Ok, so there are no rules in place that would make Comcast enforce net neutrality. But I don't understand, why wouldn't their customers have a good class-action case against them? I mean, I am paying a (decent in the case of Comcast customers) monthly service fee and I have a reasonable expectation of being able to access whatever I want at a reasonable speed. Why aren't Comcast/Verizon customers recruited for a good ol' class action, since they are essentially paying a monthly fee just to be added to the pool of Comcast/Verizon customers that those companies can "dangle" in front of the likes of Netflix in order to extract more fees. I am not in the US right now, but when I had a TWC (=another crap ISP) contract, it didn't say that TWC could decide what I could download at slow or fast speeds - is that no longer the case?

Send it on an elliptical orbit around the sun. Depending how many years you want before the key is back in our neighborhood, you select the appropriate orbit. Hmm, perhaps SpaceX should look into it and start commercializing such a service ;)

The MOST important person in the history of humanity is the one who made the species naming system we use, even if few people actually know him? Just because there are more species on Wikipedia than, say, elements whose pages link to Mendeleev (an example of a person I would consider more influential)? It is a good thing then that Jimmy Wales didn't put a link to his page on the "about" link of every Wikipedia, otherwise you know who would be #1 "according to research"!

Correct me if I am wrong, but even from the summary I get a strong suspicion this "research" is heavily flawed. I mean, the only way for "Carl Linnaeus" would be on the top spot would be if you blindly applied a sort of page-rank algorithm forgetting to only include non-standardized parts of pages. A significant percentage of Wikipedia pages on all languages are about the various species of plant or animal life, all of which have a stub which contains the link to "Scientific classification" perhaps also to "Binomial name", both of which feature Linnaeus prominently.
It reminds me a spider my boss had built to get a few thousands of pages to construct a word frequency list, and I had to point out that it needed some work, since words like "print", "home" etc were not in the top-5 most common words of the English language.

Right, while the simplest explanation was "That's no moon..."

Yes, but, apart from timekeeping, radio, clean air, water, electricity, education and roads and public order, what has the Government ever done for us?

What are you talking about? The CF-18 Hornet is an 80's plane. I was talking about 1959 when Canada canceled their homegrown and quite advanced Avro Arrow and ended up paying dearly a fleet of US planes which were obsolete shortly after they were bought (McDonnel "Voodoo").

It is probably better than the crap the Canadians got after scrapping the Avro Arrow. Of course the F35 is very expensive as well... Oh, well...

or his clone and watch it produce 100x the results it would otherwise. Ok, if you can't how about diverting a little of the defense budget to NASA? Just 1% is enough. It will still be rather wasted compared to what the likes of SpaceX could do, but compared to the complete waste of warfare it is still great...

There was a fire hydrant on the sidewalk, with a bike lane between it and drawn parking spaces. In US cities you can only park where there is a parking space explicitly drawn, so this spot had exactly what you were looking for and people parked. And got ticketed. And this happened all the time, since it looked like a perfectly fine parking spot, but the NYPD disagreed. Apparently no-one had complained loud enough (I'd think such tickets would be very easily contested), but when this guy blogged about it after seeing the data and it went viral, the DOT fixed it relatively quickly by marking it as a no-parking space.

until you find out it is just a bunch of weird vehicles with funny looking microscopic front wheels, racing for 10 seconds in a straight line (when successful) and converting a small fraction of their fuel's chemical energy into kinetic energy of the vehicle - most going in heat (that burns rubber) and sound energy. The worse part is not one of the hillbillies that "drive" them is ever in drag! Talk about a let-down...

My 3G phone in most European cities can get at least 1-2Mbps. At that speed I would manage to finish off my - ample for my usage - 1GB montly data plan in 1-2 hours. Why would I want anything faster? Would I be streaming HD video or download torrents? I have cheap DSL for that.

I mean, there is already a swift programming language. Yes, it is not popular, but when you decide on a name for your language don't you at least google it first? Is "swift" so unbelievably cool that a name collision (even with a "small" entity) does not matter? But, yeah, it is Apple we are talking about, they probably invented the word "swift" which people and companies like SUZUKI have been copying for other uses here and there...

Go to the first team meeting and start yelling: "Defenders, defenders, defenders!"

Since most smartphone royalties are charged as a % of the price of the device, they have to do the calculation given a hypothetical device with a specific price. They chose $400, seems that seems to be near the average price of a high-end smartphone.
I know it is /., but if you have such a basic question about the article perhaps you could take a quick look...

In general I can understand basic technology royalties like LTE etc. I mean, somebody spent a lot of money developing a technology essential for a device type, so you'd have to pay to enter the market of that device which would not exist otherwise. Ok, with so many companies involved the royalties may get a bit high. But in addition to that, there are companies allowed to patent obvious things (that most of the time they did not even "invent" first) like swiping the screen, or even generic designs like rounded corners that essentially had near ZERO cost in R&D and yet either demand high royalties or try to block competitors...