You are aware that Android also "kinda" has a licensing fee? The Google app stack (including the Marketplace) is only accessible if you pay Google and extend a branch for them as they keep fall- wait, what?

The source tapes were from Australia. The highest quality video from the moon landing were in Australia. Since they decided to land on the moon early, the US was under the horizon, so they transmitted to Australia instead.

Dude. They're still pumping out Bold and Curve revisions that are nothing but spec bumps + the trackpad. All this other crap? It's on the side.

I know a looot of people who work at RIM. They all know that they have to keep the enterprise market locked down. But that's mostly to do with the BES. Hardware wise, they've already long surpassed what "enterprise" needs. To keep growing, they NEED to grab some part of the consumer market. All that RIM growth the last couple years? That's just been them leveraging the hell out of BBM and selling them to college students. That's not going to last at this rate if their hardware doesn't keep up.

And Iridium is still working. After the original company went bankrupt, all the assets got scooped up for 25 million (a bargain!) and now the company is happily making money. They're even planning on the next set of sats to replace the current generation as they start to age/fail. There is still a market for these devices, though most of the time its people/groups renting out units for a month or two instead of continuous subscription. Though I'm sure there are some mining/gas exploration companies and the like who have a bunch of these.

You're seeing a moving halo effect. Most tone-mapping processes have trouble with dark on light transitions. Basically, in an attempt to 'smooth' out the transition between lightening/darkening, you get the lightening effect bleeding from the dark regions to the lighter regions creating a halo. If you watch the starting sequence with the buildings, if you look at the right side with one building in the foreground, and the dark side of another building in the background, you can once again see the halo effect. Just go google around HDR images, and you'll see it everywhere. It's very hard to get rid of, and simply put, if you run any tone-mapping process on default, you'll end up with them.

It's basically the result of the software not being able to tell with confidence where the boundaries between higher/lower exposure is, so instead it assigns an approximate that "plays it safe" in one direction, and then smears out the boundary. Basically photoshop's magic selection wand + feathering.

You can get HDR to look 'fine' or whatever adjective you want to use. It's just hard. The tone-mapping software/settings that many people use will just go and create doll skin and haloes everywhere. But if you do everything well (hard work!) you can get some really cool looking stuff. For example...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/swakt1/2322363690/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/swakt1/2322366898/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ten851/4972637653/in/pool-hdr

Somewhat like many other art techniques, when best used, you barely notice it at all. And that is the most important thing to remember. HDR + tone mapping isn't just a technology, it is an art. Being able to capture video in 3 different stops at once is great, but it'll still look like crap unless you treat it with respect and give it the effort and time needed.

Remember, HDR + tone mapping is just trying to create a low dynamic range image on a low dynamic range display that LOOKS something like what your mind perceives in a high dynamic range environment. Obviously, that's kinda hard, especially since the human eye can change its sensitivity as it focuses on different parts of a scene in real life, but not really when looking at a computer screen or print.

They already have a weapon similar to this. It's called a HARM (High Speed Anti Radiation Missile). They were developed/used to take out radar sites. Similarly, they can be used to take out radar jammers (at least theoretically, I don't know if they ever have) since they operate on the same frequencies. So if you could tune the antenna/software to the right frequencies, then you can now go after communications jammers (and assuming some sort of IFF).

I don't see the connection, nor the worry. Nike+ biggest boon for an athlete is that it made tracking your own performance even easier. You now have an automatic record of how fast/long/hard each run was. You can get on the run (ha!) updates to your progress (it'll read you how far you've run so far), which is always useful. It's my understanding that humans typically enjoy forming 'personal' relationships with 'their' gadgets. Your iPhone is the same as any iPhone, and even if you loaded the exact same data on each one, one is still 'youres' and the other is someone else's (at least initially).

Besides, Nike+ is an add-on to Nike Shoes. You have to buy the pedometer separately, and it slips in like an insole. If look around for 3rd party solutions, you can use Nike+ in whatever shoe you want. Hell, you could tape it to the top of your foot and run bare feet if you wanted to.

Finally, many of the things that the article claims Nike+ enabled people to do are things that people naturally do anyways. "Users can also upload their information online, discuss achievements with other users, and challenge them to distance or speed competitions", which sounds to me like any group of athletic friends. Just bigger. You know, the whole point of the internet. So you can now interact with people far away.

Why do you think that? I'm curious. Why not Mars orbit? It's not like the belt is actually that dense. I mean, you could blindly aim a spaceship through the belt, and as long as it can take collisions with pebble size objects, it'll almost certainly make it through unscathed. Most of its mass lies in few bodies. Putting a settlement on/around one of those would be just like putting one on any non-earth moon.

My thinking is that the best place to set up self sufficient colonies independent of Earth is to start in a location where they can be dependent on Earth. Bootstrapping and all. Once you build an self sufficient earth orbit, or lunar settlement, then you can get the hell out of there and do whatever, as long as your power and transport can scale.

They tried building a hydrogen powered spy plane back in the 70s or something. LH2 is kind of a nightmare to deal with compared to jet fuel. For one thing, its a cryogenic. The US Air Force decided that playing with LH2 was a) too dangerous and b) too much of a logistics headache. And even with LH2, your energy density is still significantly lower than jet fuel. They had a nightmare trying to get the range required on that spy plane. Wiki-link for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan. If you're interested, try finding Ben Rich's Shunkworks. He spends a chapter talking about trying to build this thing (and all the wonderful fun they had playing with LH2... they apparently went ahead and did all the usual Liquid Nitrogen fun stuff... except with LH2).

The bypass ratio refers to the mass of air moved around the core to the mass moved through the core, not the ratio of thrust. For any given mass of air being put through the core, it will produce more thrust than the same ratio outside the core because it gets hotter/faster.

Uh... we use something called i<clicker. It costs like 20 bucks for a wand (and the university store sells them at 30 dollars to students... of course). The support software/hardware is like a hundred bucks per prof or something. Haven't really had any problems with them.

Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster. While in surgery, newer procedures are almost always a measurable improvement over previous procedures in some way (time, cost, success rate, whatever), I feel it that its simply too difficult to quantify the 'success' of various techniques. Especially when the success depends so much on the course material, professors, and the students. For example, I could hardly imagine Calculus I being improved with video conferencing or blogs.

What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring? If anything, I believe there are entire concepts which are better taught on a chalkboard, not with powerpoints or slides. Things where the process matters (like integration, or physics problems) where simply seeing the steps laid out before you seems to miss out on some of the 'magic'. I really feel this because I've just completed a term where I had a calc prof teaching all on chalkboard, and a physics prof who had most of the material laid out in powerpoint, and would fall back to the board when asked a question, or having to elaborate.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging profs to try something new. Provide them with resources and information on new ways to teach. Don't force them. You'll likely just end up with a bunch of profs pissed off at the university admin, and classfuls of bored students.

That said, I do find the use of the clickers really useful. I do wish more courses/profs used them.

BlackBerrys are assembled in Canada, Mexico and Hungary. Most of the parts are manufactured from all across Asia (the low-end batteries are exclusively made in China, nearly all screens are made in Japan). It doesn't really look like that's really going to change in the future. In fact, I really don't know why RIM doesn't push this point more... it'll certainly please those pundits crying about the destruction of North America's manufacturing base. I mean, there's a BlackBerry factory right in Waterloo.

As for India's complaint, the summary is leaving out some important information. Couple years back they pressed on RIM, and RIM relented, agreeing to allow Indian security agencies access to BB comms on request (they have similar arrangements with North American law enforcement and intelligence agencies I imagine). RIM did not agree to setup a local NOC (the server where all BB traffic flows) in India. Lately, RIM agreed to set up a NOC in China (giving Chinese agencies somewhat easier access to BB traffic), in exchange for being able to do business there. India is ticked off cause they wanted the same setup and is now pushing again. It's not a question of India getting access to local BB traffic, its a question of how easy it is for them to get it.

Well, the restrictions really don't matter cause all communications to/from the President must be recorded and be made available. Bush Jr gave up on his personal email (it was an aol account) when he became president cause he didn't want to have to disclose private information. Obama's BB will be under similar restrictions. Whatever BES he's attached to probably has all sorts of ridiculous auditing and filtering stuff turned on for his account. It's very much going to be 'boring' work phone.