Sometimes I think China is run by 5 year olds.

As opposed to the U.S., which is clearly run by 6-year-olds...

If the thing works, it's not that it violates conservation of momentum, it's that it's doing something we don't understand, which appears to violate the conservation of momentum because we don't know how it works.

I'm sure many people would love to see this turn out to work because it would be a really cool real-world effect based on some of the the really bizarre and incredibly abstract physics going on these days. Like many people here I'm sure, I'm fascinated by the advances in modern physics in the last century, but a lot of it, especially in the past 30-40 years, seems to bear no connection to the world we see and experience. I know it explains how matter and energy work, but I'm talking about allowing us to do things we couldn't do before.

Plus, who isn't looking at this and wondering if it couldn't be the basis, assuming it can be improved umpty orders of magnitude, to Jetsons-style anti-gravity devices. Let a nerd dream...

which is currently from a physics stand point pure gobbledygook

Dr. Alcubierre would beg to differ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

The warp drive in Star Trek was based an earlier incarnation of this theory, which is based on results from Einstein. Warp drive FTL travel might not be possible, but the idea is definitely not "pure gobbledygook".

It has not occurred to you that the hate directed towards Israel is a natural result of the actions the Israeli government has taken over the years? The wholesale slaughter, indeed genocide, of the Palestinian people? The high seas piracy they commit frequently with without consequence? The assassinations, the hit jobs, theft of land, war crimes, etc etc.

Don't create your anti-free speech stance entirely on your pro-Israel anti-Islam bigoted belief.

No. Here's the relevant part of the ruling, quoting the Senate report on the bill:

"[i]f the `primary purpose' of the recording function is to make objects other than digital audio copied recordings, then the machine or device is not a `digital audio recording device,' even if the machine or device is technically capable of making such recordings."

What information does the car's system digitally record other than music? That it might display digital information, or play digital information isn't relevant, since those don't involve the recording function.

Computers record lots of stuff to their hard drives. Some of it is music, but the ability to write to disk isn't primarily designed for digital music, nor primarily marketed for that.

In theory it's usually good when bad things happen to congress for exactly that reason, but the violation here is "we've been spying on you and know all your dirty little secrets" ... so maybe not so much.

A lot of Slashdot back end code is being rewritten, and HTML5 is supposed to be part of the deal. All the people who actually work on the site and read your comments agree that Flash video is [insert bad word here].

What you are proposing abridges freedom of speech. If a person decides to jump off a bridge because someone called them fat, too bad. We should have learned as a society that restrictions on actions do not make us safer unless those particular necessarily lead directly to harm of others. Advocating violence against an ethnic group, while reprehensible, should be protected speech. Shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater necessarily leads directly to the harm of others, so restrictions are acceptable.

What invariably ends up happening is government takes too much control. Just look at what's happening in England (to Tottenham's Yid Army or the ridiculously racist hit job the FA did on Luis Suarez for using the perfectly acceptable by South American standards word negrito). If you give government power, they will abuse it. Every time. The question should be: is the abuse worth it? In this case, definitely not.

No, but it does sound like malfeasance. Which is a felony.

Some of them can write.

I'm not sure. I suspect that this is going to largely be "an invention looking for an application" for a decade...just like the laser was.

The problem is we've never been able to create alloys as a tightly controlled gradient of multiple metals before. Now if it could print a sharp disjunction between the materials, and especially if it could also print an insulating layer, then the applications would be obvious, but this is a very different thing. Different metals, e.g., conduct both heat and electricity differently. What will the effects be is one can print a gradient that oscillates between two different metals? How well can alloy crystal properties be predicted?

I think this is something that has a LOT of potential, but what those potetials actually are may well take quite awhile to figure out.

Yeah, but either could just sell that part of their business, or even just decide it wasn't worth the effort and shut it down without warning.

FWIW, I seem to recall approx. that already having happened, though I can't give a specific reference. The only real answer is to make backups BEFORE you put the data out to the cloud, and keep the backups (and test them periodically).

Trusting a(nother) company to guard your data has a long history of failures. But so does relying on local backups. You need both.

Which is why they need to be searchable by Google. But multiply this by most of them can't write coherently. And many of them don't want to really spill their secrets, just to prove that they have them. (This is the basis of many companies, so don't laugh too hard at them. Also remember the astronomer who published a coded note when he first sighted Uranus, so that he could claim priority if someone else completed writing their paper on it before he did. That still happens, if not so blatantly.)

I only ever found one of their journals of any value whatsoever (Computing Surveys). Their "collected algorithms" was lousy. If I were interested in representation of polynomial equations in Fortran it would sometimes be useful...but I haven't done that since college...decades ago.

Occasionally I'll follow a link that ends up in the ACM members only section. Sometimes it looks interesting, but back in the time I could follow it into the article only once was it really at all interesting, and that time it still wasn't useful.

If you've got a set of Knuth's books, then I don't think the ACM has anything to offer.

WRT ACM articles linked from Google: They are there, if only as indirect links [not sure], because every once in a while I end up on one of their "you can only read the abstract" pages. I never regret not being able to read further, because I *was* a member and *could* read the linked article for awhile. Every single one was worthless (for my purposes).

The only useful thing I've ever gotten out of the ACM site that I didn't find in Knuth was a date algorithm. And I already had most of it down. And their version still didn't deal with pre-Gregorian dates (except as if they had been Gregorian dates). (To be fair, Julian dates are rather different. Still...) Also it didn't properly handle dates BC, even in Gregorian terms.

Well, they guy that wrote the algorithm was still really tight on conserving RAM usage. It *was* a very concise algorithm. And it worked without problems (in Gregorian) back to 1AD. It was also (IIRC) nigh unintelligible because of embedded magic numbers. When unpacked it basically just said skip leap years for centuries unless the century divided by 400 is an integer. But he did it in one line of fortran.