Re: "i said it all a million times,."

How about I puncture your thoughts on electric motors right now?

Electric motors DO produce torque. In fact, ALL rotating shafts have this feature. Torque is a FORCE and fundamental to physics.

Motors CAN be overloaded. Ask yourself why a cable elevator (which is run by an electric motor) has a weight limit? Because if it's too heavy, the elevator motor can't pull the load.

How about something a little more prosaic? Try removing an old rusted stuck screw with your electric screwdriver or drill with a driver bit (the drill is also an electric motor). Guaranteed it won't go easy (if at all--sometimes you overtorque and snap the head off).

Re: "i said it all a million times,."

"If you think you can do it, build a smaller model. Even a model that produces no excess power but spins itself forever would be worth approximately all of the money in the world. You would become an overnight billionaire, worth substantially more than the oil companies who'd really not like you (but to whom you would pose little immediate threat). Maplin or RS (or even eBay!) would be able to provide you with an appropriate motor, dynamo and other components to give it a go."

Here's a helpful hint. People have already tried this technique. Lookup "Bedini motor" or "overunity engine". I guarantee you will find nothing independently verifiable except failures (because a verifiable success would draw instant international attention).

Re: Dearest El Reg

Well, to use scientific notation, the ratio of power output to that of our Sun would be around 2.0 × 10^12.

Re: SSL VPN through Port 443

Just curious, because I would think if China really REALLY wanted to see everything, they would simply block all encrypted and obfuscated traffic except from whitelisted (as in known government) addresses, which would be verified through the GFW. Then you knock out most of the possible avenues right off the top including TOR, Freenet, and VPNs. And any attempt to stego would probably stick out like a sore thumb in the age of raw binary transmissions, most of which has SOME formatting which can then allow it to be DPId, unless of course it's encrypted which would automatically make it suspect (even program code is formatted, so that's not an excuse).

Re: Google's free DNS service

And I have to use it every so often when the local DNS doesn't update often enough and some lesser-known websites I frequent "drop out" as a result.

Re: Those pesky Japanese STEALING from Iran AGAIN!

Actually, they were Photoshopped OUT. The picture with the windmills is the ORIGINAL picture, taken in Japan where they DO conduct windmill research.

Re: Reaction mass? We don't need no steenkin' reaction mass!

But terribly inefficient. 2.5kW yields .72N of force at current rates. So the ability to accelerate in vacuum an object about the mass of a fifth of liquor 1 m per second per second. Plus I have to wonder about its usefulness in atmosphere. So, looks like it's back to waiting.

Oh, and violate the Law of Conservation of Energy? Where does the energy come from?

Anyway, the DUFF doesn't answer one very important question, and one which has likely stymied all non-chemical rockets for decades: What are you gonna use for reaction mass? To date, we've yet to develop anything resembling sci-fi's pure-energy propulsion, as there remains the infamous "underpants gnomes" step (IOW, ?????). How do you convert the electrical energy into kinetic energy? The only we know how is electromagnetic propulsion, and THAT requires a reaction mass. Furthermore, if Newton has anything to say about, it's gonna either a lot of mass OR a lot of energy (probably somewhere in between) to accelerate and decelerate a manned spacecraft to and from any reasonable fraction of c.

Re: Guilty

Don't put it outside possibility they're tracking or throttling ICMP. After all, there's little legitimate use for high-bandwidth ICMP, is there?

Re: I imagine

I think most phones keep bevels on the edges so your fingers (gripping the phone on the sides) can rest on them without them curving over the edge and onto the screen itself.

Re: A river runs through your data center

IIRC it costs energy to liquefy nitrogen, making it either expensive or problematic. Plus it's a natural asphyxiant (at concentrations above 80% of atmosphere), meaning a nitrogen leak can make the server room unsafe.

Re: Yeah, right.

Mickey the character is NOT covered by copyright. He's covered by Trademark. IOW, using the likeness of Mickey without Disney's permission (unless it's for something relatively benign like a holiday display) gets the lawyers on you for Trademark Infringement. That's what got people in the past who lampooned the Energizer Bunny.

It's the cartoons and other works the CONTAIN Mickey in them that are protected by Copyright. Steamboat Willie, The Band Concert, Fantasia, etc. are all copyrighted. Using excerpts from them except in Fair Use or with their permission is a Copyright Infringement.

Re: Like Yikes Scoobs!

Forget that. What if a private enterprise does the same thing, turns it into something everyone wants and becomes the de facto standard. Now you have it even worse because the private enterprise isn't really answerable to anyone (not even the law since they'll probably be an international conglomerate with an HQ no one can approach). Forget Big Brother. Have you considered Big Owner?

Re: OTT

Considering it's needed to open the library (to check out books you need for homework), the cafeteria (so you can have lunch), or the toilet (every so often you can't hold it in), I think those would stop you from taking it off. As for shielding, as they're meant to be shown out in the open, any kind of shielding would likely be visible, too.

Re: Mixed feelings

Perhaps you should look up the term "loss leading". It's a known tactic, though this doesn't apply in Nintendo's case, as it against their policy to loss-lead. Still, it's in Nintendo's interests to lock down the Wii U as it helps to block the pirate market.

Re: table stakes

I don't know. Could go either way as game theory has its merits.

Re: Where are the animal rights activists?

Doesn't apply here. Genesis proclaims man has domain over the animals. IIRC, most of the punishments meted out in the Old Testament come from human-to-human interaction.

Re: Echoes of

Still, as someone else has said, how do you reconcile the plethora of I/O devices still in use today? How can you have one application that runs the same on a 27" desktop monitor with mouse AND a 4" multi-touch smartphone?

Re: Blue Waffles?

You forget about the fact they're islands. The GPS helicopters are being used to help keep the stuff away from the water. Now, while it's possible they make it so that it's unattractive to aquatic life, you still have to consider the toxic compounds being leeched into the nearby seawater. Don't think it's gonna be all the healthy for the fish.

No since there are endangered birds on the islands, and cats are also known to hunt birds. No, you need something a little more selective.

Re: Bendy??

How about a convex shape that can conform to your forearm. Think Fallout's Pip-Boy or those other wrist computer you see in sci-fi. A 5-in smart device wrapped around your arm with perhaps a cover flap might attract some geeks.

Re: Trusting a second, third, fourth or fifth party is contraindicated ...

Or in my case, I only use the cloud for low-security stuff. If anyone hacks into my Dropbox. all they'll know is that I belong to a gaming clan and coordinate with clanmates on common maps. Plus a handful of handy programs I don't wanna have to re-search the net to retrieve every day. IOW, stuff to which I'd respond with, "Big fricking deal."

Re: I am fed up with these stories

Hey, is that your invisible dog running out through the gap in the fence? And BTW, funny you mention an invisible shed. See, it rained last night, yet I see no dry spot where the shed blocked the rain. Nor any impression in the lawn where a shed should've pressed down.

But to the original poster, point taken. What about holding on the articles until the things are no less than 6 months from market. Save the article space for stuff we can actually USE.

Re: And of course, without coffee, we could kiss goodbye to software development as well.

IIRC in the history of beer, humulus lupulus was a relatively recent innovation (a little over 1,000 years old). Before that, we used a variety of botanicals as gruit. And we still experiment with non-hops gruits even today, especially in historical beers. Don't see why we couldn't try other botanicals today.

Last I checked, quality camellia sinensis was pretty finicky about where it grows, too, like coffee.

Re: TV -- It isn't only ads

Welcome to the non-broadcast market. They bundle channels like that for the same reason newspapers make you buy everything (and not just the most popular sections like the Sports section): they have to throw in the unpopular stuff with the popular stuff to get the ad revenues from those channels. Without them, the ad companies won't supplement their revenues with the cable ads injected into the "local advertising blocks" put into the TV shows' commercial blocks, which means the cable rates go up, especially since the channel providers are squeezing the cable companies at the other end, raising the fees to carry the top channels (like ESPN in the US).

Re: The other way to fix this is of course

And some product advertisements were better than the product. In the US, years ago, Kellog's introduced Corn Flakes with bananas in it. The ad featured their trademark rooster...well...going bananas. Seeing a rooster act like a monkey was one of the few times I turned my head to watch an ad. It was genuinely funny.

But then, I really haven't watched that much genuine TV in a long time. I have so much DVD and recorded content (commercials edited out) that I rarely get bored.

Re: Ice age?

So what if you hold it upside-down? From the perspective of someone outside the Sol system, their perspective may be different from ours (IOW, we may see it as the underside of the Milky Way, they'll see it as the top side).

Re: Ice age?

Actually, it's pretty safe to say it does. The Milky Way has a distinct planar orientation to it (the starts within are not distributed in a globular pattern but spiral out pretty flatly). There's also the idea of orienting worlds on their orbital or rotational axes. Earth's current coordinate system is oriented on rotational axis.

Re: Physical indicators

That's assuming the numbers are actual buttons. They could also be simply touch-sensitive but not powered until the Chip goes in. Such light contact wouldn't leave as strong an impression on the plastic, and by the time it did, it would probably be at expiration, in which case a new card would be issued.

Re: Levels of subscription?

"Either way, advertisers are screwed once we move to 100% V.o.D. as there will be no gaps to put adverts into and they'll have to find a way to insert them into the shows (which probably means product placement - something else that totally hacks me off)."

They already do. It's called intrusive advertising. Plastering the add right into the video. Networks do this for their programming. I've already seen many foreign networks and streams do this by shrinking the picture to show ads along the borders. Next thing you'll know, YouTube will allow advertisers to insert ads to the top or bottom of the stream, on the fly, so that there's no avoiding it without cutting out the scene you wanted to watch.

Re: Risk management.

No, because the greenies fear even the tiniest bump in radioactivity will affect the food chain, which would then, pardon the metaphor, come back to bite us.

It will look to you and the system like an actual SMS message has come in. For my phone, I get a notification in my status bar and a popup. What happens varies depending on your phone's configuration, but it will for all intents and purposes act just like an SMS message. I learned this myself when I installed an app that had an adware kit. I ran a detector, found the offending app, and removed it.

Re: Rosetta: "x86 never reorder load w/ load or write w/ writes unlike ARM."

IIRC it's also a necessary evil because otherwise you run the risk of race conditions.

Re: Emulation

Have you seen an x86-on-ARM emulator or DynaRec core in action? You're talking an efficiency core trying to emulate a performance core. In the last two instances, Apple transitioned to clearly-superior hardware which smoothed the transition. Here? ARM isn't necessarily superior to Intel: just different. That handicaps emulation: just as trying to emulate a high-speed PowerPC or MIPS CPU even on today's Intel CPUs is not a walk in the park.

Re: PowerPC?

"The nub of the matter is: what could Apple persuade Intel to do for them, given that X86 is not remotely the mainstream any more, and iGizmos must inexorably move towards zero build cost over the decades."

x86 is still king of the roost when it comes to performance applicaitons. For people running Photoship, Premiere, or the like, that's a big deal. As for HPC, ARM doesn't rule there, either. That's more the realm of specialists and GPU makers.

Re: No need to kill OS X

Maybe, but its programs don't necessarily run on anything, especially if they're binary-only. That's machine code, and most machine code is meant for only ONE type of machine architecture. It's a rare beast that can do more than one in hardware.

Pandora contends that ASCAP's behaviour amounts to cartel behaviour: forcing terms because they hold a captive market. And US law does have precedent when it comes to cartel behaviour. It's the reason why you can't buy a DeBeers diamond in the US: DeBeers is classed as a cartel cornering the diamond market.

Re: That doesn't work.

Actually, I wonder if the novice amateurs would do a better job. They'll be less motivated by re-election and more by not ticking off their constituency.

Then again, i sometimes wonder if the job of American politician shouldn't become the most thankless job in America. OTOH, doing that by reducing salaries and so on would probably mean no one would want the job. Not too many people are THAT dedicated to politics that they'd do it for the job and not for the money.

Re: Career (and term limits)

Term limits won't really do anything. It'll just give rise to proteges ready to step into the retiring politician's shoes.

Re: Intelligence can be highly selective.

No, because the BIG big issue is that sometimes we need to make sacrifices in order to advance. Trouble is, people in general don't like that. So what if you're faced with a necessary but VERY unpopular choice, such as needing to cut entitlements or raise taxes because the revenues can't keep up (I don't know about in Europe but it's a BIG problem in the US). Party has nothing to do with the decision; the morally right thing to do is ALSO political suicide. I think a number of authors have pointed out that the more people involved in a government, the harder it is to pass politically unpopular acts: barring a crisis.