First thought on reading the headline - Bill Joy finally lost his cool while giving a big tell-all interview.

Interesting. Video from the site http://news.discovery.com/videos/space-sdo-captures-eruption...

Could anyone briefly explain what consequences this could have for us?

From the article, possibly damage to a satellite. However, a really big one, like the Carrington Event of 1859 would take out long distance power transmission lines, most satellites, and unprotected electronic equipment. No Internet, airliners falling out of the sky, probably months or years before everything was fully restored.

ah lower reception for Mobile signals..facing it now using mobile broadband

anyone know where I can download the hi-res versions of these pics? it looks like they're displayed through flash so all I could do is take a screenshot of a small pic

The attribution has a link to here[1] which can get you a days worth of images. --I'm not sure which telescope the article images came from-- The telescope name (or names in the case of the top image) are in the bottom left of the image, and they are from August 9th.

[1] http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/aiahmi/dayform.php