First, in the interests of full disclosure, I do consider this a likely scam.

That said, I don't understand why so many people consider it physically impossible - Passive RFID works in very much the same way as what this Kickstarter describes. An RF pulse gives it just enough juice to do a miniscule amount of processing (looking up a stored number), then broadcast it back out to the world. Yes, capturing background RF would take some doing, but I don't know that I'd call it all that far outside the realm of plausibility.

For comparison, an RFID reader has the same FCC-imposed limits as WiFi, an EIRP of 4W (or put another way, a 1W transmitter with a typical 6dBi antenna).

Suspicious in the absence of a working prototype? Absolutely! Impossible? Not even close.

I don't know if I'd brag about my tenure there in the context of selling security consulting.

This.

Detecting and stopping an insider from downloading a library of proprietary/classified info outside their job description? Fail.
Capable of searching emails to fulfill a court order for information? Fail.
Bringing a basic (if high-end) new datacenter online? Fail (for not securing a reliable source of electricity).
Obeying the rules that govern their core mission? Fail. Performing their core mission? Fail.

No doubt, the NSA remains every bit as scary as ever, but in more of a "CIA goon" sense than their traditional so-flawlessly-smooth-you-won't-even-know-what-happened reputational sense.

Bochs? Surprised you didn't just use DOSBox.

I did end up resorting to DOSBox for a few games that used seriously funky video modes, but for the most part, I prefer Bochs as more flexible overall. For one thing, I had a few Win95 games in the mix, and at the time getting that to work on Bochs took no effort at all, while getting it to run under DosBox took an act of god, and I hope you liked 640x480x16 color.

That said, I realize DosBox has gotten a lot better since then... But, so has Bochs, so, I honestly don't know which one I would pick trying it again today. But since TFA specifically asked about Linux, that would tend to make Bochs the likely better choice.

You only need 1 gram of palladium to make a fuel cell that can deliver tens of kW ? That's impressive. Do you have a link to the technology?

Sure, first hit on Google, gets over 10KW/g of catalyst.

Keep in mind that weight doesn't matter for (solid) catalysts, but surface area does. If you can spread one gram over a square mile's worth of substrate, you get the same catalytic activity as if you used a kilogram with the same area.

You have wasted probably 50 megs of space with what a couple of 5k autoexec.bat's and config.sys's files could have occupied.

I didn't want to recreate all the "joy" of rebooting six times to figure out which configuration would best run game-X, I just wanted one-click playability.

And I actually wasted more like 10GB, since I gave each instance its own 2GB partition image. ;)

Catalyst: "a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change."

Yes, metals like palladium and rhodium cost a good chunk of change, but you don't need a lot of them, and you only need them once (per car). You add them in trace amounts to a porous honeycomb-like structure to maximize surface area, and bam, that whole gram of palladium adds $30 to the total cost of your car. Make no mistake, the more ways we have to accomplish a particular reaction, the better, and I consider TFA very cool news... But the cost of the catalyst wouldn't break the bank vs the cost of a new car.

Call me paranoid, but I can tell you a much more realistic reason we don't already have cars running on ammonia - The DEA. I can't buy a goddamned bulk pack of (real, not reformulated) Sudafed without showing two forms of ID, and $Deity help me if I actually need to get more in the same month! On the other side of the meth equation, a convenient source of anhydrous ammonia would make it much easier and safer to manufacture, so no ammonia for you!

Seriously - This.

It will take you far less effort to configure a PC emulator to look like stereotypical 15YO hardware, than it will to actually put together that hardware.

About five years ago I had a similar personal project, to find a way to replay some of the great DOS games I had lying around, most on floppies nearing the edge of unreadability. After screwing around with various compatibility modes in Windows and even going so far as to set up a multiboot system with real live DOS installed, I ended up just putting together half a dozen Bochs images running DOS under emulation with slightly different memory management configs (remember the bad old days of extended vs expanded memory and segmented vs flat and real vs protected vs unreal (flat real)?). Once I set up one image, I cloned it and reconfigured it to the rest in under an hour, then just had to remember which games needed which styles of memory management.

We tend to forget how much old hardware sucked. If I never have to manually hunt for an available base address, IRQ, and DMA channel again, I will consider myself blessed.

the Fifth Amendment protects you against self-incriminating testimony, but it is not an absolute bar against all kinds of self-incrimination.

Sure... And we didn't torture people at Gitmo - Al "Torquemada" Gonzalez made sure to redefine the term to make everything perfectly kosher.

When the government can just redefine pesky terms to mean whatever the hell it wants, yeah, the GP has it correct - We have no rights, except the right to do our best to stay under the radar and pray we never piss off the wrong person in power.

Naturally for a person that is not on average income it's difficult to understand proportion.

Naturally, for a person who doesn't need to pimp him/herself out to get reelected, it's difficult to understand the real damage here.

It takes millions of dollars per election cycle for any politician above the local-town-council level to get and keep their government meal-ticket. Joe Plumber doesn't have millions of dollars, and as a non-corporation, even if he did, he couldn't legally donate that much to a single candidate anyway. You know who does have millions of dollars, however, and contributes liberally to both sides of the political spectrum? Just about every industry-interest group on the planet.

When you complain about the ads on TV, you have to remember that you count as the product, not the customer.
When you complain about the law, remember the exact same thing - You didn't buy that law, the BPI/RIAA did.

What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?

Black: Blacks make up only 3.6% of CS graduates, 6% of CE graduates, and 7% of generic IT graduates at the moment.
Female: Female CS/CE graduates peaked in the '80s at 37%, and has fallen ever since to a current low of only 12%; the previous link also shows them at about 50% higher rates in generic IT, or 17% total.

Sorry if that doesn't give your axes a nice fine edge, folks, but the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook don't hire only misogynist racists for their HR departments - In fact, all three soundly beat the above graduation rates, making them arguably biased against hiring white males.

"In addition to the disagreement between the parties as to the meaning of the agreed-upon claim construction"

I don't fully speak legalese, but the ruling had me literally LOL'ing. The threw everything from grammar naziism to stare decisis.

Okay, so a lower minumum energy exists just past that peak... But even if the early universe reached the peak between the two valleys, why couldn't the Higgs' field have simply fallen back into the current local-but-not-global minimum?

Do deeper lows actually somehow attract the evolution of the field, or did $Deity flip a coin that, fortunately for us, came out heads instead of tails?

The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this.

I suspect the actual study, if not TFA, took that into consideration.

I actually find it more odd that the effects of mass on the neutrinos slowed them less than the effects of quantum gravity on the photons - The photons still lagged the neutrinos, rather than making up for a mere three hours' lag on a journey of 168,000 light-years? Truly mind-boggling! Kinda like driving from NYC to LA and still beating a flight that transfers at every airport on the way.

Lincoln was indeed handling a rebellion, and therefore had the right to suspend habeas corpus when the public safety required it.

And look where it got us - We still have a fundamental (pun intended) ideological divide between the North and the South, while the industrial revolution had already started and would shortly make the issue of human slavery moot.

A third of the country deciding to take their ball and go home doesn't count as a "rebellion", it counts as time to redraw the maps.

So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?

You mean other than the fact that a human driver in that situation would do their damnedest to avoid hitting any kids, while an out-of-control drone amounts to lobbing big rocks with whirring razor blades on top into the playground?

And let's look at this with a bit less over-the-top bonus drama - Realistically, both the truck and the drone would crash into a random building, and most likely not actually hit anyone directly. Now, if either of them starts a fire, which one goes unnoticed until half the block burns down? Even assuming the driver dies on impact, people notice a truck crashing into a building; not so much when one random 4th-floor window breaks and then you don't see or hear anything for a few minutes.

Yes, the FAA needs to get its head out of its ass and come up some reasonable conditions to play with drones. In this case, though, the FAA did its job as required.