The future is now. And it's freaking cool, man.

Oh, I'm sure some nay-sayers will be like "but who really needs this?"

To which I say "need? Who cares about need?"

obligatory picture of that crazy aliens guy goes here.

The right to be forgotten should apply to Facebook as well. What it doesn't apply to is first-party stuff that gets covered by freedom of the press, as that is considered to trump the privacy freedom. Don't ask me how they decide whether or not to consider Facebook "press". I quickly get lost in the mind-boggling logic of telling Google not to list something in an index that is sitting publicly on a website.

You could have a robot unplug/plug HDs, but once you're accepting the latency of disk changes and spin-up, I imagine Blu-Ray disks would be much, much cheaper than a similar capacity of HDs.

I think the point is that if you want access to stuff from an HD, it's got to be plugged into something. The more storage you have, the more of those "somethings" you need, along with the routers and logic to connect them all together. All of that stuff takes power, even when the HDs themselves are asleep.

You could do something similar to the Blu-Ray setup, where a robot plugged/unplugged hard drives instead. But I'll bet once you're going to accept that kind of latency, a robotic Blu-ray juke-box with lots of Blu-Ray disks would be a whole lot cheaper than a robotic HD juke-box with lots of HDs (the lots of Blu-Ray disks vs lots of HDs being where the savings would really be found).

Tape may have better density, but Blu-Ray probably has better access time. Sounds like this is still stuff they want to have "live", they are just willing to have be a little "less live" than HD latencies.

The point was that only the GM cars have the problem that heavy stuff attached to the key can turn your car off in the middle of driving down the road. It's especially a problem with rental cars, because they have heavy stuff attached to the keys as a matter of course.

There are government grants available for such research. Not all research is done by people looking for billion dollar paydays. Some people just want enough funding to get the research done and draw a salary.

I don't know enough to comment on the validity of the claimed copyrights in general. But I do know one thing: The fact that material appears elsewhere online is not evidence that it is not copyrighted.

The important question is not whether the stuff appears elsewhere. The important question is only whether Oracle's claimed copyright is real/valid.

The study only observed how many people used devices some time during the flight. It didn't particularly focus on during take-of/landing/taxi. So all it means is that allowing use during those extra times doesn't encourage the 65% who weren't using their devices to suddenly start using their devices. In other words, not a lot of people were saying "if I can't use it during takeoff, the I won't use it at all."

I'm not sure I understand the point. I don't remember anyone claiming that more people would use mobile devices on planes if they could use them during taxi and takeoff. It seemed it was always just that the people who were already using devices on planes wanted to also be able to use them during taxi and takeoff.

Autocorrect made it "Gods" instead of "Good", and I didn't notice before posting.

Gods thinking. But two potential problems that spring to mind:

The petal profile seems to matter, although I admit to not knowing why. You'd have to have your sphere replicate that outline from the various appropriate angles.

Controlling reflection of stray light back into the telescope is already identified as a potential technology problem. A sphere may make that even more of an issue.

You are correct that there is not an orbital alignment that would passively keep the telescope and shade in alignment with a star. They plan to put the system in a solar orbit (so that the speed at which alignment shifts will be slower than if it were in Earth orbit) and also they will have to actively guide the telescope using ion thrusters in order to maintain the correct alignment during an observation. Because of this, observation windows will be relatively short. This requirement for active guidance during observation is one of the technology risks identified in one of the links above.

Agreed. I wasn't trying to imply that making a mobile site work that way was hard. Frankly, was trying to imply it was relatively straightforward. It's always possible a big company borks something easy, but I fully expect that the need to switch to the web to purchase a comic book will be only very marginally less convenient than in the app. (I admit that in the app would always be the more elegant system, but it really doesn't have to be a big deal if Amazon is smart about it.)