Actually, that one's a little more complicated than just masks from the ceiling. You can do that in an airplane because there's still enough air pressure outside. If you're operating in a vacuum, then you have the same problem as astronauts and U2 pilots: your blood will start boiling unless you have a full pressure suit. That's the Armstrong limit: below 6 kPa, the boiling temperature of water goes below 37C.

Don't worry, they're already working on the next model that will remove the screen entirely and just do whatever you should want to do.

Despite the official spec being defined as code, there's nothing that prevents what you're talking about. As far as I know, the FFMpeg "native" decoder is actually an independent implementation of the standard and although they chose the LGPL as license, they could have used something "public-domain-like". Note that compliance itself isn't based on the decoder code, but on testvectors. Anything that decodes testvectors to something "good enough" (with a well-defined tolerance) is considered compliant with the specification.

I put it the other way: the more people use god-awful earbuds in noisy coffee shops the more we can reduce the bitrate without anybody noticing :-)

Nah, passengers are perfectly safe as long as they're properly loaded into the cargo hold. That would then make it safe to have all the laptops and other bags in the main cabin.

Of course there is, and it's called a photon. The photon is its own anti-particle. Just line the other force carriers.

Anyone with better physics knowledge can comment here? Why would you use lasers to measure differences between matter and anti-matter? As far as I know, the only difference between the two is supposed to involve the weak force rather than the electromagnetic force (on which light is based). Considering that these guys aren't idiots, I must be missing something. How are the lasers useful?

A site like Wikipedia will also need a bunch of lawyers to fight all sorts of trolls, from copyright trolls, to people who don't like what articles say about them.

This is exactly what's *already* supposed to happen. Otherwise any website could spy on anyone.

Browsers will keep doing more stuff because people want them to do more. The choice we have is between proprietary binary plugins or actual standards. I'd rather have html5 than flash.

Except that WebRTC is very useful, and (at least in principle) much more secure than most proprietary conferencing services. For example, it has (and mandates) end-to-end encryption, with perfect forward secrecy.

(disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)

The situation you're describing could still have happened if a few people in Wisconsin/Michigan/Pennsylvania cities had bothered to vote. The main reason why the electoral college might not be such a bad idea in general is what happens in case of a recount. Recounting Florida is already not fun, but recounting the entire country would be *really* annoying.

I'd guess that the main reason life is based on carbon rather than silicon is CO2 vs SiO2. It's a lot easier to breath in (plants) or out (animals) a gas (CO2) than a solid (SiO2). CO2 is also highly soluble in water, unlike (AFAIK) SiO2.

What do you think are the odds of voting illegally and getting away with it? Considering there's only a handful of cases that get detected for any particular election, and that you need a couple hundred thousand illegal votes to reliably rig an election, it would mean a party would have to devise a way to get people to vote illegally with only one chance in 100,000 of getting caught. And on top of that, you have to make it impossible to trace the fraud back to the party. That's just insanely hard. It's much easier to influence the results instead. Just hack a few servers and you're good.