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Some nice theories here but I'm sticking with my own pet theory: our observable universe exists entirely inside a black hole, slowly being compressed at the center across time. ... But since this is all happening simultaneously, even our own instruments and myriad points of reference for myriad "constants" are also being compressed, which means it completely goes over our heads and the ruler we think we're holding is much shorter than it actually is.

That doesn't fit observations or models of black holes. Falling towards a singularity, physical constants and dimensions aren't expected to behave that way.

People have thought about existence inside a black hole, and it looks very different.

You have to admit, Silicon Valley's got the Buzz though.

Oops, maybe not..

“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”

From: The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold

I'm sure a politician knows more about crypto than MIT or the DoJ.

Insomniac ? I hope you don't have that regularly, if so I suggest you do something about that. Less caffeine and less stress ?

OK, I'll be the first to admit it. I'm no expert, I suggest you talk to one.

I'm also not completely sane at this moment, this is the morning after a night on the town, their is still a lot of alcohol in my body. ;-)

Anyway, about the topic at hand...

Yes, I do think about it like a pendulum as well and about how far it can or will be pushed in one way (maybe even multiple pendulums). I think most people would really want to avoid full on revolution. Because it's hard to predict the outcome. Take for example the Arab spring. Also look at ISIS/IS/ISIL/Daesh they came out of the chaos largely created by the US (but that is a whole different topic).

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think at least some people in government get it.

Sometimes when I see police in countries like the US get more and heavier arms, I'm thinking someone is preparing for that future in a very negative way.

But let's look at the positive.

Let's take for example the people that claim that automation will take our jobs:
https://www.technologyreview.c...

Maybe they are wrong, but one thing is correct, technology can cause a lot of change and it probably will. Maybe even accelerate.

When talking about that, you'd always keep in mind what Voltaire said: Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

Then you look at what people in some governments are trying to do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From a US perspective you'd think it's some kind of socialist system, but a lot of the ideas behind that came from the US from people like: Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. Or as Andrew McAfee likes to say with a big smile: frothing-at-the-mouth socialists ;-)

In Europe we now have a bunch of organisations, countries and cities looking seriously into this and testing it in real life again.

From a pure technology perspective, I can see technology solving the need problem.

If energy prices do really keep falling like they have with capturing the energy from wind and solar light and heat then it will get easier (=cheaper). Take for example the Sahara Forest Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Energy storage is also still improving too: http://rameznaam.com/2013/09/2...

They seem to be on a Moore's Law like trajectory.

They might claim to be the first:
http://inhabitat.com/worlds-fi...

But automatic milking also has been doing very well for how long ? over 10 years now ?

If you combine: cheap energy, cheap clean water, cheap electronics/communication, cheap energy storage, cheap food production
you get a very potent mix to solve a large part of the problem of need that Voltaire talked about. In the documentary I linked they also talk about cheap health care (I hope so). Those are some very positive trends.

Cheap technology also seems to create a more decentralized future, so maybe in that sense Bitcoin/OpenBazaar and solar panels are similar.

I'm from Europe, I personally don't see the state as my enemy like some people in the US or some in Bitcoin do. For example I think of the government as the biggest VC funder/risk taker of them all. Who would spend more than 10 years on fundamental research with a high amount of risk of failure and then give it away for free (simple example: Internet, funded by ARPA now called DARPA. I don't know if it was considered a risky endeavour at the time, but it's an ex

you're really not supposed to use one in flight...

That myth has been thoroughly busted already. And not just once

And it really doesn't help much on the tracking aspect.

The coordinates, speeds, and even instrument read-outs can all be sent to the nearest tower(s) via the data-link. SSL-encrypted — with a handful of certificate authorities known to each plane.

Planes are are registered and have great big letters painted on the side of them

Right. And my face may be computer-recognizable already — or really soon. But that does not mean, I should be carrying an ID-chip in my pocket to make tracking me even easier.

But the biggest problem is that the system was designed from the ground up for safety not privacy the reason being so the fire trucks can beat you to the scene of the crash.

General-purpose fire trucks would be sent out by the air-dispatchers anyway, they don't listen to air-control AM "just in case". The specialized services at the airports, if they wish to have their own awareness independent of the control-tower, can be allowed to get the same SSL-encrypted data-links...

The origin of the issue is the bad old reliance on "obfuscation" — if I can not hear the plane broadcasting its unique ID and location, then no one else can hear it either and so there is not a problem. TFA will, hopefully, raise the awareness so the healing can begin.

I think it's more about the potential of the blockchain rather than actual use today. The idea that you can have a publicly available trusted ledger without trusting anyone has a lot of potential uses and there are a lot of people developing different applications.
Here's a few more articles from MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
This MIT syllabus gives some idea of the potential:
http://blockchain.media.mit.ed...

I think it's more about the potential of the blockchain rather than actual use today. The idea that you can have a publicly available trusted ledger without trusting anyone has a lot of potential uses and there are a lot of people developing different applications.
Here's a few more articles from MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
This MIT syllabus gives some idea of the potential:
http://blockchain.media.mit.ed...

I think it's more about the potential of the blockchain rather than actual use today. The idea that you can have a publicly available trusted ledger without trusting anyone has a lot of potential uses and there are a lot of people developing different applications.
Here's a few more articles from MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
This MIT syllabus gives some idea of the potential:
http://blockchain.media.mit.ed...

As I've pointed out, the whole business of the food industry isn't just limited to the question of GMOs.

That's why I've been calling you myopic.

Last I checked, TFS and TFA were about GMO. Anything else is somewhat off topic. Am I being myopic? Yes, deliberately, and for good reason.

But the question of what supporting your neighbors means is a very important one, and can be considered quite meaningful in an economic sense.

And it's also not a topic that I'm interested in.

So one thing doesn't sell. Guess what? They'll try something else then.

Even though that is the case, (which it is) ever since the patents expired there's already a growing market for generic GMO seed, and not many seem to be picking up Monsanto's new product.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

But quit creating this stupid straw man of attacking GMO technology over one company (or even other companies) that utilize it. You may as well argue that because Microsoft has been less than ethical, we should throw out our personal computers and go back to typewriters and handwritten spreadsheets. It's an absurd position to have, and is effectively a viewpoint that anti-GMO groups are presently beholden to.

I will say though, I perhaps should not have used Monsanto as an example, as they are not the only possible actor, it's a whole industry, and there are plenty of others. So that may have confused you, as you may have only looked in one direction. My bad with that, if you did think I believe the only problem is with Monsanto, or if my choice to use their name cut off your thinking.

It's not just you making that brain-dead argument, it's the whole food religion. If you mention GMO, they instantly accuse you of being a Monsanto shill. I don't care one way or another about Monsanto. Hell, I don't even care if you attack the industry, go right to it if it makes you happy. What I am defending is the technology itself, so quit using business entities as a straw man to defend your nonsensical viewpoint.

There really isn't any other than you just want to support your neighbors, which is a separate discussion and doesn't even relate to GMO food at all (for example, your local farmer could plant GMO seed if he so chooses.)

As I've pointed out, the whole business of the food industry isn't just limited to the question of GMOs.

That's why I've been calling you myopic.

But the question of what supporting your neighbors means is a very important one, and can be considered quite meaningful in an economic sense.

Which inevitably shapes politics and other people's lives. Don't believe me? Go check out some Chinese farms in Africa.

The rest of your argument is predicated on that off-topic, thus I won't reply to it, except for this:

Then I'll call you myopic, because instead of even saying something as easy as "Yes, there are numerous concerns about the scope of the industry, I've just not been mentioning them." you just say it's off-topic without even giving a position or admitting you weren't talking about them.

As to what you did say...

That just goes to show how you're naive. Yes, Monsanto has brought something new, but nobody seems to buy it. In fact, there's a brand new market for generic GMO seed:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Oh my, you're right, I guess Monsanto will just shut down then, they're done!

No wait, who's being naive here...I think it's still you.

So one thing doesn't sell. Guess what? They'll try something else then.

And on and on. They have a big budget for both R&D and advertising. They aren't giving up.

I will say though, I perhaps should not have used Monsanto as an example, as they are not the only possible actor, it's a whole industry, and there are plenty of others. So that may have confused you, as you may have only looked in one direction. My bad with that, if you did think I believe the only problem is with Monsanto, or if my choice to use their name cut off your thinking.

Most of the comments I've seen about locally grown food is the economic value

There really isn't any other than you just want to support your neighbors, which is a separate discussion and doesn't even relate to GMO food at all (for example, your local farmer could plant GMO seed if he so chooses.)

The rest of your argument is predicated on that off-topic, thus I won't reply to it, except for this:

Oh that naivety is showing. Monsanto will just rush something new into the lineup.

That just goes to show how you're naive. Yes, Monsanto has brought something new, but nobody seems to buy it. In fact, there's a brand new market for generic GMO seed:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

The point is valid, if you use a computer to for you livelyhood, aka you die if you don't use it and Microsoft is the only supplier you can use, then yes you are a slave to Microsoft.

So what are you saying? We should throw out all of the benefits of personal computers, and go back to manually written spreadsheets and typewriters, because of Microsoft? Because that's effectively what you're arguing should be done about GMO technology, and for the same bad reasoning.

Oh and by the way, did I mention that Monsanto's patents have expired?

http://www.technologyreview.co...

in it's putting control of the world's food supply into a small number of very powerful corporations

This argument has been dead for about a year now:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

There is reasonable grounds to be skeptical of GMOs on economic grounds.

No, there's not.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Well that guy mentioned in the Wikipedia article is free to do it now because the patents have expired:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Not only that, but he's trying to use FUD to fight the technology. Monsanto's patents on roundup ready seeds expired last year:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Craig Ventor, who supplied the first genome, intends to sequence a million by 2020. Not a shy guy.
http://www.technologyreview.co...

I believe the Japanese have already done this and shown it to be economically feasible. Not only that but there's 100,000 years worth of the stuff.

I saw this article about a biologically inspired artificial neuron. What would this neuron have to do, for you to take notice, or divert your attention to it? http://www.technologyreview.co...

...the safe sort which uses Terahertz radiation...

There's a fair amount of evidence suggesting that these aren't safe, either. The expected fatality rate is smaller, but decidedly nonzero. Unfortunately, for the same reason that molecules of certain dangerous substances resonate in interesting ways, so do the molecules that make up human DNA.

quasi-monopolies we currently enjoy

So, you'd rather have the real monopoly of the townhall running Internet-services, than the quasi monopolies? Considering, it is the local governments, who are impeding Internet-service provision competition to begin with, your stance is not just foolish, it even seems malign.

when the people want to band together and do something

Such people form a private company. Whatever government does, is done poorly. Internet-service included — 15 years ago we were arguing on these very pages about the wonderful "municipal Wi-Fi"...

the cost of medicine today hasn't been driven in very large part by technological advances

Twenty seconds on google would have disabused you of this incorrect notion. Technology advances have played a HUGE role in the rapidly increasing cost of medical care. Don't take it from me, take it from The New England Journal of Medicine.

and technological advances clearly have drastically improved outcomes.

Often yes but not always. It's trivial to find cases where technology improvements have either minimal or no improvements in patient outcomes. Sometimes we use the expensive shiny new tool in ways that don't actually improve medical outcomes. Sometimes the tools are used more for medico-legal reasons than for actual patient safety. My wife is an MD and she has to do things all the time which are unnecessary for treatment but guard against potential lawsuits. She has to order tests which confirm what she already knew with 99.9%+ certainty just for the unlikely chance she is wrong. If a hospital buys a new MRI machine you can bet your ass they are going to find ways to keep it busy to recoup the cost. Often this means ordering unnecessary tests.

MIT Technology review seems to think that the Lockheed thing is probably snake oil. http://www.technologyreview.co...

The main experiments were back in the 1960s. There are some proof-of-concepts for future commercial plants from what I've heard and read. There are some being used to provide power to high-use single users like high-energy research labs I think.

Nobody's producing power to sell just yet. It's supposed to be soon, though. A Canadian company has a design they're putting into pre-licensing review in the coming months to hopefully be online around 2020. The US DoE which first developed MSRs (a program which Nixon axed) is helping China build a full-scaled 100 MW preview unit to be operational by 2024.

These things are safer (thorium vs. uranium for the bulk of the fuel, lower pressure inside the reactor), more efficient (higher temperatures transferred to the water/steam so more work gets to the generators), have easier spent fuel requirements (the half-lives are much shorter and it's much easier to keep them from breeding bomb-grade elements). They'll be cheaper to operate and produce cheaper, safer electricity. China's into the hundreds of millions researching building these things. It should happen.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
http://fukushimaupdate.com/tho...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...

When I was reading this article, I was surprised how wired Idaho seems to be.

Not quite. They can't safely operate in snowy, icy, or heavy rain conditions yet. They would still drive over an open manhole unless there are cones marking it off.

The other issue is that autonomous cars can't just go drive anywhere:

Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can “drive anywhere a car can legally drive.” However, that’s true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car’s exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It’s vastly more effort than what’s needed for Google Maps.

The unspoken assumption, that folks like Google wish to remain unspoken and unexamined, is that "better then (sic) a human" part. That they are so committed to glossing over that suggests that they are also doubtful about how soon automated cars will, in fact, driver better than humans. Certainly, we're nowhere near that now.

interesting but irrelevant puzzles

Like "why does this lump of rock ruin my film?" and "as if we'd ever figure out how to stick two atoms together?"

If you want a practical application of neutrino detectors and their relevance today, you need look no further than Online Monitoring of the Osiris Reactor with the Nucifer Neutrino Detector which has direct applications in the field of nonproliferation. Here's a map of the world as a function of its antineutrino flux. It's a little low-res as of last month, but it looks really interesting - as in, it's a map of every nuclear reactor on earth - once you subtract out the background from decay of naturally-occurring elements in the crust.

Not only have we used knowledge of new fundamental particles to learn how to split and fuse the atom to release energies that would have been unimaginable to the Curies, we can use knowledge of newer, harder-to-detect, and "irrelevant" fundamental particles to detect bad actors trying to build bombs on the sly. If the fundamental particles underlying the first nuclear war are Nobel-worthy, surely the particles that are being measured in order to prevent history's second nuclear war, ought to be worthy of consideration, even if nobody's figured out how to make a bomb out of them.

> "using the trick" is hardly a damning phrase,

Actually, it is. It indicates they themselves were aware of their intent to falsify. People who have real data that proves their point don't need "tricks".

> In the meantime, we have a nearly universal consensus among smart people who have really studied the issue, and who generally would rather avoid politics, that AGW is going on

What we have is a universal consensus that global warming provides an excuse for centralizing control, limiting freedom, and re-allocating resources according to liberal agendas. Of that, there is a certainty. The rest of the data - genuinely studied by "smart people" - show that Earth may be in a warming trend, that that warming trend has been grossly exaggerated for political reasons, and that modelling climate is a) extremely complex, and b) entirely inaccurate up until now - as even the "hockey stick graph" man himself, Michael Mann, now freely admits. http://www.technologyreview.co...

> Conservatives lie.

"If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor"
"If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance"
"Every family will save $2500 a year minimum"
"healthcare.gov is ready"
"there wasn't a smidgeon of evidence of the IRS targeting conservatives"
"I take the 5th" - Lois Lerner on IRS bashing conservatives
"I take the 5th" various people connected with Solyndra
"I take the 5th" Bryan Pagliano Clinton's former IT staffer who handled her private email system
"Lack of transparency is a huge advantage" Jonathon Gruber, http://www.sandiegouniontribun...
The lying and stonewalling from Obama and his crooked organization has been proven over and over, demonstrated over and over, is on-going, shameless, and reason enough to doubt what he claims to be true. He hasn't made one single right decision since his first election. Now we can add refusal to reveal secret side-agreements with Iran to his list of chicaneries.

> If you had actually made an intellectual journey like you describe, you'd be able to show me some actual evidence other than misunderstood correspondence

Who the fuck are you to to be able to sit on your high throne and judge what kind of a journey I have taken or not? You think YOU are one of those liberal "elites" that you can take a dozen words in a random context and then pontificate so wisely about an entire life? You don't know shit about my life, and you are entirely too smug in your bubble, so much so you obviously don't deign to even pretend to try to see opposing points of view. Thanks so much for that, 'Mr. Tolerance and Diversity'..

The "global warming deniers" are products of the fevered and wild imaginations of paranoid liberals. What they truly are are people who think socialism has never worked and that the available evidence of warming, human-caused or not, is a shoddy excuse to try that idiocy again.

I noticed when I put in my comments that the deadline has been extended by about a month, but still, I put a comment in before the FCC took their system down for a WEEK for a software upgrade. That in itself ought to be an indication of how wrong-headed this regulation is - even the FCC can't write software that doesn't fail and require modification in the field. This regulation will effectively freeze development of wireless routers and other wireless devices that are key to Internet security and ensure that these devices are full of unfixable software defects that when discovered, make these products immediately and irreversably worthless. Not that any of these routers and devices are actually unfixable or irreversably damaged, but they are effectively so, because manufacturers often take no obligation to repair broken software in products that have expired warranties. Unfortunately, it's the nature of these software defects that the entire manufactured base of product become 100% defective all at once upon the discovery of a critical software security defect - that's world's away from the kind of random, slowly developing defects that result in poorly manufactured hardware. For example, all of my twenty or so personally owned routers would have needed to have been thrown away and replaced when "Heartbleed" was uncovered, and again when "Shellshock" was uncovered, except that they were all running open software for which fixes were provided by the open source community. If I had to rely on the kindness of profit-seeking router manufacturers, they'd all be in the garbage bin, so that I could "shell-out" for new routers. Others have written that millions of devices will never be fixed because of effectively abandoned support of these devices: http://www.technologyreview.co... ..or have exposed long-standing vulnerabilties left unfixed: https://www.mocana.com/blog/20...

This one-week downtime is unfortunate, because the news may be forgotten by this community by the time the FCC restores the ability to provide comments online. Someone needs to ping slashdot back in a week when the FCC restores service, or else this ill-considered proposal may become part of established regulation.

Define pretty good.

Google's cars haven't always been smarter than human drivers, though. Another clip shown by Urmson showed the first time one of Google's cars encountered a traffic roundabout, when it decided the safest thing to do was to keep going around. "There were a couple of engineers in the car who were giddy going round and round," he said. "It felt very Chevy Chase-esque."

You may want to see what actual autonomous vehicle experts from leading institutions have to say about it. It may open your eyes to the actual state of the art instead of the common perception of the masses: http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.technologyreview.co...

citation given. MIT knows autonomous cars. I was suggestion google is the best car, which is ok on freeway but is not ready for unassisted neighborhoods and it's not even by google admission. Not for 10 years at least in my opinion. It's a total fail at a very very long list of things.

A similar technique was tested successfully by japanese researchers in 2010, except their rocket model used ambient air directly, instead of H2 in a tank.

I wonder what kind of performance it would get from using maser-powered water vaporization for propulsion ? Water vapor holds twice as much heat as air, translating into twice the ISP. It would be very steampunk, too... I now envision aerospike-like rocket engine gloriously steaming into the stratosphere on top of a microwaved plume of vapor.

Manufacturing jobs have dropped every year since robots were introduced while productivity has risen.
http://cdn.theatlanticcities.c...
http://www.technologyreview.co...

They've been replaced with terrible low paying service jobs.
Wages have been stagnant for 80% of those who have jobs since shortly after robots were introduced. Robots are not the only cause- but they sure didn't help.

While the unemployment rate is finally tightening up some- that's because so many have completely left the work force. Participation of working age citizens age 16 to 67 has dropped continuously for the last 14 years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Who paid for this article? The robot manufacturing companies?

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/401750/electroactive-polymers/

robot muscles are real. this makes human shape robots one step closer.

Phase change drywall. Like this stuff, called "ThermalCore" from National Gypsum:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

I don't know why it hasn't been commercialized yet (they've been stewing on it for years, and some places in Europe already have it), but it sure seems like a good way to make use of the latent heat of wax.

I believe it isn't approved in the US over concerns with fire safety. Something about lining your walls with hydrocarbons doesn't sit well with some people...

They probably just have to do some demonstrations that prove it isn't more flammable than traditional drywall.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

I don't know why it hasn't been commercialized yet (they've been stewing on it for years, and some places in Europe already have it), but it sure seems like a good way to make use of the latent heat of wax.

It seems he also has more general (including non-physics) arxiv.org highlights that seem to be updated more frequently: http://www.technologyreview.co...

Actually the batteries are pretty non-recyclable, and please don't give me that about paying your health cost, the average gas vehicle is about the same as the SMUG producing EV or Hybrid. http://www.technologyreview.co...

Maybe you live in a mythical world where your imagination allows you to create arguments using rare occurrences. I mean if we are going to use exceptions to asses the situation then I don't know what to tell you. BTW, not only school zones require 40km/h zones. There are plenty of residential areas where kids are present in numbers that justify 40km/h as a deterrent for speeding since the fines are high.

It's not creating an argument, it is a single example that you theory of "speed enforcement is science" is bunk. I have plenty more, but you seem to already be aware of this with your comment "kids are present, the speed limit should be 40" comment. So much for the science eh? Speed laws are mostly emotive and political.

Yes it was but some did believe and push that agenda. Regardless there are other examples like earth being the center of the universe...

So this automatically makes you right somehow? I'm failing to see how this adds any weight to your argument

Re: self driving cars: http://www.bloomberg.com/slide... http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/... http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Yes we're all familiar with the current robot car tech, the gap which you don't seem to be aware of is that there is a LONG, LONG, road between concept and mainstream reality. Even if the Tech was perfect, which it isn't, it will still take another 20 years to get past the legal and political hurdles. http://www.technologyreview.co...

Neither did I but you can't deny the need for speed limits.

Never did. Speed laws are mostly emotive and political, not science.

Following the last link in TFS, and its link, We get a retraction of the story that is highly suspicious to say the least. Looking at "the investigation", we find a report that basically validates within reason all of the other stories by the author, leaving only the two on Carly but trying to spin the story as a complete failure to validate anything. The 'investigation' of those two seems to consist only of talking to a PR person at HP that denies the stories (yeah, big surprise, many buyers like to rationalize away and otherwise deny remorse) and "can't find" the person quoted in the company.

Retracting the article based only on that seems a bit extreme.

Will future aircraft be able to also make the switch to electric? Yes, of course. Electric driven propellers should do the trick.

Of course, the size of the batteries needed will preclude carrying any passengers or cargo.

I don't think that is necessarily true. One option is to build hybrid electrical airplanes. And if battery power density and durability continues to improve, I think you might be surprised what is possible if you fill the wings of an airplane with electrochemical cells. Elon Musk has speculated that electric airplanes might be possible if we go beyond the incremental improvements of the current players.

Thanks to Google's project Calico, I would like to be the first to wish Dan a speedy recovery.

this is the same musk that claims autonomous vehicles and general artificial intelligence will happen. they can't even get a rocket to land safely on a barge.

I've been studying AI for over a decade now and all of these people sounding alarms about imminent strong AI are talking out of their butts. In MIT review it has a decent article debunking the non-sense from people who know very little about AI. http://www.technologyreview.co...

Not nonsense. The plan is to start testing in Singapore this year. http://www.technologyreview.co...

The software may be a bit farther along than it seems.

...it is useable . And for about the same price as shipping it in from other states.

Cracking converts higher molecular weight hydrocarbons to lower molecular weight hydrocarbons, Upgrading is the term for the other direction. Maybe this is what you are thinking of? http://www.technologyreview.co...

I doubt it.

If only you knew how to use google then perhaps you would be informed.

Yes, the prototype is grossly inefficient. And yes, the final product will also be grossly inefficient. But for very small devices like watches, it makes perfect sense. You're only going to need to deliver small wattage to them anyway.

Ghostery sells data to advertisers and was bought by an ad network some time ago.

Use Disconnect instead.