That was the point of "psychohistory." The idea was you can't predict the individuals, just the mass/net effect over time.

Even in Asimov's world, psychohistory only works on groups that don't practice psychohistory themselves. Harry Seldon only kept things from going off the rails by making the science die out, and by starting a Second Foundation of telepaths.

Once someone starts making predictions from data aggregation more effective, the race will be on to duplicate or improve on it, and then nobody's prediction algorithms will work.

Almost sounds like someone should write a dystopian Foundation book, where the mathematicians race to predict each others' predictive abilities (and of course, stop them!)

At some point, you'd think it might be more cost effective for the handset manufacturers to start using some form of software defined radio to allow handsets to switch between different bands. Or at least some sort of FPGA solution reprogrammable by something like a firmware update. I suppose there might be some antenna inefficiency as you start switching away from what your antenna is tuned for, but I'm not sure how much.

Materials might be cheap, but if it requires both a laser cutter and a 3d printer, that's not exactly what I'd call cheap to produce.

As long as my colorful touch panel has MX cherry blue buckling spring switches, I'm ok with that. Oh, wait, that doesn't work? Never mind. I'll take the quaint keyboard, please.

Unfortunately it does carry a certain amount of angular momentum from the rotation of the sun, so the CME doesn't quite travel in a straight line. It's mass that's moving, not just EM/light, otherwise it would be here 8 minutes after the flare (since we're 8 light minutes away) and the mass carries that momentum. The sun doesn't rotate uniformly, it's gaseous and the poles tend to rotate differently than the equator (I think less fast than the equator but can't recall for certain) but the flare originated from closer to the equator as many of them do.

Reliable indoor positioning is probably one of the key pre-requisites to building workable augmented-reality apps like games and such. There's probably a real payoff for the long term, but maybe not for the group that invents the underlying concepts/tech, unless they find some way to see it through to applications.

It could at least specify what the 3.5 percent improvement is in comparison to. Otherwise it's pretty meaningless to make a "fastest shoe in the world" claim.

Everyone knows it's supposed to be a shoe *phone*, not a shoe printer.

Well, we now know what "living metal" the Robot was made out of in that old Tom Baker episode. They shot it with a laser, and it grew. Ergo, fullerenes.

From the sound of it, I almost thought "The Walking Dead" was based on a FPS to begin with.

Heck, next they'll want to make a game out of that awful "Battleship" movie. Oh, wait...

This story seems like an echo of the one a day or so ago about Linux being critical to the success of the LHC. Something with generic programmability supports something specific, then gets discussed as a tool for that specific task. Probably a lot of the comments there apply here.

Worse, the expected response might be for aliens to transmit the contents of the record back to us, to show us they're intelligent and want to start a chain of communication. Oops, but that would be considered a crime?

You know, some sci fi writer with the right wit (maybe Scalzi?) could make a really good spoof short story out of this one.

Should work fine, until the system decides the chrome-plated car driving in front of you is a glare hazard, and decides not to illuminate it...

Personally, I think Infrared cameras are a better solution; the wavelength is long enough it goes around a lot of rain and snow. Some cars have these already, but they need to make it more standard/affordable.

Wouldn't quite go that far... more like saying you and your neighbor are both being prosecuted together rather than being tried separately because you both used BT. You may be right about it holding up, but I would see the question more as one of whether you're two individuals interacting with the same technical resource, versus two individuals interacting with each other.