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Every defensive system takes time to operate, staring with detection, identification, classification, target selection, weapon / ammunition selection, engagement, assessment, and reengagement (if necessary). Hypersonic weapons really cut down on the amount of time you have to do that as well as make the actual engagement more difficult, and that is just based on speed. If you add any countermeasures, such a stealth technology or jamming it gets even harder. Think of the SR-71. It was never successfully intercepted. Hypersonic weapons are an even more challenging proposition since they are going to be even faster, and likely smaller, with years of advances in materials for radar shielding, and electronics for countermeasures. To successfully engage them your defensive systems have to be quick, accurate, and either have warning or be instant-on. If your defensive systems rely upon large amounts of electricity being instantly available that is going to have some implications. I have little doubt it is possible to engage them, but definitely not easy. You can look at the work being done with armored vehicle active defense systems as an example in a lower speed regime. Bottom line is that if there are a lot of hypersonic weapons in the air at once heading toward you, you're probably in big trouble unless you have deflector shields even if you have phasers.

You've calculated that precisely, have you?

A Tesla battery pack with a 300 mile range weighs 1200 lbs, so it's reasonable to suggest that an extra battery to provide an additional 300 miles of range will weigh about the same. Though he didn't include the weight of the trailer to haul the battery, so probably needs to add a few hundred pounds to the estimate.

That's why they fixed most of the issues in Windows 8.1. You should try it.

I did. They haven't. It still takes me away from where I'm working (the desktop) into Metro at every opportunity.

Want to view an image? Let's go to Metro.
Want to play an mp3? Let's go to Metro.

Yes you can fix it but you have to do it for every single file extension, on every computer you own.

Or... I could just stick with Windows 7.

Hmmm. A difficult choice.

Not.

Dear Microsoft. If I wanted a tablet interface I'd buy an iPad. Got it?

Here ya go. http://www.gizmag.com/go/4272/

Here is a different link with a nice picture of concrete panels, scroll down.
http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-largest-drilling-machine-bertha/28311/

Developing 100% new tech IS expensive. Building 1 offs is a great deal cheaper. No doubt about it. BUT, SpaceX's costs WILL RISE as they move from 1 offs to new R&D. SpaceX is counting on NASA restarting NERVA, but the neo-cons continue to derail a number of things and oddly, that is one of them. Not surprising, they have help from a number of illiterate dems to block the funding. Only Obama is keeping this going. BUT, with a change in CONgress, he may not be able to, and SpaceX will very likely step forward to do this work. Again, it will NOT be cheap.

I think a boomerang was thrown further.

While this article from 2007 begs to differ, the folks at Guinness are on your side, it seems.

So my question is: what roughly is the maximum theoretical distance an unpowered flying object can be thrown by a top athlete? Assuming no wind, level ground and the usual stuff for a record.

That seems more appropriate to ask of xkcd's "What if" section.

Easily solved. This will take at the very least a year to show up and a year to be widely adopted. Plenty of time for our bureaucrats to fix that.

And it turns out it's not quite a mandate, at leats in practice. I'll believe it when iPhones come with microUSB adapters.

Ahem.

or a battle tub?

Maybe Kayak Car Rentals has Aquadas, or Humdingas available for rent.

Would be much easier and better to just not start a high speed chase in the first place and avoid the risk of police mayhem.
I liked this idea much better:
http://www.gizmag.com/starchase-gps-police-tracking/29590/
Just zap the perp with a GPS and follow him at leisure.

you need to do some searching on the internet. and maybe wake up. :) I mean that in all light warmheartedness. It's happening.

I really don't know what Bezo's motivation is for this "revelation". But, this "plan" for drone deliveries is NOT going to happen! Never. I'll even wager that they won't even have drone use inside the distribution center campus!

This story is some sort of red herring.

P.S. Wasn't there just a story of some Australian college student trying to launch just such a system for text books? Yep! Here it is.

The iPad mini isn't 7 inches, it's 7.9 inches, and it's also a different aspect ratio (4:3 vs. 16:10). Looking at the numbers, the screen on the iPad mini is marginally taller (161mm vs. 151 mm), and significantly wider (120mm vs 94mm) as compared to the Nexus 7. Ignore the resolution numbers on that page, because those numbers are for the old iPad mini. The screen has remained the same size on the new model. The iPad mini has significantly more screen real estate than most 7 inch tablets. Also, the iPhone isn't you standard 4.3 inch phone. For starters, the diangonal measurement on the screen is only 4 inches, and it's actually more narrow than most other phones of the same diagonal measurement, because it's taller. I find that if I can't reach across the entire screen with my thumb then it really is too big. This is true for most 4.3 inch phones, and especially for the larger 5 inch phones. I shouldn't need 2 hands to operate a phone.

Just saying, watson is already doing oncology: http://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/news-releases/2013/ibm-watson-to-power-moon-shots-.html and http://www.gizmag.com/watson-ibm-sloan-kettering-oncology-diagnosis-treatment/26285/

The food will rise in price, but the jobs might not be there.

Once, wheat was harvested by hand, now it is done by machine. What once took 2 days for 1 man to do, a modern combine can do in about 8 minutes.

McDonalds has been looking into automatic burger machines, they would complely replace the staff in the back from having to cook and assemble the burgers.

At $7.25/hr, it makes sense to use humans for that.

At $15/hr, it might well be worth installing machines to replace some of those jobs. If they replace just 4 jobs per McDonalds with new machines, that is tens of thousands of jobs lost across the country.

What if half of the fast food restaurants swapped out a few workers each for machines?

http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/

There are other ways to pick fruit and other ways to cook food, not all involve hiring people.

Those people protesting for higher pay would be wise to keep that in mind.

They went shopping, bought a silver pen for handwriting electrical circuits and attached it to a printer???? (Although a plotter would be a better choice)

You appear to be working with old information. Stanford's autonomous car, Shelley, came within seconds of a pro driver in the same car at Thunderhill last year.

http://www.gizmag.com/go/4003/

From 2005. Mercedes E320 CDI, diesel sedans on a track.

I actually like the idea as a concept. Fuel Cells have been used in small applications and there was talk from the Doe PNNL about a new system just last year. I think if a large scale consumer of power, Microsoft, were to start pushing the tech you'd start to see more commercial viability of these kinds of projects. I'd also advocate going the geothermal or solar route as well to look at powering data centers but ultimately I think power efficiency will render more savings. This year we've seen AMD roll out the first ARM based server, which although not as powerful as say a Xeon class server, does offer significant power savings in terms of compute-per-watt. With the usual technology refresh cycles that occur in all data centers we may see power reduction occurring gradually. Obviously other Server manufacturers are pushing on compute-per-watt as well with other architectures but we also have more and more servers going into production so you still have to solve the power generation side of the equation as well.

Here you go.

I think I recall reading that one of the people who first discovered this problem, (a researcher at U Washington?) has been running research ships out there to see if that can be done. There are two big problems. First, the stuff isn't all that thick - while it sounds like the ocean looks like a venue after a rock festival, the stuff is not very thick in the open ocean. Second, it actually degrades - the sun breaks it down to smaller and smaller bits as the plasticizers get broken down until it's basically molecular, then if it hasn't already been eaten by something, it gets eaten by bacteria but still not digested. So whatever you do has to be able to pull it out of the ocean at a very, very fine scale.

The advantageous bit is that most of the great gyres where it collects are in open ocean which is a kind of blue desert - there's not a lot of biological activity; while the stuff that lands on island beaches can be collected locally. So my brilliant idea is to use the power of wind, geography and sun - build very large (possibly miles wide) autonomous sail-trawlers with fine net-like structures that are made of oil-attracting materials (possibly in a dual-element - one with enough strength to capture actual physical bits, one possibly in the form of jellyfish-like streamers to attract and capture the molecular stuff). The macro scale would have the sailing components connected by the net-like structures, and would look analogously like the Solar Eagle (which has several engine pods connected by wing structure).

To avoid capturing sea life, rather than a regular net, the 'net-like' system would be more like a long complex of jellyfish streamers, or perhaps some form of kelp or very flexible feathers; many individual streamers that branch into smaller and smaller branches, all covered or made with the stuff that attracts oil and plastics.

The key technology is the oil-attracting material. This exists, and it also is attracted to/attracts molecular-level plastics (think how hard it can be to remove oily stuff from a plastic container - it takes a strong detergent!). I think the feathery net-like structures would wrap themselves around larger pieces until they are covered, but fish should be able to get away. And as noted, that part of the ocean tends to be relatively poor in nutrients, and sea life. However three would almost certainly be casualties.

So these systems would basically float around in the gyre, being pushed gently against the water in various directions according to wind, waves, and the coriolis effect. Periodically a tender vessel (possibly also autonomous) would come out and pull the net-like structures through a cleaning device to remove the plastic particles of all sizes. It could then use the material collected as fuel, or return it to a recycling facility.

Alternatively, perhaps the system could work catalytically to break the plastics down to smaller molecules that then become real food for ocean bacteria and such. That seems like a few more steps up the technology ladder though.

they didn't even mention the single most important part of this device: battery life.

gizmag at least tells you (~20 hours): http://www.gizmag.com/samsung-galaxy-gear-review/29288/

oh yeah, Ars also floods my "back" buffer. wtf?

Who says robots have to go all the way through D to A one by one. Advancement is going to be quick, robots like this http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/ can already make at least c grade food, and a hell of a lot quicker and in less space than any human.

Also the developer isn't safe either, a smarter enough AI will be able to write just as good code as the majority of humans and it can be bug free. Tell the computer what you want the program to do in your natural language and it goes and knocks up a few versions for you; sure that will take longer than replacing the cooks, but it's on its way (it's the pinnacle of a programing language).

You bet your sweet ass I would.

It isn't as if using ion engines on the ISS is a new concept. The idea has been kicking around for some time and mainly needs some funding. The idea to put one of those engines on the ISS has been discussed simply to maintain the current orbit as it needs to be boosted periodically anyway.

I would even go so far as to suggest that the required delta-v to put the ISS at L5 has likely been already applied simply to keep the station where it is at instead of crashing down back onto the Earth over its current lifetime. A similar kind of energy will need to be applied over the next 15 or so years anyway, so why not build a system that can also work as an end-of-life termination system too?

Another issue with the ISS is that it is so huge that any effort to deorbit the station will most certainly result in a debris field regardless of how much effort you put into breaking it up prior to re-entry. Even splashing it down has a great many complications where it might even be cheaper and certainly offer much less risk to people here on the Earth if it was pushed up to a higher orbit as well. There is definitely going to be a cost to deorbit above and beyond just the delta-v issues.

But on a serious note. I am seeing way to many hairbrain schemes where drivers attention on the road is drawn to a screen where graphical information about potential dangers is displayed.

I am willing to put money on it that in every single case the results of the distraction causes more harm then it prevents.

How the hell can people be banned from using a mobile phone in a car but it is perfectly fine to use Satnav, radio or a gazillion new doodads. Each of them far more distracting then a conversation on the phone.

I while back I even saw an IPad application that uses the camera to interpret the car's dashboard ( http://www.gizmag.com/audi-a3-augmented-reality-manual/28693/ )

Madness.

the guys that build this http://www.gizmag.com/solara-uav-atmospheric-satellite/28886/ reckon it could run a cell phone network "Additionally, Titan points out that one of the aircraft could provide cell phone coverage for an area of over 6,500 square miles (16,800 sq km), offering the reach of over 100 ground-based towers.". Sure it's not going to be able to handle a new york level load, but there are plenty of spots in africa where only a couple of hundred people live in an area that big.

In most of the images, it looks reasonable, but in a few it just looks a bit off somehow.

I'd call the latter a bit of an understatement: http://www.gizmag.com/skype-eye-contact/28843/pictures#3
The left guy in the right picture looks like he's changed race or even species.

Considering that these are undoubtedly the cherrypicked best results and that the example images are low resolution, I'd say that the technology needs some more work. Having said that, there is nothing wrong with the idea in itself.

The really special thing about Courier is that one of the reasons it died was because it didn't support traditional e-mail (An altogether weak reason to kill a hardware platform when it could surely be patched in.) And then, what does MS launch Windows RT without? ...That's right, an e-mail client!

I was immediately taken by how RINGS resembles a fictional spaceship.

Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.

UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little

Hydrogen is great stuff. You just need to store it bonded with carbon. Do it right, and you can make butane for fuel cell usage.

http://www.gizmag.com/usb-charger-butane-fuel-cell-nectar-lilliputian-systems-brookstone/28281/

Take it a step further and let me run my laptop off a Bic lighter or two and i'll be happy.

This thing is heavier than some ultralight helicopters.

If you want an ultralight helicopter, they're available for as little as $6,000.

FYI, My wife will not be happy about you providing that link. You did a baaaaad thing :)

I, on the other hand, can't think of a more fun way to get myself killed! Well, not for the low, low price of 6 grand, anyway.

I, on the other hand, would prefer to avoid the risk of falling to my death. So what I'd really like to get is something like this. It's an Oculus Rift + a quadcopter. (But the model they use there is too expensive.)

... like half of the other articles on Slashdot.

http://www.gizmag.com/omnicam360-panoramic-camera-fraunhofer/28639/

Add in that air-jet tactile feedback device and it's starting to look pretty cool!

The print quality is absolutely embarrassing. Here's a link to some prints
A high school project out of legos would outdo this pathetic effort.

The video of the arm moving is very pretty, but the 3-D printed results not so much: http://www.gizmag.com/suspended-deposition-3d-printing/28508/pictures#4 Very much not ready for prime time.

So says the fanboy who thinks the iPhone 4 and 5 look drastically different.

A stillsuit in the middle of the ocean would be idiotic. Why capture a thimbleful of salty, oily sweat when there is an unlimited supply of seawater around you? Even if it is more saline, there's actually enough of it to be of use. Aside from hand cranked purifiers, there are solar powered, and gravity powered units. There are probably even wind and wave powered. I saw a unit on a science show back in the 1970s that looked like an inner tube with a clear plastic cone attached to it. You inflated it, set it afloat, and the sun did all the work. Heck, a properly designed life raft can be its own desalinator.

Firstly who says you can't purify seawater with a still suit? You could engineer it to absorb water through the outer surface which is what fish do although that would make it more of a 'fish-suit'. Secondly a still-suit/fish-suit would have a whole lot more surface area from which to generate energy than a solar panel suspended on the outside of your boat which is easily damaged or lost, you take a still-suit/fish-suit with you wherever you go and you could use excess energy to power other stuff such as a built in emergency beacon. As for inflatable solar stills, I have talked to people who actually tried to use them and the general consensus was that when they work you get briny water and not a lot of it either. Plus the moment your boat starts to rock or the waves get too big you are shit out of luck. I'm not saying regular purifiers don't work (some of the powered ones probably do work acceptably well) but a wearable water purifier would be pretty convenient especially if you your ship sinks and you don't make it to the lifeboat. Keep in mind that sailors in the North Atlantic have been issued with survival suits for years now that prolong your life expectancy in freezing arctic water from minutes to hours or even days and fitting them with a built in purifier is a pretty natural upgrade. Thirdly we are talking about semi science fiction tech here, not religion. Don't take this too seriously

A stillsuit in the middle of the ocean would be idiotic. Why capture a thimbleful of salty, oily sweat when there is an unlimited supply of seawater around you? Even if it is more saline, there's actually enough of it to be of use. Aside from hand cranked purifiers, there are solar powered, and gravity powered units. There are probably even wind and wave powered. I saw a unit on a science show back in the 1970s that looked like an inner tube with a clear plastic cone attached to it. You inflated it, set it afloat, and the sun did all the work. Heck, a properly designed life raft can be its own desalinator.

Now, the implantable zoomming replacement eye lense that costs $25,000 an eye they dismissed as too expensive, no THAT seems worth talking about.

In your opinion. But otherwise no. If you look at what is actually involved in implanting a telescope in your eye you'd see that it is not really a good solution compared to a contact lens (if the latter is equally effective). The contact lens is way less obtrusive, less likely to cause future medical condition, less likely to cause catastrophic injury if someone were to get hit in the eye with anything. etc etc etc. Having recently being diagnosed with early stage AMD in one eye, I am glad someone is coming up with shit like this. But I would much rather see something like stem cell therapy or other biological solutions that provide a real cure; instead of having to learn how to interpret what is directly in front of me in the form of a doughnut shaped images.

You got it wrong by not trying to understand how a telescope helps. That would make you the moron. They put a telescope on the cornea as a way to distribute the light reflected from the object of interest to areas of retina around the damaged macula that isn't damaged. It is a way to allow functioning parts of the eye to be used to see things in the centre. My mother had this disease and it would have been awesome if she would have been able to use something like this (the idea came to late, even the implantable ones) for her.

This article seems to disagree with you:
http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-entanglement-speed-10000-faster-light/26587/

..ten years ago - http://www.gizmag.com/go/2440/ and http://rmax.yamaha-motor.com.au/

Interesting article on the interpretation of expected bulb life:
http://www.gizmag.com/energy-star-led-light-bulbs/27027/

I've tried other headsets in the past - they all fail on wind noise.

I use Cy-Fi Bluetooth speakers when I bike. Unfortunately they've quit making them, they're hard to find, and even though there's tons of Bluetooth speakers out there now unlike when these were made, none of them are bike mountable now. Sure you can do your own hacks, but built in water resistance isn't a given on the rest of them and making your own tends to limit the sound. These support calls - good enough to say "I'm on my bike, may want to call later." At which time they'll try to talk to you anyways then complain they can't hear you for crap. At which time you remind them what you said the first time. They actually sound great on the road.

I have some Plantronics stereo headphones that completely sucked balls on my Evo 4G WiMax version, despite the above Cy-Fi speakers totally rocking with them and about three different models of Jawbone doing really well with it also. They are awesome with my Evo 4G LTE. Why they sucked so bad for the last phone and not this one I don't know, could be Bluetooth version I don't know. What I do know is it's the first headset I've ever had that could work with voice commands and other calling apps, but it didn't because the microphone sucks so bad.

Since when does NASA have 125 grand to toss around, all we ever hear about is how they are being strangled by budgets, but apparently have enough to give away an eighth million dollars on a sketchup drawing and melted chocolate.

Which BTW people IS NOT the first of its kind, we have seen chocolate 3d printers as early as 2011
http://www.gizmag.com/3d-chocolate-printer/19121/

How does it detect the wind at 100, 200, 300, and 400 yards? How does it detect the change in wind speed over that full distance? It is impossible.

While, in this implementation the wind speed is not automatically detected, it is not impossible to do it... and neither new (at least as old as 1977).

It is a streetable car, and it does fly.

The Maverick --- designed for medical missionary work and similar applications --- is an ATV that can take to the air with a reasonable payload when needed. Top speed in flight is a modest 40 mph. It was never intended for use in high winds or other extreme conditions.

When it's time to fly, the Maverick's central telescopic mast raises and acts as a wing spar for its chute, properly known as a ram-air wing. The flip of a switch diverts engine power from the rear wheels to the rear-mounted five-blade propeller, which propels the car across the ground, up to its take-off speed of 40mph (64km/h). Thanks to its ram-air wing design, the Maverick can take flight in only 300 feet (91 meters).

Once in the air, the vehicle's electronic fly-by-wire system allows the pilot to steer it with the steering wheel, just like they would on the ground. According to I-TEC, existing sport pilots can learn to fly the Maverick within 12 hours. A dash-mounted Garmin GPS allows for both aerial and ground-based navigation. In flight mode, it has a maximum payload of 330 pounds (150 kg).

The Maverick flying car