Actually, there is one use I could forsee. Apocalpse planning. For when there is no power for extended periods of time, and you just can't use a portable generator. If you were stuck in the mountains for months at a time or something. Still kinda grasping at straws though.

Yes, robots and drones could make excellent use of fuel cell technology. Marketing it as a way to keep you phone charged on the go? Not a great idea.

Listen... why are we going backwards in reusability? I saw that this product was highlighed at CES a short time ago, and laughed at it. Why spend $300 for a product in order to buy $10 ONE-TIME-USE cartridges over a 11000mah portable battery pack for $40 that has the same power output but can be re-used? How is this an advancement in technology?

I may be rehashing what most posters here have already pointed out in different ways, but it comes down to the fact that we can't predict the future. PCs in general allow arbitrarily defined operations to happen (copy a folder from A to B, with unpredictable contents, hardware timings, available operating system resources, etc). Added to this problem is one of interpretation: what KIND of progress does the bar measure? Is it time, disk space, ordered task number, or what? All of the above?

Suppose I make a progress bar that measures the time until nuclear winter? We call that the Doomsday clock (and yes, progress bars CAN go backwards, my fellow slashdotters). Is it accurate? No one knows, and I hope we never find out.

But lets say that we only want a progress bar that measures time to completion. I actually like the file-copy progress bars in Windows 7. I think they finally got it right. The underlying hardware will vary in its speed, so the progress bar cannot inerrantly give estimated time to completion. But it does give enough information to satisfy me while I wait. I see the current MB/s of data transfer, the approximate time remaining (and data remaining), and a bar that shows how much of the data has been moved so far compared to the total amount of data to move. Not perfect by any means, but I am satisfied to wait. And that's the whole reason you have a progress bar in the first place.

You're right, the nukes weren't developed for Mutually Assured Destruction. However, they were developed as a deterrant against further war, which is very close to the same thing. By dropping one bomb, we sent a message that technology had now made war a terrible, terrible thing to behold. By dropping two bombs, we sent the message that we had the ability to keep going. The war ended in fact because the nuclear warheads had successfuly deterred futher bloodshed.

I am not sure what the Germans intended to do with the nuclear bombs they were developing. Perhaps they too would have served more as a deterrent / threat than an actual tactical option.

That's a chicken and egg problem. If the early paleontologists had never recovered their specimens, Mr. Jack Horner would never have been inspired to spend his life studying old bones. Likewise, if today's paleontologists didn't recover their specimens, then the future "perfected" paleontological methods would never come to be.

Several people, including you, have replied to my comment, but no one has addressed my question. So perhaps I wasn't understood. I know that a sneakernet implies physical transfer of data (a Boeing 747 filled with Blu-Ray discs traveling from New York to LA has a bandwidth of 245000 gbit according to Wikipedia). What what exactly is a sneakernet FILE SYSTEM. And why would you have one? I sneakernet data over thumb drives all the time. I only need a file system designed for the thumbdrive, such as NTFS.

Actually, a thought occurs to me. The article described this sneakernet as capable of Terabyte-sized file transfers. When using a 8GB thumb drive, you must use NTFS rather than VFAT in order to transfer a 4GB + file. More importantly, a 8GB thumbdrive cannot transfer a TB file without first splitting and rejoining the file on both ends. Is this what the ExFAT file system does? Automatically handly file facturing across arbitrary media?

A file system is normally designed for one's own usages. A file system is entirely contained within your computer system (or in the event of a distributed file system, within computers under your control). What use then is "sneaker-netting" files between Windows, OSX, and Linux? Isn't this a network concept?

Good point sir. Yes, length is superior to variety. And Salting passwords may make some of this conversation irrelevant anyway.

However, you are only addressing brute-force techniques. A simple, human-contructed password of any given length is quite easy to crack using predictive methods (dictionaries, phonics, substitutions, etc). Predictive password techniques are poor at random large-keyspace passwords. Against a predictive password cracker, you would be better using a shorter, 95-key space password.

However, rainbow tables exist for most short password lengths. Rather than having to actually crack your password, if it is short enough (say 7-9 characters), one can simply look up the hash in a table to find the cracked password. Clearly, short passwords of ANY complexity are still vulnerable.

Well sir I don't know. Judging by your slashdot ID you must have been on here a long time. Perhaps the primary concern is security of the connection between client and server (man-in-the-middle attacks). I think that the hashed passwords are transmitted over secure connections to begin with anyway.

Yes there is a reasonable excuse why it must contain certain minimum lengths and characters. It has to do with exponents. For fun I've written several types of password hash crackers in the past. The best way to defeat a brute-force password cracker is to expand the keyspace.

A good password today at a minimum 8 characters, and can consist of any one of 95 keypresses on the keyboard. 95^8 = 6.6e15 combinations.
If you don't use special characters, that 8 character password is only 62^8 = 2.2^14 combinations.
If you don't use numbers, that 8 character password is only 52^8 = 5.3^13 combinations.
And If you don't even bother to change cases, that 8 character password is 26^8 = 2.1e11 combinations.

Those numbers don't tell the real story. Old Windows XP passwords could be cracked on average 2011 hardware at about 10 million (1e7) combinations / second. The "good" password above would be cracked in 21 years (max). No special characters would be cracked in 8 months. No numbers in 2 months. And single-case only in 6 hours.

But today we have GPU password cracking, and much better hardware. A Radeon 5770 could crack the "good password", 8 characters long in a mere 28 hours. That was hardware from 2 years ago.

Was my first thought too

I worked for a company that produced a software-controlled radio base-station. You have to know the secret to these devices: they can't actually cover more than 10 MHz at a time. There is a 10 MHz (or maybe a little better) band-width Yig that can be set in software to any given frequency between say 100 MHz and 6 GHz. This Yig limits sending and receiving channels to within 10 MHz of each other. Since Wifi channels are about 20 MHz each, your use case is not feasible. You could only use one channel at a time.

Now with more Yigs, you can use multiple channels at a time, but you are limited by the hardware. Yigs are very much not cheap, last I knew. A $300 software radio that can compete reasonable well with a Motorolla $5000 radio.... probably isn't running more than 1 Yig.

I was going to challenge your assumptions about the nature of empty space in regards to collisions between large bodies. I was told in school that all matter consists largely of empty space. So I examined the common element iron:

The diameter of the nucleus of an iron atom is 1.26e-8 cm. The standard atomic weight of iron is 55.845 (which is equivalent to 55.845 gm/6.022e23 atoms or 1gm/1.0783e22 atoms). The density of iron at room temperature is 7.874 gm/cm^3. So 1 cubic centimeter of iron weighs 7.874 grams, and contains 8.49e22 atoms. Assuming a cubed nucleus, and ignoring the relatively tiny electrons, each atom has a volume of 2.00e-24. Multiply by the number of atoms above and we should have a volume of 0.17cm^3. Note that a sphere occupies 52% of the volume of its enclosing cube, which would bring the estimate down to 0.089cm^3. So ultimately, solid iron is 9-17% protons and neutrons.

It appears that while matter is more empty space than it is solid, the "emptiness" is only 1 order of magnitude, whereas your example was about 7. I retract any objections.

If you really want to reduce your drain on the power grid, turn off the PC more often. It's cheaper than buying a new PC too. Now before you dismiss my suggestion as a mere straw-man argument, consider this: over the past 100 years human spending on lighting has remained roughly constant. Whenever a newer, cheaper form of lighting is introduced (electric bulb, florescent lighting, etc), what happens is NOT that money is saved, but that the same money is spent on more lighting. That my friend is human nature. A reduction in power consumption will yield more machines in your house turned on more of the time. On average.