Well, as soon as someone invents the AC battery we can switch back...

What do electric cars have to do with anything? The article is talking about *home* batteries.

No, it does not. Re-read my post after you've had your morning coffee. You're free to use the API however you want, it's presumed not copyrightable. The *one* exception is using it for interacting with the Linux kernel, because the kernel *is* protected from such access by the GPL, and only GPL-compatible code is allowed to interact with its internals. The API is irrelevant to that fact - it's simply the interface used by those who *are* allowed to interact.

Actually, correlated random noise is extremely useful for cryptography. At its simplest, Alice takes their noise as received, Bob takes the inverse of their received noise, and since the noise source is entangled they are then guaranteed to have the same noise, which can be used as an encryption key, or even a one-time pad.

One can hope.

Where do you see anything about permission. They asked for *comment* - just because you ask someone for advice, doesn't mean you're bound to follow it.

I believe it's not that you can't use the API, but that you can't interface non-GPL code with the kernel due to the restrictions of the GPL. That you would use the API to do so is incidental to that restriction.

If instead you want to build your own kernel implementing the same API, I don't believe they have any objection.

As soon as it touches something NOT moving 25.4km/s? Probably. Or if it were to hit a gas, the gas would be plasma.

In this case, you've got gas moving at 27.4km/s across a stationary funnel surface - you're going to get a lot of thermalization in the boundary region, and I would bet on plasma formation. Obviously that's not particularly relevant to the bulk of the fast-moving gas, but it's *very* relevant to the funnel.

Assuming of course, that it behaves according to our untested theories.

Oh, and as for my assumptions - yes, I could be wrong - but of all the things that might possibly emerge from new fundamental physics, it seems *extremely* unlikely that any of it would be particularly applicable to non-physics science. Well, beyond the potential fount of xeno-biological knowledge and/or interaction with alien civilizations if it led to some sort of FTL travel :-D.

Our technology is already on the cusp of allowing us to observe living organisms on the atomic level - while it's not impossible that some new physics might allow even more detailed and non-invasice information gathering, or even reveal that the ultimate source of the spark of life is not actually the biological organism, introducing new fields of science, neither would have much impact on biology itself, other than potentially accelerating it's advance by a few centuries.

Absolutely, the technology is not there yet. But the fundamental science underlying the technology is. The two are interconnected, but NOT synonymous.

As for humanity changing - you are talking about human *technology*, I am talking about humans themselves. Two very different things. We've become far less lethally violent as population density has increased and made violence much more destabilizing, but otherwise we seem to be basically the same creatures as described in the most ancient legends.

Careful yourself - heat and temperature are two completely different concepts related by a material-specific conversion function.

But yes, you are right that temperature and speed are rarely used interchangeably outside particle physics - it is quite likely you could substantially avoid thermalization of the "wind", however any portion that *was* thermalized, say by interaction with the surface of the funnel, would thermalize to an extremely high temperature. Though I suppose in that case we should probably be looking at the RMS speed, rather than the most probable, which would lower the temperature a bit

As for speeds, I'm just going from the specific orbital energies, perhaps there's other tricks that can be played - I'll freely admit that I always seem to have trouble translating between delta-V and delta-E in an orbital context. But to go from Venus's orbit to Mars's orbit you still need to add 322MJ/kg - more than to escape the sun entirely from Mars's orbit. And 322MJ/kg of kinetic energy would translate via E=1/2*m*v^2 to... 25.4 km/s....

Okay, it would seem I've got a math error somewhere... Ah, right, flipped an exponent there. 6x the energy translates to 2.45x the velocity, not 36x. Sorry about that.

So that would make the required departure velocity only 27.4 km/s, and the associated thermalization temperature only about 1,340,000K...

Except wait - we've got a phase change from gas to plasma in there, which almost certainly breaks their calculations badly. At any rate you're going to have a steady flow of hot plasma against the surfaces of your funnel - that's going to add some serious material science challenges (or engineering, if you go for magnetic shielding)

There's one substantial difference though - reaction density. Creating one micro black hole or strangelet in the upper atmosphere may be a non-issue, it will evaporate long before it can absorb enough matter to stabilize. Create dozens or thousands of them within a miniscule target region and a small fraction of a second though, and you have to start worrying about how they might interact with each other.

I'm seeing an awful lot of assumptions there.

1a) I don't see how limiting research to areas where we don't specifically predict potentially dangerous outcomes translates to scientific stagnation. Worst case scenario, we could do such experiments on the moon - if it turned into a black hole, supermassive stranglet, etc. only nighttime lighting (and any unfortunate species unable to adapt) would be affected on Earth, and there would no doubt be lots of useful applications for such an exotic moon. And that would likely only delay the research by a few centuries. And there's lots of fields of science beyond fundamental physics, most of which will likely be largely unaffected by any breakthroughs at this point. I mean we already have microscopes that can image individual atoms, and tools to manipulate them. How much more can fundamental physics realistically contribute to our understanding of biology, chemistry, psychology, etc.?

1b) Even if fundamental scientific progress were to somehow come to a complete stop, that doesn't mean worldly affairs continue along the status quo indefinitely. Technology will continue to evolve after all. We already have all the fundamental scientific knowledge necessary to completely colonize our solar system and, with enough patience, even other stars, all we need to do is work out the applied technology (fusion, high-power ion drives, etc). To say nothing of applied social technologies (religion, democracy, economics, etc) - good luck stopping those from continuing to evolve.

Reflect on the big picture, and life ever having arisen on Earth at all becomes almost certainly irrelevant.

3) We've got several millenia now of discovering game-changing facts about the universe at an ever-increasing pace. And yet to all appearances humanity itself has changed hardly a whit. What makes you think the next discovery will be different?

Perhaps, but in that case quoting the opening phrase in the first amendment seems a tad... irrelevant. The bill of rights as a whole was after all intended to be a redundant enumeration of a handful of the powers denied to the government. The constitution already explicitly limits the federal government to only exercising those powers necessary to carry out it's enumerated responsibilities.

I do agree with you though. And combined with the 9th and 10th amendments, I would say that *any* expansion of government powers into traditionally protected (by law or practicality) areas should face a very high bar of public scrutiny.