Every time there's a story about the trend of automating everything people worry that all the jobs are going to go away and there will be nothing left for anyone who isn't a brilliant scientist or talented artist. Well it actually makes sense to outlaw the automation of C&D letters by bots like the media industry is currently doing. One can make an entirely reasonable argument that this kind of legal activity needs to be performed by a human, not a machine. (At least up up until the point where we get true AI at least, and then everything goes out the window anyways.)

All we have to do is get a law passed saying that each C&D claim has to be reviewed by a real human who is employed by the company whose content is supposedly being infringed, plus specify a minimum amount of time necessary for the review. Huzah! At a minimum of one minute per C&D review (which could certainly be increased to five or even ten minutes if necessary,) 6.5 million C&Ds per week is at least 2,700 new jobs, and if the number keeps doubling every year... In less than two decades we could have an entire economy based around C&D letters!

I learned about a number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales through my Android phone. And in each case i then went and looked it up again on my PC for review before deciding whether or not to make a purchase.

Yet another thing, along with self-driving cars, Google Books, and Google Glass, that Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel seems to be on track for.

"I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes)."

And perhaps even more importantly, both of them aren't intimately tied to the file system! I still remember the first (and only) time i accidentally added a file to iTunes and then immediately deleted it from iTunes only to find out that the actual file had been deleted in windows! It was also the last time i ever used iTunes for anything other than downloading podcasts.

And i still use the winamp. And as other people have mentioned elsewhere, i've had others comment on the fact. Twice in the past month or two coworkers have wandered by my desk and exclaimed "wow, you still use winamp?!" Everyone else seems to have moved on to streaming music players, but i've already got most of my music locally and don't see any reason to waste bandwidth downloading it over and over again.

I believe, given what's said in the comic, that what Munroe was objecting to was not quotations in general, but quoting, fur humorous purposes, material whose foundation for humor was its surreality. And _personally_ i would say that although some xkcd comics are certainly surreal, that is not actually the founding principle of xkcd. I'm sure opinions vary however. The comic in question here certainly has some surreal elements, but the comic itself is about a non-surreal topic, which is why it was referenced in the first place.

http://xkcd.com/16/

So hopefully they'll give us some new spontaneous material to drive into the ground with endless repetition for decades to come? (And i admit, i'm as guilty of that as the next geek.)

I actually went to see Gravity twice. Once in 2D, and then again in 3D because my company organized a trip. If i'd actually had to pay for the 3D version i would have been sorry. I stopped noticing the 3D effect about 5 minutes in. Then during the ISS scene a couple things flew directly at my face and made me flinch (which i do not count as a positive experience) and then i stopped noticing it again for the entire rest of the movie.

To be fair i've said the same thing about every other 3D movie i've seen (with the possible exception of How to Train Your Dragon, where at least the "let's show off the 3D in the middle" scene made me go "ooohh" rather than flinch) but Gravity isn't necessarily going to cure everyone of a preexisting case of 3D apathy.

Any value the movie has as social commentary is overshadowed by its total misuse of the source material. The claims by Verhoeven and other critics that the novel supports fascism are shallow at best. The characters in the novel engage in a number moral debates about the values of their system of government, which you can certainly disagree with but can't just wave away with a simple accusation of fascism. In fact there's evidence that Heinlein got the idea of universal service in the novel from Switzerland, which as we all know is a hotbed of fascism. [/sarcasm]

I'm pretty sure the first half of that isn't true, though you may be right on the second half. The lion's share of space taken up internally is by the battery. However the thing that uses the most power is generally the screen, so if you reduce the screen size you don't need as much battery.

The Droid Mini came very close to matching its larger cousin's specs. The only shortcoming, and it's a pretty large one, is that it only has 16 GB of storage. I don't know what the form factor is for internal flash memory but i doubt there's a significant difference in size between 16 GB and 32 GB, or even 64 GB. If they'd just included a decent amount of storage, and it wasn't exclusive to Verizon, i would have bought one instantly. But going by what seems to be the standard cell phone pricing scheme, the extra 16 GB of storage would have cost $50 more, and i guess they didn't think enough people would have been willing to pay that to make it worthwhile.

After all those weeks of rumors, how did they manage to still get the wrong specs _after_ the device was announced? According to the order page the CPU is 2.3 GHz, not 2.2.

It looks like a really nice phone, i just wish it wasn't so large. I know it's only "slightly" larger than the Nexus 4 due to the reduced bevel, but the Nexus 4 was already too large. I really want a nice phone with a 4.0" or 4.3" screen. (And no, the "Mini" versions of the HTC One, Galaxy S4 and Droid don't count. They reduced the CPU and/or RAM and/or Storage for all of those when they made them "Mini".)

"If you pushed someone into a black hole, could you beat the murder rap by pointing out that he still hadn't finished falling in, from the jury's reference frame?"

Possibly. But in that case they'd just convict you of a lesser charge and instead of giving you the death penalty they'd throw you into the black hole as well.

This. Too many times i've tried to look up something on wikipedia, either because it's a subject i care about or a subject i want to find out about, and discover there _was_ a page on it, but it was deleted for lack of notability. In the second case it's annoying because it's entirely defeating the purpose of a reference work, trying to look up things i don't already know about. If it was more notable i probably would have heard of whatever it was before and wouldn't need to look it up. In the first case, it just feels like a snub.

Then there's the bit where they keep deleting lists of things inside articles, particularly lists of trivia. Trivia lists are one of the quickest and most rewarding things to skim through. (This is why every site on the internet these days frequently posts articles in the form of lists. They get a lot of hits.)

Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia. It's sometimes less informative but it's usually more fun, and i don't get the feeling there's a band of people running around deleting the stuff i'm interested in.

"(with a tip of the hat to another state, whose stupidity created similarily named labels). And now, moderators who live in those two states... fire up the 'overrated' and 'troll' buttons, and I apologize I kept you waiting so long."

Wait, do you honestly think you're going to find anyone from California who's eager to defend the Prop 65 signs? At least i presume that's what you're talking about. I started saying a long time ago that they should just start posting signs at every border crossing, airport and port: "This State contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm." It would cover all the bases and save us a lot of trouble.

I sometimes wonder if the creation of that proposition was actually a very clever black op by the people most liable to lawsuits from _actual_ contamination. Now they can put up signs to get out from the legal liability without anyone paying any attention to them because everyone else has the same sign out front.

Will this allow them to predict what compounds will make the best super-high-temperature superconductors, like Leland Hobart's periodic table of superconducting compounds?

Well as someone who already owned those things because he had a GameCube that seems backwards compatible to me. Admittedly it's a slightly fuzzy area, but you wouldn't have to buy anything to play the game on the Wii that you wouldn't already have had to buy to play on the GameCube.

I don't use the screen controls on my Nexus 7. I've got a PS3 controller synched to it via the Sixaxis Controller app. I have no idea what a Kazzo or a Retrode are, and i seem able to play the games on my PC and tablet just fine, though i'm not sure why you're making a big deal out of that. It's not like i was claiming they were somehow backwards compatible with consoles in the first place =P