The system never asks pedestrians when they will arrive, so cars will get right of way and crosswalk timing will become shorter and less predictable. Also the system probably cannot identify a car stuck in the intersection.. sounds like it lowers safety in order to reduce gasoline usage. If you want to change average red light timing based on real traffic flow you can do it without installing machinery into cars themselves and overriding the traffic lights on demand.

"So if you want to watch funnier videos.."

It seems that if you type in a long looooooooooool to google then it will only give you videos with that exact number of o's.
Or at least, it shows search results from long looooooooolz to short looolz

This is getting dumb.
- We need scientific notation for lol, lulz, etc. like lol^50, lulz^150, etc. it's just not elegant now.
- We need a way to tell google to show ALL of them, funniest first. Google: video lol^50 to lol^40 desc
    Otherwise what's the point of encoding video this way.
- Diminishing returns... and yet Google can't search beyond around 130 o's.
I calculate the funniest thousand videos or so are locked away from us in the long tail beyond google's search capability!

Google: looooooooool video

10 o's: 875,000 results
20 o's: 209,000
30 o's: 60,900
40 o's: 31,200
50 o's: 10,600
60 o's: 5,220
70 o's: 2,790
100 o's: 1,830
120 o's: 728
unfortunately many more than this and the word is too long and not allowed.

Seriously. I was recently looking to install a firewall on my HTC Evo 4G. The apps I found all had tons of useless crap and the firewall portion requires root. I don't want to root my device since I get no support anymore then. In fact I submitted a bug (.Mail folder redownloads all attachments until >1GB in size) and they tried to weasle out when they thought it was rooted.

I had some hopes for Moxie Marlinspike's WhisperMonitor.. not sure if it requires root but probably does. I can't tell because Twitter has frozen downloads.. and now I am wondering if they are touching his code.
- I want Android to have an open app like Little Snitch on Mac, or iptables based firewalls, to monitor ingoing and outgoing access by application and disallow certain ones. WhisperMonitor looks good.
- I want Android to be able to control what applications can do on my phone, including what files they can touch. The current permissions you choose upon download are really a joke. I feel like random apps are free to play havoc with my files and net connection.

> What's there to complain about?

When Microsoft does it, It's A Trap. When Apple does it, "It's a Walled Garden" which sounds positive in the sense of perhaps being more secure or promoting higher quality.

And it's true. Apple looking at the source code of apps sold on its store make me feel safer. I wouldn't be looking for a firewall for my iPhone as quickly as I am now for my HTC. And Apple makes good products; I love my MacBook Pro. An iPad is a useful device.

But look at what happens with iTunes and music. How do you share iTunes purchases made by two family members in a family with more than five PCs, iPhones and iPads? I'm not sure I solved that question on winter vacation for my own family.
I am not aware if Apple does this, but I am sure I don't want the same thing to happen for books or for it even to be possible.

Do you want books to be redefined as proprietary bits of code? How do you make libraries?
The scheme is designed to make another Walled Garden. It is not "just a proprietary platform, they are honest about it." It is in fact a spearhead aimed at students under the guise of "lower priced textbooks" while requiring the use of expensive technology and purchase through them alone. So it is the opposite of Open Courseware a la MIT.

In other words, Apple could pay professors to write books for their Walled Garden but they are not contributing to general education due to artificial limitations on ability to sell and distribute them. Apple is making most of their money now not by making tools but by controlling sales and distribution. I feel it is highly inappropriate for the manufacturer of my computer to attempt to tell me where and how I can sell products I make with it.

Yes, Apple will use this to draw authors and publishers to their Walled Garden. The combination of a proprietary format, a closed storefront, and a closed platform will still be enticing based on simple economics - it may be easiest to sell there. As titles accumulate at lower prices than for printed books, it will look better and better regardless of content quality or accessibility in terms of academic freedom. It might have a good effect in terms of lightening the economic burden on students and making it easier to carry books around.

But No, it is not acceptable to paint this as being altruistic or as supporting scholarship. It is not just a proprietary format and free tool. It also includes poisonous restrictions on what you do with the creations. It is very clearly an attempt to corner the publishing market and to poison publications from the point of authorship by making it difficult or illegal to stray from their store. In particular there are many schools that are spending huge amounts of money to introduce iPads. That books could be produced for these devices and not be available to students who do not have iPads is neither ethical nor to be allowed. I believe there is a huge danger that a company which is making billions upon billions of dollars through sales of music copyright could destroy open scholarship by attempting to roll over the next closest market it has not yet occupied, which is academic publishing: an industry which has a strong impact on how the next generation thinks.

It is said the most amazing discoveries come from a scientist saying "gee that's funny..."

By accidentally producing this very cool new material they have according to the abstract made the first electron microscopy of glass, allowed by this very thin layer being supported by but not bonded to the underlying graphite. And from the amazing picture they took, which amazingly resembles drawings made by a glass theorist 80 years ago, they were able to make calculations showing that the weak van der waals force is what's keeping this thing stable.

It is a totally awesome thing they found and probably gives them whole new ideas about how to grow thin 2d structures. Just a week ago there was another bit of news about awesome 2d ice channels in graphite that open and close to keep helium from going through them. Sounds like there are tons of totally awesome things that are possible in these crenulated 2d realms and graphite is helping us discover them.

Perhaps someone else here can theorize about what it all means.

Depends on where you live. Where I live there are a lot of used games stores. There is also a big chain of used book stores making enough money to pay for major downtown floorspace. If you think of games as books, i.e. cultural media products, then when these guys are doing is unconscionable. They really owe the purchaser a perpetually redeemable and transferable license plus very clear explanation outside the box of what they are doing. Otherwise they are just being tricky and forcing a sketchy business plan on dupes with in-box EULA. Luckily I never have and hopefully never will purchase one of their products.

The researchers found that among all intelligent sexually reproducing species in the galaxy, every single one had a list of sexual innuendoes related to black holes.

One problem with English word passwords. They can be very easily spoken.
This means if you vocalize while you type, or if the system accepts voice input, it will be very easy to lose your security and for people to share the information vocally. Since as other posters note it is low entropy if your CPU understands English.

I am so glad I recommended Crashplan instead of Carbonite to my Mom. I got Crashplan too.

The good thing about Crashplan being that it also gives you a free client to duplicate backup to a hard disk you have networked somewhere or a friend's computer. Oh and they are "unlimited backup".

From what I can tell of their character, I doubt Crashplan would ever, ever do what Carbonite did.

For those who didn't TFA, some guy trying to be educational or humorous is reaching to convert energy to mass via e=mc^2 and say that's a significant amount of mass being used to maintain an electron in place to represent a "1" bit.

What about the weight of the energy that was stored in the battery's chemical compound and was used to power the device to download the ebook? Part is dissipated as heat and light emission. So is this scientist assuming a perfect battery, a perfect reversible computational device, and an ESP-driven interface with no visual display? Those photons are heavy too..

What I'm saying is the memory chip is not isolated from its imperfect power source and CPU, and the bits do not magically appear they have to be calculated. Besides which, all this weight is surely dwarfed by the weight of the atoms being rubbed off the device by finger gestures. And lint.