Slashdot Mirror

Here is the actual patent:
http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?P...

It's almost gibberish. It's full of sentences like (and I'm quoting)
"Alternatively, when propellant 18c of FIG 4 is utilized in the embodiment of FIG 1, the laser system 22 of Fig. 1 may comprise one or more free-electron lasers for providing pulsed laser beams to vaporize, using pulsed laser beams, pellets each comprising the propellant 18c of Fig 4."

Fig 1 is basically the drawing from the Business Insider article with the parts numbered. Fig 4 is a circle.

Or, it suggests we can use "light-emitting diode (LED) driven Alexandrite lasers" instead of free-electron lasers.
Or maybe a flash lamp driven ruby laser. No kidding.

And then the patent says that the fast neutrons from the Deuterium-Tritium fusion will cause the U-238 to fission and explode.
Again, quoting from the patent:
"The secondary explosion recompresses more of the Deuterium and Tritium, causing more fusion energy to be released beyond the 'breakeven' level vaporizing the remaining pellet materials of the propellant 18c of FIG 4 and increasing the overall thrust and exhaust velocity. Use of this embodiment reduces exhaust molecular weight, and increases exhaust velocity and specific impulse."

I did not mistype that.

I'm wondering how large it will be.
AFAIK, this is what a laser fusion device looks like, except that this one isn't ready for prime-time.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/media/...
Nor this one:
http://www.washington.edu/news...
http://www.washington.edu/news...

I would go with the free-electron laser because this is clearly an attempt to make the largest possible engine for the least thrust.

Also, looking at the diagrams in the article, I don't see anything that suggests they've addressed the problem that hitting the pellet with a laser on one side simply causes the pellet be vaporized and driven away without fusion (somewhat like squeezing a watermelon seed). How can they grant patents from devices that cannot work as designed?

Here is the actual patent:
http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?P...

It's almost gibberish. It's full of sentences like (and I'm quoting)
"Alternatively, when propellant 18c of FIG 4 is utilized in the embodiment of FIG 1, the laser system 22 of Fig. 1 may comprise one or more free-electron lasers for providing pulsed laser beams to vaporize, using pulsed laser beams, pellets each comprising the propellant 18c of Fig 4."

Fig 1 is basically the drawing from the Business Insider article with the parts numbered. Fig 4 is a circle.

Or, it suggests we can use "light-emitting diode (LED) driven Alexandrite lasers" instead of free-electron lasers.
Or maybe a flash lamp driven ruby laser. No kidding.

And then the patent says that the fast neutrons from the Deuterium-Tritium fusion will cause the U-238 to fission and explode.
Again, quoting from the patent:
"The secondary explosion recompresses more of the Deuterium and Tritium, causing more fusion energy to be released beyond the 'breakeven' level vaporizing the remaining pellet materials of the propellant 18c of FIG 4 and increasing the overall thrust and exhaust velocity. Use of this embodiment reduces exhaust molecular weight, and increases exhaust velocity and specific impulse."

I did not mistype that.

I'm wondering how large it will be.
AFAIK, this is what a laser fusion device looks like, except that this one isn't ready for prime-time.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/media/...
Nor this one:
http://www.washington.edu/news...
http://www.washington.edu/news...

I would go with the free-electron laser because this is clearly an attempt to make the largest possible engine for the least thrust.

Also, looking at the diagrams in the article, I don't see anything that suggests they've addressed the problem that hitting the pellet with a laser on one side simply causes the pellet be vaporized and driven away without fusion (somewhat like squeezing a watermelon seed). How can they grant patents from devices that cannot work as designed?

Please see my well-documented retort.

I wonder how they solve the problems of directional discrimination without multiple microphones?

It doesn't.

Our current code is designed for Android phones with atleast two microphones. This includes Samsung Galazy S4 and S5 and HTC One.

You know, they published a paper. Instead of trash talking it here, you could have read the paper. This is science after all.

State schools aren't cheap.
Annual in-state tuition only for some well-regarded public schools:
University of Washington: 12.4k
University of California: 14k
University of Michigan: 13.2k
Also interesting that out-of-state tuition at these schools is just as high as at private schools, and all are increasing their percentage of out-of-staters. A very different education market than a few decades ago.

The average passenger car weight in the U.S. is close to 3000 pounds. http://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/files/MacKenzie%20Zoepf%20Heywood%20as%20submitted.pdf

Look at the p-values in this paper. You're wrong.

Multiple studies have shown that the climate models are wrong.

So will you accept science, or is the cognitive dissonance giving you problems if it disagrees with your pre-determined world view?

George Box famously said (not an exact quote) "All models are wrong but some are useful."

Your 2nd cite to the Nature article does not support your argument that models are wrong. There are a lot of quasi-cyclical phenomena that are unpredictable ahead of time (with our current state of knowledge but maybe never) but that show up as emergent properties with random timing in climate model runs. The article shows that when you pick the model runs where by chance the emergent Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation timing matched the real world that the model matched real world temperatures much better. That is solid evidence that the models do a good job of modeling the real world.

Multiple studies have shown that the climate models are wrong.

So will you accept science, or is the cognitive dissonance giving you problems if it disagrees with your pre-determined world view?

They were wrong.

But you are wronger

Multiple studies have shown that the climate models are wrong.

So will you accept science, or is the cognitive dissonance giving you problems if it disagrees with your pre-determined world view?

Well, "Learned" is absolutely a cute name for a professor.

I'll see you and raise.

From the description of "The Devourer," it sounds like Cixin could relate to "The Pagan Bible" by Melvin Gorham and "The Social Conquest of Earth" by E. O. Wilson.

Both describe civilization as a eusocial superorganism -- with Gorham being more pessimistic than Wilson as to the potential for containing its ecological conquest of sexual species.

And if you don't believe me, here is this quarter's CSE time schedule. Classes are held all over campus because they didn't put any classrooms into the Paul Allen Center.

So that photo at the top of the GeekWire story - the one with the packed CS class? I'm fairly sure that's in Kane Hall! The new building will do nothing to ameliorate that.

And the CS department was in a very dumpy building right across from the Student Union building that was a notorious firetrap.` That was a couple of buildings ago. If I remember they remodeled their current building (the old EE building) in 2003.

The department has already outgrown the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, which was dedicated in 2003. The department's previous home was the decrepit (but homey) Sieg Hall.

And the CS department was in a very dumpy building right across from the Student Union building that was a notorious firetrap.` That was a couple of buildings ago. If I remember they remodeled their current building (the old EE building) in 2003.

The department has already outgrown the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, which was dedicated in 2003. The department's previous home was the decrepit (but homey) Sieg Hall.

People who are going to actually commit suicide don't talk about it on Facebook, they do it, these people are rarely on Facebook in general.

I had it hammered into me a very long time ago that the root of rational --- productive --- debate is to expose the evidence that supports your arguments.

Forefront and Facebook launch suicide prevention effort

..."we're connecting community colleges with local employers to train workers to fill high-paying jobs..."

This is what community colleges do. Just exactly how is intervention by the federal government supposed to help? The only change is going to be an increase in the number of administrators the colleges hire to deal with the federal bureaucrats. The next step will be to offer the schools money. Then they'll hire even more administrators in order to suck properly at the federal teat. Finally, the federal government will use their dependence on federal money to impose ridiculous rules and regulations, that require even more administrators.

We've already seen how federal "help" has screwed up the American university system. Tuitions have increased by 200% to 300% in the past 20 years (that being the first example I pulled out of Google).

You know the line: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you". Time to run screaming in the opposite direction.

Just as not only one person thought of 3D printing a gun, lots of groups have had the idea to 3D print the output of medical imaging (e.g. http://depts.washington.edu/uw... and http://digm.drexel.edu/portfol...). One company has even gotten FDA medical device approval (http://3dprint.com/18577/materialise-heartprint-class-1/) and one man printed his tumor before and after chemotherapy (http://3dprint.com/14359/3d-printed-cancer-tumors-2/).

So my point is, this is /.-worthy news?

You could call it that, sure, but in practice many people studying the possibility of life on other planets refer to their specialty as "astrobiology". For example, the University of Washington has an astrobiology program.

The blind spot is not related to b pillar etc but a region of the retina that is not sensitive to light and therefore blind.

https://faculty.washington.edu...

I don't know what cool-aid the NIH is feeding you, but for people that are rich enogh to have custom drugs made for them, cancer is already cured provided they seek treatment eairly enough (Steve Jobs was a moron and waited too long). Peptide, dendritic cell, and T-cell vaccines all work quite well once you sequecne the turmor.

Here's why I'm not convinced that the answer is simply higher salaries. To be sure, some workers who could be doing tech decide to do something else. Maybe they go into academia, finance, IP law, etc. Raising tech salaries across the board, by everyone who employs tech workers, would steal some of these guys back. But would it be enough? You would probably also motivate some young people to go into tech that currently go into other fields. But that's for the future; it doesn't help the present. The fact is that there's a fixed supply of domestic talent at each point along the talent spectrum. You could pay 10x as much and it won't magically increase the amount of available talent. If there is, in fact, not enough talent to "go around", i.e. to fill all the tech positions employers want to fill, then we don't just have a salary problem.

Side note: what's good for the domestic tech worker may not be the same as what's good for the country. That is to say, an influx of highly-skilled foreign tech workers might depress salaries in the short term, but an abundance of cheap tech labor could juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole.

There's also anecdotal evidence that the U.S. is becoming less attractive to foreign talent and not more. Which, in my opinion, is terrible news.

More on this:

https://news.cs.washington.edu/2013/08/14/chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken/

Here are the instruction when dealing with bras from a site dedicated to AED information;

What if the woman has a bra on?
Lift the bra up over the breasts and let it bunch up around the neck, then attach the pads.

Those factors ceased to be relevant when military operations stopped being about people walking a hundred miles on foot and then clubbing each other in the head with heavy bits of metal.

Smaller? Well that means they are a smaller target, you can fit more of them into a transport, they have more room to move around the interior of a fighting vehicle. Strength matters somewhat but smaller people also eat less, and so are a reduced logistical burden.

In terms of speed and endurance, it is far from clear that women are inferior men:
http://faculty.washington.edu/...

Besides, armies are not composed of average men - and they would not be replaced with average women. Differences between men and women *on average* are meaningless. The average soldier can be easily replaced with exceptional women.

Sure it is. Average ICE efficiency is about 20%. So with that additional bit of calculation done, the effective energy density is about 8MJ/kg.

"It attaches current-carrying handles to either end of the central plasma"

“Here we imposed the asymmetric field, so the plasma doesn’t have to go unstable in order for us to drive the current. We’ve shown that we can sustain a stable equilibrium and we can control the plasma, which means the bottle will be able to hold more plasma,” Jarboe said.

The UW apparatus uses two handle-shaped coils to alternately generate currents on either side of the central core, a method the authors call imposed dynamo current drive. Results show the plasma is stable and the method is energy-efficient, but the UW research reactor is too small to fully contain the plasma without some escaping as a gas. Next, the team hopes to attach the device to a larger reactor to see if it can maintain a sufficiently tight magnetic bottle.

It is a Spheromak that makes use of technology developed for the ITER fusion reactor.

A high- spheromak reactor concept has been formulated with an estimated overnight capital cost that is competitive with conventional power sources. This reactor concept utilizes recently discovered imposed-dynamo current drive (IDCD) and a molten salt (FLiBe) blanket system for first wall cooling, neutron moderation and tritium breeding. Currently available materials and ITER-developed cryogenic pumping systems were implemented in this concept from the basis of technological feasibility. A tritium breeding ratio (TBR) of greater than 1.1 has been calculated using a Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP5) neutron transport simulation. High temperature superconducting tapes (YBCO) were used for the equilibrium coil set, substantially reducing the recirculating power fraction when compared to previous spheromak reactor studies. Using zirconium hydride for neutron shielding, a limiting equilibrium coil lifetime of at least thirty full-power years has been achieved. The primary FLiBe loop was coupled to a supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle due to attractive economics and high thermal efficiencies. With these advancements, an electrical output of 1000 MW from a thermal output of 2486 MW was achieved, yielding an overall plant efficiency of approximately 40%.

I have no idea if this is a breakthrough or not. I don't know if it will scale up. It's not my field.

I do know that you are a Slashdot Pundit who lives in a fact free void and you are spewing meaningless nonsense. Although you quote some of the UW press information, you obviously did not bother to read or comprehend what they were saying. You didn't even bother to get the facts right about what kind of magnetic confinement topology they use. You went off on a rant about a completely different system.

Do Slashdot and the world a favor: STFU. You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and leave us alone. You are wasting every one's time.

TFA led me to this list of interesting studies:

http://faculty.washington.edu/...

A Majorana particle is it's own antiparticle; such as, for example, a photon.

Most fermions have different antiparticles from themselves: Protons are notably different from anti-protons, electrons are different from positrons, and so on. The one exception is the neutrino, for which the question is not yet settled.

If the neutrino is its own antiparticle, we should see double-beta-decay events. A beta decay emits a neutrino, so if two happen simultaneously the neutrinos should annihilate if they are their own antiparticle. (Wikipedia link)

As yet no experiment has seen double-beta-decay, so it's likely that the neutrino has a distinct anti-neutrino - an intriguing prospect.

The article referenced in the post does not identify the fermion involved, so one can only assume that it's a "quasi particle", which is a type of vibration. Essentially a phonon (sound wave) with fermion-like properties.

So part "B" I think this is... that the sea ice is reduced... seems questionable to me.

WTF?
Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly. From here.

So why were walruses not beaching themselves then?

The ice disappeared North of Alaska, and they moved to land, it is understood. This happened at the very end of August. As you can see from the animation showing sea ice and the location of tagged walruses that I linked in the grandparent post.

As to ocean acidification, that doesn't back up your argument.

I'm just showing how you can get to (C) Because of global warming without going through (B) Sea Ice loss. Now the scientists have said that it is due to Sea Ice loss, so they're probably right. I only raise the point because your logic isn't sound on that point either.

Furthermore, I dont' think it has anything to do with beaching. After all, that has something to do with food sources... not whether the walruses actually find the water toxic. But you know what... if you can show me something about ocean acidification harming the bodies or irritating the bodies of walruses then we might have something to talk about.

You seem to have misunderstood the point. I didn't suggest that the water might be harming or irritating the bodies of the walruses. I said that it was harming shellfish that are their food. And that in turn will affect where they go, because they have to go where there is food. And that in turn might cause them to choose land rather than ice.

Keep an open mind. I could be totally wrong and you could be the person that shows me how wrong I am. But by the same token you could be wrong too. Keep an open mind and we can have a real discussion. ;)

Keeping an open mind in my case means believing that the scientists who study this stuff know about it. In your case it means believing that they've made a mistake in attribution that you can spot, but none of them have.

Which is more likely?

I agree, claims of voter suppression and racism are bullshit. Is it suppression for all the other things that require ID in the modern world? I hope you never have to fly, buy alcohol, medicine, cash a check, or do anything else either.

I think that the point is that:
1. Black, hispanic and asian voters are significantly less likely to possess ID that is sufficient to meet the requirements of the laws. They are also less likely already to be registered to vote.
2. Election fraud is rare, and in-person fraud (the only type that could be prevented by these laws) is vanishingly rare.
3. These laws are being passed by Republican legislatures. Statistically, reducing the number of black, asian and hispanic voters is likely to improve their results in elections.

So what you have is a measure that claims to prevent a problem that doesn't exist, and, coincidentally, will make it harder for the party's opponents to vote.

I don't actually believe that that is a coincidence. I don't know whether it is racist or not, but I do think that elections should be fought by trying to convince the electorate that you are the best candidate, not by changing the procedure to make it harder for your opponents to vote.

troll be trolling.
or troll needs to learn to read a graph:
http://static.skepticalscience...
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/...

Courtesy: http://www.skepticalscience.co...

"Solved" isn't a term properly used in the sciences, and your quite legitimate confusion here is a nice example of why.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference. It does not produce certainty, but rather knowledge. Unfortunately, because science is still a very young discipline (only three hundred years old) we have yet to really update our language to accommodate it, so we still talk in terms of "solution" and "proof" and the like, as if we were philosophers seeking after some chimeral goal like "certainty" or the ability to turn base metals into gold.

The questions scientists are interested in here are:

1) "Which is more plausible given the evidence we have: that we are computing something wrong in our Big Bang nucleo-synthesis calculations using existing physics; that our measurements of lithium abundance are wrong; that there is new physics that affects lithium production in the Big Bang; that our chemical evolution calculations are wrong for some reason; or that something else entirely is going on that we are missing?"

and:

2) "What new evidence might we gather to clarify the situation given we currently don't have a stand-out idea that is sufficiently more plausible than the rest that no one can be bothered to do further investigations?"

Science is a human discipline, and as such is never "settled" except insofar as no on can be arsed to look at some question more deeply because the plausibility of the currently-best answer is so high (for example, while I think it very likely the Earth is heating up, I support further research like better satellite measurements of albedo: http://www.washington.edu/alum...)

With regard to lithium, we have a pretty good handle on Big Bang production assuming there is no new physics, but lithium has a number of characteristics that make it more strongly subject to the forces of what cosmologists call "chemical evolution"--the way the chemical composition of the universe changes through time due to stellar and other processes. The Korn et al work points to one particular way primoridal lithium could be hidden away. In the '90's there was similar work being done to show that various other processes could actually break lithium nuclei up over the course of the history of the universe.

Then there is also the problem that the whole "missing lithium" thing could be a result of a local anomaly in lithium abundance: after all, we have only sampled a small part of the universe. The work this /. post is about focuses on extending the reach of measurements to other galaxies, which is a start, although one could also imagine large-scale enrichment processes in the early universe that put us in a lithium-poor bubble, so no-doubt "additional work is required" to reach a sufficiently strong consensus that the missing lithium has been explained well enough to be not worth bothering with any more.

I guess I should ask what you mean by "pretty sure". Adding to large atoms are a lot easier than small ones. It's been a long time since I've read about it, but it's called "proton induced fission". Admittedly, most of the reading when you Google it is a bit heavy. I do know that if you crack U238 with a proton that all 3 daughter isotopes have a half life of 35 days or less (one is like an hour and a half) and their daughter isotopes are all stable.

Anyway, if you Google "proton induced fission" and "nuclear waste" together you'll see there are already papers proposing the idea, such as this one:

http://www.npl.washington.edu/...

It's getting its compensation.....an Arctic Ice Cap that has expanded by 41% in the past 2 years. Most ice up there since 2006. Ironically, not reported here....
I guess anything goes to advance the global warming scam.

Pro tip: Lie Less

Arctic ice is still in a downwards trend, despite some year to year fluctuations due to different weather patterns. http://psc.apl.washington.edu/...

obviously, because global warming may lead to something very bad and very $$; if it doesn't lead to these things, not a lot of people will care.
How do we know global warming might lead to something bad , at least in a quantitative sense ?
All (all) of our detailed knowledge is from computer programs (climate models) which simulate changes in the future

However, It is an observed fact (fyfe) that over the last ten years, the surface temp of the earth has not increased as much as predicted by models; the models fail.
The models also can't reconstruct the last few thousand years (Liu), where we Know what happened.

This anomaly is the main current argument of denialists (those who think global warming is not occurring, or is not manmade, or is not important) and cause for concern among climate scientists.

Several attempts have been made to find the missing heat without great acceptance, eg Cowtan (who are not, afaik, climatologists) say that the missing heat is in the Arctic, which is not well measured by instruments.
It appears that Chen and Tung have found the answer: the earth is warming, but the heat is going into the ocean instead of the atmosphere.

SO: the models are clearly not accurate even on a 10year time scale.
so why should we take seriously alarmist views about the future ?
I guess it is probability: if there is even a X% chance that something really bad could happen, is it worth spending ~ 0.5% of global GDP (~ 850 billion dollars a year) to prevent this possible catastrophre ?

Me personally, my house is about 5 miles and 200 feet up from the Atlantic Ocean, so global warming is good for me: I get beachfront property......

Fyfe
http://hypergeometric.wordpres...

liu
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

cowtan
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

chen and tung
http://www.washington.edu/news...

I am a particle physicist, and I have worked directly on this problem. The uncertainty in the hadronic contributions to the vacuum polarization and light-by-light scattering are large enough that the supposed BSM signal is not significant.

That is, you can do nice high-order paper-and-pencil calculations of Feynman diagrams when the particles involved are electrons and muons, but there are important cases where the particles contributing to this effect are composite: hadrons (which are made of quarks). Since you cannot do calculations on hadrons without considering how the hadron is composed of quarks, you can't avoid getting into strongly coupled quantum chromodynamics (QCD). See here for further discussion: Hadronic Light-by-Light.

That means you can't do your calculation on paper, you have to use a supercomputer and something called lattice QCD. Unfortunately, it's easier to crank out a thousand crappy model calculations of BSM that is supposedly showing up than to properly fund studies of the theory uncertainties. As a result, the precision of the theory values are not good enough to establish whether the muon magnetic moment is consistent with the Standard Model or not.

That said, it's still an interesting place to look, and somebody will work out all the uncertainties eventually. In a few years, there might be something to talk about seriously.

Take a look at how RFID chips have worked since day one - they use the incident RF to power the chip that then back-modulates the transmitted signal. In other words, the RFID tag actively modulates the load impedance it places on the antenna causing changes in the radar cross-section of the tag. The tag transceiver sees these variations in cross section as data from the tag.

It only works because it has a very low bitrate of 1kbps:

The UW’s Wi-Fi backscatter tag has communicated with a Wi-Fi device at rates of 1 kilobit per second with about 2 meters between the devices.

Although the authors claim that "The Wi-Fi Backscatter tags do not require any batteries and can harvest energy from ambient RF signals" they make no attempt to back up this claim with measured or estimated energy efficiency of this transmitter. The standard metric for high efficiency transceivers is joules per bit, because low bitrate communication always consumes less energy than high speed, but the only useful way to compare it to another high efficiency transmitter is to see if it can transmit a certain amount of data for less energy.

While I don't expect every paper to address every aspect of a technology, they should not then turn around and make baseless claims like "We believe that this new capability is critical for the commercial adoption of RF-powered Internet of Things." in a length 12 page paper that fails to address the one metric which would allow them to make such a claim.

Your dismissal of my evidence is itself an example of cherry-picking. Here's another typical example of business stifling speech: http://www.whas11.com/home/12-...

"According to a 2009 study by Internet security firm Proofpoint, 8 percent of companies with more than 1,000 employees have fired someone for social media actions -- a figure that is double what was reported in 2008."

Business is built upon the idea that hoarding is good. Non-disclosure agreements, trade secrets, copyrights all serve to censor the free and open transmission of knowledge. Maybe biz will finally get it, that open exchange is better for progress. But how much will I suffer meanwhile?

Capitalism and slavery are intimately connected. I wrote an essay on this subject, for the History of Capitalism MOOC: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/...

Why do wars accelerate technological innovation? Because govt funds research. Why not invest in disruptive innovation all the time? The market is too short-sighted: see http://depts.washington.edu/uw...

"Itâ(TM)s common for business people to point to the 1990sâ"specifically, to the 1995 Netscape IPOâ"as the âoebeginning of the Internet.â This claim is unsupported by fact. The Internet was âoebornâ in 1968, more than 25 years earlier. Internet pioneers, such as Bob Taylor, in interviews express frustration at how slowly business came to realize the importance of a collection of technologies that we now consider extremely valuable. Internet pioneers worked hard to prove the value of the new technologies, but business took a very long time to âoeget it.â"

Govt's greatest potential is in creating money to free individuals from having to do what "little Napoleon" bosses tell them to do. So get rid of government bureaucracies, leave the private sector alone (to fail), but provide an opt-in robust unconditional safety net. Stimulate innovation with challenges.

I'm not a people person. People make me depressed. I prefer to go out in nature and communicate with animals. I try to limit human contact to the internet.

Why should I suffer a lifestyle below the poverty line, because I don't sell? I produce things that no one wants to buy (and I just give away anyway because I hate selling), but someone who produces the same thing gets rich and rewarded, because he knows how to communicate non-verbally. That's the fickleness of the market.

the 68k platform seemed to be neglected by Motorola

Nobody really took up the 68060, there was no reason to continue the line. They used a 68k core for the first dragonballs, though, which appeared in the Palm Pilot. But then they got access to PowerPC cores, and those became the basis of the later dragonballs. There was just no reason to keep 68k alive at that point.

The article didn't mention the final deploy of the USA side of Neptune is going in this summer. Don't think the Canadians get to have all the fun with Ocean science, but the NSF has funded a cabled observatory spanning the Juan de Fuca plate as part of an effort with Canada to get sensors covering nearly all the fault lines.

The project in the USA is no longer called Neptune, but more can be found about it here.

http://abc.cs.washington.edu/

Just because harvesting of RF energy is a legitimate field does not mean that this product is genuine.

Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.

exactly.

RCA tried this bullshit a few years ago, saying they had a product that could harvest radio waves to charge an internal battery, that could then be connected to charge a mobile device.

http://phys.org/news182595455.html

Takes less than 5 minutes to do the rough Maths and realise it's complete bullshit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8s3Xjeg0sk

http://abc.cs.washington.edu/

Just because harvesting of RF energy is a legitimate field does not mean that this product is genuine.

Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.

ok, WHY is it disingenuous? What about their claims don't make sense then? They plan to make a product that is clearly possible, so why is it a scam?

I read through a lot of that supposed "proof" and all I can find is some general wishy washy "Well, it wouldn't get enough power from the air" That's not nearly as definitive as the summary makes it out to be.

http://abc.cs.washington.edu/

Just because harvesting of RF energy is a legitimate field does not mean that this product is genuine.

Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.

http://abc.cs.washington.edu/

yes.

the "start menu" could be a top 5 Microsoft Case Study into Awful Business Choices (clippy, metro, 'automatic updates', Zune, or tell me your favorite)

assuming the use of a button labeled "start" on the desktop, here's what M$ should have done the whole time:

by default, put it where they think is best...where their "vision" tells them

give user option to remove it, or move it, or make it bigger or smaller, or edit the text...

in the standard Control Panel area...of course you can eventually find a way to hack this, but obviously I mean put it in Control Panel

I cannot stress enough that this is ***basic human/computer interaction design***....it's in colloquial language, but everyone who does any design work has heard of Ben Shneiderman's 8 Rules for Interface design

M$ kept the Start menu because some idiots in marketing were trying to justify their existence

I know that M$ had employees who were/are as apoplectic as I am about design choices like the Start Menu...

So the answer to "how" is this: bad business structure that gives decision power for technical questions to non-technical people and in general is built from the ground up to resist institutional change even if it is change that improves

> On balance, scientists aren't entirely sure what effect clouds will have on global warming. Most climate models predict that clouds will amplify global warming slightly.

That sentence lumps professional alarmists in with actual scientists. Never been outside on a cloudy day? Those "scientists" (alarmists) who say clouds make it hot are the same ones who you said San Francisco would be underwater by the year 2010. Don't let their silly pseudo-science make you doubt the obvious facts of your experience. You know that when it's cloudy, it's cooler.

What you may not know not know is that islands near San Francisco have recently re-appeared after having been underwater for the last 60 years, the exact opposite of what the alarmists claimed. There is some important science around climate change. Earth HAS warmed a bit more in the last 100 years than the other planets have. There's also a metric ton of snake oil being sold by alarmists whose pseudoscience is nothing more than patter for their act. Confusing one with the other ends up getting you confused and making you look silly. You end up believing things like "it gets hot when it's cloudy", which is of course ridiculous.

Well, at risk of repeating myself, here's some of those actual scientists who find no negative feedback, and/or some positive feedback from clouds:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

http://rain.atmos.colostate.ed...

http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...

http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...

ftp://eos.atmos.washington.edu...

http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...

http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...

Never been outside on a cloudy night? It's warmer when the heat is reflected back than when it is radiated out into space. Don't let your interests in the islands off San Francisco make you doubt the obvious facts of your experience. You know that when it's cloudy, it's warmer. The thing is, that AGW is primarily an effect of warming the cooler temps; at night, in winter, in higher latitudes, with less change in the tropics, in the day, when it's hot. So, whatever effects might occur from cooling the tropic days (which is apparently none, or close to it, but giving the credit of infinitesimal doubt) is irrelevant because those temps changed the least; the biggest warming, and therefore the most increase in clouds, will be in the winter nights in the high latitudes, where the clouds will be positive feedback.

This is just another one of the many, many balancing mechanisms in nature. Another obvious one is that more heat causes more evaporation, which causes more clouds, which causes less heat. Mother nature I has thousands of such negative feedback cycles that tend to buffer against changes.

That's Lindzen's "iris hypothesis", basically (in case you didn't know). Unfortunately, there isn't any evidence for it, http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... http://rain.atmos.colostate.ed... http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... ftp://eos.atmos.washington.edu... http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...