican congressman is now getting frantic phone calls from every rich Ayn Rand reading jerk that ever contributed to his campaign. Obama also knows that taxing the rich is probably not going to bother the electorate that much. The common working American like any other working class person derives a certain amount of 'schadenfreude' from watching rich people squirm. The is especially the case if those rich people are tax cheats who, unlike the ordinary working American, can hide their earnings in foreign tax shelters. When the Republican party rises up on it's collective hind legs and fight this tooth and claw they will once again be perceived as the party that exists mainly to defend the rich at the expense of the American people since this money would be used to improve America's decaying infrastructure which ultimately would benefit everybody including the rich (even if they are to short sighted and greedy to see it). If I was Obama I would spend the rest of my presidency luring the Republicans into fights that they are dumb enough fight but that also make them look like they only care abut the rich, thus preparing the ground for the 2016 elections.

Yes, but if US capitalism is so superior to European socialism population density should be a trifling obstacle for private enterprise guided by the invisible hand of the free market. (Hint: that was more sarcasm).

Well yes... Listing the top 16 countries is sufficient to show where the US stands relative to Europe in internet connectivity and since the topic is why US internet is so much worse than it is in Europe reproducing the rest of the list seemed pretty pointless and not including the US would be pretty pointless too don't you think?

Yeah, who would have thought that European 'socialism' would be more effective at bringing the internet to the masses than American private enterprise? But sarcasm aside, here are the world's 16 most connected countries according to a study done by Harvard University for the FCC:

1 Sweden
2 Denmark
3 Japan
4 South Korea
5 Switzerland
6 Netherlands
7 Finland
8 France
9 Belgium
10 Norway
11 United Kingdom
12 Germany
13 Iceland
14 Italy
15 Portugal
16 United States

Hehe.. maybe he is. The municipal power company in Reykjavik, Iceland built a Focault pendulum in their HQ as a showpiece. Local urban legend has it that after it was first installed the thing would stop swinging at seemingly random intervals which caused the artist and the physicist who designed it a lot of head scratching. No amount of calculations, physics theory and modelling could explain these mysterious disruptions in the predicted workings of the pendulum so finally they set up a camera to observe the thing. The footage showed the pendulum swinging away for hours and hours until suddenly a member of the cleaning staff walked into the frame, stopped, looked at the pendulum, reached out, stopped it with his hand and then walked out of the frame. Mystery solved... dunno if the story is true but it made me laugh.

The old style Blackberries weren't even very good back in their heyday. I got a Black Berry Curve 8320 in late 2007 and used it for about two years. The phones themselves, i.e. the hardware, was OK, I especially liked the Black Berry keyboard and the little trackball. However, I also concluded that the software and OS sucked ass big time if you wanted to use the Curve as a smart phone to surf the net or use apps to make your life simpler like we do with modern smartphones. And that is precisely what I have been buying large screen smartphones for since the early 2000s, to use apps. Even so I can see how the Curve was the perfect device for SMS and e-mail junkies since those were just about the only two things the Black Berry Curve series did really, really well. So I switched to iPhones the instant I could get my greasy paws on one back in 2009 and never looked back except to contemplate switching to Android a couple of times.

This isn't about a monopoly per se. The issue is that Google has got the same business unit that handles their web search operation also pushing Google services. The result is that Google is actively discriminating against competing services and since these competitors don't have their own search engine with a dominant market share to fall back they are proverbially stuck up shit creek without a paddle. It's a bit as if, say America Online, owned world's entire internet backbone and was preventing competing ISPS world wide from accessing that backbone on equal terms in order to gain a competitive advantage for their own ISP division. That being said Google has an 80% market share in the US/Europe and that pretty much makes them a monopoly in my book or at the very least something pretty close to a monopoly and monopolies are IMHO usually bad. Many of the people on this forum screamed their heads off in the past when Microsoft was doing something like this. Instead Googles army of fanboys is now out in force again trying to paint a big yellow smiley over the whole thing.