Award this year's peace-prize jointly to Manning and Snowden! Guaranteed to piss of the US big time and make the rest of the world smile. And we will forgive you for ever awarding it to Obama and Gore ...

They already hit the first million in just a few hours since the story hit the big media. Refreshing a few times, they seem to do about 200k$ per hour right now, so I guess they might easily sell the first 5000 phones at the reduced price. It was probably a good idea to trigger some people into a quick decision by lowering the price on the first day, so that they can realease a press release tomorrow saying they hit their first target. It will be hard to keep the same pace in the next 30 days, though ...

Looks like Boeing went down about 7% when the news broke ...

Two options, it is fair to assume they used both:

• A) they deployed an initial version of stuxnet which did not do any damage, but which just reported all the connected equipment back to HQ.
• B) After they had an initial idea about the equipment via A) or other intelligence, the suppliers of equiment (Siemens) got a visit from the CIA (or their german counterpart) and they figured out all the components they ordered (probably via intermediates). Ordering 1000 PLCs with 1000 motor controllers must show up on some radar ...

FTFA: "capable de gérer des dizaines de pétaoctets de données", translated as "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data".

Chapeau! Got to praise the French for defending their language against foreign bytes ...

Dear opposition parties of all involved countries (France, Spain, Austria, ...), please drag the responsible ministers to parliament and have them explain every detail of the closure of the airspace as soon as possible. I don't know how it is organized exactly in those countries, but in the political system I know (Netherlands), all ministers are forced to respond to any question posed by members of parliament. The sillier questions can be answered by mail within a few weeks deadline, but I guess that for more important issues like this one, they can have any minister get his ass in parliament with a few days notice. Willfully giving wrong answers is political suicide via a 'motion of no confidence'. In the more likely case that the relevant ministers are supported by the leading majority, they can still be forced to make some embarrassing statements (yes, Obama did call us to close the airspace ...), which could lead to ridicule in the press and losses in the polls.

Congrats to orbital, even though launching a new rocket assembled from parts built by Russians by a company that is already working in the space business for many years seems a small accomplishment compared to what SpaceX pulled off. As is common on a first flight, the main payload is an instrumented dead weight. The coolest thing about this mission is IMO some small cubesats they launched as secondary payloads. These are some super cheap phonesats built by NASA, which are powered by a Nexus One or Nexus S. Data packets that could be received via amateur radio should hopefully appear here soon.

Maybe they could put the processor on a separate daughterboard and call it Group-Hug, as in yesterday's story.

Neat plots, but I find the real-time and historic plots of actual GPS tracks shown at Flightradar24 much more fascinating. Most European flights have an ADS-B transponder on board, which basically is a radio beacon that transmits a GPS position. These signals can be received by anyone with a cheap USB receiver over a few 100 km. For these planes, the position is plotted online with a delay of only 10 seconds or so. American planes seem to lagging behind with adoption of this system. I can watch this site for hours to see what airplane flies over my house, to see how airplane are holding in case of bad weather, to see when I have to pick up friends from the airport, ...

When Shuttleworth grows his beard and tries too hard to sell something, I thought I recognized someone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmvdeNa67E

Must be his half brother ...

The EU has many issues, but prosecution of anti-competitive behavior is one of the areas where they shine. I bought a big Philips 'flatscreen' (i.e. the front is flat, it sticks out half a meter on the backside) for around 1200 euro circa 2001, so can I now claim some of my money back? (Related bonus question, since this is Slashdot: A somewhat obsolute piece of electronics weighing 50 kg is collecting dust in my living room. It is still working perfectly, but has only scart and analog coax inputs. Resolution is also on the low side, it is not HD. Any useful project it can be used for, other than throwing it out of the window to kill my neighbour's cat?)