Point out anything counter to the politically-correct paradigm on global warming. B-)

Religious zealots are more than happy to abuse the moderation system to suppress discussion threads when they begin to question any aspect of their religion.

Turning it on its side and putting it into the Google Cardboard (or similar) stereoptic holder gives you about a 1440x1250 display per eye. Looks right to me.

Now if (as I suggested in the Cardboard item) they installed two cameras on the phone back, separated by about eye distance, you'd have a camera that could take and display stereoptic pictures and/or do augmented reality without losing the scene's depth.

This is a great use for the (otherwise excessively) high-resolution cellphone displays such as Apple's "retina".

Also: This is a strong argument for putting TWO cameras on a cellphone's backside - separated by about the typical distance between a person's eyes and equally speced relative to the centerline of the phone. That would enable the formation of a stereoscopic augmented reality display showing the correct image of the background. (It would also enable taking stereoptic pictures.)

Even some of the more extreme estimates of the amount of temperature change expected just mean, to a farmer, that his great grandsons might do better if they switch to crops that are currently grown a couple hundred miles closer to the equator or a couple hundred feet lower on the hillside. (Something like they did during the Medieval Warm Period, when Iceland had lots more cropland and grapes were grown on a large scale in Britain.)

So even if you convince them that global warming is real, don't expect anything but a cheer from the farmers of Sweden.

There are a lot of steps between "It looks like the average temperature might go up four or five degrees C in the next couple centuries." to "We must take drastic action RIGHT NOW to AVERT DISASTER!". Like figuring out whether such a temperature rise is really a threat - or might even be a boon. We're still working on "Is it real?"

Except, of course, for politicians, who can use that last claim to increase their power, or (like Al Gore) make billions off a "carbon credit exchange" built on anti-global-warming legislation.

The last thing I need, if I'm injured in a way that disfigures my face, is a car that won't let me start it to drive to the emergency room.

That's right up there with the federal experiment, back in the '60s or so, with mandating seatbelt and seat weight sensors that interlocked with the starter, so you can't start it if all the passengers aren't belted in.

(I, and about five of my friends, were very luck my car dated from before that mandate, the time we were visiting a friend who worked in a trainyard, my car stalled across a track, a train came {slowly but inexorably} around the sharp curve, and my right-front passenger unbelted in preparation to bail if I couldn't get it going again. We didn't have enough time to all bail ...)

So apple is retiring a photo editing software product and expects their customers to switch to their cloud photo editing service. They're replacing images stored locally with images stored externally.

Ignoring Snowden and the NSA for the moment, let's look at LEGAL seizure of your pictures to be used as evidence by government agencies, in rule enforcement, investigation, and criminal prosecution.

Not only are files under your physical control y'harder to get to physically than those transmitted over the Internet and stored in a vendor's server farm, they're also on better legal ground. The Supreme Court seems bent on treating electronic files, under your control, just like paper files locked in a safe at home. Just three days ago they ruled that police can't even search information stored on a cellpone carried by an arrestee without first coming up with probable cause and obtaining a warrant.

The last I heard, though, they considered information you stored on some vendor's servers to have been disclosed - that you have "no expectation of privacy" with respect to it. The police can go fishing through it just by asking, without jepoardizing prosecutions that result from what they fiind. Even if the third party cloud service demands paperwork rather than just giving access, a company like Apple has far less interest in protecting your data from fishing expeditions than you do.

Given the rat's nest of laws in the US, the prevalance of false or mistaken prosecutions, and the deliberate use of the legal and tax systems to punish those disliked by those in power (at all levels), I'd think nio sane person would put any personal information onto a cloud service (without at least encrypting it locally first with a key unknown to the service), let alone in a form that could be manipulated on the service. Photos are a particular risk, for a number of reasons I don't think I need to enumerate.

So I'd think that, both for personal use and for professional photographers, the substitution of a cloud service for a local tool working on locally stored data, would be unacceptable.

The same way as when cable TV required a physical cable run to your home

Cable TV today does not require a physical cable run to your home?

B-)

The "when" referred to "... the days when all a cable-TV hookup carried was TV". That was when the original Community Antenna TV decisions and legislation - leading up to THIS case - took place.

In other words, you're saying they broke the law by complying with the law.

Close.

I'm saying the court majority said that. I'm with Scalia and most techies on this: It's up to the legislature to write it so it's clear, and the courts to enforce it the way it's written, "technicalities" and all. If there's any ambiguity giving wiggle room, the courts should ALWAYS use the interpretation that is most favorable to the defendant.

In Aereo, the Court ruled that Aereo was largely similar to those CATV operators - it took the broadcast signal off the air and distributed it to multiple viewers, essentially simultaneous.y.

And that receiving and carrying it separately for each customer (using a separte tiny antenna and cheap-in-quantity integrated circuit digital radio receiver) was a transparent workaround that attempted to use an interpretation of the letter of the law to violate its intent).

If it requires a login/password and a user account, how is that "publicly transmitting"?

The same way as when cable TV required a physical cable run to your home (back in the days when all a cable-TV hookup carried was TV).

Photons need to have gamma-ray energies before they can create virtual electro-positron pairs. Visible light simply does not have enough energy to do this.

No, they don't

They need those energies to create REAL, PERSISTENT electron-positron pairs, which fly away and last until they interact with something else - maybe centuries or eons later - that changes them to some other particle.

Virtual particle pairs, as long as their lifetime is less than a time that puts the product of the "error' in energy with the lifetime of the error under the uncertainty principle limit, can be created by photons that are far too small to create free particles. In fact, if the lifetime of the virtual particle pair is short enough, you don't even need the photon.

Something like this would be a nice coating for:
  - Windshields
  - glasses
  - solar panels
Unless, of course, it attracts grease...

Do you really think the problem in 1984 was the telescreens?

Telescreens are "an enabling technology". I see no reason to leave them, and thus any hypothetical government-or-other spy, enabled in my personal space.

I think most of us geeks grew up terrified of the very idea of the Orwellian Telescreen. However, it's not the technology that's evil (many of us have plenty of devices with a camera integrated with a display), but the threat of its use without consent.

My latest laptop came with a built-in, user-facing camera.

I immediately put a piece of opaque electrica tape over it - even before swapping out the hard disk for a fresh one and installing Linux.

The tape isn't coming off until I have a removable shutter to take its place.

if you bring back the passenger pigeon in some sort of wildlife preserve and they outgrow their food supply, how are you going to get the flock out of there?

You DO know that they fly, don't you?

Like in flocks of millions over continental distances?