I like this idea, also an analog e-ink wrist watch (by analog I mean displaying two hands on a dial) with the ability to show alerts from a connected phone & unlock that phone would be cool. Of course an optimus style e-ink keyboard would be awesome. For all these simple uses I think higher contrast ratios would be more important than color or refresh improvements. Full color e-ink could revolutionize photo frames and still not need refresh improvements.

What could we do with an e-ink display with current sizes, contrast, resolution & color (or lack thereof) but with near video refresh? I guess e-readers would be like a b/w iPad but can't think of any other uses, perhaps car / plane cockpit gauges would work better than current mixes of analog gauges and LCDs.

The largest problem I have had with coming around on the energy / global climate debate is that these horrible dire predictions are always accompanied by the most ineffectual proposals to mitigate the effects. No one is really coming out and saying straight up there is no solution we just must reduce consumption in a way that is incompatible with current society. Either they are wrong about the magnitude of the problem or wrong about how we should proceed to correct it. I was of the mind that they were wrong about the problem but it is becoming apparent that they have been wrong about he solution and things are going to go very badly over the rest of my lifetime and perhaps my children's natural lifetimes (it isn't at all certain that they will live so long) before we arrive at an equilibrium of hotter temperatures, new habitable areas (Canada will look nice) and a drastically reduced global population. We appear to be in a situation where everything is wrong and no fix that we would choose can possibly begin to help. I think the Catch-22 century came a little early.

Yes, if I had to guess I would say that the observed speed of light is being reduced by a very small fraction due to quantum fluctuations causing virtual particle interactions among photons (essentially they aren't travelling in a perfectly straight line, in time). Non-reactive neutinos would then technically travel at closer to the true 'speed of light' than photons do through a vacuum. Photons could theoretically travel a little bit faster but in practice they don't due to a very small statistical effect of random quantum effects. If anything like this turns out to be true it is a very interesting experimental result but doesn't overturn any real physics except slightly modifying c in some uses such as E=mc^2, everyone has a little bit more rest energy.

Its becoming an anachronism primarily because software developers (yes I am one) would much rather have their code running protected on hardware they control (but preferably don't own e.g. EC2 Azure) and acting as a service than letting you have control of it on your own cheap commodity hardware. Really this is plugging the 'digital hole'. Damn now I'm sounding like Stallman, see what they've done to me?

I always had a similar view of the computers in The Matrix, after-all the idea of using humans as batteries is thermodynamically unsound. I thought the machines were merely simulating humanity's power wasteful lifestyle in an energy efficient way in the Matrix.

That is all well and good, but his copyright will expire and it will enter the public domain at which point his desires about restricting this will become unenforceable.

I was thinking about how the energy of chemical rockets is just barely sufficient (given fuel mass) to make chemical rockets that can escape Earth's gravity well. I'm not sure of the exact headroom but my understanding is that it is fairly tight. From what I have read on the strength of nanotubes, they too are theoretically just strong enough to barely make a space elevator a possibility (if we could manage to weave them into a macro-fiber without significant losses.) If this turns out to be the case I wonder if there is a connection between these two methods and the strength of chemical bonds to overcome the gravitational potential of our planet. Need it be so that these two very different ways of utilizing bond strength achieve a similar maximum gravitational field that they can overcome? And even more speculatively could the fact that the gravitational field of the Earth is near this value be important in the suitability of it to life?

I'm just as concerned with the tendency of websites with 'mobile apps' to intentionally break their own website experience when browsing on a mobile device in order to push their native app instead. Deep links redirecting to mobile homepages are also breaking the web (from mobile at least). In many cases the web worked better on my iPhone 1 then it does today on my iPhone 4.

In order to successfully mitigate congestion in a network requires the sender having detected packet loss to cut transmission rates exponentially and then linearly increase transmission rates until congestion is detected (exponential back off). I suspect that power congestion response in a smart grid would be similar, perhaps by doubling the current price if demand is exceeding production but only linearly decreasing the price as production exceeds demand.

The real value of this post is not that exponential growth is unsustainable (a fact that is essentially impossible to refute) but the amount of time the current growth is sustainable (a vague approximation based on questionable figures) its the 300 year number that really needs to be addressed. I question how accurately the past energy production measures all forms of power produced including food sources grown by the sun. Underestimating these values (I believe likely) will overestimate the actual rate of growth and thus exponentially underestimate the amount of time we have at current growth rates.

While playing the lottery is for people bad at math, designing the lottery is for people good at math and if you are very good you let it be rigged in a non-obvious statistical sense. A very serious look needs to be had at those who designed this system.

I can certainly understand concern over the size of the national debt and the projected debt over the next 20 years and I can understand that this was an attractive political maneuver to try to force spending cuts and / or tax increases, but I cannot fathom why any one of our Senators or Representatives would, at this stage, vote against a compromise that is essential to raising this debt limit in order to stand by and make good on our obligations to investors, both foreign and domestic, who put their faith in the American people's word. I encourage everyone to seriously question any and all congresspeople who vote against this bill. Do they really believe the country would be better off without passing this bill (not accepting an appeal for a mythical third option, this is a yes or no vote after-all) and how can they possibly justify such a position. I think that anyone unwilling to vote for this bill at this point is entirely UNFIT to represent the United States people and should be removed at the next election.

I see you on the street and decide to target you, I sniff some packets and learn your MAC address. I then use this MAC address to find where you are/have been/will be. The point is the connection between you and a set of MAC addresses is random but pretty static which can then be indexed to learn a lot about your locations.

I am in process of installing a 5kW DC (4.2kW AC) solar system on my house, through SolarCity. This is a 20 year pre-paid lease over the course of 20 years they guarantee at least 144 MWh of production and the cost of the lease is $10k (thanks to hefty government rebates, thank you everyone). Which works out to just over $69 per MWh, or better considering this is based on a minimum production (below which they pay me $170 per MWh so I'm sure it is a conservative number). I project this will mostly negate my electric usage (based on my average use of 21 kWh / day). I currently pay about $156 - $187 per MWh from the local power company.

Hopefully in 20 years when this lease expires I will be able to replace the system with one that will produce more power at a comparable price buying it outright without government rebates and hopefully the grid will have excess storage capacity in the form of large molten salt batteries to flatten out everyone's load without relying on power plants at night.

As these systems are designed by some of our most talented scientists and engineers it isn't so much about whether or not to pay them but what we should be paying them to do. Is this what these people should be spending their efforts on, just because they want to. Wouldn't society be better off if these resources (people as well as money) were spent on other activities.