When the market desires a solution so strongly, sometimes engineering companies figure out a clever solution, physics constraints be damned. (fit thousands of phonograph records in your pocket, no way!)

Is there any equivalent to retinal displays that could be used to create a sort of "projected lens"? Maybe heat up the air with a laser in a careful way to create a temporary optic? No, that's probably too far out.

Perhaps, like the retinal display, the military will have the incentive to eventually research this, and find some far-out solution that industry can then produce?

What about the Red Epic 617 that will deliver 261.4 megapixels at 30fps, that's supposed to be available for $53k next spring?

I had thought that Japan's 4320p HDTV (33 megapixels) cameras were nuts, but Red's sensors are pushing far far past that.

Cameras and displays are getting to the point that they push more data than any network we've built (and so are obviously many orders of magnitude faster than the human optic nerve).

From TFA:

this polymer system still needs some work before it can be released commercially. For example, the authors must figure out what happens if a second scratch occurs directly where a previous scratch was mended

It's a bit hard to believe they've never tried this though, just to see what happens. So, this comes down to "more funding plz"?

Oh, the Anarchist Cookbook has most of the elements, sure:

• Recipes involving hazardous chemicals? Check.
• Recipes that are likely to explode during key stages of manufacture? Check.
• Recipes that warn you in advance about manufacturing risks? Nope! (caveat emptor)
• Recipes that give good advice on mitigating the risk of explosion during manufacture? Again, no.

Well, two for four isn't bad, right?

Right, I agree with the broader perspective. I was just responding to the one assertion that "citizens can violate the 1st Amend, government can't violate the 1st Amend, but it's government that enforces on behalf of citizens, so effectively citizens can never violate the 1st Amendment". That proposed interpretation of the law, regardless of the broader context, is always wrong.

So NDAs and other trade secrets are unenforceable all of a sudden?

No. It doesn't matter who does the enforcing, it matters who the enforcing is being done on behalf of.

That's like saying "it's wrong for Citizen A to jail Citizen B in their home, so it's also wrong for the state to jail Citizen B for committing a crime against Citizen A". The state and the defendant are totally different parties, you can't do transitive math on them.

For Windows, there are others:

• FoxIt
• Xpdf (win32 binaries available)
• Cool PDF Reader
• MuPDF
• Okular (win32 download)

(yes, there's a ton of good PDF freeware available now)

Benevolent worms are a perennial suggestion in computer security, and the conclusion is always no no no no.

Right, so you've established that copyright protects things that are less useful. So why do copyrights deserve more incentives than patents again?

Obligatory YouTube video.

Also, you can't mention Indian traffic without mentioning farm animals.

Yitzhak Rabin? JFK? MLK Jr? Clinton?

This guy suggests that it's pretty simple to get around, though if it were that easy, you'd think there'd be a tool out there that would implement that already. And I don't see any tools available.

Does Hulu use RTMPE and/or SWF-Verification? If so, apparently the only way is to use ye olde screen-grabbing trick, suck as it may.

Bigwigs can talk all they want. Once a product is free, the grunts don't have to involve the bigwigs in the decision-making process. And grunts choose products based on merit.

I suppose there are support contracts, but 1) that only applies to the largest businesses, and once medium and small businesses move to another product en masse, then bigwigs will start hearing about that other product ("what's this Firefox I've been hearing about so much lately?). And 2) when the answer to "do we need a big support contract for product X" is "not so much... all our people already know product Y inside and out, it's free, it's what they use in their own projects at home, so it's easier to get internal support for that", then the bigwigs will start paying attention to product Y too.

That's the way office politics works. If the guys white white labcoats and clipboards show up, they all of a sudden start behaving nicely. It's only through years of personal experience, and comparing notes with other people, that one gains insight into the proper way to handle people who are clearly going to backstab you when given the chance.

Two problems:

1. Wifi uses a shared-communications medium, so various attacks like DNS spoofing, TCP hijacking, etc. that people have stopped studying because they "went away" once everyone replaced their hubs with switches... Surprise! They're back. It's trivial to spoof DNS over wifi, which means it's trivial to do HTTPS man-in-the-middle attacks. This is the very reason that Firefox tightened up their self-signed SSL certificate behavior recently.
2. Most home gateways have a layer2 bridge between the wifi and LAN networks, which means it's possible to do an ARP spoofing attack on the wired segment, which means that it's possible for someone on the wireless side to sniff traffic on the wired side.

Both of these issues have solutions (DNSSEC + IPSEC for the first, turning off bridging for the second), but the first is onerous enough that 99% of users won't do it, so having a "must use WPA encryption" policy is actually a good idea for in most cases.