Why would it not be legal? The law, by default, allows for anything to be contained in contracts except for specific exceptions that are deemed generally unconscionable. It makes perfect sense to include a clause like the one the OP is talking about when buying the source to a program for incorporation in a larger closed-source ecosystem. If you end up being given something with a GPL-esque license and forced to open-source some or all of your code, at least you have someone to sue for damages.

One word: echolocation.

It will be a long time until any of the science from the target planet comes home. It will almost immediately begin delivering useful data in the meantime, however. There are a lot of things to see on the way out of the solar system, and a lot of interesting data to be gathered during the journey.

That's true, but it could easily collect other data along the way. We could get some more interesting details about the outer reaches of our solar system than Voyager has provided, take pictures of parts of the sky that are obscured by other objects from our perspective, observe the CMB, etc. I'm sure that there's plenty of interesting things that we could come up with to have it do during the journey.

We aren't as far off as you think. What's important is being able to constantly accelerate during the journey. Slow and steady acceleration wins the race. You're not going to do that with a chemical rocket, but with an on-board nuclear reactor and a few advancements in ion propulsion or vacuum propellers, we could make the trip. We could easily launch a probe to start making the journey in the next five years, if we allocated the budget to do so. Humans could make the trip as well, given the right accommodations--only a few years would be passing on-board. None of the technology to do this is very far-fetched at all, but we just aren't willing to spend the money.

That's exactly the problem. I don't care how a game looks, but their camera angle ruined the gameplay itself.

It may have been a great game, but they absolutely ruined it with the camera. The fact that the center of rotation was still on your character, which was permanently stuck covering up one side of your screen, meant that the camera, and thus your weapon, rotated faster in one direction than the other. This only compounded the problems that arose from the fact that you couldn't see what was coming from the "slow" direction.

I understand that they were going for some kind of "cinematic view" or something, but it completely got in the way of the gameplay.

I wonder if we will actually be able to see more than 60% of the screen, this time? From the screen shots in TFA, it doesn't look like it. Within 5 seconds of gaining control in the first game, I opened up the menu to look for a way to change the perspective. When I realized that you couldn't, I gave it about 15 (incredibly frustrating) minutes before I simply shut it off, never to be played again. That was a UI decision right on par with Microsoft's ribbon, if you ask me.

"Difficult to label and identify in a way that people could trust"? Simply putting a term like "made from artificially-grown flesh", or whatever they decide to call it, on the label would constitute an express warranty. If that warranty is breached (by including regular meat), the customers can sue (and win). What's their complaint, here? Do they just have a total ignorance of basic business law?

In my opinion, programmers are born, not taught. People who naturally break their decisions down into logic structures will immediately see the usefulness in programming and find it interesting from the start. People who don't think this way will never enjoy or become proficient at programming. Changing the way that you present the introductory material isn't likely to change this. Advertising an intro class on "video game programming" might cause your enrollment to swell, but I doubt it will noticeably affect the number of people who make it through the program. If a student doesn't already intuitively understand basic constructs such as if-else chains, loops, variables, etc. in their own decision-making process before they take the class, they aren't going to be able to suddenly start thinking that way once you give them a lecture on the subject.

Although this is most likely a joke product, I would definitely go for something like this for gaming. MMOs in particular require an absolutely insane number of buttons to control your character proficiently. Changing the movement keys to TFGH, binding every other key within reach, and using an 8-button mouse still falls short most of the time.

No matter how good Chrome's JavaScript performance gets, it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all. Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing. Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change. Until another browser implements these two features, Firefox is the only rational option for home browsing.

I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.

If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.

How exactly do we verify that the choices we didn't pick on the form don't have the same set of verification characters as the candidate we did choose? It appears as though we can only see the code for a candidate if we reveal it with the invisible ink; checking the others would ruin the form. I think that these verification characters should be readily visible with or without the invisible ink applied. Otherwise, it would still be possible to fudge with the system and change the vote count while passing all of the verification tests.

Perhaps this is somehow handled by the "independent auditors", but TFA is light on details in that area. Since they don't have access to the voting machines and their source code, nor the actual forms themselves, I don't see how they could verify this, though.

That's hardly a decent solution to the problem, since EVE is the perfect example of how not to handle excessive numbers of players in a single location. EVE has a huge universe and all, but it's mostly accomplished by putting small groups of systems on their own "node". When any significant number of players pile into the same node and start doing things (such as shooting at each other, or just trying to take the gate to leave), it results in instability, poor performance, and quite often brings the entire node down on itself, sometimes stranding characters for days. EVE is quite notorious in the industry for poor performance issues, in fact, though they've been constantly improving over the years. It's also known for requiring an hour or so of downtime every single day or the entire system buckles under the pressure. The problem in MMOs is not scaling to a large world, as this is easily accomplished by simply dividing it into areas and adding more hardware for each segment. The big problem is when people decide to all hop into one location in the game and melt an individual server or node, which happens by default at launch time.

I'm not sure what planet you're from, but around these parts, pirated copies of Windows pass WGE checks just fine.