A lot of people are suggesting faraday cages as the answer. I'm not sure that is really as cheap as people think it would be, and I really don't care if people are using their phones during the pre previews or previews. I'm thinking that a zero tolerance policy along with a phone detector system is a better answer. My guess is that once the lights are out, an HD camera mounted in the ceiling over the audience will easily be able to pick out any light coming from the audience. With a one time simple calibration (putting a light in the end seats of each row and telling the software how many seats are in the row) the software can probably report the exact seat location, or close enough. Then after some threshold, say 30-60 seconds of light, the system could report the theater number and seat location of the light source to theater staff. An usher could then be dispatched to observe the behavior and throw the customer out, or at the very least cause the customer to quickly put their phone away when the usher walks into the theatre.

Yes, that is one of the purposes of a pretrial hearing. The judge has to determine whether or not the case should proceed to a trial or be dismissed. In order for there to be a trial, the Judge has to determine if the party bringing the lawsuit (the federal government in this case) has enough evidence to warrant a trial. The Judge also has to make a preliminary judgement about how likely the party bringing the lawsuit will win. This is needed in order to determine whether any preliminary injunctions should be issued prior to the trial (i.e. an injunction that takes place and stays in force until the trial is completed or another hearing reverses the injunction).

Amtrak doesn't go to Hawaii.

Seriously? I hope you are the last one to say it. Reading between the lines of your quote above, it would appear that you think it might be reasonable to outlaw access to this technology, solely because you can't think of a legal use for it.

As others have posted, there are certainly legal usages. I can think of others, but that is besides the point. The whole idea of limiting something because it might be used for illegal purposes is ridiculous.

Regardless of the "legal" ideas proposed, sometimes new technology leads to new ideas, i.e. as storage costs go down and capacities go up, new ways of using storage may evolve. One (possibly half-baked) idea I can think of is crowd sourced, highly redundant, "free" backup storage.

No, the article is quoting aureal density which is expressed in gigabits or terabits per square inch. The problem with the article is that it is combining data from various sources and misreading/misinterpreting the data (so what's new, this is Slashdot after all).

First, the summary above says that Seagate will produce a 60 Tb drive by 2016. That is not true. Seagate has said they will produce a drive with "up to" 60 Tb of capacity (30-60 TB) by the end of the decade. This is based on the theoretical limits of HAMR technology, which are projected to be in the 5-10 Tbits/sq. inch. range. Current 4TB drives are made with platters that have a density of around 650 Gbits/sq. in., so the math works (10Tb/.65Tb is approximately 15x).

The other part of the article is talking about what the maximum density is likely to be over the timeframe from now to 2016 using PMR technology and transitioning to something new like HAMR. PMR technology will top out at about 1Tbit/sq. inch, so anything over that will require something new like HAMR. that underlying article quotes 1.8 Tbit/sq. in in 2016, which may not be out of line with 5-10 Tbit/sq. in. by 2020 as a new technology like HAMR comes online.

The two articles that I am basing the above on are:
Seagate/HAMR article
IHS/ISuppli article

The digital TV standard allows for providing up to 16 days of guide data. However, the FCC only mandates that a station provide 12 hours of guide data, and many stations only provide the minimum. In many cases the station is just going with the default settings and can be convinced to change them; however, the most guide data I've seen, at least in the Denver area, is 7 days of guide data.