Don't they get around the certification issue (I believe MIT does this) by issuing a certificate from a spin out company with a totally unrelated name?

And yes, ambient light may be a issue, but it would still work where you just needed some differentiation between background and stuff on top. Remember that to see your walls they have to reflect light - you're just blocking it. Same goes for mirrors.

People seem to be missing the fact that this is damn cool and instead are posting inane offtopic rants about Apple vs Samsung, the widget design (is it really relevant compared to the tech?) and even SOPA.

I think this would be really cool somewhere like the shower if it could be made waterproof. I do a lot of my thinking there, solving programming problems, etc. Having a screen that I could touch and draw on would be really useful.

Essentially this is getting into the realm of smart glass everywhere. It could be put on mirrors to let you 'try on' outfits before you wear them, it could be on oven/microwave doors to display cooking information (I'm a metrics geek) and the list goes on. You could also just have a pane of glass stuck onto a wall - a truly invisible. When you turn it off, it just looks like the wallpaper. Just because it's on a window doesn't mean it *has* to be on a window outside - the technology, to me, is a transparent display which is much more interesting.

PS - the whole point of a weather forecast is that it's a forecast. You look out of your kitchen window and the display tells you what it'll be like in 6 hours including the temperature. Weather widgets are no more pointless on a window than they are in every single smartphone that seems to tout them.

The amusing part is that it would actually reach a slower terminal velocity as the atmospheric density increases.

Have you ever bought something on eBay before? They always rip you off on the postage.

Your mistletoe is no match for my TOW-missile!

The list is clearly stolen from elsewhere. A quick Google of some of the more obscure phrases, such as "Purina Princess" yields this:

http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm

Surely that's not a coincidence?

If he can now see UV light surely it means his eyes will respond to the perceived brightness and contract? Conversely us mortals who can't see in UV should have the opposite effect and our pupils will stay dilated. And presumably in sunlight the brightness should be high enough that your pupils will constrict massively anyway - the danger would be in a dark place with a strong UV source.

Indeed, I think it's a very sensible idea to put a lot of focus on unmanned exploration (comparatively cheap) while we simply don't have the money for big bucks manned missions. Don't forget that while we did some bloody amazing things in the 70's, we did it on the back of frankly obscene levels of government funding. The US, as one economist recently put it, is currently so much in denial about its debt that it's akin to hiding the dead body in the closet.

Bear in mind that in the heydey, the NASA budget was around 4.5% of the federal budget and it's now 0.6% - that works out to be about half the money in constant dollars. Double the money and almost all of it was being poured into the Apollo program. Now NASA has less money, is a larger organisation and has more projects on the go.

This is a golden opportunity to focus our attention on enhancing robotic exploration and unmanned experiments. Thus when we do have another golden age, we'll be a lot more ready for it. There is no point at all throwing small amounts of money at human spaceflight, it is and always will be expensive and cutting corners leads to wasted research hours and costs lives.

The Sussex entry was proven to be false http://uxbridge.uxbridgegazette.co.uk/2010/08/uxbridge-meteorite-claims-prov.html

Only an American English-based machine would. TheRaven64 is from Britain, judging by previous posts (thought I'd check before making baseless assumptions), and over here we call it maths, as a contraction of mathematics. Similarly would it be hard to add in a function that randomly selects whether to use the digit or the word when referring to a number depending on the context (which could conceivably be taught)?

I thought that "may be" as opposed to "maybe" was a bigger giveaway.

Either way, a smart AI attempting to trick humans should deliberately add in mistakes because this is exactly what we perceive as human.

If it's a phone number, what does it matter? You just dial them all in one go.

Hence why I suggested unless it was an outburst on the scale of a cataclysmic variable - in which case we're all dead then anyway, probably before the satellites fall on our heads.

Although note that attitude deviation is a rotational thing (whoops, should have noticed that) - the calculations are essentially to work out the torque on the satellite, not the change in orbit height. In which case it may well be very insignificant.

Interestingly the Ministry of Aviation in England did a study on something similar a while ago: http://aerade.cranfield.ac.uk/ara/arc/rm/3332.pdf. They claim that attitude deviations of up to 1.5 degrees may be observed for a 3 square metre surface area (normal to the Solar radiation) and a 2.5T satellite. That's not insignificant, and if the Sun did somehow produce a sudden large outburst, akin to a cataclysmic variable, then perhaps it might be enough to push the satellites into a decaying orbit. Then again, there are a lot of integrals in that paper and I could be reading it wrong!