If he was trying to observe the transit of Venus at night I doubt clouds were the problem. He might have had more success if he stayed on his own side of the planet.

No Clue indeed. No clue from almost anyone reporting on this piece of news. (it is dissapointing that the BBC headline is so wrong)

Have a read of the Euro Parliament's Press release or (unbelievably better than the BBC) Tech Crunch.

Its a general resolution about online search engines bundling services & about the need to enforce European Competitions laws in the online space.

It's obvious to me he is talking about GPL and not Linux itself.

Its obvious to me that he is deliberately conflating GPL & Linux to scare companies. That's the way MS operates.

You are twisting his words. Ballmer was not talking about Linux, but about the GPL and it's 'viral' nature.

No. You are totally incorrect. Here's the quote, from it source in the Chicago Sun-Times (via the internet archive):

Imagine... a phone you can steal tiny little parts out of, rather than the whole phone. It might be minutes or even hours before anybody even notices.

Are you serious? You think your little armchairy-10-seconds-of-analysis thought on the security of this device hasn't been covered by google's team of engineers?

Oh, it has:

Google says that there will be a “manager” app on the smartphone that controls some kind of locking mechanism, which keeps the modules from popping out when the phone is dropped or twisted.

Because Legos are made out of pixie dust, not oil.

Thanks for your insight AC. Because anyone opposed to drilling for oil in the artic of course, must be opposed to use of all oil products, produced anywhere in the world for any reason.

To the Indian government though, I suggest the next project be here on planet earth:

That is, to make public toilets as easily available as every other space power.

1) China is a space power. Not exactly know for the quality & quantity of rural public toilets.

2) If everyone waited to solve every domestic issue before becoming a space power, noone would have developed rockets yet. I think you would be astonished by the poverty that existed in Appalachia or other rural isolated areas in the US when their space program started. Ditto for Europe (portugal / greece) and Russia (almost everywhere).

The Golden Compass is considered as dangerous by Christian parents as Narnia is by Atheist parents

So... not dangerous at all then? I'm an Athiest. I loved the Narnia series aged 7-11. I'll get my kids to read them. I know many Athiest parents who have allready bought The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe for their bubs before they can read.

I want my kids to be as wideley read as possible Most Athiest Parents I know feel the same way. Knowledge is something to be embraced. Not feared.

Is that legal though? Can you really just give your product away for free? Can't that be construed as anti-competitive? It's called "predatory pricing" I believe, isn't it? Sincere question here.

This statement is bogus. 3rd parties cannot sue under copyright law. VLC is developed by multiple parties, some of whom wanted VLC in the app store & others who didn't.

Portraying this as Apple & VLC vs the FSF is a misrepresentation of the situation.

I agree with them on that one. The last thing we need here is additional inflammatory commentary in the news summaries. Leave that stuff for the comments section, where there will be no shortage of it.

I've been on Slashdot for many years now and I'm just starting to finally get tired of the general level of complete idiocy of most posters here. Am I getting old or is the internet population at large just getting dumber? Not sure.

Pfffft, screw chipped squirrels, I want Squirrel Chips!

Well enlighten us, Big Sexy Joe, what's so awesome about wherever it is that you live that you can so easily look down on the clueless 8 million or so that can't possibly have a good reason for living in the SF bay area?

I agree there was some trickery there. Since they did not address this at all, I am assuming that the answer is simply that they had to manually paint in the parts of the photos that were revealed when other parts were removed. Having to point that out in the video would take away from the apparent magic which is probably why they didn't mention it (and that's somewhat disingenous if you ask me). It's possible that they provide some tool that attempts to automatically fill in the background, and if so it would appear that it was used in some of the examples (such as when the apple or whatever it was was moved in the painting, the area that was revealed looked more like the cloudy background than it did like the table that the apple was on), but there's no way that they automatically compute the background for anything that is not on top of a pattern or more or less flatly shaded surface. I also noticed that in some examples, they were merely adding new objects to the scene (such as the NYC taxi cab example), and although they started with a scene that looked like the cab was already there is moved it to reveal painted chevrons underneath, it's likely that those chevrons were already in the photo and didn't need to be recreated.

In short: they glossed over that detail and used examples that didn't require explaining it, but it'c certainly an issue that a real user would have to address and doesn't happen as "magically" as it would appear from the video.

BTW, CMU alum here. Went back to campus for the first time in nearly 20 years earlier this year. My how things have changed. I suppose every college is the same way now, but holy crap it's so much more cushy than it used to be! Guess all that cush keeps the computer science juices flowing ...