For someone whose job is based on the premise that people will not always obey the law, that police chief seems a bit too trusting that laws will prevent abuse.

I had a laptop that would barely be able to do hdtv, and couldn't handle 720p content without significant stuttering. I believe the issue was that I had done enough research to know its graphics card supported decoding, but not enough to know that the particular brand making the graphics card had a long history of terrible linux support.

As far as whether hardware decoding is even necessary, it's something that I'd look at as an issue for set top boxes/low power media centers. It seems XBMC has generally been able to get linux drivers for these released fairly quickly in recent years, since the hardware manufacturers are aware that a significant portion of their potential customers are looking for a device to run XBMC.

If it's anything like H.264/x264 then I expect to have the hardware to decode H.265/x265 in my laptop about 2 years after movies and tv shows are being distributed in this format, but 2 years before there are any linux drivers for the hardware decoders.

This doesn't really help. I pondered this for a while the other day when I read that first and gave up trying to wrap my head around it. I was always under the impression that 0 kelvin (absolute 0) meant a state at which there was no movement at the atomic/subatomic level. It would seem as though to reach a negative temperature, one would have to slow a substances particles to less than 0 movement. Then I realized they were talking about a quantum state and I pretty much gave up trying to understand it at that point, because anything which has the word 'quantum' in it suddenly defies all the rules I'd ever been taught about anything at all. :o)

As far as 'quantum' goes, if you're okay with the idea that a particle can have either a positive spin or a negative spin, even though spinning would always seem to imply a positive amount of spin, that's halfway to understanding what's going on here.

The way that temperature is defined, (1 / Temperature) = (Change in Entropy) / (Change in Energy). By this definition, absolute zero would mean that there is an infinite decrease in entropy for any decrease in energy, i.e. going to absolutely no movement of particles as energy decreases.

What happened here is that scientists developed a system where increasing energy decreased entropy, so (Change in Entropy) / (Change in Energy) had a negative value. This naturally involved a vacuum and a lattice of lasers and anything else a Bond villain could ask for, with the end result being that the particles could continue to take energy while decreasing the entropy in the system.

As far as this particular article being easy enough for a layman to understand, if it were I wouldn't expect to read "researchers getting a quantum gas to go below absolute zero" in the summary, because:

tl;dr: A quirk in the definition of temperature allows for it to be negative without having to remove energy from a system that is at absolute zero, meaning the temperature never 'goes below' absolute zero.

I think it's more an issue of the phones people are using. None of the cell providers appear to be separated into 3g/4g, so the more people who are using older cell phones the worse that provider will appear in the measurements.

Using the "off-topic" moderation to describe being irrelevant to the thread a comment is posted in as opposed to the original article should discourage this behavior. Unfortunately it would require changing the way a lot of people view that moderation option.

By registering these domains he prevented the senders from getting a message that the url in the address they were sending to did not exist. Presumably he also made it so whatever catch all for the typoed domains wouldn't report an error. If he hadn't set up these domains then the senders would have received automated messages informing them their emails weren't delivered. While he didn't violate the law in stopping these emails from bouncing with errors, his behavior certainly wasn't ethical and did disrupt the intended communications.

You ask for a source giving a specific viewpoint on SOPA/PIPA that is also as unbiased as possible?

The savings from using Chinese labor is actually estimated at 23%:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/17/jon-stewart-foxconn-siri-the-daily-show-video_n_1210556.html

Employees at Foxconn who put together iPhones earn 31 cents an hour. Clearly anyone who isn't willing to fly to China to get a 31 cent/hour job is too lazy to be employed.

Does copyright law in Slovakia have the notion of fair use applied as it does in the U.S.? Without fair use of copyrighted materials as a middle ground you'd have a much harder time arguing that news articles can be copyrighted.

Groupon only gives the actual vendors half the money, so if a groupon user paid £6.50 the retailer would receive £3.25, so she was spending about £6 to make a dozen cupcakes and charging £26. Those are indeed some very healthy margins.

It's 1 minute 23 seconds.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&ie=UTF-8&q=250+MB+%2F+24+Mbps

The classic example is JavaScript-rendered dynamic content. This tends not to work so well when you're dealing with search engines. However, if you can serve them a static page that contains the text of the page minus all the rendering, then it can index the content without choking on the JavaScript. I'm not sure how important this is these days, but it certainly was a problem at one time.

That's what the noscript tag is for

It's also useful to serve modified versions for search engines so that searches for content within your site can return more relevant results. For example, you might insert certain keywords that describe the content of the page using terms that don't actually appear. Case in point, your page talks about Airport, but you serve a copy to Google that inserts the terms 802.11 and Wi-Fi.

That's what the meta name=keywords tag is for

Finally, there's the question of bandwidth and CPU overhead. If your site changes a lot, Google beats on your servers rather frequently. You can reduce the bandwidth hit by stripping JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. from your content before serving it to Google. This won't significantly change the searchability of the content, but will reduce the bandwidth overhead. And, of course, if there are static versions of content that you can serve instead of a server-side-dynamic version, this also saves on CPU overhead.

Google spiders text, not images. It also doesn't spider the text of css or javascript files. Also, I question how effective it is to dynamically decide to serve a static page based on a user-agent as opposed to merely serving everyone the dynamic page.

Jailbreaking is breaking out of a software-based jail, necessary to gain access to anything outside of a sandbox. On an iPhone this is necessary before one can root the device.

Rooting is simply gaining root privileges, and is all that is needed here.