The choice of music is hilarious!

"Born Free" during the opening beach scene.
"Pirates of the Caribbean" during the missile launch.
And even "Command and Conquer"'s victory music at the very end of the clip.

At least we know the RIAA/MPAA can send take down notices to get this "arms deal commercial" removed =P

The cool, practical implications for hand-held devices start coming to mind if this is combined with a touch screen.

(The camera would also need to be less obtrusive, and able to detect fingers just above the touch screen.)

Great idea. It got me excited until I read it a second time thinking from a non-geeky perspective. It won't get off the ground unless they get someone that understands PR.

Having 3 paragraphs to explain themselves, and mentioning things like "distributed network", "aggregate", and "extendable plugin framework" simply alienates most people that use social networks.

Facebook just says, "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life." Twitter says, "Discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world" on the front page, and had a cute video to explain itself before. Foursquare does the same thing.

For Diaspora to get off the ground, they need a similar cute video, and succinct slogan like "All your friends in one spot. More control over your stuff."

Those radio waves that are beamed into "deep space" degrade and become indistinguishable from the rest of the background electromagnetic radiation just outside our solar system.

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is 4.2 light years away. Our radio waves don't even come close.

So yeah, SETI... that organization that spends a lot of time listening for and sending radio signals, can only hope to catch something from a ship EXTREMELY close to us. And if the aliens have the capability to get that close to our solar system, you can damn well bet they have the capability to see/scan everything in our solar system and already know we're here.

So no, it's not too late. One way to get a signal out in the future, is send a massive amount of organic compounds into the sun. Those compounds are not seen naturally in a star, and they can be detected by examining the light through astronomical spectroscopy (a current human technology). Then we wait the light years it takes for the photons to get to them, and see if they notice.

The effect of volcanic ash on airplane engines can be found here.

A very interesting read, however it's based on a report from proponents of the change.

I'm optimistically inclined to believe everything, but it'd be best to link to a less biased source.

H. G. Wells wrote about this:
The Country of the Blind

As usual, you can start with Wikipedia (Comparing infant mortality rates), and click on their sources to see if they're worth anything.

Here's Facebook threatening a Greasemonkey script developer for pretty much the same thing (altering the output after it's in the browser).

It was the only fully featured music player / organizer (that I know about) that ran on the platform trinity (Linux, Windows, and Mac) out of the box. It looked and acted the same irregardless of the platform.

This is rather important in my opinion, and I find myself recommending these kinds of programs (Firefox, Open Office, VLC, Gimp, Pidgin, etc), because when a computer illiterate friend learns a program like this, they are less locked into their OS. They can use them on their Macs at work, their Windows at home, and Linux if they happen to stumble on it, and they'll feel comfortable with the same familiar programs.

Songbird is far from perfect, but it is an easy switch from iTunes (it can keep the iTunes library in sync with its own), has more features (with some excellent addons) and plays more file types. So now I'm looking for the next platform independent player / organizer to recommend.

I'm rather skeptical of how well boycotts do these days.

However, bad reviews and ratings seem to work.

I'd love to hear about an observed star like this, but at the same time I'm very skeptical of this prediction. We've created strange quarks in particle accelerators, but they decay in 10^-10 seconds. So the prior theory (that they may exist for a brief instant as a stage in the star's collapse) seems to correlate more closely to actual observation. The new theory suggests a way for the star to obtain equilibrium, keeping the quarks in that state while burning them.

Hopefully now that they know what to look for, we can turn the prediction into observation.

oh...

Well then, for the time being I'm more inclined to side with the other guy in the article:

XKCD #720

This bill is not about a kill switch.

From the summary:

Giving a strong legal power (such as power to shut off the internet in an emergency) makes it much easier to control individual websites.


A few years ago, during the big debates on the legality of wire-tapping and torture, many of the counter arguments ran along the lines that the president was within his legal rights because of similar and more massive powers he had during "emergencies" or "war time". And those arguments worked.

No one cares about the practicality of a kill switch, least of all the politicians intelligent enough to understand the bill. A kill switch is not the main goal.

And because of this, the number of donors in those countries is significantly higher.

Dan Ariely talks about this "organ donation phenomenon" about 5 minutes into his TED lecture.
Opt-in European countries: 4-28%
Opt-out European countries: 86-100%

If you want your citizens to donate more organs, you simply change the check-box at the DMV from an opt-in question to an opt-out question.