Reminds me of the chapter in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion (part of The Baroque Cycle). Japanese mercury vendors try to disable the Minerva (an armed merchant vessel) by filling its cargo hold with half-filled pots of mercury, rather than filling them to the brim. The idea is that the sloshing in the hull would resonate with the waves at the entrance to the harbour and slow the ship enough to be captured (or something to that effect). There's a discussion of whether Stephenson got the science correct here.

"A single gun owner could also temporarily program a friend or family member's print into the gun to go target shooting and then remove it upon returning home."

Either that or the guy who takes your gun will also take your finger

My late father-in-law was a DJ. We have several boxes of his LPs, 45s and reel to reel tapes in the garage. Would you like them? If you call now I'll throw in a few milk crates of our VHS tapes, CDs and DVDs at no extra cost.

In contrast, we also have 40 years or so of 8mm/VHS family video that he put on DVD before his death. DVD isn't perfect, but those get backed up and have been shared with family.

What about using an antenna? I cut cable about 7 years ago - everything comes in on Mythbuntu via an HDHR hooked up to a small roof-mounted antenna. We get about 30 channels OTA with no excess compression and no copy protection. Everything else comes in over the net (Netflix and "other").

You don't say what metro area you are in or whether you are living in an antenna-friendly building but you've already got 90% of the gear you need. Lots of info on the web about how to make the jump. You may have already investigated OTA, but if not you definitely should.

As a surgeon, does he really think it's a good idea to replace the "Guy Hingston bankrupt" autocomplete with "Guy Hingston lawsuit"?

So they replaced pixels with a two-dimensional grid of sqare vectors that scale in width and height to grid width(or height) divided by the number of square vectors on the grid?

Actually just skimmed TFA and it looks like they have an interesting model - they separate the three channels and then fit vector "contours" around the different levels of brightness for each channel. The finer you need control, the more contours you add and the more explicitly you define the the polygons. Looks like a promising, workable solution.

In other words, he's using a slit camera to make photo finish images (but with the subject something other than finish lines). Technology is being repurposed for a potentially interesting effect, but not technically revolutionary.

Almost anything you can do or use today has an open source option. You have open source options for everything from your operating system to your chat app. You can read open source textbooks, cookbooks and encyclopedias. You can even build an open source airplane or brew your own free beer (free beer as in free speech, not free beer as in free beer).

Given all these options, what part(s) of your life would you be unwilling to open source? Your children's education? Vaccines? A pacemaker? If so, what would your test be for deciding that a closed-source option is the only choice?

"Down there," said Golg, "I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds."

"Bosh!" said Jill rudely. "As if we didn't know that we're below the deepest mines even here."

"Yes," said Golg. "I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But
that's where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing.
There I'll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You
won't care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the
live ones of Bism."

"My father went to the world's end," said Rilian thoughtfully. "It would be a marvellous thing if his son
went to the bottom of the world."

No go with a Bold 9900 - the "Load Mobile site anyway" link doesn't even work. Disappointing but not a big loss - die OS7, die.

Works well and looks great on a PlayBook. Actually might prefer this layout to the full version!

Unless the MRI can show the brain as a series of miniature illustrations, these guys are about 121 years late to the game. But maybe that's just my approbativeness showing...

If your accountant is using Excel to run your books that means it's time to get a new accountant.

And before the internet it was all done with photocopiers, fax machines, (to a much lesser extent) VCRs and (even more rarely) BBSs. People used to keep binders full of these things at their desks. Before photocopiers showed up it was done via mimeograph, and one assumes that before that people were tracing boobs through eight layers of carbon paper.

Just as porn is at the forefront of all consumer technology, any office technology gets immediately co-opted for cartoons, kittens and breasts.