Well. For what it's worth, if they brought down an operational or recently decommissioned Chinese or Russian satellite, the world would come one step closer to exploding. Seriously, its great to fantasize about this stuff. But going out and blatantly stealing other countries' military/intelligence hardware (and in effect, deploying an ASAT weapon) would just become a diplomatic disaster.

They do look down at significant angles. This is why you have to hide stuff you don't want seen whenever the spy satellite is over the horizon, not just when its over head. The operators get to decide when to use fuel (or bleep off a flywheel) to reorient a satellite.

It means that life that already started may not cease when supermassive black holes enter the super radiant (ha!) phase. The article mentions this phase lasts hundreds of millions of years. The estimated time of start of life on earth is like 4 billion years ago. So if the atmosphere of a life bearing planet can shield enough of the xrays, then life could well continue on a planet during the super radiant stage.

It just means life (well, really stars) will end faster in those galaxies in the LONNGGG run.

Deception is skill. Playing the player is every bit as important as playing the "cards". This is true of nearly any sport/game. Two boxers may be physically identical with the same reaction times, strength, speed, technique, etc etc. But if one guy can make the other step in the wrong place (playing the player) then that "light" jab will put them right out.

The robots are for sniping practice. For long range shooting, nothing comes close to the actual thing. You really don't want to put real people out on the range.

I mean sure, they COULD just send their snipers off big game hunting, but that might not play so well.

To be fair, the article didn't claim to really 'break' Brooke's Law. The submission did. TFA just pointed out that it doesn't always hold. And that they've totally lucked out and have a perfect situation where it doesn't hold. Infact, I saw this article on Hacker News first. The discussion there is way more interesting, even if half of it is just people arguing about the legality of 'unpaid interns', cause they're not spending their whole time going "OMG NO THEY DIDN'T". It's a fucked up submission.

I doubt the GP would deny your point. You're arguing two different things. We've incorporated a ridiculous amount of viral material over the course of human (or any) evolution. That said, when you get infected by HIV or any other retrovirus, it's not like every single cell in your body all gets brand new retroviral goodness injected into the nucleus. All that viral material in our DNA is from viruses infecting gametes that managed to go on and produce a viable reproducing human being (which now has the viral goodness in EVERY cell because the gametes had it too). Over and over and over again over a shit load of generations. Two related... but also completely different things.

A whole bunch of Pixel Qi running devices were demoed at CES this year. We'll probably never see half of them again, but the rest are all presumably coming out sometime. This shit is friggin NEW. Hasn't really been time to integrate into most laptop lines yet. My bet is that the high-end laptops will start offering this as an option soon enough.

And there are a few downsides. I'm assuming that they are still more expensive than a plain LCD screen. But from what I can remember from the CES videos, there's a distinct yellowish tint to the display (in color/video mode). It was very much as if it was all printed on newsprint. Now, nothing wrong with that for what the screen does, but I cannot see manufacturers pushing out a yellow tinted display across all their lines. There would be... backlash.

They're probably repeating exactly what their supplier told them. Yeah, sure it sounds fishy to Newegg. But until they have actual proof of what happened, its not very nice to go about accusing a long time partner of naughty deeds (or broadcasting that to the whole world... they're probably sending some really angry emails and phone calls right now). Remember, when you have long term suppliers and buyers like this, you actually create a real relationship, and that relationship is worth more than just the money and product changing hands. You don't want to terminate or damage that relationship more than you have to.

When subs (at least US subs) surface to talk, they use highly directional satellite links. You pretty much have to position yourself between the sub and the satellite to pick up the transmission. They also like to use burst transmission for as much stuff as they can. Being short in time makes it pretty tough to pick out too.

There are missiles between the Stinger and the Patriot. The current stock of US radar guided missiles cost anything between 150k to half a million per round. Sure, probably not cheap enough yet, but getting there. And really this all comes down to range/capability. The current stock of missiles are designed to shoot down other missiles or aircraft, meaning they have to be really high-performance. For example, the AMRAAM has to fly out maybe 20-30 miles and then still have enough energy to chase down a maneuvering plane.

When you're dealing with a swarm of "cheap" drones, you won't need all that performance. It's cheap, so it probably wont be able to pull off those high G maneuvers fighter jets try. If it has a small engine (thus small IR), then it probably can't go very fast either. And it's range of its weapons is probably small too. So now you can build a missile with semi-active radar (like the Sea Sparrow), give it 10 miles (or even less). It probably doesn't even have to be supersonic (even cheaper!). So now may have a missile that's as cheap, or cheaper than most drones you're trying to shoot down.

Or, we might just see the return of large caliber AAA. Computer guided 88s. Yum.

Well, as much as desired goes, this also affects how a lot of filters and effects work. For example, it causes most Gaussian blur implementations to 'flare' brights into darks more than they should. And that's been happening for so long, that that's now the expected/wanted behavior out of 'Gaussian Blurs'. If you changed that, you would have some confused/annoyed users.

There was kind of a big splash back in December about this Broadcom chip... Crystal HD or something. Basically, it's a $2 (or some other absurdly low price) video decoder chip that'll take pretty much the full load for decoding most common codecs in use today. It was certified by Intel as well. Wonder why we aren't seeing more netbooks out there being announced with this bugger. I mean, it'll cost next to nothing, and put plain-ass Atoms at par with Ion powered netbooks (well, for 90% of users who only needed/wanted Ion for the video to begin with).

I while ago I was thinking about picking up a netbook versus a used X61. What I found while digging around is that, as a rough guide, any Pentium M of the same clockspeed of a a given Atom chip will kick that Atom's ass in terms of performance. As for your battery life expencancy, my experience with Lenovo Thinkpads (I'm using a T400 right now), is whatever they advertise, lob 10-20% off it and you'll get a fairly representative number. A lot of it has to do with how low you're willing to turn down the backlight. In those terms, the newer thinkpads are really better, cause they're the only ones that have LED backlight option.

Basically, if your current X31 has maxed out RAM and anything but the slowest CPU option, it's at least at parity, if not better than pretty much any Atom powered netbook out there. It also has a much nicer keyboard.

Uh. Safari 1.0 was released in June 2003. Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004. I think it's safe to say that Safari was released before Firefox was mature.