Let's hope Facebook's successor doesn't bother doing them the courtesy. After all, at least Sun left a legacy of something tangible behind.

All the value and cost of the LEDs is in the silicon dies they get from Taiwan. That's why they cram 4,000 dies onto a silicon sheet the size of a postage stamp. The labor required to manually pull them off is cheaper than the material and manufacturing process of the die.
The surface area of a stoplight led panel would be at least 40 dies worth. That's 160,000 LEDs worth of silicon and production time in the fab plant. Just to get 200 LEDs worth of illumination using your technique. Plus, setting up the fab to produce the silicon would be a large initial investment. There's no way it makes sense to make that manufacturing proprietary to something as specific as the stoplight application. It makes about as much sense as building a plant to make custom nails to build one house.

The GP did not say murder rates. He said violent crime rates. Even the most conservative comparisons I can find, which attempt to compare like types of crimes in UK and USA (because they are classified differently), shows at least 200% more violent crime in the UK compared to the USA.

http://www.politifact.com/trut...
http://blog.skepticallibertari...
etc, etc.

A decade ago, this was predicted to be the realm of Java. An internet of things incorporating chips that natively execute Java bytecode, I'm thankful that hasn't come to pass. Even more so now that Oracle is in the picture.

"the immediately earlier sequenced packet". There a word for that. It's called "previous". As in "the previous packet".

I very much doubt they had to "work very hard". You just link to your own software FP library is all. Back in Windows CE days before the mobile devices had math coprocessors, we had to link to software floating point libraries. Intel had their own compiler and linker libaries (that cost money, versus Microsoft's free eVC++ toolset), which vastly outperformed Microsoft's. Using a specific FP library instead of falling back on the default library (which uses hardware and thus where the calculation differences you mention arise) is hardly brain surgery.

This should have far reaching ramifications when it comes to copyright law. As long as the original video or photographs were made consensually or in public then the photographer owns the copyright. I don't see how that can be undone. It also should open the door for further defining what exactly entails "compromising the reputation". What if someone takes a (non-sexual) photograph of a person cheating in public? Or a video of someone acting like a jerk? Those would also compromise the reputation of the subject. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets overturned higher up.

Okay, so explain to me why Google Glass has to be a stand-alone computing device (requiring wlan connectivity, more powerful CPU, larger batteries, etc) to meet your 3 points, instead of a simple optional display / camera peripheral that is used with an existing cell phone? I don't remember any genius deciding that cell phones should all be crammed into bluetooth headsets because a certain portion of the population likes to wear bluetooth headsets all the time.

Google Glass is in the form factor of a display device that has been overextended into the all-in-one device. That makes more sense for a less obtrusive form factor like a wristwatch, but not for something that you have to wear like a cyborg. It will never, ever gain traction as the core mobile computing device, because people that don't want to wear it on their head all the time won't tolerate having to switch back and forth between it and their cell phone. I think the adoption rate will be no better than bluetooth headsets at best.

How much less would Google Glass cost (and weigh) if it was just a low-power bluetooth peripheral with a display and camera? 1/5th the price?

Can you please video yourself reading your comment, upload to Youtube and post a reply with the URL? I read your text too fast and was jumping around in it a bit, and I really would like to adhere more to your original though process as intended. Thanks!

Last year's failure occurred immediately - it was clear there was a major issue with one of the first stage engines from ignition. This latest failure was in the third stage. That's actually worse, because it's showing problems across the board with different engines in different stages, which would be because of totally unrelated issues. Sounds like either fundamental engineering issues or major quality and control problems (probably the latter).

For me this is a very good thing due to the technical aspects, not whether or not you can speak. A text message is just one single packet of data (140 bytes, which can encode 160 7 bit characters). At the lowest voice bitrate, a single second of audio is like sending over 50 text messages - PER SECOND. It takes a much better (as in consistent) connection to initiate and maintain a voice call compared to sending a text message. It also requires a lot more power. As someone who does a lot of hiking and dual sport motorcycle riding in the Appalachian mountains, I know first hand that often the only usable mode of cellular communication is SMS (and don't even dream about data with a bad connection - that's worse than voice even). Of course I also carry my amateur radio as a last ditch fallback if there was an emergency.

Another big advantage of SMS is your phone will keep retrying to send the message. With voice 911 you have to manually try over and over again until you can get a connection.

If you look at the death of CNet editor James Kim, and the miraculous survival of his wife and two very young children, you'll find they were saved because just a few packets of cellular data made it from their phone to a cell tower, and a diligent cell tech found that in a log file (which narrowed down the search and his wife and children were found as they were on foot trying to hike out). It's my opinion that they are alive today due to a rare and unpredictable phenomenon known as Tropospheric Ducting, which can temporarily reflect radio waves back down to earth (thus greater than line of sight) when there are layers of atmosphere at different temperatures in the exact right configuration (kind of like how you can see light shimmer over a road surface on a hot day - that is because of the temperature gradient of the air directly above the road compared to the air above it - same thing can happen with radio waves at a larger scale).

Anyway, there are many times that SMS messages can get through when a voice connection cannot. I will stop on my motorcycle and send a text, then maybe 30 minutes later it will finally go through as I temporarily get service on a mountain ridge, or my cell phone is simply rotated to a more optimum angle relative to the cell tower.

And tummy ache too. In fact, I bet the tummy ache comes first.

I live a couple hours from Lynchburg, and one of those rail lines passes through my town. The problem is these railways were laid down in the late 1800s, and either the rail lines were specifically routed through cities, or towns were literally built on or moved to be on the rail lines. So it is a conundrum that in areas like this, the rails pass through every small town along the way, yet they are now beginning to haul more dangerous cargo, like oil. The funny thing is we no longer have passenger service, mail, etc, so it's just that the trains go through town for no good reason at all. There's no way, in this area of the Appalachians, that it would be feasible or perhaps even possible, to lay down new lines that do not go through towns. The routes are already where they have to be because of the geography of the mountain ranges. Often the rail lines follow rivers (like the New River), because as the oldest river in the world, it has already carved a relatively level grade through the mountains, and thus the rail line follows it for a hundred miles or more.

So trying to make the actual shipping containers as safe as possible is the only real option available if they want to ship oil via rail in this part of the country.

It takes a lot of Sleep(1) calls to pad a program out to that many megabytes.

I found it odd that the plane's axis was on a perfect north / south line. To me it looks exactly like there is a few "pixel" (or whatever the individual data points are) anomaly in a vertical line, probably from whatever sensing instrument generated the raw data. It reminds me of the type of wildly divergent data points you see when a gamma ray hits a sensor type thing. Then all the various "shapes" they produce from the data that supposedly represent the different types of metal, etc, are merely the results their algorithms spit out when given the anomalous data point. The real question is how much actual data there is, and how much of it is being extrapolated by what probably amounts to not much more than image processing type filters.