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Look at the bottom edge. EXACT SAME placement of headphone, charging port, speaker grill...

Come on. Man up and at least admit that part alone is a direct copy.

Great link. I was thinking of nearer objects (like a plane) with a powerful $300 laser, but it's interesting to see how much further you'd have to go to have a visible effect on the moon.

It would be interesting to see what a stadium full of synchronized powerful laser pointers could do...

Turns out those green laser pointers you get in the mail are a lot more powerful than you would think.

I, for one, am concerned over the constant use of the words "legal content"

Exactly, none of us are going to be happy when we find out what that means - because it implies a whole set of other actions for anything deemed "illegal content".

Well except for me; I plan to laugh and laugh when the other thousand shoes drop and the internet lets forth a vast and pitiful wailing. So that will offset the sadness substantially. If I can't be free at least I can be proven right.

Well, bankruptcy is considered fraud in some places, but no bank has ever refused Donald Trump a checking account,

Whoosh. As in, you jetted past whatever point you may have been trying to make and went directly into the sun.

And Mega...

Did you just completely miss my whole point or what?

I said that what was happening to Mega WAS NOT THE BANKS CHOICE. It was government pressure; the mention of fraud was just generically is response to the notion that banks should be unable to refuse any business at all.

Banks should be able to choose who to business with - but that includes choosing to do business without any government pressure on who that may be. There's no reason why banks should not do business with Mega apart from the government disliking it.

Technology creates new fields

Yes, I realize that, but will it always be enough to offset the losses? I don't see enough "new fields" to replace lost factory jobs. Retail? That seems like a stretch, but the web and self-checkout technologies are eating into that also. Plus, retail pays lower than factory work.

Road construction, gas stations, repair shops, car factories, etc. clearly offset any loss in the "horse and coach" business. I don't see the equivalent in quantity these days.

Quark chips?

It used to be that new technologies created new jobs as it destroyed old ones. But that's merely a historical pattern, not necessarily a law of nature, and it may end.

It's kind of like Moore's Law: it's held so far, but nobody knows if it will keep.

Many conservatives feel that if the gov't doesn't meddle, new jobs will come from somewhere. However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.

If the Chinese gov't cant find jobs for that many people, bleep will happen. Rioting will likely happen based recent history just after the mortgage crash. They may have to dust off the socialism.

why do banks get to pick and choose who to do business with?

Well first of all, they shouldn't be required to do business with someone who repeatedly commits fraud...

However what is happening here is not the choice of the business. It's the government saying "we can make life very unpleasant for you in terms of audits etc. unless you cease doing business with this list of people". The government has been going after many adult businesses in the same way for a while now, google Operation Chokepoint

I'm still dubious about the end effect of net neutrality regulations being passed (remember that none of us have seen the actual regulations to take effect, and none will until they are finalized).

That said, the real road to true Net Neutrality is and always will be in allowing real competition for your ISP provider, and that's the kind of thing that this allows for. If a community cannot be well served by a "real" networking company it makes no sense to block them from taking matters into their own hands.

So I applaud this action, I just wish they would be open in other regards rather than limiting.

As far as I'm concerned, if it's gravitation is enough to pull it into a sphere, it's a planet

Then we'd have hundreds of "planets".

One could argue that since the definition is arbitrary, including that of "sufficiently round", we might as well stick with the "classic 9".

Calling the entitled, greedy rich "Neptunecrats" doesn't sound right.

But "Uranuscrats" or "Uranus-craps" is quite fitting.

I don't know if it's in this article, but in an article I read before they planned to do exactly that - put three seismographs in the region, as currently whatever caused the holes did not register on the seismographs elsewhere in Russia (since it appears they are not really explosions but pressure caused ejections, the earth would not be as shaken).