I've been doing home automation stuff on and off for about 10 years now. It seems like every new device in the past few years has to have a connection to the internet and be controlled through a web-connected app. In some ways I kind of understand this: so many people have a smartphone, and they already know how to get it online, so if you connect your "IoT" device to the internet then you kind of get your remote control for free.

However, the whole idea of broadcasting data from the inside of my house to some 3rd party server on the internet is such a crazy idea. I recently installed a whole home energy monitor (it monitors the incoming feed and a bunch of the main branch circuits). It does come with software that I was running on a local PC, but the main way that they recommend to use it is to sign up for an online service (around $2/month) and have it upload your data there. Since their software wasn't great, I was tempted to do that... for about 10 seconds. Do you realize how much personal information that would mean transmitting to a 3rd party?When your stove, microwave, dishwasher, and washer/dryer runs? No way! Looking at the data it's pretty easy to pinpoint when we're there and when we aren't. In the end, I opted to write my own logging and reporting software, and that gave me the ability to add some useful features, like emailing me if the backup sump pump turns on (meaning my main sump pump has stopped working for some reason). Still, most people just have to take what's offered, and I think that's pretty scary.

Also consider the nest thermostat, which has an occupancy sensor, or the Xbox 360 which has a camera that's reportedly "on" all the time looking at your living room. This isn't a good idea.

Surely, this situation has come up thousands of times already. I thought the precedent was that it is basically legal.

Or this happens.

This experiment measures the power level where spontaneous emission becomes comparable to stimulated emission.

You have a similar situation in a laser. A laser works on the principle of stimulated emission. When you pass laser light of an appropriate frequency through an excited laser cavity, the light is amplified, since the light stimulates nearby particles to emit more light. So the light grows exponentially with the length of some cavity until saturating (by fully de-exciting the cavity). But, where does the initial "seed" light come from in a laser? The laser cavity also emits light via spontaneous emission. So what you have is some combination of spontaneous and stimulated emission. The stimulated emission ramps up exponentially and dwarfs the spontaneous emission, which is always present.

Stimulated emission can be treated using classical mechanics by treating the medium as an amplifier. But spontaneous emission must be treated quantum mechanically. Of course, stimulated emission can also be treated with quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics is valid all the time, but classical mechanics is only valid above a certain point.

That is a totally different phenomenon.

I don't think this work directly puts any limit on the size of a quantum computer. But the larger the computer, the harder it will be to keep the computer from coupling to environmental vacuum modes, which destroy the interference pattern.

80 mW of pump laser intensity. I don't know how many photon pairs that generates in the photonic crystal.

Robots do what humans ask them to do. Robots don't need laws. Humans have laws for dealing with other people, and this includes treatment of their property.

Every time they test it, it turns out it actually IS magic, though.

Just spin the printer, duh.

Agreed. The ONLY effective punishment for a CA that breaches trust or competence this poorly is to mark its roots as permanently untrusted. In a world that has set aside morals and ethics (or redefined them into doublespeak meaninglessness), the only punishment that will actually make corporations change their behavior are penalties that significantly exceed the full gains of breaking the rule or law. The related challenge is raising the certification bar, so this doesn't become a "whack a mole" with CCNIC2, CCNIC3, TOTALLY_NOT_CCNIC, etc...

HK-47, opining on torture
"Droids tend to blend into the background, like a bench or a card table. Mockery: Droid, fetch this. Droid, translate that. Droid, clean out the trash compactor. Part of the love of my function comes when the ‘furnishings’ pull out tibanna-powered rifles and point them at the owners' heads."

You sound like someone who's old. Or irrelevant. Were you one of those people protesting in front of air force bases in the 70's? Sure, a nuclear-armed Iran is a convenient boogeyman to wave around to scare the US public. Who's doing that? John McCain mostly. Let's apply our criteria to him. Old? Yup. He's practically yelling at the rest of Congress to get off his lawn. And irrelevant? Yep, pretty much. No one cares what John McCain thinks, except maybe some old people in Florida and Arizona and some irrelevant people at Fox News.

Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.

So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.

It's like an anti-social network! If you had some data you wanted to make sure no one would ever see, you could post it to Google+!

I saw some (i'm assuming) teenager post some angsty thing on a social page the other day and it occurred to me that we built this huge network that lets you reach out and speak to basically any other human being on the planet and people seem lonelier than ever. Odd, how that works...