We've got three XBox 360s in the house, and we buy a lot more Bluray movies than we do XBox games. So much for how the physical media balance out. As for streaming, we only stream when we *can't* buy, because the quality is never even close to that of Bluray, and of course, if the connection goes down, as happens from time to time, you're screwed.
It seems to me that between the cost of the high speed connection, the cost of the rental, the fact that it's gone after you watch it, the quality is lower, you can't lend it, you can't significantly time-shift it, and the fact that it can and does fail... that if you do prefer streaming, you're simply not a very picky viewer.
No. You're bewildered. Theism: belief in a god or gods. The root "a": without. A-theism: without belief in a god or gods.
That's it. That and no more than that. Your definition is some kind of crazed religious nonsense.
Go ahead. That's when you'll find out that (a) I switched your TOL with some dirty old yams, and (b) I know where the funny bone is in your bulbous, nasty elbow joint.
Protector... what a great book. I need to read that again. I've only read it like ten times, clearly not treating myself right. Wonder if Amazon's got it for my Kindle reader app... [wanders off]... cr*p. Audio and physical only. Guess I'll have to go back to paper for an evening.
Yeah, I get why... I'm just saying, gee, that might affect an analysis of how efficient home delivery vs. local shopping might be.
Lay out a 'modern' city in grid-form, and you get... Ugh... Milton Keynes.
Not always. Look at Manhattan... nominally laid out in a grid, yet down in Greenwich Village, there's at least one street that actually crosses itself, I don't remember which one anymore. I think city designers might do a lot of drugs. Or simply delight in confusing people.
The joys of hundreds of passengers vomiting at once as they are exposed to real-time visual confirmation of aircraft motion in storms, stunned by lightning strikes, and get to see the wings nearly brush the ground on landing. What a great plan.
In other news, Wonder Woman sues, and the puppeteers prepare a formal complaint to be submitted indirectly.
Last time I was in London (some years now), I was appalled at the traffic, and the disorganized nature of the city's layout. Can't say I've experienced anything like that in the US, and I've driven in a lot of US cities. Los Angeles and every Florida city I've ever been in come to mind as the most annoying, because they're so spread-out; it takes more driving to get anywhere, and that might be comparable on some level. Where I live (Montana), we're definitely in the "over 50km" class; heck, it's 140 miles to the nearest city, and that's not even in my state. If I want to shop in a city without sales tax (and oh yes, you can bet I do) then staying in-state, it's a 300 mile drive, or 482km. As you might imagine, we're definitely fans of Internet shopping!
An engine like PostgreSQL is so complex, there are few standard tests that could really give you the data you're looking for, unless your application is so vanilla the KKK would endorse it. The only way to understand -- beforehand -- how a new version of a DB like this would work in an existing environment is to set up a test server, set up your database on it, and test it against the real-world operations the production server is experiencing, then compare the two in areas like execution time, memory utilization, thread count, etc. After you'd carefully evaluated what benefits any new features might bring you.
Seems to me that if you want to get beyond "perception" and into a worthy objective analysis, complaining is a waste of your time, because only you can do such a thing. If you want general info, the PostgreSQL team already gave you that -- they claim performance hasn't been hit. And a canned analysis doesn't, in my experience, reflect your own results. Benchmarks may give great results, but you write a simple little join a little funny, and oh brother, can your results differ. And so forth.
*** I've been using PostgreSQL for years; I'm not affiliated with those people, but I am pitifully grateful to them.
Judges, trial lawyers, and others who hang out in court rooms will readily tell you that both assumptions are demonstrably false.
Those of the religious persuasion --judges, juries -- having the religious test preceding anything else you say, will then apply their dogma to what you say. So either you lie, in order not to awaken the idiocy, and thereby compromise your integrity, or you tell the truth, and thereby risk compromising your case.
As for the tax load question, consider the alternative. They pay their own taxes and are no longer enjoined from, as in institution, being a part of the political process.
They're a huge part of the political process right now. So clearly carrying their tax load is ineffective as a tool to keep government free of religious influence. As far as I'm concerned, the constitution's prohibition against makings laws that respect religions should stand strong with regard to making laws that exclude religion from carrying the same burdens everything else does. Further, the free exercise of religion should allow them to participate in the political process. While I object to the ideas they push, I don't say they shouldn't be able to push them. What I was trying to get across is why, as an atheist, I am concerned with my being compelled to support and endorse religion.
The government isn't allowed to do things like put "in god we trust" on the money; the fact that it does so simply demonstrates that the legislators are willing to violate their oaths. But that doesn't mean that the religious shouldn't be able to walk up to a legislator and say anything they like, including expressing their dissatisfaction with the godless way the government is constructed. It just means that the legislators are forbidden to act on those inputs. The constitution enjoins the feds, and indirectly, via the 14th, the states, to not create law that respects religion. It does not enjoin the religious from speaking, and I think it was a massive error to erect such an idea. I can think of no reason whatsoever that is sufficient to stop a preacher or a supplicant from speaking in any general public venue they please, about any subject they please. Including from their pulpits.
Furthermore... if the religious can get a big enough head of steam going, there's a mechanism in the constitution (article five) that will allow them to change the government into a purely religious one, or make any other changes, large or small, that they like. As it stands now, however, the constitution says no law that respects a particular religion may be made. In the language of the time, that means supporting any religion or religious outlook over any other. It doesn't say religious organizations can't be taxed; in fact, it says they can't be taxed differently. And it doesn't say the religious can't speak to their ideas, no matter what I, or anyone else, thinks of them.
It's bad enough that the SCOTUS has decided that corporations can enjoy the privileges of citizenship.
What we care about are the constant invasions of the religious into our non-religious lives. Why can't I buy beer on Sunday? Why can't Linda and Gwen get married? For that matter, why can't Linda, Gwen, Melissa and Steve get married? Why is it expected that I put my hand on a bible in a courtroom? Why does my money say things I cannot possibly agree with (I don't trust in God, you see)? Why has my patriotism, as expressed by the pledge of allegiance, been hijacked into a totally false declaration of subservience "under god"? Why do my kids encounter religious dogma in public schools? Why am I forced to carry the tax load for the religious, when I in no way support their existence, outlook, dogma, or teachings?
If they want to dunk each other in the water, so what? That's not the problem. That's never been the problem. The problem is they don't limit their religion(s) to themselves. And in turn, that converts my general attitude from "don't care" to "religion is an obstacle to reasonable life."
On the whole, I think I'd rather hire an au pair girl.
If the Robot does the dishes and the floors and etc., then neither you nor your lady have to do it, and thusly, get to spend more time exploring the various corners of your sexual identities.
This does, of course, require a ladyfriend, and this is, of course, slashdot, so perhaps I'm being overly optimistic.
You'd scream like a scalded baby if we let some character work on the electrical system in your house who wasn't certified as qualified to do so; understands the job, won't set your home on fire, etc. You'd shop around for the one who does the best work you could afford even so, and why? Because you don't want to die in a fire.
But you're perfectly willing to let someone with any degree of incompetence adjust how the most powerful entities in the state, and country, work.
Here's the problem, see: Our system is one which allows any two incompetents to outvote a competent person, in an environment where competence is rare. This goes for electing politicians, and because of that, it also goes in the halls of congress and state legislatures when they get around to voting.
but academia has fairly solid proposals for machines that DO leave traces and that DO let voters verify votes.
Even so, I'm with the First Poster. He's got it exactly right. We can let machines do the counting if and when the machines are smart enough to vote and to care about those votes, presuming we're still engaged in pretending to stick to our constitutionally based, vague semblance of a democratic republic. Until then, machines that control vote counting are potentially proxies for corporations. No more, no less. And that is extraordinarily dangerous.
In the meantime, the system is absolutely corrupt from the top down, and introducing new mechanisms that may or may not allow wholesale election buying are a bad idea, because what is here now -- that is, people doing the counting -- is extremely difficult to corrupt all at once. It's probably the only thing in the entire process that works half-decently on a reliable basis. And yes, we can wait a few hours or even day for results if we have to. There's no actual need for a McDonalds/FedEx mentality about the vote. It isn't like the elected must start work on the very next day.
What we need (since I'm on my soapbox) is to stop regarding corporations as "persons", and forbid them from coming anywhere near a lawmaker or a political party or an election with money, opinion, gifts, or offers of employment before, during or after their elected term. Under penalty of having the executives hung. Corporations are not people. At best, they are sociopaths. Dangerous, without any concern for actual humans, and with goals that have no natural connection with the best interests of humans except at the executive levels. As demonstrated by such things as nine million dollar salaries. And higher.
The original idea of the constitution was, here we make the federal government, which we strip of most powers, not in ignorance that it will make things difficult for the government, but because it will make things difficult for them.
First, we should get back to that, and stop accepting the government's complaint that is "has to do something despite the constitution, because it needs to (if it really needs to, there is article five, ready and waiting... we will decide, not them, if it's really required.)
Second, we should apply the same general idea to corporations. These entities, when medium sized or larger, by their very nature, can collect more power in a day than most citizens will in their entire lifetime under the current setup. That's a really, really bad thing. Putting them in control of the voting process -- that's a REALLY really really bad thing. And that's what voting machines do. So lets not go there.
"That" was two smug and obnoxious slashdot members picking on some person who hasn't got much, if any, of an artistic bent, and acting like they have some imaginary reason to feel superior.
If you have an accurate WWII story that includes the rape of Nanking, the conditions at Auschwitz, Japanese keeping of "comfort women", or the Nazi experiments on Jews, you'll find that your imaginary distinction of war as violence that excludes the sexual goes pop like the foolishness it actually is. Not to mention current Islamic practices, any of the crusades, etc.
Agreed. Speaking as a musician who owns a full traditional recording studio, if it costs you much to make your music available to the public right now, you're doing it wrong. The gear I had to buy 20 years ago, is *not* what you need to buy today.
The Beatles created all manner of good stuff with 4-track recording. You can buy a standalone four track recorder for about $100 right now. Or you can use your PC, which you (probably) already have; the Mac comes with GarageBand at no extra charge, which can create excellent results. Or you can spend a whopping $500 or so and get something like Logic Pro, and have more power than you know what to do with.
Frankly, if you can't get your music out to people today, it may well be because your music sucks. If that's not the case, then your ability to use the tools available to you sucks. Or you aren't really trying.
Solar power would contribute *zero* to pollution once in place; there are no secondary products. All you get out is electricity. Period. Modern nuclear reactors are almost as good, producing very little waste, and what waste they do produce can be easily handled. Both technologies require significant manufacturing to be put into place, but the waste product costs there are spread over such a long operating lifetime that they are actually insignificant.
WRT global warming, in the classic alarmist sense, there are no atmospheric carbon products from either power source as a consequence of operation -- there would be some during construction, but they'd be absolutely insignificant as compared to, for instance, that produced as a consequence of operation of coal, oil or gasoline power plants (and which also cost a good bit in pollution to build.)
There's also a cooling effect for solar: incoming heat which normally has to be re-radiated away from the planet can be converted into mechanical energy and RF energy, etc., which would in turn change the global heat equation in favor of cooling. This could be balanced with nuclear energy, which does produce new heat. They're an excellent pair of technologies, used together thoughtfully at high levels.
since waste heat will become an issue if everyone can use as much energy as they want.
You're making several assumptions that aren't supported by the facts.
First, the earth is very good at radiating excess heat. It does it all the time; convection is the primary mechanism for initial heat lift, then radiation outwards. If you stop to think about it, you'll see this must be the case, or the enormous amount of energy the sun is dumping on us each day would have long ago burned us off the surface.
Second, if the energy source is solar and stored solar (quite practical in terms of space and materials required), and we turn some percentage of that into mechanical or other non-heat energy in service to our needs, we're actually reducing the amount of heat the earth has to re-radiate; so the issue there would be aggregate cooling. Which one could balance by burning nuclear fuels. The combination of the two would allow for essentially zero-concern generation of waste heat.
Also, just to put a fine point on it, there's no particular reason an inductive/resonant charging system would waste significant power when not actually charging something -- and if they've got power transfer to 85% at 15 cm as claimed in TFS, then it'll almost certainly be much higher in efficiency at, say, 1 cm (sitting right on the charger.) Which is not to say that the actual act of charging the battery is all that efficient -- it's not, that's why they get hot. Again, we have to hope for ultracaps here.
1) If the gov't nails down a specific operating frequency, then it's a done deal. And they probably will, because these things are going to put a spike in the RF spectrum like just about nothing else we use other than intentional transmitters.
2) Could be low, near zero. Because it's quite easy to tell if there's a no-load condition, as opposed to a load condition. Put a load on it (drop your phone or whatever on there) and a lightly-pumped LC resonator will drop in peak voltage by quite a bit. So you punch up the drive until you're at optimum operating voltage; when the phone stops taking current or is removed, the waveform resonator will rise to a higher voltage, and you know to stop driving it so hard... at which point it'll settle back down.
Nope. You're thinking 60 Hz power transfer. That's not what is going on in any reasonable design. High frequencies let you build high-Q coils that are physically very small. Likewise, wall-warts with power transformers are old tech; decent wall warts are now switching power supplies. Which are perfectly suitable for powering a compact sine wave generator -- at the other end, in the device, you basically need a coil, a small cap, a bridge rectifier, and a battery (or an ultracap, depending on the run-time you're looking for and the power consumption of the device. Of course, if we see some of the developments in ultracaps that have been bandied about, batteries will be history.)
Slashdot Mirror
Speak for yourself.
We've got three XBox 360s in the house, and we buy a lot more Bluray movies than we do XBox games. So much for how the physical media balance out. As for streaming, we only stream when we *can't* buy, because the quality is never even close to that of Bluray, and of course, if the connection goes down, as happens from time to time, you're screwed.
It seems to me that between the cost of the high speed connection, the cost of the rental, the fact that it's gone after you watch it, the quality is lower, you can't lend it, you can't significantly time-shift it, and the fact that it can and does fail... that if you do prefer streaming, you're simply not a very picky viewer.
Plan B - The B team!
No. You're bewildered. Theism: belief in a god or gods. The root "a": without. A-theism: without belief in a god or gods. That's it. That and no more than that. Your definition is some kind of crazed religious nonsense.
Go ahead. That's when you'll find out that (a) I switched your TOL with some dirty old yams, and (b) I know where the funny bone is in your bulbous, nasty elbow joint.
Protector... what a great book. I need to read that again. I've only read it like ten times, clearly not treating myself right. Wonder if Amazon's got it for my Kindle reader app... [wanders off]... cr*p. Audio and physical only. Guess I'll have to go back to paper for an evening.
That's all right. If they confront me about it, I'll just yell "boo" and we won't see them again for a century...
Yeah, I get why... I'm just saying, gee, that might affect an analysis of how efficient home delivery vs. local shopping might be.
Not always. Look at Manhattan... nominally laid out in a grid, yet down in Greenwich Village, there's at least one street that actually crosses itself, I don't remember which one anymore. I think city designers might do a lot of drugs. Or simply delight in confusing people.
The joys of hundreds of passengers vomiting at once as they are exposed to real-time visual confirmation of aircraft motion in storms, stunned by lightning strikes, and get to see the wings nearly brush the ground on landing. What a great plan.
In other news, Wonder Woman sues, and the puppeteers prepare a formal complaint to be submitted indirectly.
Last time I was in London (some years now), I was appalled at the traffic, and the disorganized nature of the city's layout. Can't say I've experienced anything like that in the US, and I've driven in a lot of US cities. Los Angeles and every Florida city I've ever been in come to mind as the most annoying, because they're so spread-out; it takes more driving to get anywhere, and that might be comparable on some level. Where I live (Montana), we're definitely in the "over 50km" class; heck, it's 140 miles to the nearest city, and that's not even in my state. If I want to shop in a city without sales tax (and oh yes, you can bet I do) then staying in-state, it's a 300 mile drive, or 482km. As you might imagine, we're definitely fans of Internet shopping!
An engine like PostgreSQL is so complex, there are few standard tests that could really give you the data you're looking for, unless your application is so vanilla the KKK would endorse it. The only way to understand -- beforehand -- how a new version of a DB like this would work in an existing environment is to set up a test server, set up your database on it, and test it against the real-world operations the production server is experiencing, then compare the two in areas like execution time, memory utilization, thread count, etc. After you'd carefully evaluated what benefits any new features might bring you.
Seems to me that if you want to get beyond "perception" and into a worthy objective analysis, complaining is a waste of your time, because only you can do such a thing. If you want general info, the PostgreSQL team already gave you that -- they claim performance hasn't been hit. And a canned analysis doesn't, in my experience, reflect your own results. Benchmarks may give great results, but you write a simple little join a little funny, and oh brother, can your results differ. And so forth.
*** I've been using PostgreSQL for years; I'm not affiliated with those people, but I am pitifully grateful to them.
Those of the religious persuasion --judges, juries -- having the religious test preceding anything else you say, will then apply their dogma to what you say. So either you lie, in order not to awaken the idiocy, and thereby compromise your integrity, or you tell the truth, and thereby risk compromising your case.
They're a huge part of the political process right now. So clearly carrying their tax load is ineffective as a tool to keep government free of religious influence. As far as I'm concerned, the constitution's prohibition against makings laws that respect religions should stand strong with regard to making laws that exclude religion from carrying the same burdens everything else does. Further, the free exercise of religion should allow them to participate in the political process. While I object to the ideas they push, I don't say they shouldn't be able to push them. What I was trying to get across is why, as an atheist, I am concerned with my being compelled to support and endorse religion.
The government isn't allowed to do things like put "in god we trust" on the money; the fact that it does so simply demonstrates that the legislators are willing to violate their oaths. But that doesn't mean that the religious shouldn't be able to walk up to a legislator and say anything they like, including expressing their dissatisfaction with the godless way the government is constructed. It just means that the legislators are forbidden to act on those inputs. The constitution enjoins the feds, and indirectly, via the 14th, the states, to not create law that respects religion. It does not enjoin the religious from speaking, and I think it was a massive error to erect such an idea. I can think of no reason whatsoever that is sufficient to stop a preacher or a supplicant from speaking in any general public venue they please, about any subject they please. Including from their pulpits.
Furthermore... if the religious can get a big enough head of steam going, there's a mechanism in the constitution (article five) that will allow them to change the government into a purely religious one, or make any other changes, large or small, that they like. As it stands now, however, the constitution says no law that respects a particular religion may be made. In the language of the time, that means supporting any religion or religious outlook over any other. It doesn't say religious organizations can't be taxed; in fact, it says they can't be taxed differently. And it doesn't say the religious can't speak to their ideas, no matter what I, or anyone else, thinks of them.
I'm with you there.
What we care about are the constant invasions of the religious into our non-religious lives. Why can't I buy beer on Sunday? Why can't Linda and Gwen get married? For that matter, why can't Linda, Gwen, Melissa and Steve get married? Why is it expected that I put my hand on a bible in a courtroom? Why does my money say things I cannot possibly agree with (I don't trust in God, you see)? Why has my patriotism, as expressed by the pledge of allegiance, been hijacked into a totally false declaration of subservience "under god"? Why do my kids encounter religious dogma in public schools? Why am I forced to carry the tax load for the religious, when I in no way support their existence, outlook, dogma, or teachings?
If they want to dunk each other in the water, so what? That's not the problem. That's never been the problem. The problem is they don't limit their religion(s) to themselves. And in turn, that converts my general attitude from "don't care" to "religion is an obstacle to reasonable life."
Yes, that was the point. Whoosh much?
(to the tune of the Intel commercial):
Bum-bum-bum-bum!
If the Robot does the dishes and the floors and etc., then neither you nor your lady have to do it, and thusly, get to spend more time exploring the various corners of your sexual identities.
This does, of course, require a ladyfriend, and this is, of course, slashdot, so perhaps I'm being overly optimistic.
Not the same thing at all.
You'd scream like a scalded baby if we let some character work on the electrical system in your house who wasn't certified as qualified to do so; understands the job, won't set your home on fire, etc. You'd shop around for the one who does the best work you could afford even so, and why? Because you don't want to die in a fire.
But you're perfectly willing to let someone with any degree of incompetence adjust how the most powerful entities in the state, and country, work.
Here's the problem, see: Our system is one which allows any two incompetents to outvote a competent person, in an environment where competence is rare. This goes for electing politicians, and because of that, it also goes in the halls of congress and state legislatures when they get around to voting.
Even so, I'm with the First Poster. He's got it exactly right. We can let machines do the counting if and when the machines are smart enough to vote and to care about those votes, presuming we're still engaged in pretending to stick to our constitutionally based, vague semblance of a democratic republic. Until then, machines that control vote counting are potentially proxies for corporations. No more, no less. And that is extraordinarily dangerous.
In the meantime, the system is absolutely corrupt from the top down, and introducing new mechanisms that may or may not allow wholesale election buying are a bad idea, because what is here now -- that is, people doing the counting -- is extremely difficult to corrupt all at once. It's probably the only thing in the entire process that works half-decently on a reliable basis. And yes, we can wait a few hours or even day for results if we have to. There's no actual need for a McDonalds/FedEx mentality about the vote. It isn't like the elected must start work on the very next day.
What we need (since I'm on my soapbox) is to stop regarding corporations as "persons", and forbid them from coming anywhere near a lawmaker or a political party or an election with money, opinion, gifts, or offers of employment before, during or after their elected term. Under penalty of having the executives hung. Corporations are not people. At best, they are sociopaths. Dangerous, without any concern for actual humans, and with goals that have no natural connection with the best interests of humans except at the executive levels. As demonstrated by such things as nine million dollar salaries. And higher.
The original idea of the constitution was, here we make the federal government, which we strip of most powers, not in ignorance that it will make things difficult for the government, but because it will make things difficult for them.
First, we should get back to that, and stop accepting the government's complaint that is "has to do something despite the constitution, because it needs to (if it really needs to, there is article five, ready and waiting... we will decide, not them, if it's really required.)
Second, we should apply the same general idea to corporations. These entities, when medium sized or larger, by their very nature, can collect more power in a day than most citizens will in their entire lifetime under the current setup. That's a really, really bad thing. Putting them in control of the voting process -- that's a REALLY really really bad thing. And that's what voting machines do. So lets not go there.
"That" was two smug and obnoxious slashdot members picking on some person who hasn't got much, if any, of an artistic bent, and acting like they have some imaginary reason to feel superior.
If you have an accurate WWII story that includes the rape of Nanking, the conditions at Auschwitz, Japanese keeping of "comfort women", or the Nazi experiments on Jews, you'll find that your imaginary distinction of war as violence that excludes the sexual goes pop like the foolishness it actually is. Not to mention current Islamic practices, any of the crusades, etc.
Yes. Without any doubt at all.
Agreed. Speaking as a musician who owns a full traditional recording studio, if it costs you much to make your music available to the public right now, you're doing it wrong. The gear I had to buy 20 years ago, is *not* what you need to buy today.
The Beatles created all manner of good stuff with 4-track recording. You can buy a standalone four track recorder for about $100 right now. Or you can use your PC, which you (probably) already have; the Mac comes with GarageBand at no extra charge, which can create excellent results. Or you can spend a whopping $500 or so and get something like Logic Pro, and have more power than you know what to do with.
Frankly, if you can't get your music out to people today, it may well be because your music sucks. If that's not the case, then your ability to use the tools available to you sucks. Or you aren't really trying.
Solar power would contribute *zero* to pollution once in place; there are no secondary products. All you get out is electricity. Period. Modern nuclear reactors are almost as good, producing very little waste, and what waste they do produce can be easily handled. Both technologies require significant manufacturing to be put into place, but the waste product costs there are spread over such a long operating lifetime that they are actually insignificant.
WRT global warming, in the classic alarmist sense, there are no atmospheric carbon products from either power source as a consequence of operation -- there would be some during construction, but they'd be absolutely insignificant as compared to, for instance, that produced as a consequence of operation of coal, oil or gasoline power plants (and which also cost a good bit in pollution to build.)
There's also a cooling effect for solar: incoming heat which normally has to be re-radiated away from the planet can be converted into mechanical energy and RF energy, etc., which would in turn change the global heat equation in favor of cooling. This could be balanced with nuclear energy, which does produce new heat. They're an excellent pair of technologies, used together thoughtfully at high levels.
You're making several assumptions that aren't supported by the facts.
First, the earth is very good at radiating excess heat. It does it all the time; convection is the primary mechanism for initial heat lift, then radiation outwards. If you stop to think about it, you'll see this must be the case, or the enormous amount of energy the sun is dumping on us each day would have long ago burned us off the surface.
Second, if the energy source is solar and stored solar (quite practical in terms of space and materials required), and we turn some percentage of that into mechanical or other non-heat energy in service to our needs, we're actually reducing the amount of heat the earth has to re-radiate; so the issue there would be aggregate cooling. Which one could balance by burning nuclear fuels. The combination of the two would allow for essentially zero-concern generation of waste heat.
Also, just to put a fine point on it, there's no particular reason an inductive/resonant charging system would waste significant power when not actually charging something -- and if they've got power transfer to 85% at 15 cm as claimed in TFS, then it'll almost certainly be much higher in efficiency at, say, 1 cm (sitting right on the charger.) Which is not to say that the actual act of charging the battery is all that efficient -- it's not, that's why they get hot. Again, we have to hope for ultracaps here.
1) If the gov't nails down a specific operating frequency, then it's a done deal. And they probably will, because these things are going to put a spike in the RF spectrum like just about nothing else we use other than intentional transmitters.
2) Could be low, near zero. Because it's quite easy to tell if there's a no-load condition, as opposed to a load condition. Put a load on it (drop your phone or whatever on there) and a lightly-pumped LC resonator will drop in peak voltage by quite a bit. So you punch up the drive until you're at optimum operating voltage; when the phone stops taking current or is removed, the waveform resonator will rise to a higher voltage, and you know to stop driving it so hard... at which point it'll settle back down.
Nope. You're thinking 60 Hz power transfer. That's not what is going on in any reasonable design. High frequencies let you build high-Q coils that are physically very small. Likewise, wall-warts with power transformers are old tech; decent wall warts are now switching power supplies. Which are perfectly suitable for powering a compact sine wave generator -- at the other end, in the device, you basically need a coil, a small cap, a bridge rectifier, and a battery (or an ultracap, depending on the run-time you're looking for and the power consumption of the device. Of course, if we see some of the developments in ultracaps that have been bandied about, batteries will be history.)