Anybody can use the AED's in use in the Netherlands; they are fully automatic and tell you exactly what to do.

Thank you sir. That's exactly what we need; we just need to take the web back using open standards.

However, I think one or two major things are currently missing. The first is that the browser needs to be involved - in order to be able to properly authenticate on all your friends' walls/blogs/homepages, we need it to be automated: we need your browser to be able to tell any website you want it to where your online identify "lives". Furthermore, we need those online identies to be able to trust and communicate with each other - for example in order to access your "wall" as an RSS feed in order to show it on your newsfeed, your friends' provider will need to authenticate with yours.

Furthermore, we need a much broader protocol for those "online identity providers" to be able to fully replace functionality currently offers by Facebook/Whatsapp/Flickr/LinkedIn etc.

Without these two things, this will never work. But with them not only social network functionality can be fully replaced, but we can probably do away with logins on websites and filling out our address or payment info in webshops as well.

Waste heat already is quite a lot: 15 terawatt. Global warming equals something like 250 terawatt. If energy consumption keeps growing about 1.5% / year like it has for the past few decades, it will take about 80 years (T+80) for waste heat contribution to overtake the heat flux from earths interior. 40 years later (T+120) our waste heat will equal the total energy used by photosynthesis. In about two centuries from (T+200) now it will have risen to values comparable to what the greenhouse effect does today. Two more centuries later (T+400) we'll finally quality for our Kardashev Type I medal according to some and yet two centuries later (T+600) our energy consumption will surpass the total solar irradiation. In theory, because by then we'd be fried unless we have our giant space coolers in place. About two millenia (T+2500) later our power requirements will outshine the sun.

What's ridiculous here is that charges will not be pressed *because* the officer did not violate Vehicle Code section 23123.5 (which prohibits operating electronic wireless communication devices while driving) since it "does not apply to an emergency services professional using an electronic wireless communications device while operating an authorized emergency vehicle".

Apparently they totally failed to check whether the dude might have violated the law that says you should not kill people by driving over them with your car, which he obviously did violate.

Apparently killing people with your car is illegal UNLESS you're doing it while operating an electronic communications device in a police car; in that case you actually get a reward: the job you applied for over a year ago. How odd...

It's much more than that; the images contained in a TIFF file cannot be downloaded separately while the images contained in a picture-tag can. This way I don't have to wait for ages when browsing on my phone while I can still enjoy top quality images on my desktop. That was already possible by allowing the webserver to serve a different pictures based on the User Agent, but that's ugly and it doesn't allow the user to choose the bigger file after all. Furthermore, this new tag allows the browser to select an image based on the speed of the connection, potentially making the web much more responsive in general.

Peak phosphorus is expected by 2030. Total depletion a few decades later. This problem will solve itself and while doing so it will probably solve the overpopulation problem as well;-)

Germans have always had more of an issue with "being spied on" than others do. For example, Germany is one of the only countries in which taking a picture with others on it is illegal unless you've got permission from all subjects!

Also, Germans have major issues with Google Streeview and they were the ones that sued Google for receiving their wifi-broadcasts.

I think they've taken this privacy-thing a bit too far, though...

I bet you cannot do this on a deadline set by others in an environment you're not familiar with. You're just going to sit and wait for the researchers to come back in and announce that your "thinking" period is over. This experiment obviously fails to create the conditions that are needed to be properly alone with your thoughts.

I would absolutely not be able to concentrate in this setting even though I have no trouble at all to be alone with my thoughts for extended periods.

I really don't get this. You get a radio transmitter, start transmitting stuff en then go complaining that others are listening. Anybody, corporations like Google included, should have the absolute right to do whatever they want with any electromagnetic or other radiation that reaches their bodies or equipment. Any restriction on that would be the modern-day equivalent of prohibition to look at things. If you don't want me to see your stuff or receive your radio waves or listen to your sound waves, just don't be so rude to transmit them towards me, even penetrating my body.

So photon's act like matter at bit more often than we expected, right? How much of dark matter/dark energy problem can this phenomenon account for?

It's not (only) a hipster thing; it's mostly a budget thing. Many photographers want to work with a properly large camera (35mm full frame, medium format (60x60mm) etc. Since most of us don't have the budget to shell out at least several thousand bucks up to well over $10K for a proper camera, our only option to get large format quality is to use old school film.

Said differently: digital has only surpassed film quality in a cost-effective way for very small sensors and/or large volumes of photographs (where the cost of developing film starts to become a factor).

That's not what that link says; it says it has been losing mass "since at least 2002". While it is obviously losing mass now, it has most probably not "been melting for decades". We don't have any serious data on that before 2002, when GRACE was launched. Funny how the real facts get in the way of a good misinformation campaign.

As far as I'm aware, all available editors are based on contenteditable functionality, which has been bug-ridden for years and simply was not designed to offer a rich content editing experience to the end user of a CMS. Yes, this is a huge problem with CMSes, including Drupal. For this reason, this is not fluff, pointless of misleading, it is an outright lie.

One thing I believe was not mentioned in the article (though I only quickly scanned it) is that if such cars start behaving too predictively, they can be gamed. Once we know that a car will do whatever it can to avoid a collision with a pedestrian, it will be extensively gamed; cars will be tricked into doing stupid things.

So when the decision who to hit comes up, the only way to be reasonably safe is to determine who's not following the rules and to hit that one. Any other rules will be gamed extensively. This will become a major hassle to adoption of autonomous vehicles; they will probably need to drive much slower than actual humans to avoid getting into such situations continuously, especially in built-up areas where any parked car could hide an annoying car-bully trying to trick your car into acting like an idiot.

Sony Clie (1999)
Pentax K-5 (2011)
Megallan GPS (2000)
Samsung BW laserprinter (2003)
Subaru Outback (1995)
Yamaha Clavinova (1988)

Apart from the Pentax DSLR I have not encountered similarly sturdy stuff recently... built to last mostly appears to be a thing from the past:|