I'm not sure about this legally. The software does not infect devices, nor does it get installed through deception. It is purchased and installed by someone who has access to the device. The person who installed the software without the owner's permission (assuming that person doesn't own the phone in the first place) would be responsible for any illegal actions. An analogy is trying to bring a lawsuit against a company that produces baby monitors, because someone put a baby monitor in someone else's home without permission or notification in order to stalk them. There are legitimate uses for the software, for example a parent wanting to monitor their minor child's use of the phone. Or I might would put it on my own phone in case my phone is stolen or lost.

bool WillCharacterBeKilled(Character c)
{
          return IsCharacterPopular(c) ? true : true;
}

Stephen King did the same thing in The Stand. He ended up with too many characters and no actual story arc, so he had to abruptly kill a few off. Even then, the book still had a lame dues ex machina ending, and other major characters (Stu) ended up totally irrelevant at the end.

Actual space battles would be extremely boring to watch. It would all take place at such distances that nothing could really be observed very well or viewed as a whole. Assuming energy / laser type weapons, it's purely a matter of how sensitive and accurate the telescopes are that identify the enemy ships and direct the weapons where to fire. Stealth and cloaking would be where the real arms race would be.

That might qualify for the only time I didn't find Bob Saget infuriatingly annoying.

Absolutely not. I live in the middle of the Jefferson National Forest. Within 10 minutes of my home there is also 1,000+ acres of state wilderness, and 1,000+ acres of town wilderness recreation land. Of the three the more local the ownership, the more draconian the laws.

Did you even look at the URL in the OP? It shows several phones that are permanently bent - some plastic, some metal. It shows plastic phones, like the Galaxy, with a cracked display from where it was bent, plastic phones that are permanently bent (BlackBerry Q10, Oppo) as well as other phones with metal frames like the Sony Xperia Z1 and HTC EVO. It also shows various other older models of iPhones that are bent.

No phone is immune to this, and just because it's plastic and kind of "bends back" does not mean the screen or plastic won't crack, etc.

I'll tell you exactly what this is about. Millions of existing iPhone users now have a larger phone in their pocket, and because the previous models were smaller, they were just under the bending threshold (due to the weight of the person, size of pockets, whatever) and they didn't have a problem. Now with the larger phones there is more leverage to exert more force (plus being thinner might make them weaker as well), and suddenly the bigger phones can't handle the stresses that the smaller phones could handle. If these people were to stick a Samsung S5 in their back pocket bad things would happen too (and it just so happens that the older, smaller iPhones were tough enough to handle that).

Is the iPhone 6 as tough as the smaller previous generations of iPhone? Almost certainly not. Is it as tough as other phones the same size like the Samsung Galaxy? Probably so.

Directly below the video I see a link "Hide/Show Transcript", and clicking it expands and shows the transcript.

The burn was successful and Maven is in orbit. It looks like the engines were under-performing in some way though and they will have to tweak the orbit some as a result.

Let me flip your two sentences there.

There you go, in that order you can see what is referred to as "cause and effect".

Here's a good analogy for the movie. Imagine that the hubble / shuttle and each of the two space stations are actually ships in the ocean. When you're in a spacesuit you're in a little dinghy paddling with oars. Thus there are only 3 ships in all the oceans, each operated by a different country with no coordination as to their positioning, yet miraculously they are all so close together in the vast stretches of the ocean that you can easily row from one to another.

Even then, the analogy still doesn't begin to do justice, because orbits are all about motion and not position, and are 3D with elevation, inclination, etc, etc, as well, so there are even more "places" to be than the entire expanses and depths of all the Earth's oceans.

You're comparing a continent to a country. Your Area of Europe at 10.18 million km^2 includes the area of Russia, which by itself is nearly 4 million km^2. The area of the EU, which is likely what the OP was actually discussing, is 4.2 million km^2 (and that includes countries added as recently as last year), which is indeed "half the size" of the area of USA.

The important part is the population density. For the EU it is 112 people per km^2. The population density of the USA is 1/3 that, at 35 people per km^2. Now if you want to compare entire continents, then try North America and Europe, which gives you 12 people per km^2 to 51 people per km^2 respectively.

This happened with Hubble too.

Yes, I most certainly have. Check out Flickitty in Google Play or the iTunes App store. 99.9% of my code is identical in both platforms, which of course is all C++.

What the heck is he talking about? Android has the NDK - native development kit - which allows development in c++ using the standard libraries and even The OpenGL ES API, which is exactly right up Carmack's alley. Plus his code will compile straight across under iOS as well. I really don't understand what he feels is preventing him from going that route, unless he wants to do a ton of UI widget stuff that is platform specific.