So... "fun gimmick, or a serious commentary on an increasingly surveillance based society?"

Really?

How about both. Are having a sense of humor and making a serious comment mutually opposed? Slashdot deserves better.

Not 100% sure this is WebKit-free. On MacOSX there's still a reference to webkit in the UserAgent string as: "AppleWebKit" anyway.

There are thousands of visual effects artists who are, or soon will be, out of work -- who would be happy to model anything for you. Schools today are training thousands more every year.

I think the biggest problem is that people don't want something unique -- they wants something everybody else has.

Think about it -- say you could print your own phone; and it would be unique; custom fit to your hand (say), and really the best possible phone for you. How many would want that, vs. the phone that everybody else has?

Back when it was thought that neutrinos were massless, it was impossible to believe that there were huge masses of neutrinos surrounding galaxies, as they would have to travel at the speed of light. But now that we know that neutrinos have mass, maybe they could travel a lot more slowly, slow enough to be captured by a galaxy.

Think about it; there are a huge amount of neutrinos created every microsecond in every star in every galaxy, and they hardly interact with anything. They've been accumulating since the big bang.

What happened to the early photons? Those created as the universe first became transparent initially were very high energy indeed, but as the universe has expanded they've lost energy, to the point that they correspond to a temperature of just 3 degrees kelvin. What happens to neutrinos of a similar vintage?

Ammonia is terribly useful in its own right. The amount of energy used making ammonia for fertilizer is huge, and is growing. You can stop right there, and have a very useful process -- even if it only runs on sunny days.

Wild, I never expected these poll results to look like a progress meter.

du -h

Duh.

I was working at SGI at the time, late 1991. The cheapest way to buy expansion memory was to buy Indigo's and throw out the rest of the computer. SGI was just feeling the first tickles of the commoditization of computer hardware, and was looking for ways to make their components unique (and keep them expensive.)

The Pixel Qi LCD screen does exactly this to get high-efficiency color; splitting the RGB colors from the LED backlight to direct it to individual LCD cells. The idea of applying the same ideas to cameras are not new.

A big challenge with this idea, and many others, is that for cameras with variable focal lengths, the light hitting the edge of the sensor might come from almost straight in front (for a long lens); or from an extreme angle (for a wide-angle lens) causing significant issues with this kind of optics-in-front-of-the-sensor camera. For a fixed-focus lens as on a cellphone (like 90% of cameras built today) it's not an issue.

During a week in 2008, three undersea cables were cut off of Egypt. At the time (and still) the cuts were attributed to ships dragging anchors -- although the fact that there were three cuts so close in time was, and remains, hard to believe.

So, now we see people intentionally cutting a cable. Hmm.

During the second world war, there were teams of saboteurs who were tasked with cutting telephone cables across France, in preference to almost any other target, because it was much easier for the British to intercept radio messages than telephone messages. I can't imagine any other reason for this.

Oh, my information was, sadly, out-of-date. Sorry about that.

I've never seen or heard of an ambidextrous pitcher. Can you imagine the benefit, though? Switch-hitters are prized for the ability to adapt to a pitcher, but if the pitcher could adapt to the hitter? It'd be amazing.

Now, it might be impossible -- that competitive pitching requires you to make your body significantly asymmetrical -- perhaps the extra mass of the muscles on the other side would slow you down.

I mean, we've had an All-Star pitcher with just one arm! And he pitched a no-hitter in the bigs! Why can't we have an ambidextrous pitcher?

One of the big issues with LCD displays is that they block most of the light going through them; so they are inherently inefficient. The first polarizer blocks 50% right of the bat, and by the time you are done, a color LCD screen showing its brightest white is still blocking probably 85% of the light from the backlight. Electrowetting displays promise to let some 80% of the light through for b/w, and quite a bit more than LCDs for color. For example, 3D shutter glasses currently use LCD displays and they block 60% of the light, electrowetting displays would be far better.

You know, if they existed.

Anyone can be seriously "offensive" in this business. All it takes is $100 laptop and msf.

Defense? That, my friends, is the multi-tens-of-billions industry we're in.

Cyber Command? Show me your defensive game and stop wasting my tax money.

About 15 years ago, Grumman made a similar proposal; to build F-14s for half the cost of the F/A-18s. In that case, like this one, the F-14 was a faster, more capable platform than the F/A-18. The DOD response was to order Grumman to destroy all the F-14 jigs, so that they could never possibly build another one. I suspect the same will happen now.

I was hoping to use exactly something like this years ago, when I had to transfer tens of GB to and from Korea every day when I was working at Hammerhead Productions. Using rsync was painfully slow, because TCP/IP required acknowledgement of each packet -- and even though our bandwidth was high, our latency was very long, and we were getting less than 1 Mbps rather than the 10 Mbps we should have been getting.

Using something like BitTorrent, which uses UDP and does the error checking itself asynchronously would have been a huge help. We had multiple cable modems on both ends, and BitTorrent would have been perfect.

In the end, I wrote a simple tool which copied files using scp, but ran 10 threads with 10 separate scp calls and got almost 10 Mbps from each cable modem.

Aspera does similar things at insane prices.