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  1. Re:Adds new import to the phrase "keep off the gra on MIT Envisions DIY Solar Cells Made From Grass Clippings · · Score: 2

    If you have no electricity to start with, even a little is a huge improvement. This is not meant for industrialized places.

  2. Re:Electric car with problems? on Electric Mini Cooper Has Rough Start · · Score: 1

    "Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips"

    "radical solutions"? how about, "sensible solutions"?

  3. Re:Have they played the mission? on Russia Recalls Modern Warfare 2 · · Score: 1

    if the end results are the same, i see no difference

  4. Re:Let sleeping dogs lie on Software Enables Re-Creation of 'Lost' Instrument · · Score: 1

    I know at least 10 people who play the banjo...

  5. Re:Don't just say it, do it! on Interesting Uses For a USB LED Screen? · · Score: 1

    One of the earlier search engines had something like this - there was a live view of (all?) the searches being conducted at the time scrolling by at the bottom of the screen. It was called something like "search voyeur", and it was very interesting.

  6. Re:Time for vector processing again on IEEE Says Multicore is Bad News For Supercomputers · · Score: 1

    you are an idiot

  7. Re:Whoa There Chen on Accident Could Lead To Better Digital Cameras · · Score: 1

    i just got a D300 - which has a detector very similar to the D90 that you mention. its low light performance is far less satisfactory than the ISO3200 film i used to use. while film does get grainy at high speeds, as you mention, the noise that these detectors (CCD and CMOS) is far uglier. in my experience, film is still superior at low light

  8. Re:The real news on Surgeons Weld Wounds Shut With Surgical Laser · · Score: 1

    YAG is yttrium aluminum garnet...

  9. Re:The Red Cross caused this problem on Johnson & Johnson Loses Major Trademark Lawsuit · · Score: 1

    Spoken like a true coward.

  10. Re:Read your references on Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players · · Score: 1

    furthermore, 'k' is the SI prefix for kilo. K, in SI means kelvin.

  11. Re:Anything is better! on Windows Live Hotmail CAPTCHA Cracked, Exploited · · Score: 1

    spoken like a true coward. fuck you

  12. Re:global warming on The Texas Petawatt Laser · · Score: 1

    the problem with this is that you are assuming that the laser is 100% efficient - which i'm sure it's not. So the power needed would be three to four orders higher than the power delivered by the laser.

  13. Re:Standard or proprietary on Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly' · · Score: 1

    Well, there was the time that Apple allowed third parties to sell Mac clones, and then totally screwed them when they started outselling Apple...

  14. Re:have they solved QD blinking yet? on Researchers Explore Quantum Dot Based NVRAM · · Score: 1

    Quantum dots (and other quan`tum 2D and 3D structures) allow for highly tuned and tuneable electrical and (as you noted) optical properties.

    So the big deal is that they are potentially super useful in ANY field that is "electrical" or "optical", which is a lot of fields.

  15. Re:This scan would make "House" episodes... on New Super Scanner Can Scan Body in Under a Minute · · Score: 1

    also, gold can easily form amalgams, like with mercury. so it might be a route of entry for other toxins

  16. Re:White elephants on Germany To Build New Maglev Railway · · Score: 1

    One of the advantages of maglev, apart from its high speed, is its high acceleration. So, even over a short course, it can save quite a bit of time, because it can spend more time at high speed. I believe that maglev acceleration is limited more by human frailty/nausea rather than mechanics/power etc.

  17. Re:Hah. on Intelligent Design Ruled "Not Science" · · Score: 1

    "Tell me, after being skeptic of an experiment, then trying it time and time again, coming up with the same results...doesn't that eliminate the skepticism?"

    If you are a good scientist, repeated experimentation should not eliminate scepticism. It could be that you are confident enough in a theory at a certain level of precision, but that does not mean that the whole "edifice" of a theory is 100% certain.

    Just because an experiment yields a certain result consitently, this does not mean that a slightly different experiment (or the same experiment at a different time/place) will give you the same result. (in my lab certain chemical recepies would yield entirely different results in the winter and in the summer - the humidity in the air made a huge difference..)

  18. Re:single isotope on Perfect Silicon Sphere to Redefine the Kilogram · · Score: 1

    As far as I see it, there are two huge problems, and the FA did not touch on these at all.

    First, as you mention it, is the isotopes. Not all Si atoms have the same mass, and different natural samples have different distributions of the different isotopes. So even if you can count the number of Si atoms, you can't be sure of the mass. I know that the semiconductor industry working on single isotope chips, http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2000/C/ 200002512.html, but how "single" is that?

    Second, defects, in particular voids. If you have a perfect sphere, there is one configurational state. A SINGLE exlusion defect for a ~28 g sphere will have an Avagadro's number (~10^23) of possible configurations. So the question is, how easy is it to form defects? (very easy, because of the second Law of thermodynamics) So the question becomes, how many defects do you expect to have in a 1 kg sample of Si? Unfortunately, i've forgotten stat mech that lets me calculate that...

  19. Re:Obviously on Golf-Ball Sized Hail Damages Shuttle · · Score: 1

    i think some of the Saturn stages had internal insulation...

    http://www.geocities.com/launchreport/satstg5.html (the s4b stage)

    http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/01launch_ascent.htm

    (sorry, not the best links, and i don't know why this was chosen, and apparently forgotten....)

  20. Re:Ummm. enterprise are their customers on Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities · · Score: 1

    excellent post. thanks very much. tell us more about the bonsai...

  21. Re:and we see again on MPAA Sues Company For Selling Pre-Loaded iPods · · Score: 1

    "It's competition because they want to sell you the physical DVD and then sell you a digital copy for your ipod."

    the irony is that the DVD presumably contains a digital copy to begin with...

  22. Re:10GHz Microwave? on Frozen Chip from IBM hits 500 GHz · · Score: 1

    actually, microwave energy corresponds to molecular rotations, not vibrations. vibrations happen at higher energies, in the infrared region...

  23. Re:Super for Camera resolutions on Nvidia Launches High Powered Mobile Graphics Chip · · Score: 1

    you might also say that the problem with cameras on phones is the LENS.

  24. Re:not so, my friend, not so... on Remains of First African Slaves Found · · Score: 1

    what is the definition of slave? is it not a person who is owned by another? i'm not saying that this is good - in fact, this is what makes slavery repugnant. this, however, does not change slaves' (potential) role in an economy.

  25. Re:"international disaster" on Challenger Tragedy - In Depth, and Deeply Felt · · Score: 1

    very nicely put - but in terms of what "traged" actually (or used to) means, and in terms of how Feynman had to submit a "dissenting" voice paper after the inquiry, when he found out the engineers knew that the seals had a real chance of letting go at that temperature...