The article says "roughly a quarter the temperature of the surface of the sun". 1000 could be considered roughly 1400. The hottest solar concentrators I've read about were just under 600C (~580). I don't see anything in the article or summary that suggests 1000 is approximately the temp of the sun's surface.

Instead of releasing stored energy from within the earth's system (aka, burning fossil fuels) and releasing greenhouse gases that help trap the sun's energy, we're just going to cut out the middle man and trap the sun's energy directly?

What middle man?

One process creates a bunch of localized heat and releases greenhouse gases that help to trap heat long-term. The other process creates the exact same amount of localized heat and doesn't release greenhouse gasses.

A lot is an article or set of articles for sale at an auction. Both sausage and stolen credit card numbers are often sold via online auctions.

Since no one ever checks signatures properly, stolen cards can easily be used for fraud in the US, without needing to shoulder surf for a PIN first.

Some notes on this... Merchant agreements PROHIBIT merchants from asking for ID and DO NOT REQUIRE that merchants check signatures. In fact Visa et al actually essentially PUNISH vendors who do. Famously, Wal-Mart used to have a policy to check signatures and VISA successfully argued that they should not be on the hook to cover fraudulent purchases that Wal-Mart should have caught via signature checks (ie, they said Wal-Mart's employees were inconsistent). So over 10 years ago Wal-Mart changed their corporate policy and cashiers are instructed to NOT check signatures. The same amount of fraud happens, but VISA et al are now on the hook and can't blame Wal-Mart employees.

In Europe, the card vendors were forced by law into Chip+Pin. VISA has more profit that the GDP of many countries and they don't even loan out money. They don't care about a little fraud. Their concern in the USA was users might periodically forget their PINs and pay with cash instead. So they lobbied to keep signatures, and of course our congress persons don't listen to security experts if corporate interests disagree.

This may be helpful. It was posted to slashdot a few years ago.

He said "get a will and you're covered". I don't think he was talking about losing a computer to lightning, but getting struck personally while you're walking around.

That said, there are things you can do for that, too... try not to be the tallest object during a thunderstorm (ex, don't be in a boat on the lake, don't be in the middle of a field, and don't hide under the tallest tree). As you point out, there are very few times when burying your head in the sand is the best move.

Android has no API for "take_a_photo_with_permission()", there's just stuff to access the camera. It definitely makes sense why facebook app might need access to the camera: it clearly supports taking photos directly, and that's something users want. I'm not sure about Firefox or Chrome, but maybe flash runs within the brower's security context, so the browser would need permission to access the camera if flash was going to?

I highly doubt facebook, chrome, and firefox are using the camera without our knowledge. That said, the permission system on android could be improved to ensure this doesn't happen. Google has alread said they don't want to do that, though.

Is there a timeline on this? I see the lifetime purchase of Switchboard is currently discounted. Will I be able to get the linux version before the price goes up?

I could maybe justify it right now to secure the price, but I literally only have 1 windows machine at home: a laptop my wife uses, so it would be a tad useless.

Doesn't Open Source predate the free software movement? When Richard Stallman was fighting with that printer which he didn't have a driver for, he was using a Unix machine. Traditionally, Unix has come with the source code but you were restricted with what you could do with it. That sounds like Open Source to me.

Doom is open source. You still need the level file (*.wad) to play the game. You have to pay for that.

The DOJ isn't involved yet, so cut the conspiracy bullshit.

Whether a monopoly is illegal isn't decided by how you acquired the monopoly. It's what you do after you achieve monopoly level market share which determines whether your monopoly is legal or illegal. You can be as anticompetitive as you want, but once you dominate any market segment, you have to be careful how you use that dominance.

I agree Google is probably fine, but for different reasons.

Really? Because we subscribe to Google Apps and let me tell you, Google Docs is incredible for shared content creation even if it is absolutely horrendous at formatting.

And LibreOffice/OpenOffice are almost as good as MS Office for sharing... put the files on a Samba share and then utilize the trackchanges and commenting systems built into the application.

So our process is often generate the content quickly in Google Docs, then 1 person copy/splats that into LibreOffice and cleans up the formatting (adding company watermarks, properly inserting figures, etc).

I should hope not! Installing a browser kiosk on your desktop would be weird, and if you installed it on a server I might have to take away your keys to the server room.

Is he afraid of kids getting access to porn or is he afraid of kids becoming politically active and starting a "Russian Spring" or sorts?

What the hell is this shit? Your comment reads like you asked why he murdered your wife. You're not publically interogating Salvatore Riina, you're asking Linus about ABIs. That's not a question that takes "guts" to ask. Cut the dramatic bullshit.