It's beyond we mere mortals to stop this trend. Only Science can save us now. Praise be to Science! (Incoming *whoosh* in 3... 2...)

War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength!

The files discovered in the Android code repository are unequivocally Oracle's IP, with an inappropriately modified license. This means, that for these at least, Google is almost certainly liable for infringement. However, since none of those files ever went into an Android handset, their presence, in a legal sense, is most likely completely irrelevant with regards to Oracle's main aim, which is to extract court-mandated royalties from Google and/or handset manufacturers for each Android device they produce. It would be like the RIAA trying to collect royalties on music that I wrote and produced on my own, because they found pirated music on one of my computers.

Does that sound about right, or am I way off-base here?

I'm no scientist, but to my untrained nose dark matter has the same smell as "luminiferous aether" and "epicycles." Basically, it's a theoretical placeholder for something we don't fully grasp yet.

In my daily driver, with mirrors set more or less where the GP's link recommend, that blind spot is not more than a few feet wide at the next lane over, and with a driver who has enough presence of mind to glance out the side window when something moves out of my left wing mirror, it doesn't exist at all. Granted that my car has very narrow roof pillars and no backseat headrests to impede visibility, but it's not impossible to nearly eliminate blind spots in most cars.

Like that $578-million-dollar school they opened in August in LA?

I mean Christ Almighty, Elon Musk has a damned private space program for less money than that.

It's not wrong, it's just what the RIAA thinks it's owed when someone pirates a CD.

See, here's the thing: I drive a 20-year-old car that has... uhm, power brakes? Not ABS, just vacuum assist. As far as driver aids go, that's everything. But right up to the point where somebody in a Suburbalade drives over top of me without noticing, I would argue that in the hands of an attentive driver, it's a safer car than 9/10ths of what current for sale:

I have a foot. If I'm getting too close the car in front of me, it goes up. If I'm going too slow, it goes down. No messing with switches or reliance on electronic sensors needed.

The superstructure of my car has the stiffness of undercooked spaghetti in comparison to most new cars. On the flip side, however, I can see damn near everything, because the A, B, and C pillars aren't thick enough to block much of the road, and the window in the rear hatch goes down to about two feet off the ground. In addition, I can adjust my mirrors so that just as cars leave the center mirror, they enter one of the wing mirrors, and just as they leave the wing mirrors, they enter my peripheral vision. Presto! Total situational awareness.

I know how to drive my car at the limit, and it's four feet tall so it's not about to roll over.

I listen for skidding, and then back off until it stops. It's surprisingly effective, you just have to de-train yourself that pushing harder equals stopping faster.

In addition, because the car is tiny and weighs next-to-nothing, it changes direction quite handily, enabling me to avoid trouble with ease compared to Mr. Suburbalade Owner, whose electronic gizmos are nice, but unable to change the physics of a top-heavy three-ton projectile. The trick here is that for this all to work well, the driver has to be attentive and a good driver. Perhaps not surprisingly, those two things are what most drivers on the road today flat-out refuse to be. Unless a sudden outbreak of common sense overtakes the driving populace, it seems like the trend of taking more and more control away from the driver and giving it to a computer is going to continue, along with the attendant increases in cost, complexity, and motorhead joy-killing. If automation is the goal, though... why don't we just build trains!?

Just because railroads can and have done it doesn't make it a cost-effective solution for houses. There are added maintenance costs involved, and when you start adding moving parts to a structure that's usually expected to last 20-100 years with the occasional re-shingling and coat of paint, you start shortening its effective lifespan.

Same issues as above. We can do it, and do it regularly with RVs, but most people don't want to live in RVs forever, and when something goes wrong with the blackwater tank, the maintenance gets... icky. There's also increased infrastructure costs when you have to place and maintain weatherproof hookups anywhere that somebody wants to park their house.

Every other multistory structure typically has an enclosed and insulated ground floor with a thick foundation beneath it. That is to say, there's usually not direct exposure to the elements on the underside of every upper floor. You also lose the opportunity to take advantage of the ground's thermal mass. There's a reason raised construction is much more common in the South.

You also have to anchor the building to keep it from tipping over in the wind, and have a workaround for when a wheel bearing seizes up or a pusher motor doesn't start after sitting for six months. I won't argue that the scheme is technologically possible, but the real issue is that given the initial costs, added long-term maintenance, and human expectations it's not really feasible, at least not within a sane budget. Don't get me wrong, the overall concept is *really* interesting. For my part, I have an unhealthy fascination with taco trucks -- it's a mobile restaurant! -- but at the same I'd prefer not to live in a motorized apartment block. It's not just a question of "can we?" but "should we?"

I wish they wouldn't have. Along with the various IT "architect" positions, it makes sorting out job listings for building architecture incredibly hard. :)

You have no idea how many times I heard this line in studio: "Hey, you think like an engineer...!" followed by a question about basic structural issues or weatherproofing. It's very frustrating how few architects and designers actually know how a building goes together. I'm a far cry from an actual engineer (show me a load-transfer problem and my eyes glaze over and roll up into my head) but I like to have at least a general concept of how the things I draw actually translate into physical objects. That's a shockingly uncommon sentiment amongst my peers.

This actually happens already, in a sense. I briefly worked for a company that was (tangientally - asbestos abatement is a big deal in older rail cars) involved in the conversion of old Pullman sleeper cars into high-roller wine-and-dine suites for companies and the wealthy. Once they'd been converted over, the owners could invite people aboard for a business trip, or rent them out to travelers looking to experience something new.

As somebody who keeps up with this kind of stuff (albeit often with a rather quizzical expression), you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on. Don't think about how monstrously impractical this would be. Don't consider the long-term maintenance issues involved with the moving parts, the problems involved with things like plumbing and electrical service, or the insulation requirements of a floor raised up off the ground in a northern climate. Don't try to think about how much simpler it would be to achieve the same goals in a passive design. Don't think about any of these things, because if you do your brain will break from the glaring obviousness of the problems. Just take a moment to appreciate the zoomy science-fiction cool factor, and get on with your day.

Still, my jaw hit the floor when, on reading this article, I checked Newegg and found that an 8GB DDR3 kit could be had for less money than what I paid for a 4GB kit at this time last year. I'm almost certainly going to have to jump on that...

I'd say that it's about the point where the government allows itself to become a pawn to another corporation. At that point, what else are you supposed to do?