Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sort of invisibility cloak would not be perfect as described.

As light is initially slowed down to make "room" for the invisible event to take place, there is going to be a red-shift in the light because the waves must start arriving more slowly. While this change can be made subtle, that means that an "attacker" needs to either spend a long time slowing down the light, or the "attacker" would only create a small gap in time in which to work.

Still very cool though!

I'm all for more privacy, but all this means is the NSA and those other three letter agencies have decided it's easier to snoop on us without asking Facebook and others simply hand over the data they need.

Great. Now where did I put that tinfoil hat...

I think it's pretty clear that is not what I am saying.

Yes. If their motivation for signing up is to "protect us", then I have a great deal of respect for them. My respect for people willing to give their lives to serve others is not dependent on whether or not the services they provide do us good.

Consider the following scenario. Alice is crossing the street right as an oncoming bus approaches. Bob sees this, jumps in the middle of the road, and pushes Alice out of the way.
Whether or not the bus stops (meaning whether or not Alice was in any real danger). If Bob's intention was to give up his life to save Alice's, then I would have respect for him.

The troops can choose to participate as the "sword" of you will, hoping that they can have a positive effect on their country. While someone who signs up for the military now is most likely going to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, it doesn't change the fact that our armed forces are there to protect us, even if that isn't what our leaders task them to do.

I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to risk their life to try to make our country safer, and whether or not they actually make us safer is irrelevant, so long as their intention is to protect us.

One could fairly easily sell these sorts of bugs for much more than a "modest sum." I believe the common counter argument is that those finding these bugs should be given something closer to the "market price" (for bugs in something as wide-spread as IE, this can be on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars).

I don't really agree with this argument, just thought I'd fill you in on why some people would be complaining. The fact that these bugs were found and patched means that it can't be a horrible arrangement though.

(Note: IANARFE)
There is a difference between prioritizing antenna performance over physical design, and maximizing antenna performance. Maximizing antenna performance isn't really necessary if the signal is "good enough", meaning you wouldn't drop calls when you hold the phone, for example. Prioritizing would mean "this adjustment would look nicer, but we would start to drop calls if we did it", and they are suggesting those adjustments would not be made.

Also, I believe the older rod antennas would be for the 900MHz spectrum, rather than the more modern 2.4GHz spectrum. You can fit an entire quarter-wave antenna inside of the case of a cell phone easily now (although of course having an antenna that extends above the head to get a clearer signal would still be beneficial)

Finally! Then this will certainly be the Year of the Linux Desktop!

Sure, but a thick cloud with high density can also cover up a lot of important things, like roadways and utility poles.

I don't know what is wrong with his statement. Last time I checked, power plants produce more electricity than they use without violating any thermodynamic principles...
Presumably they are converting the stored energy in the waste into electricity, much as a coal fired plant might convert the chemical energy in the coal into electricity.

My dad is a photographer (doing archival work for museums and the like) who uses a Hasselblad. I can verify that at least one of the older models came with a 40GB hard drive attached to the camera, and I think the newer model that he got uses a hard drive as well.

While it would depend a lot on what the photographer is doing, he also tethers his camera to his PC most of the time (since he only shoots stationary things in controlled environments), and the images get saved directly to the computer rather than getting stored anywhere on the camera, so the hard drive space isn't really an issue.

*ignores low UID*

Original? you must be new here.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/

After seeing the pictures on their website http://www.peratech.com/qtcscience.php (the ones at the bottom), this technology looks a whole lot less friendly than an etch-a-sketch.

Sure, I know these are tiny particles, but if most consumers see a giant spiky ball shooting lightning I think they might be a bit weary of this new technology.

I have to wonder a few things after seeing that video:

What happens when a person going 70mph suddenly loses control of their vehicle?
How accurate can that sort of gun be? Over what sort of angle and distance is it will effective?
Is there a way to shield the car with a faraday cage to prevent this sort of thing from happening? And if not, wouldn't this just mess up the police cars? What's going to stop the police (or **AA) from "accidentally" frying your computer with one of these?

This is certainly cool technology that I'd love to get my hands on.. but more info would be nice...

I think this graph in the wiki links sums the problem up nicely.

These copyright extensions are simply ridiculous. It's pretty obvious that the copyrights are going to continue being extended indefinitely, even though this clearly wasn't the original purpose of our IP laws. What gives?