Easy one. The people he sold the photos to probably offered him more money. Why take one free phone when you could buy several?

There are (commercial) programs which can legally play encrypted DVDs on Linux. Now if you were looking for free (as in beer) or open-source programs, that's a separate matter ...

I don't know about "99+%" ... and of course the president isn't really decided by plurality anyway. However ... some states do have a runoff system for state and local offices. I recall runoffs in Texas when I was living there. Of course the President has to be handled according to the US Constitution (the electoral college and all that), the state has no say in that.

Of course non-prescription use is ethical - if it is used for its intended purpose. Just because a drug doesn't require a prescription doesn't make it ineffective. And abuse is abuse, whether or not the drug requires a prescription. The summary (and presumably the article) isn't really about whether a drug happens to require a prescription or whether a drug is actually prescribed (I suppose physicians can still subscribe drugs that don't require a prescription), but whether use of a drug outside of its specific intent is ethical.

I mean, I can easily imagine that parents of a child with ADHD might hear of some non-prescription alternative, do suitable research to determine if it is likely to be effective, what an appropriate dosage for their child would be, and of course compare costs - and decide to switch to the non-prescription alternative. What, exactly, would be unethical in that?

Wouldn't the amount of C-14 have been the same for humans and Neanderthals at any given time? Therefore while we may be unclear exactly when they went extinct (presuming Bigfoot is not a surviving branch of Neanderthals), we should have a pretty good idea in the overlap. Unless they use different dating methods for different events, this really shouldn't change the general picture.

It occurs to me ... how large are normal crystals? Has anyone ever heard of a crystal a light-second across? If the size of a time crystal corresponds to the size of normal crystals ... picoseconds? Not very practical.

Probably meant "a la" (sorry, my keyboard doesn't have the proper accents for French) which mean like or similar to.

We haven't had truly anonymous ballots in years here - sort of. When you show up at the poll, they write down your ballot number next to your name. Of course no one is supposed to be able to get that information and correlate it to the actual votes, but just saying ... doesn't matter if they use bar codes or human-readable numbers, as long as no one actually can obtain both the ballots and the lists.

In that sense, no different from all this "anonymous usage data" and other statistics that most software or websites collect. Yes, it could be abused and in fact is hard to prove it is not being abused (as long as they don't tell you about it). Sorry, no idea how to solve that one ...

Of course now we need to find out if it will be safe after the zombie apocalypse!

Presumably that would require curved lenses (parabolic) reflecting the actual image to the wearer, like they use in those "holo sights" for firearms. Not impossible obviously, but not something from a standard ski goggle either.

Obviously focusing on a nearby object would be something of an issue though.

Opera Mobile supports video and camera via getUserMedia (mentioned in another reply, I see) ... no idea of gamepad support though, as it's still pretty rare on phones and tablets.

As a mathematician who sometimes programs, much of my code is indecipherable to non-mathematicians and any degree of commenting won't change it. If you don't understand why there's an exponential function in that code for assigning probabilities to an event in the simulation, dumping an entire textbook into the comments won't explain it to you. Can I assume at least a certain level of knowledge so I don't have to write a textbook? Well, at the time, no - I knew the expertise of the person I was coding for, he simply couldn't grasp that. (He had told me so himself, too.)

If I'd been writing for people who have my non-programming knowledge, I wouldn't need to comment on that particular algorithm at all, it's pretty basic in the field. Should there be some comment left for people who don't know that discipline? Okay, sure - but honestly it won't explain it to them.

84% of Sol's light, and likewise 1%. Combined, they still have 15% less light than Sol at the same distance.

Not possible given the orbital periods. Both planets orbit outside the orbits of the twin stars. (That's the definition of circumbinary, also.)

Personally, one of the first things I did on my XP system was change that infernal blue color scheme. Olive is so much easier on the eyes. (Yes, changed the wallpaper too.) Likewise I found my android tablet never went dark enough so I turned off Auto brightness - even in daylight I prefer it darker than they set it. (Even at minimum brightness I wish I could turn it down further at night.)