Well, without actually reading the article itself I'll venture an opinion of course. If you carried the fuel and lasers yourself it wouldn't be like the sailor blowing on his own sail at all; it's be like the sailor facing the stern and blowing his ship forward. That's because the ship would still be powered by the rearward expulsion of electrons.

The advantage of the system with an external laser is (I presume) that even though it is no doubt very energy inefficient, since all you're expelling is electrons the specific impulse would be quite high. This allows you to apply small amount of thrust, but continuously for a long time without the bulk of your payload being fuel. If you are going to carry the fuel needed to power the thrusters you might as well go with compact ion thrusters.

Well, bankruptcy ALWAYS is the result of somebody demanding something they think is owed them under the law. In fact that's pretty much what bankruptcy is: when you can't raise enough cash to pay people what they're legally owed. If your company can't pay the rent you don't go around saying, "We'd still be in business if the landlord hadn't sued us." People would laugh at you. But for some reason if you say "We'd still be in business of the employees hadn't sued us," then people somehow act as if that isn't equally ridiculous.

It's the same attitude where companies raid the employee pension fund to pay for current expenses: that somehow employees ought to pay for the mistakes of management.

It's perfectly sound marketing logic.

Explaining things to people who aren't up to speed yet is difficult and tedious; and in any even people don't have the patience to sit through explanations. So the obvious thing to do is to describe your product in terms that confuse everyone, equally.

The hospital didn't show that normal lagtime won't affect remote robotic surgeries. It looked for possible effects of that sort and didn't find any. That's a good result, but it's only the start of a process that might show that doing this is reasonably safe for patients.

The real world is much more demanding and uncontrollable than simulation. Remember the Therac-25 incident. Thorough functional testing apparently showed that the machine was perfectly safe; it didn't take into account the difference between testers and people who would actually be using the device every day. While you can never prove the non-existence of some unknown and unpredictable factor, that doesn't mean that a long and critical search for things you might have overlooked is useless.

When you're dealing with some obstreperous functionary who is leaning on status and authority rather than knowledge or competence, it will no longer be possible to think to yourself:

this asshole, too, will soon be departed

With the loss of life's great equalizer, about the first thing to happen is that the entire population goes into legacy mode.

It'll be like all those crappy ISA cards with jumper blocks in the back of your ugliest junk drawer that you never get rid of because, technically, they still work perfectly fine.

Only it will be the humans with ugly jumper blocks (slavery, racism, sexism, elitism, ageism, gated-community-ism) that live to be 10,000 years old and never "get with the times" because "the times" themselves have shuffled off their mortal coil.

Either of the world wars.

I assume detecting the RF signature of the transmitter controlling the drone is the best way.

Of course there are these problems:

1. There are many signals on the bands used for RC.

2. It is possible to build an autonomous drone.

3. In these days of software defined radio, people can spin up non-off-the-shelf, non-standard radio control systems.

Which of course means we are no threat whatsoever to to each other, because on both sides of the relationship the leadership is and is guaranteed continued to be completely rational.

As a matter of fact, the study itself seems to provide a positive result that, ironically, authors have used to discredit similar studies :)

That said, from personal experience (as someone who lost 60 lbs by making changes to my diet) chocolate does have beneficial effect on weight loss, in that at a very least consuming smaller amounts of chocolate (in terms of calories) satisfies craving for sweets better than consuming much larger (in terms of calories) amount of other sweet foods (such as pastries). Just this benefit alone is sufficient to recommend (prudent) use of chocolate in a calorie-controlled diet.

As far as "bitter chocolate tasting bad" - well, tastes differ and some people find caviar or foie gras to be disgusting, but by an large they are smart enough to keep those opinions out of research papers. Me - I'll take my 90% dark any day (but don't shy away from milk chocolate, as long as it's not Hershey's anyway)

Well, driving cars in urban centers generally sucks between the traffic and finding parking. The problem is people are too stubborn to get their act together and provide abundant satellite parking and transit links. Sure, driving your car right up to a store is ideal when you're the only one doing it, but there's a reason malls are built with parking on the periphery and pedestrian access at the core. If parking was the most pleasant and convenient way to get a lot of people into a confined area you'd be able to drive right into Disney World and park your car at Space Mountain.

Anything that happens inflates someone's bank account. If governments ban CFCs then people with CFC substitutes get a windfall. If governments don't ban CFCs then makers of sunscreen and skin cancer treatments get a windfall.

This is how capitalism works -- how it's supposed to work. Problems attract capital, which generates profits. But it's also how market solutions fall short. It's better for the public if someone makes a killing replacing CFC than if someone else makes a killing treating skin cancer.

It's a little late to be talking about averting global warming.

Google's core businesses would be seriously damaged if Apple obtained a monopoly on mobile computing. If it breaks even and prevents Apple hegemony it's as much of a success as it needs to be.

As for the supposed switching of Android users to iPhone, notice the tortured stipulations in this sentence: "the 'majority' of those who switched to iPhone had owned a smartphone running Android." It's also no doubt true that the majority of users who switched to new Android phone had owned a smartphone running Android in the past. The vast majority of smartphones out there are Android, and that's been true for years now, so it's not surprising that someone buying a new smartphone of any kind has previously owned *some* android handset.

When someone becomes President, they become privy to information very few people in the world know. I'll guess some of this information guides your decisions, perhaps not to where you would have been before you learned the information.

I'm not saying I agree with any decision which have been made. I'm simply remembering some people know a lot more about these decisions than I (or most members of the press) ever will.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I also don't know if the folks who wrote out Constitution had any idea either.

Not too long after Windows 8 launched with the AC-3 and E-AC-3 codecs, Internet Explorer has had the capability to decode these audio formats. It recognizes the FourCC codes in the ISO Base Media File Format container as well as the MIME tags.

Part of the problem, however, is the perceived shift in both audio loudness and the perceived location of speech. All AC-3 and E-AC-3 content, when properly measured, should play dialog back at -31dB relative to full digital scale. Unfortunately, this makes the codec inherently quieter unless the decoder is set to something called RF mode, which boosts the loudness to -20dB and compresses the audio more heavily. Such control for loudness is not typically found in HTML5-based apps, though the W3C has a committee working on this issue. The loudness can be a particular problem on the Windows 8 tablet devices out there, as many programs in AAC format come pre-normalized to somewhere around -23dB to -24dB relative to full scale. Unless all content is pre-normalized to the same consistent playback level - which AAC ads will definitely not be, and probably not AAC stereo content - there will be an inconsistency of experience.

All of this also presupposes that you have either a proper surround virtualizer or a discrete 5.1 speaker system such as is found in a properly set up home theater. Considering that less than a third of homes have any kind of surround sound in them, and given the loudness issues, I'm not certain what the benefits will be here. But it gets even worse, as dialog in multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3 is steered to the center channel in most programs, whereas in stereo content it is mixed into left and right without regard to position. This can result in disturbance to the listener. Furthermore, any channel configuration changes to an audio-video receiver will typically cause muting when switching modes between stereo output and multichannel output, potentially interrupting the experience for the listener.

Part of this is the add-on nature of AC-3 and E-AC-3 to Windows and an inherent failure to integrate stereo AAC and HE AAC playback behavior with that of stereo and multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3. Until then, this will be more of a curiosity than anything substantially improving the consumer's experience, and developers should take note if they believe that HTML5/CSS/Javascript development of their apps can really unify their experience across devices yet.