Google doesn't want this either. They fought this tooth and nail up to the highest European Court, but the court decided to force them to remove requests under certain (but not clearly defined) circumstances.

That's the thing I find baffling about some of these EU court decisions.

EU: "Google is abusing its near-monopoly position in search. This needs to stop."
Google: "Ok, what exactly do you want us to stop doing?"
EU: "Um, we don't know. Why don't you come up with some suggestions and we'll tell you if it's agreeable?"
Google: "OK, how about this?"
EU: "Hmm, no, we want more."
Google: "How about this then?"
EU (to Google's competitors): "Do you think this is enough?"
Google's competitors (sensing an opportunity): "Hell no!"
EU: "No, something more."
Google: [exasperated sigh] "what about if we do this?"
etc.

EU: "You need to remove people from your search results if they have a legitimate reason."
Google: "Ok, just tell us what's a legitimate reason."
EU: "Um, we don't know. Why don't you decide and we'll tell you if you're doing it wrong."
Google: [exasperated sigh]

Methinks the EU court really, really badly needs to adopt the concept in the U.S. Constitution of the right of the defendant to know what crime they're being accused of.

The most destructive and demoralizing relationship I've had with the government was a health inspector who basically made up rules on the fly. Including one which the fire marshal later told us was a fire code violation. And another where the serving table manufacturer told us, "We sell this product to restaurants all over the country, and we have never had a health department request that modification." But there's nothing we could do about it because she had the power to shut down our restaurant that very day, leading to us being bankrupt within a couple months. We had to comply with her inane requests if we wanted to stay in business.

The great thing is seeing the amount of creativity and artistic styles people can come up with.

As someone who plays classical piano, IMHO this is the most destructive effect of modern recording technology and the current copyright stance of Hollywood. Since the pieces I play are long out of copyright, there are literally as many interpretations of them as there are performers. Sometimes I spend an evening just listening to dozens of pianists' interpretations of the same piece. It's amazing the amount of creativity and different artistic styles people can imbue into what on paper is the same song. How a part I've always considered boring can suddenly turn surprising and entertaining when someone interprets it in a way I'd never thought of. If you've been to plays, you see much of the same thing. The actors each imbue their role with a unique interpretation. Some you may like and others dislike, but there's no end to the variety.

By contrast, modern movies, pre-recorded TV, and music are canned. Aside from the occasional remake, what you see is the same performance over and over again. With rare exceptions, there's no opportunity to explore possible different interpretations. The much ridiculed "Han shot first" controversy is a great example. When Han shot first in the original, it told you he was a ruthless smuggler who would do whatever it took to save his own skin. Which gave more meaning to his transformation into a hero who fought to save others. Lucas' edit to make him shoot in defense was a different interpretation, but a weaker one. Without both versions, people may have just watched that scene without realizing the importance of it. About the only way you can get interpretation in movies and TV today are if they're intentionally made vague enough to be open to multiple interpretations by the viewer. Inception, or the ending of Pan's Labyrinth are examples of such ambiguity, and I think both movies were rated so highly partly because they added that element of interpretation which is missing from so many other shows.

Right now, most copyright holders are scared to death to let others recreate their works or create derivative works, and thus use legal threats to squelch artistic reinterpretation of their work. I think society is lessened because of it. Kudos to Disney and Lucasfilm for allowing this one.

Success requires good engineering combined with good marketing. Musk has the engineering down pat, and is smart enough to give his marketing department freedom to decide how his products are represented to the public. If he didn't have his current marketing department, he'd go hire one and give them as much free rein as necessary to keep the public excited about his products.

Jobs was a master at marketing, but he didn't give the engineering enough credit. If he hadn't been fortunate enough to run across Wozniak and Woz hadn't been so blase about Jobs taking credit for his work, Jobs probably would've ended up a (very good) used car salesman.

They're limited by the weight of the battery pack. The 85 kWh battery pack weighs about 1200 pounds. A typical 3.0 liter V6 found in competing cars about 400 pounds. Even if you add in transmission, fuel, and drivetrain, the Tesla's propulsion system weighs about twice as much as an ICE car's (the Tesla S weighs 4600 lbs - more than a mid-size SUV).

Making the car bigger allows that propulsion weight to be a smaller fraction of the total. If you make the car smaller, you're basically giving up passenger and cargo capacity without much weight savings.

Well of course it produces much more methane gas. Natural gas is methane. The trick is to capture it so you can burn it for energy (converting it to CO2 and water), and not let it leak out.

In the past energy prices were low enough that it wasn't worth capturing the methane (which being a gas tends to take up a lot of space unless you compress it to about a thousand atmospheres of pressure). Now we're busy not just capturing it but finding new sources of it. Once the plant owners find out from this NASA report just how much methane they're losing from leaky pipes, I'm sure they'll eagerly patch up the leaks so they'll have more methane to sell.

on github the submitter states "After talking with the frustrated non-technical people who owned/managed them, I wrote this program to help network users and owners."

While the program can be used with the network owner's permission, the fact that it can more easily be used without permission makes it rather dubious.

I think he's/we're going about this the wrong way. If this is really a widespread problem afflicting non-technical people trying to run a public wi-fi hotspot, what needs to happen is for router configs to limit the number of connections from a single MAC address by default. If you're a gamer or running bittorrent on your own network, it's easy enough to change those configs. But on a public hotspot, they're the ones who'll be forced to contact the network owners, not the people trying to get legit access.

I'm also a bit skeptical that the submitter really talked with the owner. If you've got access to the router via the owner, the most obvious thing to try first is QoS. Assign torrent traffic to low priority, default everything else to medium (to catch encrypted bittorrent), and give ports 80 and 443 (http and https) high priority to keep web browsing customers happy. You need to be careful about giving ssh high priority because it's possible to run a tunnel over ssh and do your torrenting that way.

While the significant anti-Google sentiment among privacy advocates is not without merit, Schmidt has a point. There are basically two models for how the Internet could work when information crosses international boundaries.

There's the free/Chinese model (free for information going out, Chinese for information coming in). You put whatever you want on your server, and that's what it serves to everyone who visits. If a national government has a problem with it, they selectively block it via a massive firewall. This is analogous to how physical international borders work (although on the Internet, every country "borders" every other country). If a country wants to keep people/materials they consider to be bad out, it is their responsibility to stop it at their border.

Then there's the U.S./French model. Filtering out content a country considers to be "bad" is somehow no longer their responsibility, it's the responsibility of the server hosting the content. And when multiple countries demand different standards, the server needs to selectively block it based on which country the info is being sent to. It's an attempt by countries to offload work that's clearly their own responsibility onto others simply because they're big and have enough legal/financial/political clout to force it.

That's basically what this boils down to. If each country is responsible for enforcing their own standards with firewalls, surveillance, and filters they set up, then (putting aside free speech issues) enforcing ~200 different standards is plausible. But if you insist on shifting that enforcement work to several million websites, you will break the Internet.

Don't be so blinded by your hatred of Google that you fail to see how what Schmidt is complaining has implications for companies and individual websites other than Google.

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".