How many stores used to sell ham radios, nascent computers, electronics components and more? Contrast with how many stores sell iPods and Android phones.

Perhaps "don't have anything to offer anymore" is the wrong phrasing. Rather, they don't have anything distinctive, yet are generally more expensive or come with more restrictive policies than Walmart, Best Buy or Amazon, while not offering better sales service.

If that's their goal, I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy Xamarin. It'd give them a serious foothold into the Android and iOS development space using their own technology and language as a basis. It would also go a long way towards cementing their claims to be taking Mono more seriously, since Xamarin sponsors Mono.

Most people have to hack their phones to install HTC Sense on a non-HTC device, voiding their warranty and risking to brick their device. Trying to install vanilla Android on a non-Nexus phone carries the same risk. I think there may be a flaw in your logic somewhere...

What in the hell? Is Cyanogen "rogue" because they're using the Android Open-Source Project as it was designed? Because that also makes Samsung, Motorola, HTC and every other manufacturer who reskins/alters Android "rogue".

This is all true, but it depends on the state of the society you're looking at as well. Propel humanity a few centuries in the future... It's plausible that we'd be in a post-scarcity society where energy is so ubiquitous and easily acquired (be it through fusion or another similarly efficient technology) that it no longer is a point of contention. In those circumstances you could envision building a giant space ship running with the best technology you can manage and power an Alcubierre drive with it.

You're also assuming that such an advanced species would necessarily care about the resulting shockwave.

Yeah, this was absolutely the right call. There were four possible scenarios here:

• -There is no snowstorm and the officials shut the city down. At worst, people lose a day's worth of work, some businesses are affected. Whiners abound.
• -There is no snowstorm and the officials leave the city running. Nothing happens, nobody notices.
• -There is a snowstorm and the officials shut the city down. Everyone congratulates them for their foresight.
• -There is a snowstorm and the officials leave the city running. Possible severe damage to infrastructure, possible death toll, cleanup is significantly more complicated and takes far longer. Officials are berated for their carelessness.

The best course of action by far is to shut the city down. The downside of doing so when there is no snowstorm is far lesser than the opposite. Those who complain have no idea what the fuck they're talking about (and who really expects a cabaret singer to have any knowledge of risk assessment and weather prediction?).

If your business and your work was a chaotic system involving billions of mostly random variables, I'd question your organizational skills. Unfortunately, you can't ask nature to sort her shit out.

If they're targeting key resellers, they aren't. The key resellers were the people covered by the first sale doctrine, whereas you as a consumer buy the key "second hand" from the reseller and therefore cannot claim any support under that doctrine.

It's the nice thing about American politics: equal opportunity corruption. Everyone gets their fair share!

What's next, are you going to start talking about how there's a worm hidden in everyone's ring 0? Look, as much fun as it is to fantasize about a super smartly designed virus which "tells windows not to report it" and "doesn't show up in the registry editor" (why a virus would have to write in the registry in the first place is beyond me), they're unlikely to be on your computer. All those botnets you keep hearing about? They're far, far more likely to be built off CatPicturesScreensaver.exe than from some crazily smart drive-by which is completely undetectable and doesn't do anything... until the doomsday comes.

This isn't to say that "visual cues" and "checking stuff" aren't ridiculous, but you're also not a character in a Bond movie.

Wait. They're slowing the group velocity, which isn't what most people think of when they read "velocity".

Group velocity is the speed at which the signal carried by a photon propagates. Essentially, if you look at a moving sine wave, group velocity is the speed at which it's moving. We already know that this velocity can be altered and can even be faster than c. This is different from signal velocity, which is the speed at which the individual photons carrying the signal propagate. Each photon is also a wave thanks to particle-wave duality, so the wave you're analyzing when you look at photons is the wave embodied by every photon you catch. You can't have faster than light communication even if group velocity is higher than c because the signal is still only going at c. The little packets carrying the wave travel slower than the wave's oscillation, essentially.

Altering group velocity is neat and cool, especially doing so in a vacuum, but it's not what a lot of people here believe.

Quite frankly I don't see why religion would be held to a different standard from any other reason people can think of to not get vaccinated. If someone doesn't want to be vaccinated for ideological reasons (say, Big Pharma conspiracy theorist) or because their religion says no, they should be treated the same way: as a potential danger to others. If it means Disney wants to fire them, well, they should be able to, for both of them. To do otherwise would be discrimination!

Which means you'll have variable sound levels for 15-30 years as old cars aren't upgraded to the less noisy sound requirements. Thanks, but no thanks.

If you remove significantly from the second question, then it loses all meaning. Humans could contribute 0.000001% and the answer would still be "yes", but they'd consider it not to be a problem because it's so small.

You want them to learn the abstract concepts of programming. With C, you quickly get bogged down in memory management, notions like pointers, the complete lack of object-oriented programming, awkward functions and weird workarounds like variadic functions. You can learn that stuff after you've understood what a loop is and how variables work.