Well, that would explain that creepy incubus.

Nah, a Stanford Torus style space station would be a better fit for Journey.

Well, let's split the difference, and say that they come from a tiny moon between Spain and France.

Over its lifetime? Per year? Per what?

You know, and the whole murder / bodytheft thing.

I guess you could try to find a matching service, but given all the factors involved, I doubt you're going to have an easy time finding someone who wants to swap bodies with you who has the same tissue type, same skin color, compatible build, equitable age & health, etc.

Brain meats decay and age too. Unless you're operating off of some bizarre ship of Theseus theory of identity.

So after skimming that presentation, I wondered: would it also be accurate (by the same logic) to say that the Earth doesn't orbit the Sun; it orbits the galactic center (and is perturbed by the Sun)? Serious question; I'm curious as to whether there's a qualitative difference between the two that astrophysicists would identify, or if it's just a matter of scale.

The central power station is not making its emissions a few feet from the sidewalk. Its pollution controls aren't restricted by weight or the need for portability.

It's also way more efficient.

Electrifying the vehicle fleet is like modularizing your code. Instead of being tied to petroleum, with an electric fleet you can snap in nuclear, tidal, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever else turns out to be a good idea.

Saying that something is "good, but not for the masses," is elitism; even if you take the rather odd tack that you consider yourself in the group of the masses when you make that pronouncement.

Maybe he'll actually be able to raise the standards of ethics and customer relations at Zynga. After all, starting so much closer to their level than the average executive will make it easier for the business culture there to relate to him.

My own freaking mother did this once in a theater and talked for 2-3 minutes. My father and I were appalled. IT was embarrassing, and she didn't really understand that what she did was wrong at first.

Not all of us have tunnel vision, and cell phone screens are bright. Someone texting out of the corner of your eye can be very distracting even if you can't see the screen and only see the glow, especially in stadium-style theaters where multiple rows are easily visible. Plus, even phones on vibrate make distracting noise when text after text comes in.

Oh, I wouldn't, but then again I'd mostly be up in arms about why some jerk decided to reach into my pocket and grab my silenced cell phone from out of my front pocket in the first place. Bad touch! Bad touch!

Well, although I don't believe in the whole "24/7 connectivity is required" mindset (somehow society survived for thousands of years before it became an option), if you insist on being connected at all times, a theatre that implements this wouldn't be an option for you. Your options would be to patronize a different theatre, or choose a different form of entertainment.

Javascript is supposed to be sandboxed in all modern browsers, but that doesn't make it perfect.

And Java was supposed to be in a safe sandbox as well. And anyone here should know about the variety of Java exploits out there and the constant patching to stay ahead of them.

Trusting a sandbox is stupid.
You also need a way to globally deny the option of running the code in the first place.

What exactly was "stupid" about ActiveX aside from potential malicious code (either directly or via overflows) that was either enabled by default or presented to the user with a "just click yes so the website will work" style input box?

Isn't the part about enabling malicious code by default stupid enough?

Firefox "avoided" this by not implementing ActiveX but most or all of the functionality was recreated in Javascript, giving it basically the exact same level of "stupid" with the benefit of having learned from about 10 years of exploits.

It's more of the "globally disabled EXCEPT for a whitelist maintained by the user".

It's the security methodology that is the difference.
Global enable vs global deny.

And Microsoft had the exact same reasoning behind their global enable. It makes it easier for THIRD PARTIES to present their content in the way that they want to the user.

That's almost acceptable when those THIRD PARTIES are trustworthy.

But those THIRD PARTIES could just as easily be crackers. And why make it easier for crackers to run their code on your computer in the way that they want to?