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The best part of the listed articles is the picture of the sheriff pointing a gun at the dalek with his finger on the trigger, while two employees stand directly on the other side of the robot!

Awesome: 2nd article, go to last picture.

Maybe this is a cunning advertisement by Knightscope to demonstrate why police need to be robotized.

Even if this global warming nonsense wasn't the most huge hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind and probably more dangerous than the last hoax of eugenics which inspired the likes of Hitler, pauparizing everyone except the very very rich, and attempting to create a society of only the very very rich and the very very poor by raising energy prices is not a righteous goal.

Lets compromise. Lets do everything we can to lower energy prices and thereby boost near-universal prosperity, while spending the resultant surplus money from said prosperity to bury the internal combustion engine, and later the external combustion ways of generating power forever. Something like this may someday actually happen:

http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

but if it doesn't, then SOMETHING, but only if we have the available money supplies to pursue it. Available money supplies do not tend to spring out of a society where 99% of the people are dirt-poor and 1% are extremely wealthy, but that's what high-cost energy tends to promote.

Ah - here's a better summary....

http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

Imagine... a phone you can steal tiny little parts out of, rather than the whole phone. It might be minutes or even hours before anybody even notices.

Are you serious? You think your little armchairy-10-seconds-of-analysis thought on the security of this device hasn't been covered by google's team of engineers?

Oh, it has:

Google says that there will be a “manager” app on the smartphone that controls some kind of locking mechanism, which keeps the modules from popping out when the phone is dropped or twisted.

No, I'll just agree with you. I own two Intel 120GB drives that have been running solidly for years. One is on my main programming workstation, so it gets pounded on daily, and the other is on my digital audio workstation. It's hard to extrapolate from small samples, but I went with the same brand as my former employer did when they installed SSDs, and I haven't been disappointed. Since the market has changed significantly from several years ago, I couldn't honestly tell someone that they're still the best - just that they were almost certainly so several years ago. However, it may very well be the case that Intel is still king of reliability.

And also, seriously... SSDs have been on the market for a while now, and companies are STILL getting the wear-leveling algorithm wrong? That's one of the most crucial components of an SSD. We saw a rash of problems like this with early SSDs, which was a little more excusable since the tech was brand new for just about everyone. This is simply poor QA, or at least a refusal to acknowledge or fix what QA actually found, which probably happens more often than anyone would like to admit.

Apple's products are priced only a very little bit higher than what other PC manufacturers offer given the exact same hardware

Actually, the high-end Mac Pro is currently cheaper.

By comparing a build that costs as much as a car?!?

You guys can't be fucking serious with this shit.

Mac hardware is good, but stop calling it some kind of fucking bargain when you need to eclipse the $9000 mark for a computer to prove it. You get what you pay for, and with Apple, you pay a shitload with almost zero upgrade capability.

If that works for you, fine. But you're trying to compare a Ferrari build to a Porsche build to see which is cheaper. If you can afford a $10,000 PC, then you likely aren't pinching pennies, sot the argument is rather pointless.

Apple's products are priced only a very little bit higher than what other PC manufacturers offer given the exact same hardware

Actually, the high-end Mac Pro is currently cheaper.

I know you can do that with other OSes, but they all require 3rd-party VM software to do it. Apple builds it in.

This has nothing to do with VMs.
Bootcamp is little more than a setup and partition tool. You can have multi-boot (keyword: bootloader) on all PCs including Macs, but you can't just go ahead and install OS X on most of the ones not designed in Cupertino.

Think you'll have to rely on your sales of dessicated dihydrogen monoxide

http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

Multi-stage heat to electricity systems can help minimize the local heat effect, though to the extent the earth is a closed system, if we are adding heat it might be like sticking burning candles into an oven.

Solution? MASERs tuned to frequencies that the atmosphere is transparent to, to pump excess heat out into space. I envision roof-top masers as the final stage of a buildings HVAC system (replacing the current simple heat exchangers). We could mandate that all AC units over a certain size must use same, just don't fly over them. Did Clarke get patent credit for his suggestion that satellites would be useful in telecommunications?

You can actually punch a hole in many popular ATMs and there is a live USB port right behind it. This has been discussed repeatedly as a security problem. I don't know if they fixed that one, but there could be more or it could be really slow to be fixed. http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

You're arguement lacks merit. The size of the pipe is not the problem.

Verizon is still throttling Netflix even after being paid.

Netflix has offered to host servers closer to the end users, freeing up bandwidth on the backbones.

This fight is not about network capacity or technology. It is about money, plain and simple.

Yes, they'll probably look for alternatives (the same way they are looking for an alternative to the Samsung chip fabrication).

I thought they already signed on with TSMC for this. Yes some could look at it as Apple looking to smite Samsung but also remember that TSMC currently is ahead of Samsung when it comes to feature size. TSMC will be producing 16nm chips in 2015 and 10mn after that while Samsung has only recently made 20nm ones. Only Intel is ahead of them but Intel is not yet producing ARM chips in this size. They seem to be reserving these fabs for their own x86 chips.

From a live blog

"14:01pm: Question about how long Windows 10 will “last.” Microsoft answered that it can support operating systems for a long time. No answer on whether Windows 10 is the last major release, though (which is probably what the questioner was after)."

Name three things wrong specifically with Windows 8 (8.1 now) which aren't about the GUI. If you can't manage that, include problems that aren't fixed with the installation of a free Start menu replacement
 

Think of it this way... design a blueprint of your building in something like sketchup, and tag all the different surfaces according to type. Then put antennas in strategic places in the structure (could do 3 in each room, or surround the entire building) and turn on the multiband antennas.

The RF interference should be able to be mapped in this way fairly easily; especially if you set state and then open/close doors, turn WiFi on/off, turn on lights/heaters, etc.

Record all this state information, and then with minimal training, the system should be able to identify all mobile objects and when they moved.

If you toss in the RFID chips here, you could serialize each major mobile item, and actively track them anywhere in the structure.

This isn't new, and doesn't need all that much knowledge of RF, just a good AI that can learn.

See: http://www.extremetech.com/ext... for one way it's been done.

There is also this : http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

IIRC they were laser sintering some exhaust nozzles. So yes, it is a technology that can be added to our bag of Homo Industrialis tricks. No, it's not going to replace much in the manufacturing sector anytime soon.

Using wikinumbers, here are some relevent energy densities.

• Li-ion battery: 100 to 265Wh/kg (900 to 1900J/cm3)
• Supercapacitor: 0.5 to 15Wh/kg (no volumetric density easily obtainable).

Here's a press release from some company that claims 60Wh/l (~200J/cm3) from their research supercaps.

I never cease to be amazed by the progress made in shrinking transistors. I wonder how long the trend will continue.

Joking aside, the "99 cents" headline might give the impression of a big (if not "fire sale") reduction, but it's is as misleading (and pointless) on its own as the subsidised headline "price" of *any* contract-tied phone is.

This post already made the point that the total price of phone + contract (since you can't get the former without the latter) over two years is $600, which implies that it was $800 before when the still-contract-tied phone was selling for "$200" and it was being panned as an awful deal.

If it's not quite a non-story, it's not the one it's being made out to be either.

Uh.. hate to break it to you but no... Blu-ray does not have the success that it was supposed to have. In fact, the thing that has taken off is sub-par supposedly HD streaming content... which often times looks worse than DVD. Sony paid a whole lot of bribery money and arguably lost (again). http://www.extremetech.com/wp-... Hopefully that shows that Blu-ray is hardly a "win"... in fact, it's sort of pathetic... especially if consider the saturation of DVD content and (illegal) the accessibility of such content vs. HD and Blu-ray. That is to say, DVD is doing quite well when arguably it shouldn't be doing well at all. Does it show DVD decline? Yes. Does it show Blu-ray rise? Yes... but doesn't look pretty for Blu-ray. Sony tried to buy their way technology wise this time (after the betamax debacle)... how well is Sony doing nowadays? I find that interesting...

ISS supply mission. Engine explodes. Fails to deliver secondary payload

Primary payload delivered to orbit, secondary lost due to a failed engine re-ignite. This is a partial failure.

ISS supply mission. Maneuvering thrusters fail.

Supply craft captured by ISS due to space x incompetence. This is a failure.

Satellite launch delayed by helium leaks. First stage recovery failure.

Primary payload delivered to orbit after huge delays cutting into profit ability. This demonstrates space x's need to cut corners in order to remain viable.

Test rocket explodes.

Prototype failed due to a production ready component unrelated to the test that could have easily gone off on any of the other flight and again caused delays of their flights cutting into profitability requiring space x to cut corners in the future.

Fixed that for you.

ISS supply mission. Engine explodes. Fails to deliver secondary payload

Primary payload delivered to orbit, secondary lost due to a failed engine re-ignite. This is a partial success.

ISS supply mission. Maneuvering thrusters fail.

Supply craft docked to ISS. This is a success.

Satellite launch delayed by helium leaks. First stage recovery failure.

Primary payload delivered to orbit. This is a success.

Test rocket explodes.

Prototype failed. This is a test. This was not a launch ready first stage. This was not carrying a second stage or payload. This has no relevance.

You're replying to the Anti-SpaceX Nutter, who really appears to believe that every one of their launches was a failure. I'm guessing he thinks those satellites SpaceX launched are just faked in the Arizona desert.

They have had a string of failures.
ISS supply mission. Engine explodes. Fails to deliver secondary payload
ISS supply mission. Maneuvering thrusters fail.
Satellite launch delayed by helium leaks. First stage recovery failure.
Test rocket explodes.

If you could pull musks dick out of your mouth long enough you would notice a long line failures due to shoddy engineer practices caused by cutting corners.

See http://www.extremetech.com/com... and https://pcpartpicker.com/trend...

The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.

Yeah, because V2V has about 300 m range. Posting my location to people within view range is really a massive "privacy concern".

We complain about patent trolls getting trivial patents for non-inventions by taking something totally normal and adding "with a computer" to it, but sometimes we do the same. Licence-plate reading cameras are a privacy concern because they can enter your location into a global database in near real-time. Telling people electronically what they could see with their own eyes? Hardly a privacy problem. If we were talking about a system to intercept these signals and update some global database, yes - but that is just the license-plate-reading-camera problem with a different technology. The problem in either case is not having a license plate or having V2V, but the people turning local information into global information.

And other than license plates, it's easy to solve it. Your car could automatically generate a new random ID for itself every time it stops for more than a minute, for example. Pseudonymity is quite cute when you understand it.

Part of that problem is location of the battery. In a roadster it's essentially in the trunk over the rear axle.

Picture of a Roadster's battery location.
Picture of Model S battery placement.

With the ability to start 'from the ground up', the model S relocates the battery from a box in the rear to more of a flat sheet covering most of the undercarriage. They couldn't do this with the Roadster's Elise frame because it wasn't designed for it.

This change evens out the weight distribution and helps with stability, to the point that in rollover tests they had to resort to 'extreme measures' to flip the test car. Well duh, obviously it's not going to want to flip when approximately half the weight is UNDER the axles!
Model S totals 4,647 pounds:
1323 lbs - Battery
350 - Motor/Inverter(per diagram it's under the axle height as well)

Stuff above the axles - computers, hvac, seats, glass, etc...:1360 pounds.

Thus a Model S, while perhaps not as 'nimble' as a lighter vehicle, still performs much better than you'd expect from a car of that weight.

Part of that problem is location of the battery. In a roadster it's essentially in the trunk over the rear axle.

Picture of a Roadster's battery location.
Picture of Model S battery placement.

With the ability to start 'from the ground up', the model S relocates the battery from a box in the rear to more of a flat sheet covering most of the undercarriage. They couldn't do this with the Roadster's Elise frame because it wasn't designed for it.

This change evens out the weight distribution and helps with stability, to the point that in rollover tests they had to resort to 'extreme measures' to flip the test car. Well duh, obviously it's not going to want to flip when approximately half the weight is UNDER the axles!
Model S totals 4,647 pounds:
1323 lbs - Battery
350 - Motor/Inverter(per diagram it's under the axle height as well)

Stuff above the axles - computers, hvac, seats, glass, etc...:1360 pounds.

Thus a Model S, while perhaps not as 'nimble' as a lighter vehicle, still performs much better than you'd expect from a car of that weight.

VLC is in the Windows8 App store. IT doesn't work terribly well yet, but Microsoft have made a genuine effort to allow GPL software into their walled garden.

HVDC is one. Superconducting cable is another. Both can be pretty expensive so the number of installations so far is quite limited. There are also people working on so called ballistic conductors. If those work out they should be a lot cheaper and easier to maintain than the superconducting cables which require liquid nitrogen cooling.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/...
"ishanda --- Kerbal Space Program Apr 17, 2013 @ 2:29am; If you REALLY want Star Trek Style impulse engines why not mod them yourself? All you really need is to make copies of the relevant part files, change the name of the Xenon Tank to "Deuterium" and change the Ion Engine to "Impulse Engine" and then change a few values to make them super efficient. Done."

Still looking forward to seeing how the real device pans out though... Just like I'm still wondering about all the claimed cold fusion results which may also be exploring new areas of physics and chemistry with the behavior of hydrogen atoms at the edges of metal lattices or in cracks in them perhaps in interaction with electro-magnetic pulses ...
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

I'm still waiting on "Tom Swift and his Space Solartron" though: :-)
http://www.tomswift.info/homep...
"The main invention in this book is, of course, the Space Solartron. The Space Solartron was probably Tom Swift's most amazing -- and far-fetched -- invention. Its purpose was to make space travel practical by creating oxygen, water, and food from sunlight -- not a simple task, to be sure."

I've mused about even better tech that will extract energy and mass from zero point energy. Although we might then get a "tragedy of the commons" as so much mass and energy is created in nearby outer space as to collectively form a black hole? Now that might be another good mode for the multi-player version of Kerbal Space Program to see what happens politically as that "tragedy" plays out as the outer space equivalent of anthropogenic global warming? :-)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...

Perhaps that political problem might already be playing out at the core of out galaxy? :-)
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Back to the EmDrive device, it would not surprise me if the impulse provided by the microwave device is much less than the impulse imparted by photons and/or solar wind on any satellite's solar panels to capture needed electricity. But that might be a non-issue if you have a small "Mr. Fusion" fusion reactor or cold fusion LENR device onboard the satellite? :-)

Of course, station keeping is even easier if you have a "HyperEdit" debugger hook into the simulation. :-)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...
"If you still think MechJeb is cheating, take a look at HyperEdit. It is cheating. Install it, tap Alt+H, and you're given a menu full of options that let you tweak and edit the game. With a few clicks, you can teleport your craft to the orbit of any planet on the solar system, then use the landing options to gracefully touch down. Alternatively, you can instantly replenish your fuel, obliterate a selected craft, or readjust Kerbin's gravity to make escaping its atmosphere unnaturally difficult. HyperEdit is a flexible toolbox that, when used without restriction, completely destroys the difficulty. With a little imagination, though, you can use it to create your own custom scenarios. It's as simple as popping an abandoned craft on a distant planet, and suddenly you've got the basis for a tricky retrieval mission."

See also:
http://www.simulation-argument...
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct

Getting a Linux to run on a bunch of different architectures was done many years ago. That's not remotely the same or even a similar thing as designing a new strategy for low power CPUs. It isn't ARM that is different. It is the instruction execution strategy and the tremendous internal parallelism that's different. The A7 is amazingly efficient using all sorts of small limited functionality subsystems to execute in parallel.

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-...

There are designs like this in the Intel Sandy Bridge but nothing like it at these power levels. For example the ROB is the same size as you see in the Haswell to allow for this much out of order execution!

"i guess netflix got so big they think they can extract payment from everyone" Now there's a good one. In reverse shill-logic world perhaps. For those interested in what's really happening I'll point you here ( http://www.extremetech.com/com... ). Headline: Verizon caught throttling Netflix traffic even after its pays for more bandwidth. And that is basically what they are doing, artificially restricting Netflix not going through VPN to (arguably) criminally low speeds by means of not upgrading hardware on purpose to thwart who they view as "competition. Although I'm not sure Verizon will sell you anything remotely useful for $8 a month. I quit Verizon for this reason although I never told the CS rep because they try to make it hard to quit anyway. Verizon seems to be trying to fool everyone with (what seems to most people) lots of mumbo jumbo and outright deception, I for one hope they don't continue to get away with this attempt to make there "competitors" look bad.

Do by invasive surveillance they mean something like what has happened to mean something like what it appears the NSA is involved with for James Walbert. Perhaps some nice extremely invasive tech as described here... http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

Frankly, I think net neutrality will win out in the marketplace because of the things some companies, e.g., Google, are doing to let their users know that the ISP's are throttling them.

I'm not so concerned for Google or Netflix as I am concerned about startups who would otherwise be able to compete with the content provided by ISPs. What would've happened had Verizon and Comcast slowed down traffic to Netflix when it was first created? What about if it were possible when Facebook, or Google, were born?

I think it sets a dangerous precedent when one or two companies literally get to decide what new services are good ideas and then create their own, shitty version of it that competes only on the basis of not being fucked with by the ISP.

The ISP's can't prevent them from doing this and ISP's customers can choose another ISP that doesn't do it, or at least offers better performance.

When 37% of Americans have only two wired broadband providers, 28% have just one, and 2% have no wired broadband ISPs at all, I don't think this is really as much an option.

China only does assembly. They do not design the chips, and they do not write the software.

Not only that, there is the problem that nearly everyone chooses to ignore, the insecure baseband system and processor. One of the biggest moves China could make would be to both design and certify a processor and a baseboand OS. Then they could just run their own version of Replicant or whatever on the other processor while knowing that the 'hidden' part of the system is also clean. It's the certification that is a big barrier for most teams but China could squash it easily.

Space-time is bent by mass.
If light is truly massless and it can be concentrated to form matter and later destroyed by antimatter, there's your wave generator.
Good luck realizing that though.

References:
light creates mass
matter-antimatter annihilation destroys mass and creates energy

Cost. The wikipedia article says that the cost is similar to the cost of synthetic sapphire. For a cell-phone sized sheet of sapphire, the cost is apparently 10x as much as the cost of a similarly sized piece of chemically hardened Gorilla Glass (source). Most customers would rather save 90% of the cost and get a slightly inferior product that they have to replace sooner.

That's the benefit to owning the means of production and not giving a shit about what design they're churning out. Intel would like to beat them with Atom, but they don't have to.

Microsoft are no longer actively developing XNA, and haven't been for quite some time now. Better to go with something which is going to support the systems which will be available when your development's finished.

Oh my god, do you troglodytes live in a fucking bubble or what.

No, the troglodytes live in the basement. However, comparing the earth to a bubble is somewhat apt, based on how radio waves bounce off the atmosphere.

Both you and the "I should have the right to do this" crowd are missing a few details.

1) Everyone has the right to block radiation. They have the right to do so inside any space they control.
2) Jamming is not blocking. Blocking is sticking a cone of silence around someone (yourself or the emitter) to keep from hearing their senseless yammering. Jamming is shouting louder then they are and attempting to confuse them so they can't talk anymore (more like this SoundJammer.

So you're both right, and you're both oh so wrong.

The combined T-Sprint will have to maintain both CDMA and GSM networks for some time. I hope that the tower hardware costs have dropped and dual CDMA/GSM hardware is available. I bet there will also be significant frequency waste.

Both carriers are dragging along a wagonload of MVNOs, so customers of several other companies will see migration impacts.

Verizon is dumping CDMA for their own customers, but keeping it for the MVNOs. This will become more problematic, as Android is dropping support for CDMA, so everything on the Sprint side is going to get a bad case of bitrot.

First, someone mentioned their Verizon phone wouldn't work in Africa: this is no surprise, as Verizon uses CDMA, which is found only in islands outside of N. America. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Second, here is Wikipedia's list of bands since no one bothered to include it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

and an alternative source: http://niviuk.free.fr/lte_band...

Now, for a list of phones, a quick search found this article: http://www.extremetech.com/ele...
    This phone doesn't support 600-700 MHz LTE, but I don't think that's being deployed much yet in Europe, anyway (though it's coming). And, of course, the mention of the latest Apples.

Personally, I think it's a miracle that EE's are able to squeeze in as many bands as they have (650-928 MHz and 1710-2600 MHz with a gap or two PLUS 2450 MHz WiFi and Bluetooth) and still have usable sensitivity and selectivity. This is more than just SDR at work.

if she has higher brain functions then she's not a vegetable. It might take a long time but there's a chance of recovery.
The brain stem takes care of physical movements and automatic movements.
She's in a stage where she's basically paralyzed from the brain down. I'm sure there's some research and tools that can help her. Probably first problem with communication.
Here's something promising:
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
Maybe instead of an animal a robotic prosthetic arm/hand.
There's some brain mouse thing i remember seeing:
Here's a commercial one that won't break the bank: https://www.emotiv.com/epoc/
I'm sure there are others like it. Get the communication part down first, then go from there. Don't give up hope.

40Gbps is coming.

That old hackney phrase.
Where you outlaws get those guns?
Oh from good guys in states where it is legal to sell them in bulk.

I didn't expect you to read the submission, but at least read the title. They just make the guns themselves, dumbass. They have hardware stores the world over with ball peen hammers, pipe, and fittings. Zip guns are even better than most 3D printed guns, and will remain so until additive and subtractive metal machining becomes available in a single device.

Funny how you have no data to back that up.

oh ho ho heee hee hee hahaha lol:

http://www.extremetech.com/com... :chuckle:

Well there is a way to do this, http://www.extremetech.com/computing/178091-how-to-download-and-install-windows-8-1-update-1-for-free-right-now It's not really a offline installer like methode. If you apply the KB in the wrong order it could have interesting effect. But you do have a wsus server, microsoft free update solution (as in you gotta have an AD, and CAL, and a w2008 server, and SQL free...)

IR and visible light camera on a

This one is expensive. Budget $5000 for it.

Less than you'd think. Pretty much any digital camera can be easily modified to be IR capable, from cheap-but-good GoPros to high end DSLRS.

http://www.extremetech.com/ele...

Volvo is just now putting autonomous cars on public streets, so google is getting all the glory for a good reason - they are years ahead. Google had logged 300,000 miles by 2012, and now have reached 700,000 miles. And in contrast to highway driving like in this blurb (lane following, merging), google is way beyond that; highway driving is almost a given and google has moved on to construction sites, pedestrians, cyclists...