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However, there is still the question: is technology really improving our lives?

You might want to read this:

There is, though, one group of Americans that is imperturbably sunny: the Amish. Their depression rates are negligibly low relative to the rest of societys. Their happiness levels are consistently high. The Pennsylvania Amish, when asked how much they agree with the statement: You are satisfied with your life (using a scale of 1 to 10), turn out to be as happy as the members of the Forbes 400. The Amish, though, do without most of what we think of as modern technology. They don’t rely on the automobile, don’t need the Internet, and seem to prefer stability and permanence to the heady growth that propels innovation and the U.S. economy. The comparison is a little facile (the Amish have a lot of other characteristics that make people cheerful, including strong community ties, stable families, and religious faith). But it suggests an interesting question: is it possible that technology, instead of liberating us, is holding us back? Is technological progress merely a treadmill, and if so, would we be happier if we stepped off of it?

Taken from: http://www.technologyreview.com/review/403558/technology-and-happiness/

But your forget that the U.S. legal system has decided that accessing publicly accessible URLs constitutes hacking. I guess the new definition of hacking is "using something in a way you weren't intended to".

It was several years ago, and I don't know the current state of their bullshit legal theories ... they certainly made claims that ripping is in fact illegal.

If they could outlaw it, they would. Because in their mind, anything other than how they envision things should be illegal.

The MAFIAA may be entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. And the fact of this matter is plain and simply, "Fuck you, MAFIAA."

What was that about no recognition of format shifting? I didn't even have to do the shifting, Amazon did it for me.

It was several years ago, and I don't know the current state of their bullshit legal theories ... they certainly made claims that ripping is in fact illegal.

If they could outlaw it, they would. Because in their mind, anything other than how they envision things should be illegal.

Doesn't everybody remember last year, when multiple reports came out from sociologists saying that food prices cause riots, and that food prices worldwide were expected to peak in the summer of 2013? Headlines like 'We have until August 2013 before riots sweep the globe', and 'We have one year before everything explodes' -- that doesn't ring a bell for anyone else?

Social unrest is correlated to the price of necessary commodities. When the poor cannot afford basic necessities, they have no choice but to get violent. Because of crop failures last year, this year is primed for social unrest EVERYWHERE.

The Arxiv paper demonstrating the correlation, based on data from the 2008 food riots.
An article warning us from last year. And another. And another.

Sociologists have known this was coming. Governments should have known this was coming. It's going to be a brutal, bloody summer. Get ready.

Also these are very easy to make. Here are some links and notes for informational purposes only. In it's most basic form wires with cloth dipped in salt water connected to a battery. More refined DIY designs include an electrical meter. http://gizmodo.com/5882754/how-to-electrify-your-brain-to-be-smarter-with-a-9+volt-battery http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427177/diy-kit-overclocks-your-brain-with-direct-current/ Most of the components: - A battery, I've seen designs using 9 volts and I know of some designs that use 6 volts. - Some cut off pieces cotton as cotton can be less drippy then sponge. - salt shaker + water - Wires, regular radioshack UL-Recognized RED Hookup Wire 22AWG (though thicker electrical wire will work too). Strip off the ends to contact the cloth. - Duct-tape to hold the cloth to the wires. - Optional, an electrical meter to get the current in the range you want. - Optional, you can modulate the amps though battery selection, resistors, salt water resistor or just moderating the salt water concentrations. - Possible bonus, the salt water connection is imperfect and provides a crackly connection as in slight random current pulses without special circuitry. Rubbing the contact wire on the battery terminal will also create staticy pulses somewhat similar to what some of the more complex devices produce. - Common sense, take it off if it's burning or injuring your skin.

Keyless entry that uses proximity to a wireless fob, and that explicitly does not require a button press to activate, has been well and thoroughly cracked and the exploit published. The basic idea to use two bent-pipe analog repeaters to fool the car into thinking your fob is right beside the car and not currently inside Wal-Mart (or in this case, Tessco perhaps?) where the accomplice is standing somewhat close to you and the fob in your pocket.

Oh lookie... here's the popular-press article right here.

I never did much time in college either but, that's besides the point. I found a couple of better articles and exploitations, by people who seem to actually understand it:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/424682/first-demonstration-of-time-cloaking/

So, they are speeding up some photons, and slowing others, to create a "gap", passing something through that gap, and then, readjusting speeds. So, imagine the beam is..... Route 1 in Saugus MA. One of my favorite roads. Its not just 6 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic, that traffic is bumper to bumper at full speed.

Like most beams of light, you have fuck all chance of passing through it without casting a shadow (this is the detected event being "hidden"). But imagine if all the cars were in communication by computer. A mile down the road about haldf the cars speed up, and bunch together, and the other half all slow down, then all resume normal speed, creating a traveling gap.

Now, if you knew this gap was coming, you could scurry through it without traffic detecting you across the pavement.... after which, they perform the opposite operation, sealing the gap, as if nothing happened.

Sounds like a really cool system doesn't it? Now lets imagine it has a limitation of a 100 foot gap, moving at 75 MPH, giving you less than a second to pass the 60 feet of tar before you get....detected

I think part of the reason this sounds so weird is the terminology. It makes sense, there is no point in space where an object can be continuously and not be detected by the beam, however there are points which the beam intersects in space where the object can be, between the beam, and not interfere with the final beam...

Or at least, that's what I get from it.

Why don't they just ask China for help? http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427413/how-china-blocks-the-tor-anonymity-network/

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512701/ocean-faring-robot-cashes-in-on-offshore-oil-and-gas/

The Silicon Valley-based company yesterday [March 19, 2013] raised $45 million in a series E round to grow the companyâ(TM)s sales and services around what it calls âoehigh-value ocean data servicesâ in research, defense, and oil and gas exploration.

They seem to have a really good thing going and I'm glad the recession hasn't crippled their business.

Businesses don't give a second glance to PhDs in literature, or sociology, or plant physiology

Your data are wrong. Although I can't comment specifically about lit or plant physiology (do you mean botany?), smart innovative companies are actually highly interested in sociologists and are fiercely recruiting them. Facebook's data science team is run by sociologists, and Google engineers are collaborating with sociology departments on various interesting research topics. This shouldn't be much of a surprise since network analysis was invented in sociology in the 1970s. Today's tweets and likes are still analyzed using techniques that sociologists came up with back when the only twerking going on was led by John Travolta.

It amuses me to no end how so many otherwise intelligent technical people maintain a stubborn bias against social science. Do you have to denigrate other fields in order to keep a sense of self superiority? That is an exceedingly narrow perspective completely unbefitting a rational engineer or a scientist of any stripe. If instead you would take the time to study these other fields, you might find something with which you could collaborate, or at least learn and expand your mind.

I'd say that rather provides answers to fake problems.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512386/danger-lurks-in-growing-new-internet-nationalism/?hubRefSrc=permalink#lf_comment=63033832
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As I suggest in this essay: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "

The hard part is getting people onto some kind of platform that works and where friction and transaction costs don't eat all the money. If, theoretically, one existed, then maybe it'd be interesting when people click 1 cent or 3 cents; but a bigger issue is putting them in a position where they can easily click at all.

The only micropayment-for-writing platform I've seen with significant uptake was Readability's now-discontinued experiment, and it worked (to the extent it did, though it's been canned, so perhaps not that well) because lots of people used Readability for other reasons. So it was more of a revenue-share that Readability was offering to any webmaster who wanted to sign up. I think you need something like that, a platform that people are already on for some other reason.

Story is here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512381/astrobiologists-find-ancient-fossils-in-fireball-fragments/

*possible*, unconfirmed, still-to-be-validated evidence, more like it.

From TFA: "Either way, considerably more work will have to be done before the claims from this team can be broadly accepted."

Story is here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512381/astrobiologists-find-ancient-fossils-in-fireball-fragments/

Wow, will those panels really last 20-30 years on a roof? I'm picturing myself spending a lot of time up on the roof soldering replacement panels in!

To be sincere, I don't know. Note they are actually "modules" (no longer individual panels to be soldered together) so they actually might.
In Australia, without aberrant custom taxes, the "installation industry" really took off. The price is about $1.5-$1.6/W installed on your roof and dropping... the 25y warranty was offered to me by the installer (and most probably backed by the manufacturer).

Here's an insight on what a mature "installation industry" has to do with the prices.

And here's a site that seems to offer reasonable prices with the added advantage you can actually ask them about warranty conditions.

So I live in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. Google fiber is not in offered in Overland Park yet, but because it is close by and spreading I checked out the prices and signed up for email notification when their service becomes available in my area.

The prices. Holy cow. It's free. A one time $300.00 installation fee but then it is free. So I was wondering for months how is that possible? Is Google taking a massive loss? Did Google invent a new technology which allows them to undercut their competitors?

Then on a drive across town to the local Fablab I was listening to the local public radio station which just happened to be interviewing Susan Crawford, author of the recently published book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. As the summary at Amazon states:

This important book by leading telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford explores why Americans are now paying much more but getting much less when it comes to high-speed Internet access.

Well as you might guess from the subtitle of the book, what she finds out when she explores is that internet and cable service in the U.S. are regional monopolies. Even when multiple internet and cable service providers operate in the same city they divide up the city into regions of monopolistic coverage and only overlap on small percentages of territory.

So Google offers such spectacularly low prices by undercutting monopolists, having enough clout to overcome barriers to entry which block startups, and Moore's law has reduced the cost of providing internet service to something pretty close to free. The inflated prices for internet broadband service which we have paid in the U.S. have not followed Moore's law because service provider are monopolies. Now with the disruption of that monopoly in one regional market prices are back on track with Moore's law there.

In other words, the Party of Thieves. How admirable.

Chill, mate. No Aussie is going to steal that black hole you are creating in your locker.
Got some links to any other "creations" that you're afraid of being stolen? Or are you just "rhetorically whinging" around?

no joke about it. batteries are supplied by GS Yuasa.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509981/grounded-boeing-787-dreamliners-use-batteries-prone-to-overheating/

There cannot be any proof, it is obviously impossible to distinguish between "simulated" and "real" reality

Not that obvious to me. You're assuming the simulators have made a perfect simulation, which they may not have done. Or they could leave deliberate clues, if they so wished, which would help us distinguish simulation and reality. Of course, on a broader philisophical point, you could argue there would still be no difference - reality could be a simulation and still be real.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429561/the-measurement-that-would-reveal-the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation/

Hi there, You can stop philosophizing, I just deleted that guy from the simulation, he was getting annoying. Incidentally, if you subscribe to the specific flavor of mass delusion you guys call 'Christianity' and are wondering when the rapture will happen, it'll come the day I finally slip up while combining wild-cards and the 'rm' command on my Simulatron 6000 (TM).

Sincerely, Your lord and cereator.

I get it you created everything, but you running all your commands as root is really a huge risk!!

There cannot be any proof, it is obviously impossible to distinguish between "simulated" and "real" reality

Not that obvious to me. You're assuming the simulators have made a perfect simulation, which they may not have done. Or they could leave deliberate clues, if they so wished, which would help us distinguish simulation and reality. Of course, on a broader philisophical point, you could argue there would still be no difference - reality could be a simulation and still be real.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429561/the-measurement-that-would-reveal-the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation/

Hi there,
You can stop philosophizing, I just deleted that guy from the simulation, he was getting annoying. Incidentally, if you subscribe to the specific flavor of mass delusion you guys call 'Christianity' and are wondering when the rapture will happen, it'll come the day I finally slip up while combining wild-cards and the 'rm' command on my Simulatron 6000 (TM).

Sincerely,
Your lord and cereator.

There cannot be any proof, it is obviously impossible to distinguish between "simulated" and "real" reality

Not that obvious to me. You're assuming the simulators have made a perfect simulation, which they may not have done. Or they could leave deliberate clues, if they so wished, which would help us distinguish simulation and reality. Of course, on a broader philisophical point, you could argue there would still be no difference - reality could be a simulation and still be real. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429561/the-measurement-that-would-reveal-the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation/

is there a possibility to send some nuclear generator, like submarine one or this famous russian lighthouse? Or maybe 5 of them, it might solve some problems

It's gotten a lot of thought. I regard it as pretty likely.

But, you are still likely to be power limited.

Let's delve into the details a bit. The predictions from 2006 are predictions for 2012. Have they come to pass?

1. Prediction: "We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world" The prediction describes online health records, and telemedicine.
Reality: There have been some efforts, in some countries, to digitize records. Many have failed, some are moving forward. However, to my knowledge, none of them have gained wide acceptance (nor overcome the huge privacy and legal obstacles). The current level of web-integration of our records today is not much different from 2006. As for telemedicine? There have been a few more flashy proof-of-principle demonstrations, but nothing has become routine.

2. Prediction: "Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm"
Reality: Microsoft recently demonstrated realtime English-to-Chinese translation. However, the very media buzz about that shows that it is far from "the norm". What we have is just tightly-controlled tech demos, not technology integrated into all of our smartphones ("the norm"). It's likely that existing software will get better (text translation has become amazingly good of late)... but it didn't happen within the 5 years they estimated.

3. Prediction: "There will be a 3-D Internet", by which they seemd to have meant three-dimensional navigation/environments (virtual-reality-like).
Reality: Same as 2006, really. We had Second Life, and we still do. We had 3D video-games, and we still do. In fact, this was quite a silly prediction to make in 2006, given how much was already known at that time...

4. Prediction: "Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance"; this is a vague prediction wherein they reference "Green Chemistry" as if they invented it (they didn't).
Reality: I don't know how to judge this one, since they didn't really make a prediction. There's been more research in the area of green chemistry. Nothing revolutionary has happened in the last 5 years, though.

5. Prediction: "Our mobile phones will start to read our minds", which they clarify as meaning that "mobile devices and networks to (with consent) learn about their users' whereabouts and preferences"
Reality: We can be generous and say that this has come to pass, in the form of smartphones and their associated ecosystem of apps. As a particular example, Google Now (available on Android 4.1 and later) provides contextual information to the user without the user having to explicitly arrange it. For example it warns you that you have to leave now to get to a particular appointment (based on knowledge of your location, the appointment location, and current traffic). If you're at a bus stop, it automatically pulls up the schedule. These kinds of tricks are neat, and will no doubt become more sophisticated with time.

So, my assessment is that their past predictions are right about 20% of the time.

When you separate the actinides from the rest you actually will have something that will decay below natural uranium in radioactivity in a relatively short period of time, say 400 years or so.

That's exactly what the Secretary of Energy was talking about in 2009.

[We’re] looking at reactors that have a high-energy neutron spectrum that can actually allow you to burn down the long-lived actinide waste.

Technology improves over time.

Once there's a working prototype, it can be improved in thousands of ways that are less challenging to produce than the prototype itself.

Right now, there are some challenges in making Iron Dome into SDI. However, there's also a working model which can be refined until it has SDI-ish capabilities.

If you looked at a computer in the 1970s, you might think it could never simulate a human cell. And yet, we're almost there.

If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick.

As far as I can tell, he's been concerned about global warming for a long time.

Muller was never a skeptic.

No skeptic I’ve met said that “ carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” (Richard Muller, 2003). So perhaps he became a skeptic later? Not so much. Richard Muller, 2008: “There is a consensus that global warming is real. it’s going to get much, much worse.”

Um, here you go from the horse's mouth.

The numbers the Guardian cites are somewhat dated and don't reflect the very recent American switch over from coal to natural gas. Many electricity operators have converted their coal plants to burn natural gas instead, because hydrofracking has made natural gas so cheap in the USA. This trend will continue and the result has been a net reduction in CO2 emissions, so much so that right now I believe the USA is on track to beat the EU at the CO2 reduction game (kickass!), because the Germans are retiring their nukes and using coal now in the winter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428947/a-drop-in-us-co2-emissions/

and, while I disagree with this article about the risks / rewards of fracking, it is worth pointing out that as America switches to natural gas, the Europeans are buying our coal...

http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/co2-drop-us-25092012/

I see a distressingly large number of people who blithely dismiss paper after peer-reviewed paper, preferring to cherry-pick data that supports their preconceptions

Yeah, I try not to do that. I am forced to confess that I do sometimes make mistakes, but I do try to focus on what is right rather than who is right (ie, me or you).

I thought the definition of a skeptic was someone who questioned the accepted opinion, evaluated the evidence for himself, and reached his own conclusion. Did Muller not do exactly that?

Maybe, but I would hope that one would continue to evaluate the evidence even after reaching a conclusion. If that is what he means by skeptic, then I am worried he describes himself as a former skeptic. I suspect when he says 'former-skeptic' he is trying to imply that he doubted the reality of AGW.

Here is what he said, while he was still a skeptic:

If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick.......[otherwise it] might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey.

He wasn't a skeptic at all in the sense that he doubted the reality of global warming, he was very concerned about it. His concern was that scientists aren't careful, they will have trouble convincing the public that it's real. That's fine, but it's something that will make me want to examine a little more carefully a scientist's work, and not trust the abstract.

Is this the same as last months "breakthrough" technology described in the MIT technology review.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429722/a-bandwidth-breakthrough

That breakthrough uses special coded TCP secret technology only known to the select few who sign the NDA. The rest of us have know it since 1951 as Hamming Codes, or more recently Forward Error Correction.

To be fair they will replace any faulty cover for free and it's not like it even stops working suddenly. Also why are we reading about a split keyboard when they just invented real time voice to voice language translation using the tones and voice of the original speaker. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507181/microsoft-brings-star-treks-voice-translator-to-life/ .

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/

M$ should be worried. Along with Apple and anyone else trying to keep their proprietary little death-grip on their market share. Android is turning up everywhere. It's becoming ubiquitous. You can find it on everything from smartphones to Televisions[0] to Refrigerators[1]. Why do you think Apple is going 'thermo nuclear' on Android? It's not just due to 'Rounded corners and rectangular design' it's because Android can be made to run on just about any home appliance imaginable -- and guess who makes a lot of home appliances (TVs, fridges, washing machines, etc) as well as smartphones? Now guess who doesn't?

Apple and Microsoft PAY people extraordinary salaries to forecast market trends. They know where the industry is trending. And it ain't trending into Cupertino or Redmond at the moment -- at least not in the world outside of the US.

[0] - http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/android-powered-pocket-tv-turns-any-television-into-a-smart-tv/

[1] - http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425210/do-we-really-need-an-android-powered-fridge/

Scientists are actively working on a test for whether the universe is a simulation.

That all being said, however, Venter is once again vastly overambitious. 'Booting up' synthetic chromosomes only works in sufficiently similar chassis...

If you dig into this story just a little bit (look at the short piece from the Los Angeles Times linked in the summary, and follow its link to Technology Review's article), you will find what you should have suspected in the first place - this stuff about recreating Martian life on Earth is just the most sensationalistic footnote in a story that is really about detecting DNA on Mars.

The purpose of the sequencer is to find out if there is any DNA on Mars, the only way to do that in a convincing, scientifically useful way is to try to sequence it.

swapping an electric car battery isn't possible in reality? Thanks for enlightening the world with your clearly superior intellectual abilities.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424587/israel-to-get-electric-car-battery-swap-stations/
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/21/159355676/dont-charge-that-electric-car-battery-just-change-it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu9PST7oXls
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/better-place/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd0WPw3p2MQ
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/better-place-unveils-battery-swap-station/

If only these people were as smart as you...

What matters is that they take energy and store it in a convenient, portable form. We have many millions of machines which run on petrol, and replacing all those machines with equivalents which run on batteries would require a huge consumption of energy. So there's merit in keeping them going.

Also, this process can take energy for example in periods of strong wind when there's a surplus of 'green' energy, and store it for periods of calm. My home is entirely wind-powered and consequently I have a huge bank of lead-acid batteries as energy storage for calm weather - they aren't very efficient, but they do what's needed. If this 'air (plus electricity) to fuel' process is at least as efficient as a lead acid battery, it's a win.

Yah, doesn't anyone remember the "hydrogen economy?" Although completely misunderstood by the media, the idea was to store and transport energy via hydrogen. But it was a stupid idea. I like the one in TFA and this one better because they don't require converting internal combustion machines to electric.

Unless you're in the quantum world. Entangled pairs affect each other instantaneously, regardless of distance. Welcome to the edge of theoretical physics. Things get weird here.

Technology Review has a similar piece.

Here's a quick summary of the procedure you're talking about: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423302/nasa-studies-laser-for-removing-space-junk/

Initially, they were thinking of ablating the surface of the junk with the laser, but turns out you need a hell of a lot of power to do that, so it wouldn't be very economical. More recent calculations suggest exposure to a ~5kW laser might be enough to decay the orbit enough to bring it back into the atmosphere where it'll burn up, and they estimate that a device such as this, big enough to handle 5-10 objects a day, could be put together for a few million dollars.

Whoever marked this as flamebait should read this article posted by numbius above. Worth study, it seems.

It is cool. Might turn a satellite into a cloud of debris, not a slower solid satellite.
But is it obvious, if you know astronomy, read manga, or just live in space for a while and try to stop debris with what you have on hand?

1. From the DARPA zero robotics challenge, "RetroSPHERES satellites launched into a polar orbit to deploy micro dust clouds that can deorbit small pieces of space debris with high velocity collisions (ablation)."
   A "micro dust cloud" sounds similar to Boeing's cloud of heavy gas (a "nano dust cloud").
   http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/ZRHS2012/RetroSPHERES.pdf
2. 
   Also recent news, but "The US Naval Research Laboratory is proposing to encircle the Earth with tungsten dust in an attempt to bring down dangerous space junk"
   http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423629/orbiting-dust-storm-could-remove-space-junk/
   IANAP but "Their scheme is to release some 20 tons of tungsten dust at an altitude of 1100km, creating a thin shell of particles that will entirely envelop the Earth," that sounds like a baaaad idea!
3. 
   ARXIV black hole paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9512101.pdf
   In 1995 these researchers modelled collisions of supersonic gas streams and found they are efficient at circularizing debris orbits.
4. Coronal Ejection. Basically a gas cloud, IIRC it is known to affect satellites but not sure if effect is primarily electrical or is here also a physical deflection of orbital path?
5. In PLANETES a space debris cleanup team deorbits junk in LEO, not by shooting it with gas but by pushing, sometimes with a gloved hand, onto a terminal vector. But their guns and bikes are gas propelled.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
6. In Moonlight Mile, which covers exploitation of the Moon, there are a number of scenes in which clouds of debris moving at orbital speeds cause tremendous damage. Not exactly the Boeing invention though.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Mile_(manga)

1. its still an invasion of privacy as the outline concept or any other concept related to the technology cannot be verified
2. its still a health risk
tin foil bonus round: it would also be much easier considering the entirety of the TSA revolves around security theater to simply remove the existing units, replace the chassis, and reinstall them with livery to suggest millimeter wave scanning is in progress.

Well maybe you should just start with slashdot and work forward in time:

http://www.science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/30/1216230/How-Terahertz-Waves-Tear-Apart-DNA

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416066/how-terahertz-waves-tear-apart-dna/

> It’s apparent that the people filing the suit don’t understand the technology or the products enough to realize that Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub are completely different products from different companies."

The problem is that if you are sued for patent infringement - regardless of the merits of the case - you are up for $2M in lawyers fees and court costs to defend it. Recently a judge speaking out against trolls said $3M - $5M. If you're a small company or worse - a lone developer - that will send you bankrupt. The suit will most likely be filed in a troll-friendly court district such as the East District of Texas as this case was. The judges in E.D. Texas there are notoriously pro-troll and won't dismiss even the most stupid of cases. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/405259/a-haven-for-patent-pirates/

Trolling causes a lot of damage for innovators elsewhere in the US, but it is huge source of revenue for E.D. Texas. Congressmen from these other districts need to gang up against the Texas trolls and Congressmen: http://www.house.gov/representatives/#state_tn

You're referring to Hawking radiation, and of course that only applies to the temperature as measured externally. What's the temperature of your refrigerator? Mine's a bit above 0C, but I can't measure that externally. Similarly, the event horizon can be viewed as an insulator, so what is the internal temperature of a black hole?

With a covering (accretion disk), the externally seen temperature is much higher, in the millions of degrees, hence my comment.

Acting like these proprietary cloud services are a legitimate case for discussion is disgusting. I find it deplorable that we give these organizations so much attention every time somebody has a horrible idea.

Blah blah blah. We're not getting off you're lawn, gramps.

Despite the rather large noise-to-signal ratio, overall, Twitter has the potential to help disaster management through crowdsourcing. Don't worry, I hate buzzwords like "crowdsourcing" just as much as the next slashbot. Bear with me.... First responders for big disasters have a big problem: where do you spend your resources? You start by sending out search teams, but big cities like New Orleans are, well, big. You just do not have enough manpower to rapidly triage the whole city to know where you should spend your resources. So you guess, and you put triage teams on the 911 lines to take calls, but again, there are many more callers than 911 operators, and those operators need to manually enter a lot of information. This is where Twitter comes in. Citizens that are hurt, or that come across people that are hurt, make tweets like "Man lying hurt, legs crushed under car near Second and Main". Volunteer crowdsourcers re-tweet these events in a format a computer can easily parse, such as "Man crushed by car #location ". A computer gathers all these tweets and presents them in a nice summary format. Even better, this is already being done:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419368/how-twitter-helps-in-a-disaster/
http://epic.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=11

Could we design something more reliable from scratch? Probably. But that would cost $cash to design and deploy, and then you'd have to convince people to actually use the damn thing. Twitter has a large active user base right now, so it makes perfect sense to exploit the tweets as much as possible. (Note also that TFS says "Japan considers '911' calls from Twitter" not "Japan considers replacing '911' calls from landlines with Twitter".)

p.s. Landline 911 works over proprietary lines owned by AT&T et al. ... you might want to rethink your use of the scare term "proprietary".

The fact is, that uranium is increasingly not going to be an important issue. The reason is that over the next decade, the reactors will be of 2 designs:
1) something to burn up current waste. It will still require loads of 'waste' which it will burn up.
2) thorium reactors.
As such, pulling uranium is not that big of a deal.

Now, if they can pull a number of other elements out of there, they would have something. If you look at this, you will see some rather useful elements:
Lithium
Metals such as Aluminum, iron, etc.
Rare earths such Scandium, Neodymium, etc
Perhaps even gold.

Now, there is a group who is doing just this, but they are not getting it from the Ocean. Instead, they are getting it from geo-thermal energy plants.
Simbol Materials is looking to pull minerals, in particular lihtium, from already concentrated fluids.
For now, they will go after Lithium, manganese and zinc, but with the idea that down the road, they will grab other minerals as they can be done economical.
What is interesting is that Lithium 'mined' this way, should be a fraction of the price than anything on the market today.