Handy in places where reflections are bad though such as telescopes and high end camera internals perhaps.

Unfortunately only very rich ninjas will be able to afford this material. (Pirates will just steal or copy it of course)

If this stuff where painted around the entrance of a curved tunnel and sun light shone on to it, if you you could only see the painted material then you would most 100% definitively see sunlight shining off of it.

Bright daylight being 10,000 foot candles and 1 candle light being something that we can see, 0.035% = 2,857 to 1 ratio.

So, if a fire's too hot then what's stopping you from making the fire smaller and distributing the heat a bit?

2.6Mb = 325KB = half a web page, not very useful.

100Gb/s / 3 billion = 33b/s or 4 Bytes per second each.

100Gb / 10Mibt = 10,000, factor in 250/1 contention ratio and there's maybe enough bandwidth for 2.5million people, not bad but 99.9% short of 3 billion.

Wikipedia says 12Gbit total per satellite: O3b (satellite)

Not enough for 3 billion people.

Whilst I can't say I've mentioned ECHELON, I've certainly known about it for at least 13 years. And why would anyone bother mentioning it when you would just have been labelled a tin-foil hat loon.

Dated 2001:
http://textuploader.com/kxe7

It's been on Wikipedia since then too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think the consensus (amongst people who knew about ECHELON) back then was that all calls were recorded but they couldn't keep them for long.

How much evidence do you need considering that the NSA habitually lie and that whistle-blowers have said they record everything. They are spending a billion plus on a data centre when $27 million is estimated to be enough for the hardware to record all calls. If that doesn't sound like an attempt to record everything then I don't know what does.

And a couple of slashdot links for good measure:
NSA Tapping Underwater Fiber Optics

One mentioning ECHELON:
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Can't you make some kind of setup that triggers if the update fails and alerts you / wakes you up with noise from your smartphone etc.

Or like the other poster who beat me to it - off-load your work to someone in a country where your 5am is mid-day in their country.

Then there is a growing number of Americans who are prejudiced about blacks/democrats/liberals, take your pick, or have -no idea- about history, politics and governing. In these difficult times of wars and crisis, Obama is one of the best presidents Americans could have hoped for. Better than most of your clueless American public deserves.

Yes, and? What's your point? The US and Germany are allies, it makes sense to share intelligence with allies. What doesn't make as much sense and undermines trust is spying on the administration and institutions of your allies.

This is especially true for Germany, to a lesser extent Spain and France. Not true at all for Italy.
Italians love waving their flag around and displaying it on clothing, almost as much as Americans.

I really like DF and have had quite a few memorable moments in both fortress and adventure mode. But the interface is outrageous. Using three (at least) different sets of keys to scroll through a selection, depending on context, is madenning, especially when starting out. I often wonder how Tarn can have so much talent to create a game like DF while at the same time failing so gloriously at implementing a decent interface.

It's $1,7100,000 due to exchange rate. And it doesn't cost more, I think it's less on average due to better standard of driving here. Yes insurance on average costs about 20% more this is partly due to the pound being strong, dollar weak. Also of note is that there is a fraud epidemic happening at the moment, the price of insurance here has doubled over the last 7 years.

So higher liability does not equal higher insurance because those higher amounts are extremely rarely if ever claimed.

8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation. Procedural generation can be a very powerful, impressive tool, but in the case of Elite, creating some generic star systems is really not a big deal. If you want to see incredible precedural generation, look at "KKrieger".

What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds... simply amazing. The ability to fly through the depths of space and landing on a realistic planet without a loading screen has been a long time coming since then. The only other game that implements this, as far as I know, is a comparatively recent indie title "Evochron Mercenary"

Rage didn't crash a single time for me, and I didn't have any of the video driver issues some people where complaining about. I remember it being a fantastic, open shooter with some of the best AI and NPC animations I have ever seen, plus entertaining vehicle combat. And it ran fluidly on my old GTX275 card.

Anyway, JC deserves alot of credit for Doom and Quake alone, which were simply mind blowing, earth shattering games at the time.

The tipping point is where robots + AI can do work equal to that of an average human being. Once that point is reached, why would a corporation choose a human when the robot can do the work?

Luckily AI is coming along slowly, but how long is it before many jobs are replaced by systems like this 'The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong's Subway Engineers' combined with robots, or more specifically jobs being modelled by clever people like Chun in the article.

Chefs, construction workers, cab drivers, factory workers, delivery drivers, miners, cleaners, fast food workers, farm labourers, retail workers, accountants etc are roles we could see fall one by one to better AI and robots.

When most food, construction, gadgets and services can be supplied by robots, what work is left for the majority of the population?