The idea to reproduce important results is good and is part of the scientific method. In practice this is much harder to accomplish due to several constraints. I can only speak for my field but I think this applies to other fields as well that the reproduction is hard by itself.

This leads us to a bunch of problems. If it takes a graduate student a year to collect a data set on a custom made machine that is expensive and time consuming who has the resources to reproduce the results? In most branches we are limited by the available personnel. It is hard to imagine giving someone the task of 'just' reproducing someone else's result, as this does not generate high-impact publications nor can be used for grant applications.

The thought behind this would benefit the scientific progress, especially to weed out questionable results that can lead you far off track but someone needs to do it. And it better not be me, as I need time for my own research to publish new results. Any reviewer always asks him/herself whether this is really an achievement that it is worth publishing, which reviewer would accept a paper stating "We reproduced X and did not find any deviations from the already published results" ?

This is exactly what someone would come up with as some kind of "challenge" where the outcome is so obviously biased.

In none of these videos the speed of any smartphone or operating system is on the test. It is the speed of the individual people using their phones. I tried some of these challenges, like a local search for a restaurant. After a bit of practice I could get an answer on my 3 year old and slow smartphone after 6 seconds. From those 6 seconds I spend about 1 second waiting for my phone, the rest is the network connection and my typing speed.
So any improvement on the hardware or software side can only influence the 1 second. Other than that the phone has to guess what I think to prevent the slow typing or speech recognition part.
My first try took 20 seconds as I missed a few shortcuts and this is how you can beat almost everybody by claiming to have a faster phone when you just know exactly what to touch/type.

I agree that in-sourcing can be cheaper as you do not have to pay for overhead and profit. Your argument relies on one premise, which is completely broken.

Your cost to do something is almost never their cost. So if they can get to the same result with 50% or sometimes far less due to economies of scale adding another 20% is still much cheaper than paying for in-source. Even if you in-source you have to pay for the whole infrastructure. Your email server needs a backup, UPS and staff, whereas the cost of a UPS in a large datacenter is split over millions of users.

Unfortunately the situation is not as simple. Just one example: With physical items it takes time and effort to share them. You own a book, the neighbor down the street might own the same book. The likelihood that you are reading it at the same time is pretty low, so why not share it? In a digital world this is no problem, just send some bits, use dropbox or something similar.

Or think of network licences in a company. For a lot of special programs we only have around 10 licences for 250 employees. It's never a problem usually, as very few people are working with the same software at the same time. So we only pay for 10 instead of 250 because sharing the licences is seamless. If the software company would charge the same amount for the 10 network licences than for 250 regular licences they would damage their business model quite a bit. In comparison we use a lot of reference books. I would guess we have around 100 copies of the most used ones, so that you don't waste your time looking for one. It would be painful to only have 10 and then search the whole place to get hold of one.

This is just one aspect but illustrates that there is a conflict. I personally also prefer a game that I can buy and sell as I want to like a physical item but I have tons of games that I only play for a few days per year. In principle I could give away all those games for most of the time on some kind of lending model but that would definitely influence sales of all those companies that produce games, software or other digital items.

recent publications. Good luck trying to find and email an author from a 1980ies paper.

While I do not want to defend the journals I think your comparison with Bernie Madoff does not work here.

While he might have been well respected, he had an incentive to cheat and abuse the trust by putting the money in his own pocket. Why should any journal profit from suppressing or pushing a certain kind of research? It is more the other way around: as an editor I would be looking for breakthroughs and unusual findings as they increase the influence of the journal.

The newspaper article is not giving any information that is not already included in the summary.

The paper is published in Optics Express, the abstract can be read here. The full article is behind a paywall unfortunately. The author claim that this concept could deliver random numbers at a rate of 100 GHz which is quite fast compared to other true random number generators out there that are based on thermal noise, radiation or other processes.

In short: THz penetrates your T-shirt (airport scanners) but not any thin drywall.

Roughly speaking for electromagnetic waves the higher the frequency the more light-like the radiation becomes. THz is close to infrared light, it will not penetrate much but can be used to transmit a lot of data because you can modulate it with a much higher frequency than standard 2.4 GHz wireless LAN. This comes at a price though, if a person walks through the line-of-sight between your notebook and the hypothetical THz wireless access point the signal will be cut off immediately. So it is a nice idea to replace HDMI cables or similar connections but might not work so well as a WLAN replacement.

There are also people working on modulating your LED lighting to transmit data without cables (OFDM Visible Light Wireless Communication Based on White LEDs) and this is a nice example that in the future we might use the whole available spectrum to transmit information and saturation will not be a big problem anymore.

So this would be the answer how it is possible to display so much information with so little memory. That means that the CPU basically has 320x240*24 bit = 225K of video memory to draw the picture in.

How is this possible with so little RAM? It has an image viewer app. A single 320x240 8 bit image is 75K and somehow the LCD needs that data for smooth scrolling at 25fps. So does the processor basically generates a few lines of pixels, sends those to the LCD and then continues rendering/reading from SD card the next few lines and manages all that at 25fps?

1. Yes, they can see each other. Why should they not? You can hear a fighter jet flying faster than the speed of sound easily, similar here. But don't get confused: you will only ever be able to see the past "image" of the other object, this image is traveling towards you with c.

2. More than 1 year. Your idea of a rod is not quite right. Think of it like a big rubber band, then make it stiffer and stiffer. If you pull too hard you would rip off one end but in any case they would probably not notice it for way more than a year (speed of sound).