[civilian]

The idea is the angle of it. If I have an intensely bright spotlight (on, say, a satallite?), and I make it spin 360 degrees in a second, then somewhere out in space the trail of light is going faster than the speed of light.

You can also think about the beacon that a pulsar gives off. We can detect the pulses happening every few seconds-- so what happens when our friend on Alpha Centauri also detects the pulses? The pulsar 'spotlight' is cycling between Alpha Centauri & Earth in a fraction of a second, even though we're 4 lightyears away from eachother.

It's not really FTL, only from a certain point of view. As the author says: "These are all examples of things that can go faster than light, but which are not physical objects. It is not possible to send information faster than light on a shadow or light spot, so FTL communication is not possible in this way. This is not what we mean by faster than light travel, although it shows how difficult it is to define what we really do mean by faster than light travel."