So what youâ(TM)re telling me is that employees might have different political interests than their senior executives?

Wow we ought to write that down or something.

Yeah, youâ(TM)re right, the sensible first response to âoehey, sexism is kinda prevalent and also badâ is âoeI bet those females are lyingâ.

Well done. Good job.

Lemme guess...you have never seen a comic book.

Iâ(TM)d love for you to make that argument for Windows Mobile. Thatâ(TM)d be pretty funny.

In 1972 or 1973, my family vacationed for a week in the summer on Chincoteague Island off the coast of Maryland. NASA launched sub-orbital rockets that did this exact same thing -- created colored clouds in the night sky.

Why do it again, 45 years later?

SevenEves would have been better if it was half as long. Stephenson is a great writer, though, and I understand if he can't help himself on that!

I agree than Anathem was incredibly good. A long book that you should really read twice to get everything.

You say "caring", I say "having integrity". But hey, you've got the only correct value system, right?

I work for Dolby Laboratories, and am deeply involved with high-dynamic-range content creation and hardware.

We created the SMPTE 2084 standard HDR EOTF (electro-optical transfer function.) It turns out that human perception is such that by choosing the luminance for code values to be just barely indistinguishable from the adjacent ones, you can get 0 to 10,000 nits (10x as bright as this Panasonic display) with only 12 bits. SMPTE 2084 is what all HDR TVs are using today.

Uh. You don't know how to spell "weird". I don't think we should take you very seriously.

When I was shooting Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift in Tokyo, in winter of 2005, I saw a rig a lot like this. I was walking down a street, and saw a van with four cameras, four LIDARs, and two GPS sensors on the top. I asked a man working on it what it was, and he said "Oh! Are you engineer?" and I confessed that I was just a movie-maker. But, nevertheless, they showed me everything in the van, and said that the point was developing 3D models of all the streets in Tokyo. At the time, it wasn't for self-driving cars though -- they wanted to build 3D in-car maps for navigation. The team of engineers was from a university in Tokyo; although I don't recall which one.

While in the past, I agree that people were correct to hold the government accountable for this kind of surveillance, it isn't the biggest issue today. Huge amounts of information are gathered by companies about everybody on the 'net, and shared between them without any limitations. You don't want the government to see your email? Ok, fine -- but Google's incredibly powerful AI team doesn't just see your email -- it *understands* your email. Google can, and does, use that knowledge in any number of ways; and ways that will get more diverse (and perverse?) in the future.

In the not too distant future, I believe that companies like Google and Facebook will become more politically powerful than 99% of the governments in the world. Facebook was going to launch a satellite today to allow everybody in Africa to use Facebook; although somehow the rocket that was going to launch that satellite blew up. My belief is that Facebook wants to get information about everybody on the planet, and will do whatever it takes to do that.

Governments? Come on, that's not the threat.

My believe is that they intend to fly hundreds of these. If you have 100 tethers from 0 to 60,000 ft or so, I believe that you would have many aircraft accidents. Recall that the British used tethered balloons to protect themselves from German air raids. There is no way that you could see those tethers while flying, until you were very close to them -- then it would be too late to avoid.

There are a dozen or so tethered balloons around the border of the US now, so far there have been no incidents that I know of -- but the border is a place where pilots are very observant. Also, the balloons are only at about 10,000 ft or so, so most planes are far higher.

While the parent is Anonymous coward, please rate him up, as that is correct.

Facebook is either going to fly a few thousand WiFi drones or thousands of WiFi satellites to cover the entire planet. Why would they be doing that?

While I think that Pirate Bay guys suck hard (I spent my life creating content that they pirated), I don't think in this particular case he's wrong.

Fuel cell cars all have significant-size traditional batteries as well, because during acceleration or climbing of hills you need more power than a practical fuel cell can provide.