The Mars rocks will be brought back, at astronomical speeds, straight to the NASA budgeting subcommittee.

The technical definition of 4G requires 1Gbps stationary and 100Mbps while moving. The network tech mentioned in the article is thus 4G.
Notice that current '4G' technologies are usually called '4G LTE' in advertisements, to try to get around the established non-marketing definition.

The book 'the end of homework' explained this pretty well. Research has found that school starts an hour before children are typically awake. School starts so early so that there can be long afternoons of sports practice. Prioritizing learning over sports would thus lead to improved learning.

I recall Junior year of high school. Biology and Geometry were my first two classes, and I would fall asleep during the latter due to late nights exploring the nascent Interweb. Late at night there are no parents nagging you, you can go to sleep whenever you want, it's quiet and you can think or do whatever you want. And, ya know, less sleep means more free time, of which high schoolers feel quickly slipping away as their homework load increases.

Much webmail sent today isn't transmitted cleartext... because it's not sent between two mail providers. For example, if you log into Gmail with SSL, and send a mail to another Gmail account, it's not being sent cleartext across the Internet.

Furthermore, most email users don't know that emails are sent cleartext, particularly if they "see the padlock icon" when logging into the webmail provider, so they may actually expect that emails are sent encrypted, assuming they even know what encryption is. They know they can't read others' emails since they don't know the login credentials, thus conclude that emails are private (if they're unaware of man-in-the-middle attacks or sniffing). So, there's a de-facto expectation of privacy, thanks to ignorance.

Personal robots are basically mobile computers with servos, and computer software/hardware has a long way to go before it can be considered trustworthy, particularly once it's given as much power as a human.

First there's the issue of trusting the programming. Humans act responsibly because they fear reprisal. Software doesn't have to be programmed to fear anything, or even understand cause and effect. It's more or less predictable how most humans operate, yet there's many potential ways software can be programmed to achieve the same thing, some of which would make it more like a flowchart than a compassionate entity. People won't know how a given robot is programmed, and the business that writes its proprietary closed-source software likely won't say, either.

Second is the issue of security. It's pretty much guaranteed that personal robots will be network-connected to give recommendations, updates on weather/friend status/etc., which opens up the pandora's box of malware. You think Stuxnet etc. are bad, wait until autonomous robots are remotely reprogrammed to commit crimes (say, kill everyone in the building), then reset themselves to their original programming to cover up what happened. With a computer you can hit the power button, boot into a live Linux CD and nuke the partitions; with a robot, it can run away or attack you if you try to power it down or remove the infection.
Even if it's not networked, can you say for certain the chips/firmware weren't subverted with sleeper functions in the foreign factory? Maybe when a certain date arrives, for example. Then there's the issue of someone with physical access deliberately reprogramming the robot.

Finally, the Uncanny Valley has little to do with the issue. It may affect how much it can mollify a frightened person, but not how proficient it is at providing assistance. If a human is caring for another human, and something unusual happens to the person they're caring for, they have instincts/common sense as to what to do, even if that just means calling for help. A robot may only be programmed to recognize certain specific problems, and ignore all others. For example, it may recognize seizures, or collapsing, but not choking.

In practice, I don't think people will trust personal robots with much responsibility or physical power until some independent tool exists to do an automated code review of any target hardware/software (by doing something resembling a non-invasive decapping), regardless of instruction set or interpreted language, and present the results in a summarized fashion similar to Android App Permissions. Furthermore, it must notify the user whenever the programming is modified. More plausibly, it could just be completely hard-coded with some organization doing code review on each model, and end-users praying they get the same version that was reviewed.

Boycotting the Superman issue (which supposedly doesn't contain any author tract on gay marriage) wouldn't change Card's mind, but only tell him that people strongly disagree with him (which I'm sure he's already aware of). His claims need to be directly debunked; it sounds like he has some convoluted speculative-fiction logic that leads him to believe that legalization of gay marriage would lead to a dystopic government. I've heard parallel arguments about chaos being caused by traditional institutions being threatened, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a moral panic. Maybe people will start using critical thinking to challenge traditions based on archaic, often dubious, assumptions. If that's a good or bad thing depends on your point of view.

Some media may be convinced to stay away from homophobic authors/content, but that won't stop homophobia because prejudice is easily spread by word of mouth. Self-censorship won't change anyone's minds, the marketplace of ideas needs to do its thing.
Think of it this way, which is better?:
a) someone never hearing homophobic ideas before, then being deluged by the flawed logic of a true-believer, which they are unlikely to be able to completely debunk on the spot
or b) someone hearing point/counterpoint on every issue as they come up

On one hand, everyone being spied on means everyone has standing (but since it's a secret program noone can prove it).
On the other hand, allowing discovery to prove standing allows for fishing expeditions of the type that IP holders would love to use to catch every act of copyright infringement (which judges are now getting wise to).

Zug.com snuck into the super bowl using social engineering as well.
Details here

All Internet 'speech' is hosted by third parties, if you go far enough up the chain. Even if you avoid Youtube etc., and post a video/article to your website, someone can complain to your webhost and get your hosting yanked. Colocate or own a blade in a datacenter? Datacenter owner can yank you. Use Akamai or another CDN? They can yank you. If they're getting DDoSed because of 'speech' on your site, they'll find an excuse in their EULA to justify dropping you.

Now let's say you own a datacenter. Your BGP peers can disconnect from you, stranding you from the Internet. If you find a webhost that cares about free speech, people can jump over them and get their provider to disconnect the entire webhost (this has happened before).

P2P infrastructure depends on peers wanting to connect to you. If you're seen as 'toxic' then noone will.

If someone actually does the research to find what game mechanics are the most pleasurable, that likely won't lead to other games usurping shooters as being the genre that publishers feel safe pumping $50 million into each.
It's also not just a matter of the intensity of pleasure, but also the frequency. If a shooter is very pleasurable when you're shooting things, but a puzzle game is only very pleasurable when you solve a puzzle, then you get more pleasure per minute from shooting.

Those making manipulative 'social games' who have studied psychology to understand how people feel rewarded already understand this (in theory), and have made games with a variety of methods of pleasing the player. It will probably be found that the theory matches the results of the experiments. This means instant rewards, periodic rewards, sparse rewards, novelty, and different game modes.

What would be interesting is to use fMRI to figure out why certain people consider a game fun and others don't. Then, those elements which prevent people from enjoying your game can be alleviated so that the game's audience can be widened. The trick is doing this without dumbing the game down, of course.

Unfortunately one of the first votes the generalists agree on is to delegate power to specialists, including leaders. It's the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

If your unit gets surprise attacked by the enemy, do you want to spend 5 minutes (at least) calling an online vote on whether to counterattack or retreat, or do you want a commander to give an immediate order?

In forums it seems everyone wanted the 3DS Lite, with better battery life and form-factor, ideally with built-in second circle pad.
Nintendo hasn't announced how much better the battery life of the 3DS XL is compared to the original, just that it's 'better'. Better than the available aftermarket batteries?
The XL is now arguably too large to fit in a pocket. This is crucial, since once you get past 'pocket size' you have less reason not to go with a PS Vita or a tablet.

The larger size makes touch controls easier to nail, especially with the finger, which is useful for some games. Deemphasizing the circle pad pro is probably due to the games utilizing it mostly being shooters, and they don't want it to become a 'shooter system'. The people who buy a system for shooters would get a PS Vita, and trying to compete toe-to-toe with the Vita could be a big problem (the original PSP sold well but its games were mostly in different styles/genres from what the DS had.) In other words, market differentiation.

Something I was hoping for from a redesign would be better viewing angle for the 3d effect, as you have to look at it pretty head-on or else you lose the effect -- not good considering the system utilizes gyroscopes and cameras in games that require you to move the system around. And if you're on a bus or something, (I speculate) you'd lose the effect as you bounce around.

I see this as a move to give them an excuse to sell the system at a (probably profitable) $200.

I'd rather type in www.blah or ftp.blah instead of having to remember if it's blah.com, blah.co.uk etc.
The TLD indicating if the site is commercial, organization or a network stopped being accurate once they allowed anyone to get .net, .org or .com domains.
Country-code TLDs have been subverted, with sites like bit.ly using other country's TLDs than the country they're based out of. .gov/.edu seem to still have integrity, yet it's generally obvious what such an institution is given its name.

The main reason for TLDs to exist is so that different organizations around the world can manage their own little slice of the DNS system. Considering how much this is being abused (or about to be) with governments mandating DNS blocks, this suggests a peer-to-peer solution would be superior, or something managed by a central authority not beholden to any government which has the health of the internet as its primary concern (like the EFF).

Years ago I worked at an ISP, and one of our websites was defaced. The FBI traced the vandal back to his AIM account name and left it at that. One of my coworkers checked the AIM profile, which contained some personally identifying information. One phone book later we had a phone number, and some phone calls were made of an, err, 'intimidating' nature. We weren't defaced again (setting a Frontpage password probably helped, too).

The new business model is:
1. Hold onto IP
2. Wait for someone to violate it
3. Sue grandmothers and small business startups
4. Profit!

Seriously though, the article doesn't suggest that legal avenues aren't worth creating, simply that they're inadequate in eliminating piracy and that legislation is needed. The research mentioned is that 86% of 'persistent downloaders' pirate 'because of cost' although the article is unclear if this means that cost is merely a factor or if it's the biggest factor; it's even less clear if this means 'at any price'. This research was commissioned by a pro-IP group, of course, and has yet to be publicly released or validated. Incidentally, the people surveyed were Australians, the same ones frequently charged 100-500% markup for 'digital downloads' (god I hate that term).