As a more ragged and old alumnus of the Reading University Cybs Deprtment (1984-1987), I have to add my own observation.

Prior to Prof. Warwick being engaged, we were a backwater department of about 25 students per year, stuck in half of a drafty old WWII building at the Earley end of the campus, equipped wth a heating system inherited from early Pleistocene times. (The other half was the psychlogy department.)

Warwick was appointed one year after I left. Within a year after that, the department moved to a nice shiny new building with hot water and transistors so plentiful that they didn't have to be desoldered and reused at the end of a project. I think that he can be credited with at least some of this upswing in fortune, even if he is a regular figure of fun in the news.

...currently headed by a Health Minister who is doing his best to sell off as much as possible, close A&E departments, believes in funding homeopathy as a treatment using taxpayers' money, and who co-wrote a book describing the NHS as a "sixty year old mistake".

I agree that lyrics are distracting. I like ambient or Berlin school electronic music for this purpose.

Here's a link to a rather good tribute podcast made for what would have been his 59th Birthday, including Simon Jones (Arthur Dent), Mark Carwardine, Stephen Mangan, Dirk Maggs, and me as the voice of Douglas himself.

http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2011/03/08/a-tribute-to-douglas-adams/

Master Control P (below) also points out that you need to supply the additional energy (about 0.78MeV) to account for the difference in mass between p+e and n. That sounds like "game over" to me.

Since the ionization energy of hydrogen is around 14eV, there's nowhere near enough energy in a bound electron to do so, by a factor of 50,000 or so.

Also, the photoelectric work function for nickel is of the order of 5eV, so I'm pretty sure that unbound electrons at 100,000x that energy would easily boil off the surface, at least until the nickel got charged up enough to prevent it. But then, this residual positive charge would attract lower-energy electrons from the surroundings, effectively cooling the electron gas.

So, the remaining question is: can the THz radiation boost the energies of sufficient numbers of bound electrons to make the process work?

The more I look at it, the more skeptical I get.

Nickel-64, at a natural abundance of about 1%, would be a better candidate, as neutron capture would result in Nickel-65 which decays to stable Copper-65 with a very short half-life of 2 hours. This is a "clean" beta-emitter with an energy of about 2.1MeV.

The overall reaction seems to be p + Ni-64 -> Cu-65 + ve + anti-ve + 2.1MeV. This is at least physically plausible as a reaction. The electron (removed from both sides above) acts as a sort of catalyst, a way to get the proton through the coloumb barrier by transforming it into a neutron.

Getting the neutrons to collide with Ni-64 nuclei rather than escaping implies a lot of Ni-64, and any escaping neutrons would irradiate everything else nearby, or impurities in the nickel such as the aforementioned Ni-62, or worse Ni-58 which would produce Ni-59, a positron emitter with a half-life of 76000 years.

But to me, the real red flag on this is getting the hydrogen atoms to collapse into neutrons, a process which I've never heard of before. Even if it's possible, can you get a net gain? Does it take more than 2.1MeV? Slashdot - educate me!

I've been involved with the 3D-browser market since before VRML. Does anyone remember the Superscape VRT, Visualizer plugin, and the Virtual World Wide Web? The VWWW was a linked 3D world, spanning multiple websites - you could walk from one site to another in a virtual world, back in 1996 or thereabouts.

There's a problem with the economics of 3D content, but in my view it is beginning to shift.

On the one hand, creating 3D content is hard. There's a lot more effort in creating a model of a toaster for an online catalog, as opposed to taking a photo (even a nicely lit, airbrushed, professionally produced one). Time means money.

On the other hand, there is your market. VWWW required a rather hefty download - about an hour on a 28.8kbps modem - and a separate installation process. This limited the number of people who could see the content.

The tools for creating 3D content are also getting more available, and more automatic, and more pre-built models are available than in the VRML days.

WebGL has the possibility to crack the audience side of the equation. Three of the big four browser manufacturers are behind it. It just needs a very successful browser game to force the hand of the fourth. What if the next Minecraft was a browser game?

3D will never replace 2D. But it will become a useful tool alongside it, just as video and Flash do today. WebGL will be an important part of that process.

The Personal System glasses from "Norbert and the System", a short story by Timons Esaias from 1993, may anticipate some of the features of this system. I haven't read the patent, but the overlay of contextual social information sounds a lot like what the original poster describes.

(Here's a link: http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/Esaias-Norbert.pdf)

The Professor Jameson series by Neil R Jones. Clunky but fun.
Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. How they translated all the wordplay from Polish I will never know.
Not forgotten, exactly, but all of Larry Niven's "Known Space" series, especially "Protector".
Dragon's Egg and Flight of the Dragonfly by Robert L Forward.

(I just had a look at my bookshelf. Half the space is by authors beginning with "B" - Banks, Baxter, Bear, Benford, Bester, Bova, Brin, Bradbury, Brunner, Bulmer. Weird.)

No, the real reason was what happens if you walk into a hospital and say you are there for an NMR (say it out loud, quickly).

I have deliberately not purchased any Sony products since the Rootkit fiasco of 2005. Up until then, Sony was a trusted, quality brand for me and I had quite a few Sony gadgets around the place. No longer.

So I'm going to "sit out" instead.

Not from Muppet Labs, but from ExTechOp (a subsidiary of SHIELD) in the Elektra graphic novel. His work on the revivification of Arthur Perry was incredible, even if ultimately flawed.

I've seen a lot of knee jerk MS-is-evil stuff (this is Slashdot after all) but what are the actual facts of the case? Just because we don't like someone doesn't mean that they can't be right occasionally.

We're supposed to be geeks here - rational, logical, all that jazz. Let's base the arguments on the facts.