This is the type of thing that will doom eBooks to failure. How can anyone equate a mechanized text-to-speech voice to a human being narrating an audio book? Sorry, Amazon, but it's this kind of crap that's going to keep me from buying a Kindle anytime soon.
We have something like this today; it's called the microwave oven. Microwave energy is a frequency that causes water molecules to vibrate, causing food to heat. That is wireless transmission of power, a significant amount of power. The old crystal radio headsets ran off of the power of the radio signal itself. Obviously, there's not a whole lot of power in a radio signal, but enough to do some real work. The original pacemakers were recharged daily by magnetic induction. There's a bunch of devices that have been powered wirelessly. If this new system works safely, it would be fantastic.
It has been proposed that rail gun catapults could be used to inexpensively send shipments to Earth from the Moon. It might have been first proposed by Robert Heinlein in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
I don't think this could be used as a weapon, at least not in anything remotely resembling this application. It's designed to use focused unltrasound at a very high power level to heat the tissues enough to cause coagulation. The military already has a sound-based weapon that can also be used as a long distance loudspeaker. In fact, a Carnival cruise ship used a similar device to successfully repel pirates several months ago. The military version could liquify someone's brains if it were close enough. Although it would probably be possible to design an "assassination headband" with this technology, this tourniquet appears to be a very clever lifesaving device, if it works as expected.
It would be great for camera lineses. "Big glass" can take several minutes to warm up enough for fogging to evaporate. Very inconvenient when I want to take a photo of something outside.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the type of thing that will doom eBooks to failure. How can anyone equate a mechanized text-to-speech voice to a human being narrating an audio book? Sorry, Amazon, but it's this kind of crap that's going to keep me from buying a Kindle anytime soon.
We have something like this today; it's called the microwave oven. Microwave energy is a frequency that causes water molecules to vibrate, causing food to heat. That is wireless transmission of power, a significant amount of power. The old crystal radio headsets ran off of the power of the radio signal itself. Obviously, there's not a whole lot of power in a radio signal, but enough to do some real work. The original pacemakers were recharged daily by magnetic induction. There's a bunch of devices that have been powered wirelessly. If this new system works safely, it would be fantastic.
This, apparently, is the crowning glory of unicellular evolution. Imagine what it might evolve into in another billion years.
It has been proposed that rail gun catapults could be used to inexpensively send shipments to Earth from the Moon. It might have been first proposed by Robert Heinlein in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
I don't think this could be used as a weapon, at least not in anything remotely resembling this application. It's designed to use focused unltrasound at a very high power level to heat the tissues enough to cause coagulation. The military already has a sound-based weapon that can also be used as a long distance loudspeaker. In fact, a Carnival cruise ship used a similar device to successfully repel pirates several months ago. The military version could liquify someone's brains if it were close enough. Although it would probably be possible to design an "assassination headband" with this technology, this tourniquet appears to be a very clever lifesaving device, if it works as expected.
It would be great for camera lineses. "Big glass" can take several minutes to warm up enough for fogging to evaporate. Very inconvenient when I want to take a photo of something outside.
Which means that lighting your backyard BBQ grill would probably be a bad idea, since it could ignite the entire planet.