Also, of course, by far the easiest U.S. bases for NK to attack are those located in ... South Korea.

It doesn't look like the editors had a whole lot to work with ... the quad-copter stunt, while a fun idea, didn't seem to work very well in practice (the drones were almost invisible), and the movie it's intended to promote looks absolutely cringe-inducing (Justinnnnnn Beiberrrrrrr innnnnn spaaaaaace > )?

I think it's not really an unsurprising question though. Highly functional phones are relatively new (especially in the U.S.) and thus very fashionable now, and have sort of come to occupy a mental slot as the "do everything solution"—even though they're actually pretty bad for many tasks.

In some cases, of course, the poorer functionality of a phone-based solution is acceptable, and using a device one already has offsets the problems, but I think even in cases where this arguably isn't true, people want it to be, and so tend to try and justify a phone-based solution anyway.

"Resolution" is pixel density, pixels-per-inch or whatever, not number of pixels.

So a higher resolution is actually a great way to give a smaller screen for a given display size...

One reason I mentioned that in particular was because the GS3 mini seems to have a resolution of 224ppi, which is significantly less than current high-end phones. There are also plenty of small high-resolution displays around; my current non-smartphone has like a 2.5" display with about 350 ppi...

I second this. Students in dorms cover their walls with all sorts of things—when I was in college, one of my friends had 99% of his wall surface area covered with tin-foil (not kidding; his stated purpose was to drive his roommate away, but ... oO; ).

Indeed, the "cover walls with soundproof foam" idea actually seems rather more practical in a dorm than elsewhere because of the typically small size of dorm rooms...

The problem is that the mini models aren't just smaller screens, they're lower-spec generally. I suspect that most people that don't like the current bloat-o-phone/phablet trend actually want a nice fast processor, high-resolution display, lots of memory, a good camera, etc, they just don't want the ridiculously oversized phones. I know I certainly don't.

It isn't just Samsung, this sort of simple-minded "bigger = better, smaller = old phone for kids" mindset seems very common amongst all the smartphone manufacturers. [Samsung perhaps deserves a bit more of the blame, though, as they're an industry leader, so other makers probably tend to follow what they're doing to some extent.]

In a computer software context, "orthogonal" has the huge advantage that it's idiomatic. People will immediately understand your meaning... (with "tangential" they'd just go "huh?")

Most people I hear using "orthogonal" outside that context are involved in computers, so for them, it's perfectly normal.

Er, more correctly, some Chinese hate Japan. Many Chinese do not, of course, particularly amongst the younger generations (I live in Japan and know quite a few Chinese people). The same is true of Korea (a younger Korean I know described the well-publicized antipathy towards Japan as "sort of true, but kind of an old-person thing").

In any case, Japan does a lot of business with China (not only does Japan outsource huge amounts of manufacturing to China, but China is Japan's biggest export market, by far), and if this sort of project had gone through, it would be "strictly business," not based on mutual admiration....

Do you think Japan would ever risk becoming reliant on China for any significant amount of their energy supply, at least while China has its current political system?

It'd be neat as an optional "top up" source of power, but it seems a non-starter for anything more, at least in the short/medium term. For now, Japan's gotta figure something out on their own.

This is wrong. The standard Lua implementation is one of the fastest widely used scripting languages out there, by a long shot. It blows python, ruby, etc, out of the water.

LuaJIT can be even faster (sometimes on par with optimized C), particularly number-crunching loops, but in many cases, it doesn't really offer much speedup over standard Lua. [and of course LuaJIT has some drawbacks compared to normal Lua, like increased complex, reduced portability (if you rely on LuaJIT specific features), and a smaller maximum memory limit due to details of its nan-encoded object representation.]

... insanely complex for no apparent reason (like trying to use libpng ...)

This is just wrong.

libpng isn't entirely trivial, but it's actually very simple to use, and quite flexible as well—e.g., it's easy to make the library handle all the weird cases automatically itself, but the option exists for you to handle them too if desired. All in all, I'd say it nicely hits the sweet spot between ease-of-use and power.

It's vastly better designed than many other image libraries (e.g. all the horrid examples that only support whole-image I/O into some awful least-common-denominator image format).

or (c) the story on RT wasn't true. Given RT's usual really, really, bad fact-checking, (c) seems pretty likely...

From what I read, they've currently got four Iron Dome batteries, with a fifth due to be delivered soon. However that isn't enough to cover all the areas at risk, so they're moving them around randomly and in secret.

Although this means that Hamas doesn't know which areas are currently not protected, they sometimes get lucky and target such an area by chance. According to the story (sorry, I can't remember where it was), almost all the rockets that make it through are such chance shots into unprotected areas.

they say a plane is efficient compared to a car but forget that cars and planes don't use the same fuel so it's bullshit, but I'm hoping their numbers are right

The numbers you give for the 747 don't look unreasonable to me, but it seems worth noting that jet airplane efficiency is downright awful compared to other mass-transit. While jet planes are the only practical solution in many cases (overseas, extremely long haul), they're overused in the U.S., where poorly developed regional transit leads to an over-reliance on inefficient (in terms of fuel usage, landling slots, etc) regional jets. It would be a good idea to better develop regional and medium-distance rail, and concentrate on using air-travel for cases where it works better (many countries have already done this of course).

5 gallons of jet fuel per mile is around 450MJ/km; if we assume a 747 holds 450 seats, that's about 1MJ/seat-km. A bit of googling suggests that this is roughly accurate, but probably based on cruising efficiency only; takeoff/landing is much less efficient, and regional jets are signficantly less efficient than large ones.

Modern HSR (and modern non-HSR electric rail) uses around 0.15MJ/seat-km or better....

Seems pretty obvious to me: The Pilot HI-TEC-C 0.25mm

Super thin, extremely consistent, line (no blobbing, faint-spots, or slow starts), widely available in a range of colors, and rather cheap.

The HI-TEC-C line has been around for ages, and there's a reason it remains popular in the crazily volatile world of mass-market pens...