Not that it matters anyway. Everyone I know that has a recent phone has a big fat case to protect it.

If the flare was pretty much a direct hit, are we still going to be in the way if it takes 2-3 days for the CME particles to reach us? With a radial velocity of 30 km/s, the Earth will have moved several million kilometers away from the point where the flare struck. I know the Sun rotates in the same direction (~24 day period) as the Earth orbits (~365 day period), though, so maybe that imparts just the right amount of radial velocity.

You're going to have to explain to slow people like myself. Where is the following logic wrong?

Tesla is going to produce, on average, enough energy to run the gigafactory without getting any externally-created electricity. In reality, sometimes Tesla will not create enough energy, so it will draw from the grid. On the other hand, sometimes it will produce too much, and that goes back to the grid, where it is used elsewhere. The energy used elsewhere is used instead of fossil fuel-produced energy. Therefore, effectively, carbon emissions from energy production will be zero (though, as you say, their equipment will produce produce greenhouse gases).

Anyway, I don't get why this should be disappointing to anybody. It sounds like awesome news to me; if everybody did this, we would be a lot better off.

Lastly, I found it quite interesting that 85 windmills in Reno could produce more than twice the energy of 850,000 square meters of fixed solar panels...and it would be more if wind speeds were slightly higher. That seems crazy to me.

He claims they were making $1.5 million a year, actually. I could see why it might be tough to sell out if that's true.

I used to read on a Droid Eris (2009 phone with a 3.2" screen), and it was perfectly fine for my purposes. Well, not for the Kindle app. That worked very slowly at first, then they "upgraded" it and it was unusable. Aldiko worked and looked great, though. In fact, that was pretty much all that phone was used for after a while, since it wasn't connected to any cell phone service. With it on airplane mode, the wifi off, and the brightness at minimum, the battery would last several days. I've since graduated to an old Droid Incredible with a 3.7" screen, which felt huge at first. Put the latest Cyanogenmod on there with the same settings, install Aldiko, and you're golden.

Granted, I couldn't imagine using a 3.2" screen if I needed a larger font, and my Nook Touch is a whole lot more pleasant, but the phone is easier to carry around, so I ended up reading on it more often than the e-reader. The only bad part is losing your place; it's difficult to control the little slider to get back to where you were even on large screens...on the tiny screens it's painful.

This is definitely true of their modeling UI, but I found the video editor quite intuitive, and my last video editing experience before that was several years prior, Adobe Premiere 2.0 or so. With only the tooltips, I quickly figured out various helpful keyboard shortcuts without referring to a tutorial or cheatsheet or anything. The only thing that tripped me up a bit was how to change the output settings (you have to go back to the Scene view/window/whatever it's called in Blender parlance).

Actually, that's more like schadenfreude. It does not take a personality disorder to dislike a famous person. It might not be a reasonable dislike, if it's due to jealousy of their wealth or looks or what have you, but it's not sociopathy. And given the reasonable expectation that these celebrities' exposure will almost certainly garner sympathy for them and improve their careers, their temporary anger and mortification doesn't even seem like that high a price, when the one feeling the schadenfreude is struggling to make ends meet, or has had people making fun of their looks since middle school.

Not saying I agree, but I can understand the point of view.

At any rate, the damage has been done, and trying to stop people from looking is an exercise in futility and madness. Appealing to people's sense of morality or social justice might work for a few people, but it's not going to make any of the victims feel better, or make people check their security settings. It's not going to give NSA an "in" on spying, either. It makes far more sense to raise awareness for the sharing/security settings on phones and other devices, and push handset makers and backup solution vendors for sensible defaults, including encryption. Between social engineering, physical theft, and spurned ex's we probably won't stop this sort of thing from happening entirely, but we can make it a whole lot more difficult.

Two words: cloud city.

Sounds preposterous, I know, but it's almost certainly easier than colonizing the first completely habitable earth-like exoplanet (and the article actually makes it sound more plausible than the name implies). That's not to say we should stop looking for them, of course...far from it. Those are the best chance we have to find extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise.

The important point, I believe, is that incarceration shouldn't be the first response for non-violent criminals. Which makes a whole goddamn lot of sense, the massive snark in the comments here notwithstanding. Yeah, we might end up having to incarcerate some, or maybe even a majority of them, but I guarantee you we end up with less overburdened prisons and more tax-paying, productive members of society.

As for the guy headed to prison for almost 3 years, he should've been hit with fines and/or wage garnishment the first time they caught him. If he kept it up after that, that's when you start hitting him with heavier fines, community service, confiscating tech, computer restrictions, etc. Wage garnishment need not be as draconian as some of the other commenters have said. They know they have to make it worthwhile for the person to work. Yeah, he might quit his job and refuse to get a new one and end up in jail anyway, but he might not, and that would be better for everybody.

Just so. In fact, these days it seems like libraries are more about being community centers than a place to borrow books. Where I live now it's not quite as noticeable, but in my previous city there was always a line to get on the computers, but hardly anybody browsing the stacks.

My library hosts story time for kids, book/movie/anime clubs, beginner PC classes (typing, office software), board game nights, arts and crafts for kids, arts and crafts for adults...all free. During tax time, they have all the forms and information you might need, and they provide information sessions and classes on free e-filing. They also host paid events; recently they had a LEGO exhibit with competitions for kids and open build time, and a Tor editor and author Q&A session where they critiqued the first couple pages of attendees' stories. Granted these things could be hosted elsewhere, but being at the library makes it more likely that I'll hear about it and far more likely that I'll go.

Also, my library also gives me access to subscription sites, including ebook and audiobook sites. I can pay $100 per year to subscribe to ancestry.com, or I could go to my library. I can pay $260 to get lifetime access to a single language on RocketLanguages, or I could go to my library and get access to every course on every language they have for free. While the interface isn't as slick as Duolingo, there are more languages available and it just feels like a better way for me to learn.

And of course there are the books themselves. My city has a pretty solid collection of sci-fi/fantasy, though it's not quite as exhaustive as my previous city. One nice thing they do here is try to have plenty of copies of the first books in a series, something that was a big annoyance before. I can't remember how many times I saw an interesting book while browsing, only to find out it is a sequel and I'd have to request the first one. I could also check out e-readers themselves, something that is relatively new both here and my last city.

TL;DR: you might replace one single aspect of libraries with something like Kindle Unlimited (and poorly at that), but that's not all libraries provide. Not by a long shot.

I'd like to see (and I think this is where things are going) displays that combine or simplify information from sensors.

My car should basically build a mini-map of vehicles around me, potential dangers, and so on. I don't need to see it on the HUD, but perhaps just arrows (color-coded and/or faded with distance) pointing to other cars in case I don't see them. Arrows toward nearby emergency vehicles would be helpful, too, since I can never tell what direction the siren comes from. It should estimate braking distance and monitor driving conditions, and warn me if I'm too close to the car in front or behind me, or if I'm getting too close to anything beside me. That's combining knowledge of the vehicle (weight and braking info), GPS, cameras/range sensors, and current weather information.

I would like performance displays as well. Checking the tach and speedometer is all well and good, but I like to keep an eye on efficiency gauges when the car I'm driving supports it. More to the point, I'd like my car to tell me how fuel efficiency might change if I sped up or slowed down, being mindful of course about the speed limit. I'm picturing a HUD showing a small slice of an estimated efficiency curve with a marker for the speed limit. Maybe a fancier version would take into account information about the terrain and surrounding vehicles to somehow suggest optimal speeds for efficiency and safety. I want my car to notice when efficiency doesn't meet expectations, too, and tell me if tire pressure is off nominal, the car weighs more than expected, and so on.

Lastly, I want to be able to bring up lots of information on startup that disappears when I'm moving or in gear. I want to know how approximately how many miles I have until empty, how my car's fluids are doing (including things like oil purity, not just level), how my car's my battery, tires, brake pads, air filter and so on are doing, safety information (everybody is buckled up, emergency break is off, lights are on if not automatic), and so on.

Or, for the less altruistic out there, write tutorials, put them on your own blog and youtube, link them from the project's wiki in a reasonable, completely non-spammy way (e.g. copy the content, attribute it to your blog with a clearly marked external link), and make a dollar or two from advertising.

Or, if you have the money to spend, offer a bounty.

That's good to know for future reference, though every company I've worked for has offered those things to its employees and contractors.