(*)Stop laughing at the back. It consumes less than 10w of power an hour.

You mean it runs on just ten Watts. A Watt is a unit for the rate of use of energy. What you pay for are units of energy. You could have said 0.01 kw/h per hour ... perverse but correct.

BTW I run an Atom server as well, though I'm wondering if it should morph into a Rasberry Pi soon.

You don't need anything radioactive! A noise diode is quite good enough.

Don't virtually all PCs have a hardware RNG these days? Although it's rarely used as such. It's the integrated audio system.

Rack up the gain on the microphone input and you'll hear noise generated by the switching of other electronic systems in the box. (Even better if a mic is connected and you pick up external noises). It shouldn't be hard to generate a fairly random number from a second's worth of samples thereof. It may not be good enough for crypto on its own, but XORing it with a "good" random number cannot make it any less good.

Great for one-offs

I think this hits the nail on the head.

It may revolutionize prototyping. Design a complicated 3-D object on your computer, and print one. Handle it. Stress it. See what feels good or bad, what breaks or bends too easily. Revise your design. Print another prototype. No problem with going around this loop several times.

For manufacturing, you'll still bite off the large expense of having a mould manufactured, so you can knock out the item in thousands or millions for cents per unit.

It'll also mean that at the other end of the cycle, one-off spare parts for obsolete models will be similarly easy to manufacture. What is the state of the art in 3-D scanning? Take a broken part, reassemble it with superglue, 3D scan it and 3D print a replacement? Maybe not there today, but soon. Photo-copying for objects.

It may revolutionize lost-wax casting, because it'll be easier to make the wax originals. What makes sense for jewellers today (with hand-sculpted wax), may make sense for any smallish cast-metal object tomorow.

Perhaps surprisingly, no.

There's a lot of law pertaining to exhaust pipes in particular. It was established that car manufacturers had no rights over the manufacture of functionally equivalent parts which, externally, were indistinguishable from copies of a registered design, because they HAD to be exactly the same shape, diameter, etc. in order to attach to the car and not impede the operation of its engine. The internals were a different matter - there is freedom inside to make changes, and the third-party manufacturers were indeed making the innards differently to the car manufacturer.

Further, if you are making your own parts rather than manufacturing them for profit, you have even greater license. For example, you are allowed to make an instance of a mechanism described in a patent for your own curiosity, enjoyment, maintenance of a broken purchased item, etc. even though you need a license to sell such parts for profit.

As with audio and video, watch out for attempts to take away the freedoms we currently enjoy!

Re: More adverts, everywhere.

So, don't patronise us and tell us to grow up for lamenting the removal of the option to exercise choice.

But your freedom to choose to block adverts has not been removed. It's just that the Google store has stopped stocking that app, so you have to get it from somewhere else and learn an extra trick or two to install it. To me, it's a bit like your default supermarket deciding not to stock one of your favourite products. Annoying.

If they'd made it impossible to block adverts without voiding your phone's warranty, THAT would be interfering with your freedom of choice. If they'd used cryptographic techniques so it was impossible to install anything they didn't want you to, and so they could retroactively take away something that they didn't want you to have , that would qualify as evil. Nobody could be that nasty, could they?... Oh.

Cetaceans

We can't even work out how to communicate with cetaceans. What chance have we got with something with which we share no common ancestry at all?

(They sometimes save our lives by swimming us back to dry land. That shows a remarkable capacity for abstract reasoning by dolphins and orcas, and inter-species empathy in advance of our own. )

Re: No such thing as degrees Kelvin.

Which has just made me think, why haven't I ever seen use of kK or MK? (temperatures appropriate for describing stars).

(Unlike the Yg, which isn't NEARLY big enough).

Re: Anything we can do

Even if they happen to be within a few tens of light-years, even if they are currently watching Lucille Ball on Earth-TV and trying to work out what those strange techno-primitives are up to, they may still be thwarted by real-world physics. In other words, they've come to the same conclusion that our scientists have, that interstellar travel isn't ever going to happen outside of the movies. No wormholes, warp drives, ZPE drives, reactionless drives, or any of the other devices that SF authors use to get an interstellar plot going. Just rocketry and relativity and radiobiology, saying "can't be done".

My riposte to the (strong) Anthropic principle is that the universe is NOT optimised for Homo Sapiens. It's optimised for our silicon successors, who'll be able to slow their clock rates down so that a thousand light-years becomes a few years subjective. They'll prefer just about anywhere in the universe to those hot balls with moist oxidizing atmospheres, where some (mostly ridiculed) few amongst them think their ancestors must have developed, back before the Archives and the Memories.

In the worst-case scenario, they're here in our Oort clouds already, we're making far too much noise, and they're getting ready to drop a comet on us. (It worked last time, 65 Myears ago).

The day the earth caught fire ...

Premise is utterly bonkers. A bad fantasy. No science at all. Newton would have discovering relativity as a consequemnce of how fast he'd be spinning in his grave. Even "The day after Tomorrow" made more sense.

Logan's run

At last. I was thinking I was the only person who thought it a worthy contender to replace Zardoz.

Re: A tenth of that?

it was a coding error from someone who thought "hey, she will only fly for a few hours however, so why bother".

Someone thought that way in safety-critical code? Please reassure me it was just the in-flight entertainment system.

Where's the scream icon?

Re: Sacrifice some weight

Out of interest - how much weight does the Lithium battery save, compared to an NiMH stack of the same capacity?

Would lead-acid be allowed in an aircraft? Spilled acid in an airframe would be very undesirable, even if gelled. Even more so, the hydrogen gas that the things emit under failure / overcharge conditions or when spilled acid finds something metal to react with.

Re: Slaves to convenience ( and Intellectual Property)

Indeed. What we have here is an very unsurprising demonstration that the ruling party in a post-communist but still centralist, controlling and repressive state doesn't understand open-source. It's a bit like expecting a mole to understand flying.

Walled garden versus open source is an old discussion. Evidence so far is that given enough time, open-source always wins. Recently Apple, with its massive first-mover advantage, is losing ground to Android. But that's just a recent skirmish in a war that's been going on since bacteria developed plasmids, and higher organisms developed sex - both means for spreading their source codes as far and as wide as possible, and for maximising the amount of development thereof. (Mutually synergistic, of course).

Re: Engraving

I'm reminded of the USA experts laughing at the USSR's avionics in a defector's jet, that still used thermionic valves (tiny peanut-sized ones).

Until someone pointed out that valves are EMP-proof, and transistors aren't.

Indeed, it's a great idea

For a long time it's offended me that most datacentres are busy throwing away heat to the air outside, while the same building is burning fuel to keep its inside warm for the people that work there.

In fact one can source airconditioning plant that pumps heat from the air in the server farm "uphill" into the building's central heating system. However such plant has a higher capital cost, and the IT people and the estates people and the finance people don't properly talk to each other and argue over "whose budget" rather than seeing the "interest" on the capital invested (arriving by way of a reduced fuel bill). So it's rare to find such a system. Personally I'd say legislation or tax breaks should make such airconditioning either compulsory or highly tax-advantaged.

CPUs are happy running at 80C so they could be "cooled" by water from a central heating system. Trouble is that water and electricity don't mix. The tiniest leak from the CPU cooling circuit can trash the motherboard. Cue a nonconductive inert liquid which could be pumped through heatsinks above the CPUs and then through a heat-exchanger plumbed into the central heating system, with no aircon (pumping of heat uphill) required.

Looking further ahead our CPUs could be happily running at 100C or even 120C if they were designed and tested to do so. Nothing in the physics says it can't be done. They'd slow down in proportion to the increase in absolute temperature: 60C to 120C is 333K to 393K, so that's about 20% slower. In most environments a couple of extra cores on the chip would be adequate compensation for the lost MHz.

I wouldn't even say tricky

Clockwork and dynamos are very old ideas. Putting them together to power a radio shouldn't be patentable. By all means register your design so that others can't copy it exactly. By all means patent any mechanical widget that makes the clockwork dynamo work better than it ever could without that widget - if there is such a widget involved.

But patenting a concept that amounts to connecting a radio to a power source ought to have been thrown out by the patent examiners! Even if there wasn't any prior art for clockwork radios, it STILL shouldn't be possible to patent the concept.

Whatever next - a patent on kiddies' play bricks with rounded corners? Oh, wait a moment ....

Re: Not a meterorite

It's literally boiling the water in the atmosphere as it comes in.

A masterly understatement. It's literally boiling the iron or whatever that it's made of. It's probably going past that, all the way to plasma. Afterwards, the iron, silicon, whatever condenses (as oxide, mostly) and hence the thick trail.

If you watch the car footage you can actually see the trail appearing to burn for a few seconds. I expect that's a Nitrogen - Oxygen fire, or possibly or additionally an Oxygen - Iron fire if the meteor was iron.

One of the worries prior to testing the first nuclear bomb was that it would ignite an (exothermic) Oxygen - Nitrogen combustion, that some thought might propagate to consume the Earth's entire atmosphere and everything living therein. I wonder if someone else pointed out that were that possible, a meteor strike would have done it long ago? Or did they just chance it?

Re: Russians - hard as nails, not fazed at all

My thought too. Are Russians completely unflappable, or is it a language where excitement is conveyed through choice of words rather than tone of voice?

It's even more noticeable in the other video, of people when the shockwave arrives and smashes loads of windows.

Re: Not a meterorite

"Should have been vertical". You must be a troll. No-one can be that thick around here, surely?

Almost horizontal means that its intersect with the Earth just clipped our atmosphere. Dumped most of its energy at a decent altitude. Bloody good thing too. If that had come in much closer to vertical it would have been far more destructive of whatever was underneath.

Re: How 'sensitive'? Not very.

Much better if society can be persuaded to mount an "immune response" BEFORE the next outbreak of ethnic cleansing, rather than after.

A lesson from history. In the late 19th century the unified state of Germany was formed to great public acclaim. Its new citizens queued up to obtain their papers. The form they filled in was quite simple. One of the questions was "Religion" to which many happily replied "Jewish". After all, this new state had for the first time granted them constitutional protection against harassment and discrimination.

Scroll forwards to the late 1930s and their parents' replies stored in dusty filing cabinets doomed not just the parents, but children and grandchildren not even born at the time.

Re: There's the Kool-aid...

people like me will get sick of trying to retrain them and just go with linux instead.

There's also Linux-lite, aka OpenOffice / LibreOffice running on a Windows PC. It's probably easier to re-train someone off Office 2003 onto OpenOffice, than it is to re-train them onto Office 2007. And the OO folks seem mercifully free of the desire to inflict new interfaces on their users in order to look cool.

And of course the price of OO / LO is very competitive indeed.