The company has no plans to shut down, nor liquidate assets. Ch. 11 is all about restructuring debt so that they can pay off the creditors and return to normal operating procedures.

Indeed. Since their re-payments to Apple are technically debt, and Apple is now one of many creditors, I'm curious if it will be "restructured" so they don't have to pay Apple back as much as originally contracted.

Solyndra's "technology" involved using cylindrical solar panels instead of flat ones. They claimed it increased the amount of captured sunlight. Anyone who's taken enough calculus to understand flux can already see the problem with that claim, or (if you've got good intuition) enough trig to understand geometrically what a cosine is (length of a line segment when viewed at an angle).

The amount of solar energy you can capture is determined by the projected surface area perpendicular to the rays of sunlight. The exact shape of your panel is irrelevant - only its projected surface area matters. A flat panel is the minimum surface area you can use to maximize projected surface area (when angled perpendicular to sunlight). Any other shape (like cylinders) just needlessly increases the amount of material needed, and thus your production costs.

Solyndra should be a case-study of how marketing and political influence trumped what was mathematically obvious. That the Federal government fell for their scam (despite employing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who could tell you what was wrong with Solyndra's tech) is actually pretty strong argument for why the government should not be allowed to act like a regular investor. Those empowered to make decisions in government don't have enough personal stake in the outcomes (Presidents will be out of office in a few years anyway) to really listen to what the people who understand the tech have to say.

Out of curiosity, if Cyanogenmod were bought for $1 billion, who would get the money? The executives and officers who manage the open source company? Would the developers who contribute to the project for free see any of it?

So... What's this lone actor's real name? :)

I have a sneaking suspicion every Facebook user out there already consented to that in the long EULA when they created a Facebook account.

Remember, it's a free service. As long as you're not paying Facebook anything for it, you don't have a right to anything - Facebook is under no obligation to give you anything since you aren't providing them compensation. They can put whatever restrictions or requirements on the service that they want, including being able to perform A/B testing. Your only choice if you don't like it is to not use Facebook.

Yes it will affect competition. The moment Comcast started charging Netflix for access, Netflix became a customer. Every website out there is now a potential customer.

As long as Comcast and Time Warner are competing with each other, Netflix can say "Well Comcast only charged us this much, can you lower your price?" to Time Warner. But if they merge, that reduces competition. Websites have to pay more, and they'll have to charge their customers (you and me) more to compensate.

The Republicans don't oppose NN because of ideology. They oppose it because that is what their big donors want them to do.

No, they oppose Net Neutrality because of ideology. The conservative position isn't that Net Neutrality is bad per se. It's that it's the wrong solution to the problem.

The real problem isn't lack of net neutrality. It's lack of competition due to monopolies granted to the cable and phone companies by local governments. Net Neutrality is just more government regulation to try to solve a problem created by government in the first place. The monopolies were typically granted in exchange for a contractual guarantee that service is provided to low-income neighborhoods, though lately it's become a straight payola scheme with the chosen ISP having to pay the government per household serviced. IMHO the government should never be allowed to "sell" access to its citizens like that - it corrupts not just business but government itself.

Remove the government-granted monopolies and the problem goes away on its own. Why are Korea, Japan, most of Europe, etc. not grappling with this same issue? Because they have true competition in the ISP market. Any ISP which deliberately slows down web traffic as part of an extortion scheme to make web sites pay them hemorrhages customers until they put themselves out of business. Such extortion is only possible when the customers have no viable competitor they can switch to, as is the case when the government grants the ISP a monopoly. That's the free market approach conservatives advocate.

Of course 9 out of the 10 rated responses so far are how conservatives are evil greedy robbers who will kidnap and eat your children. People typically want to cast the issue in a manner which villainizes the opposition, rather than try to really understand the other guy's point of view.

The English equivalent to "hai" in this context (phone call) is "uh huh".

Several years before 9/11, pilots were asking that the cockpits be made more secure by installing a $200 lock on the pilot's side of the door giving access to the cockpit.

Do you have a reference for that? I find it hard to believe because when the FAA implemented the sterile cockpit rule after recurring accidents where crew distraction was a contributing cause, the pilot's union fought it tooth and nail. You're now saying the pilots suddenly want to be isolated from the cabin?

Also, the predominant cost of adding equipment to an aircraft isn't the purchase price. It's the fuel burn cost. An airliner flying 1750 miles burns about 5 cents worth of fuel for every additional pound it carries. If that beefier lock weighed 1 pound, at 3 flights a day, 330 operational days per year, and 20 years in service, the fuel cost to carry that lock is $990.

If you factor in the cost of a (say) 20 pound $1000 steel-reinforced door to go along with the lock (after all what good is a $200 lock if the door has 35 cent hinges), you're now talking about ~$22,000 in additional fuel per aircraft. This is the reason why aircraft manufacturers and airlines are willing to spend thousands of dollars extra on materials which shave just a few pounds from an aircraft's weight.

Can't call it Windows X - too easily confused with X Windows.

No confusion at all.

Win X
Is
Not
X Windows
= Win X

Hey it works for a bunch of other FOSS projects.

I'm a 2-decade subscriber to Consumer Reports, but sometimes they just get their science (engineering) completely wrong.

A force doesn't bend an object. A moment does. That is, the propensity to bend is not proportional to the force applied. It's proportional to the force times the lever arm. i.e. A 90 pound force applied to one point on an object may not bend it, while applied to a different point it can easily bend it. So the bigger (longer) phones were actually resisting greater moments, even though the force was the same.

Another problem is the test they came up with supported the phone at both ends, while pressing down in the middle. Basically a simply supported beam. The important thing to note here is that in such a config, both sides of the phone are resisting the bending moment. If it took 90 pounds of force applied to the middle, then the left side was resisting 45 pounds, the right side 45 pounds.

When a phone in your pocket is bent, it is in a cantilever configuration. One end of the phone is held rigidly, while the other end is free-floating. If the phone reached sufficient deflection to permanently bend in a simply supported config at 90 pounds, it will reach the same deflection at just 45 pounds in an equivalent cantilever (more precisely, 45 pounds pushing one way at one end, while your body weight holds the other end of the phone in place). You can try it in the calculators I've linked. Give both the same load, make the cantilever half the length, and you'll see the cantilever has twice the deflection. Make the load on the cantilever half that of the simply supported beam, and they have the same deflection.

(The actual force and moment diagram when you're sitting on your phone is a lot more complicated, since the force is distributed along the phone instead of all at one point. Integrating this is trivial for anyone who's taken a structural engineering course, but explaining it is beyond the scope of a forum post.)

Won't work. Well it work in one special case, but not in the general case. Any time the fiber path (defined by the two endpoints of the fiber) isn't parallel to line of sight, the light coming out the end of the fiber won't match what's directly behind that point. So if you place a camera in a specific spot, and you route the fibers from the front to the equivalent position in the back (relative to the camera), then it would work. But the moment you moved the camera, the fibers would then be at an angle instead of parallel to line of sight, and the "background" as seen through the fibers wouldn't align with the actual background. It also fails when there's parallax. Line of sight is diverging rays shooting out from the eye, so the fibers have to be aligned at that exact angle of divergence. If the eye is closer or further, there's parallax, and again the background through the fibers doesn't match the exact background.

Basically, your optical fibers are just mimicking putting a TV in front of the object and displaying an image of the background on the TV. A real cloak can't just take light which strikes a plane (sphere, whatever) on one side and emit the same light on the opposite side. It also needs to preserve the arrival angle of the path that light was taking as it struck one side, and emit it on the other side at the same departure angle it would have taken had the cloaked object not been there. Which this clever arrangement of lenses does (albeit for a very narrow field of view).

Look at Germany. Solar has made coal and nuclear unprofitable.

That isn't something to be proud of. Solar is, by far, the most expensive way to commercially generate electricity. If solar has made coal and nuclear unprofitable in Germany, you guys are doing something seriously screwy. Germany's sunshine profile is absolutely terrible for solar. The capacity factor (ratio of actual annual generation to generation capacity) you can calculate based on Germany's annual solar power stats is around 0.1, compared to 0.145 for the continental U.S., and 0.185 for the desert southwest U.S. i.e. the same PV panel in the desert southwest U.S. will produce 1.85x as much electricity that it does if located in Germany.

Since there hasn't been some miraculous breakthrough in PV solar production efficiency, the only remaining possibility is that electricity prices in Germany have risen so high that solar has artificially become competitive. And that's precisely what you see. You guys have enacted laws making producing electricity cheaply so difficult, that the price has risen to the point where solar "makes sense."

Why do you care when you are not liable?

Why do you think caring should stop with liability? The merchant who ends up paying for fraud just raises their prices to make back the lost money. So you are still paying for the fraud whether or not you're directly liable.

The same is true for men. Research has shown that attractiveness has a significant positive correlation with winning a close election. The only real difference is that there are a lot of crass men out there who are willing to publicly vocalize the bias (which ends up being predominantly about women because that's whose attractiveness men predominantly obsess over), while women tend to keep quiet about it.

Getting people to not talk about it in public doesn't make the problem go away. You just have to accept that that's the way we're wired, and take measures to neutralize it when necessary. Like how Juilliard does its music auditions - with the candidates behind a screen so the judges cannot see them, only hear them.