This is resistive random access memory, which is non-volatile. Yes, with transistor you could have printer other forms or RAM before, but you would have to keep supplying power or that memory would erase itself.

Let's assume you carve your page up into 'pixels'. If each 'pixel' is one bit (2 colors or on or off) then you would have to have pixels of 100 microns (.1mm) on a side to have the same information density as this process. If each 'pixel' is 4 bits (16 colors) then your pixels would only have to be .2mm on a side to retain the same information density. I kind of doubt you could distinguish between 256 different colors reliably enough for computer reading of data under varying light conditions but if we assume you can that would mean your pixels could be just under half a millimeter in size.

No. Laws may be employed to control the populace, but they originated to prevent harm.

Kind of like how contracts originated so that both parties would fully know and understand their responsibilities and what they were agreeing to (and so third parties would have evidence of what the first two had agreed to). The fact that they are sometimes (or often) employed to trick or trap people doesn't change what the were originally intended to do.

Quickly! To the Batdetector!

Except that's not what the article is saying. The article doesn't claim that the system's bios was remotely compromised using audio. What it is saying is that a system that _has been compromised_ is using its sound equipment to communicate with other systems that have likewise been compromised, allowing infected systems to maintain communication with one another despite an airgap.

This could be viewed as 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that does not ordinarily happen', but it is not 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that defies conventional belief'. As many people have pointed out this is the same basic principle that modems use, merely in a somewhat different 'packaging'.

In that sense it is no more extraordinary than claiming that someone has painted an elephant blue. It is not something which commonly happens yet the possibility of its existence hardly defy belief.

It's so infectious it's already reproducing on Slashdot?

The government isn't asking you to do anything. It's asking the fuel companies to come up with a 100 octane fuel that will run in your older engine that doesn't contain lead.

Now if you want to get indignant about the poor, put upon oil companies, have at it.

Three thousand hours, three thousand hours clicking on that mouse, collecting weapons and gold. It's almost as if it was a huge waste of time.
--Sheldon Cooper

Mercifully it looks like the math error might be on the part of the poster rather than the article. I did a quick skim of the article and didn't see anywhere were they mentioned anything like how far apart people would be if stretched from coast to coast.

Of course it is always possible that the article was edited by the time I saw it but since the post doesn't appear to be a quote ripped from the site Occam's Razor is that the poster wrote up the post, did the math, and got it wrong.

Because everything is so far apart.

Seriously. Ignore for a moment any questions about energy or mass. The distance to the moon is 384,403,000 meters, give or take. At 1G you accelerate at 9.8 m/s. This means if you fly straight to the moon (or to where the moon will be when you arrive) under 1G of acceleration you're looking at about 2 1/2 hours to get there, at which point you plow into the moon at some god awful speed because there's no way to slow down in time. Assuming you only accelerate half the time then turn around and decelerate the remaining half so that you arrive at something approaching a sane velocity it would take about 3 1/2 hours.

That's an awful long time in terms of combat and the moon is incredibly close (if you are considering targets like Mars). Sure, it is incredibly fast in comparison to our current technology but a lifetime when people are shooting at you.

(N.B. The numbers provided are 'back of the envelope' calculations. The actual time would be quite a bit different because you could accelerate faster as you clear Earth's gravity well since a 1G acceleration would mean the astronauts would be subjected to 2G's on the ground. Assuming you were staying at a constant 2G's of force on the passengers your acceleration would increase the further you got from Earth until you reached your halfway point. However the math to deal with all of that is way, way to ugly for me to even consider right now).

Not sure if anyone else has posted this since a 'space combat' thread on Slashdot generates so much traffic it seems as if it should crash the servers (Dude, I heard you liked Slashdot....)

Anyway, it's kind of hard to talk about what 'space combat' will look like since 'space' is simply the theater for the conflict to occur in. Its like asking what 'land combat' looks like. When? 2012? 2025? 1942? 550 A.D.?

You probably need to start of with some assumptions concerning your technology. Lasers are a big one. I am not a laser physicist but as I understand it there's certain maximums of focal range that are related to the size of the lens. As I understand it in order to focus a laser at a spot about half a light second away you would need an absolutely gargantuan lens, one so big as to be impractical for combat. Now maybe I am wrong on this but this is an example as to why using lasers over such long distances might not be as easy as some people think.

Of course that assumes we don't find 'loopholes' around the problem such as somehow creating a synthetic lens through spatial warpage or some other technology. On the other hand if you've got some kind of technology that allows spatial warping then you quite possibly have much more effective weapons than photons.

My guess, in shorthand, is that combat in space will bear a certain resemblance to current combat. I suspect you will see guns for a long time (when jets were first becoming widely used by the military a lot of theorists thought that guns were going to go away because of the ranges and speeds jets would be engaging at. You'll notice they are still there because it turns out that at short ranges a missile often isn't the best option). I suspect you will have lots of your 'cheap' units (infantry, drones, spearmen, etc.) backed up with heavier units (tanks, fighter planes, knights on horseback, etc.) often employed along with small numbers of 'heavy hitters' (bombers, battleships, catapults, etc.).

The exact form these all take will be dependent upon the technology of the day.

Average rate of 9 cubic feet per year X 7 years = 63 cubic feet.

That's a cube of dirt 4' x 4' x 4'.

Hardly sounds like 'excavating a basement'.

I'm guessing that the 9 cubic feet number is wrong. Maybe 9 square feet (with an undisclosed height of about 8'-10') for an annual average of 72-90 cubic feet and a final excavation of a room about 8' x 8'?

There's a reason the article doesn't answer that question; because the answer is really, really dull.

At least that is what I'm assuming. The truth of the matter is that two weeks prior to the company's servers being hacked (March 30th) Sony Online Entertainment was forced to lay off a large amount of staff (I believe the number I read was 1/3) due to financial reasons. This layoff included programmers, designers, artists, administrative staff, and yes, people involved in the network security division.

I for one seriously doubt that there is really a causal relationship between the reduced network security staff and the breach. Two weeks just isn't long enough for things like that to fall apart. Just because people left the security they set up doesn't immediately shut down.

And for anyone who suspects that the employees who were let go caused the breach themselves, technically all those employees were still employed (there's a legal requirement that employees affected by large scale layoffs like this be given 60 days warning before being laid off, however because of reasons of security once people were given their warning they were sent home and paid for the next 60 days even though they didn't do anything). That would mean those employees would have been endangering six weeks of 'free' pay, their severance, and being paid for unused PTO.

While that doesn't absolutely rule out the possibility it does make it much less likely in my mind.