LTE will give 100Mb/s on the move and more if stationary ...why exactly do we need this and who is paying ?

Don't worry, if the 3G precedent holds up in 4G, the actual data rates will be MUCH lower and latency will be atrocious.

Our reference frame does not magically cause a photon to travel 21 million LY in zero time, so this did not happen hours ago for anybody. Just because information travels at the speed of light doesn't mean events don't happen before we see them. By your line of reasoning, the Big Bang just happened because photons from around that time are still hitting our detectors today.

It's amazing how many people get this stuff wrong. I blame physicists who make it a habit to formulate anything related to relativistic effects (or quantum physics for that matter) as misleadingly as humanly possible.

Damn'd. Now RealNetworks will confiscate all the /. servers. See what have you done?

Not only that, apparently they'd have the power to confiscate all the desktop and laptop computers of Slashdot editors' families as well if interpret this precedent correctly. To me, this is the most disturbing part of the entire thing. There is no way all of their computers are connected in any meaningful way to the site that this guy ran. Also, it's apparently enough to be related to an alleged copyright infringer in order for them to come and take your stuff away.

Then I'm wondering: if this code is not used for, you know, actual panty shots - where is all the consternation coming from? Lots of projects have not-so-clever names that are in no way connected to how they work. If the stink caused over this non-issue was actually enough to make a developer quit the project, then it's a big red flag for everyone to stay the hell away from this toxic community.

That's why they give you the option to get the stamp on a separate piece of paper that you can just take out of your passport when you no longer need it.

Clearly they won't ever actually be able to pay the fines, and by extension it's clear that those doing the suing never intend to collect these ridiculous amounts.

Of course the CEOs of these companies intend to collect these amounts. At the highest level, those companies are convinced that pirates make obscene amounts of money off their copies. And I believe the lawyer scum specializing in those kinds of lawsuits are paid or at least credited proportionally to the amount awarded.

In any case, collecting the whole amount is not the point. Ruining the defendants is. It's exactly the meaning of the phrase "suing you for everything you got". The system is set up so that the trial alone could ruin an average citizen - whether they are found guilty or not. And in case someone still has anything left, they'll take that when they collect the fine.

So what happens after they declare you guilty? The fines are so high as to ensure every last penny you own and every last penny you will ever make is going to them. That means you lose everything. Your house, your car, your job. What follows then is bankruptcy, which in many cases means simply a controlled descent into hopeless poverty.

Incidentally, these effects are exactly the same as when an average person comes down with a serious illness in the United States.

They can turn the phone on remotely without your knowledge.

No, they cannot, it's an urban legend. For "them" to activate any kind of backdoor (of which there are some) the device must be turned on. In order for a phone to receive and execute remote commands, its operating system must be running.

Well, God is about the only entity which almost no one expects to do evil (or even bad by mistake)

I'm just glad he's imaginary, because that sky wizard dude portrayed in scripture comes pretty close to any modern definition of evil. Also, I'm no expert on this, but isn't this devil character just the other side of the same coin?

This guy is trying to establish himself as some kind of authority on futurism, but I just perceive him as an attention whore who actually contributes very little. Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but his TV series "Physics of the Impossible" was one big self-aggrandizing marketing gig. I barely made it through two episodes that essentially consisted of the professor rehashing old science fiction concepts and passing them off as his own inventions. Every episode ended with a big "presentation" in front of dozens of fawning admirers. Before the credits rolled, they made sure to cram in as many people as possible saying how great and ground-breaking his ideas were. It was disgusting.

Are there physical limits to Moore's law? Sure. We already knew that. Circuits can't keep getting smaller and smaller indefinitely, and we have already run into the limit on reasonable clock speeds several years ago. And despite this, the computer industry hasn't cataclysmically imploded.

Works for me in 4.0b12

How bizarre, I'm on 4.0b12pre (Mac) and I firmly recall WebGL working just a few days ago - not so much now. Oh well... Chrome did the job.

You'd need a PhD to predict the tides.

Whenever I hear about observations like these I basically fall into an infinite loop imagining what it would be like to actually see this in person.

I was having trouble imagining the 8:6:4:3 resonance pattern, so I dug out this very cool visualisation: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/KOI-730.html (needs a WebGL-capable browser, for some reason FF 4 doesn't work though).

Yesterday I removed a friend because I got a notification that he answered a question about me on some Facebook application. I didn't join this app, and a friend who is willing to give details about me out to a third party so casually isn't someone I am willing to share a link with on this type of system.

Sadly, those apps are lying. Chances are, nobody answered anything about you. It's a ploy. I can almost guarantee you that the app only had access to that person's friend list and used the friend list to contact you. It's probably not your friend's fault at all. Most of the time, when you're trying out a new FB game, it wants access to your friends list before you can even find out whether the game is legit. Even if you remove the app again immediately, it still had enough time to siphon off your data.