I appreciate the film makers revolt on this but I seem to remember that something similar happened when "talkies" came out and when "technicolor" came out. Purist felt the new technology did more harm than good to film making. And that is probably true in many cases though there is schlock enough with 2D color films anyway.

Guess it's time to print up some tarpaulins with the image of a swimming pool and stake them up in the backyard just to fuck these bozos.

Yeah, a $1B write-off for product failures seems like my idea of success also...

If you look at a lot of HTSC data, most of the "transitions" seem a little dicey but that's not so surprising based on recent models of the phenomena.

This is simply highlighting the inadequacies of the grid itself and the limitations in the methods of alternative energy source inter-ties. The grid is "tuned" to a particular generator characteristic which alternative energy doesn't possess. Very simply, the grid expects a lower frequency generator variance than alternative energy sources exhibit. This is literally like an op amp with a high frequency instability that hasn't been compensated but has always had only low frequency, band-limited inputs that never "tickle" the point of instability. It can be fixed.

The ways that ads (visual or text) are inserted into the web page tends to be common for any ad type. In information theory circles this is called "high redundancy coding". It's generally easier to create automated tools that find patterns that have high redundancy. This redundancy includes the URL from which the ad is pulled to the specific HTML mark-up used to insert it into the page.

In other words, the NYT system selects for crap writing that has no value or utility.

As someone actually deep in the industry (rather than speculators and wannabes), specifically to density and Moore's Law, I'd say not so much. Reason: electromigration. It's electromigration that defines design rule line widths for metal in microelectronics.

The researcher (like most/many academics) is clueless about real life applications and doesn't really understand the driving factors of the technology he claims this could replace. I.e. he's pulling masturbatory fantasies out of his ass when he talks about that 30% improvement. That's the problem with specialization and with ivory tower isolation.

Electromigration is the failure mechanism of very small metal lines and wires in microelectronics. Basically momentum of electrons in a current is transferred to metal atoms and they are forced to move. This results in extrusions and voids in the metal line forming over time. The effect occurs to some degree over time at all temperatures and all currents - only the rate of action is changed. Because voids increase resistance and thus current density, the system has a positive feedback loop.

Making lines smaller raises the current density which raises both the electron flux and the temperature of the metal line which both increase electromigration. It doesn't really matter what technique (to 1st order) you use to make the line; making the lines smaller is the critical 1st order factor affecting failure rates.

If (and only if) this technique can impact the grain boundary orientation could the reliability be improved but even then current thin film deposition techniques mostly have this dialed in already.

The place I see this having the most value is in being able to create entirely new wiring schemes such as 3D integration or in planarizing things like wire bonding to get the photolithography advantage. The latter less so - planar alternatives already exist. That's about it.

Yes, diversity is important, but... If the species is so close to the edge, would anything else have done the job eventually as well? You can argue that man put them on the edge but I'm not sure how often that either actually true or simply a matter of coincidence. In the very long view, I think Carlin pretty much hit the nail on the head.

I was thinking instead: "We'll nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Have to disagree on maturity critique. Maybe because I used to work in space system architecture and design. Mostly military: I'll leave it to the imagination which programs - actually it was most of them - so never mind.

The biggest assumption made in costing is that semiconductor photovoltaics would be used. Well, those aren't the only solution or even the best. Semiconductor photovoltaics suffer from radiation hardness issues. They do have overhead costs in manufacturing - though that's not really a problem right this moment - plenty of capacity exists already.

An obvious alternative is thermionic power generation which would be a far better choice: it's simpler to manufacture and operate, has better reliability (especially for radiation hardness) and has a broader spectrum (of energy convertibility) than simple light-based photovoltaics because they are heat-driven.

Beaming the power back with better matured microwave-based transmission would be better than using lasers. You get far better beam-forming control with microwaves than with light and the attenuation is lower. You'd use a phased array antenna to transmit the microwaves with retro-reflecting alignment on the ground for beam correction feedback to the satellites. Pin-point beam accuracy with real-time correction is pretty trivial.

And frankly, with Peak Oil now combined with Peak Credit, satellite power is the only technology with the energy density to really replace oil/gas-from-the-ground and assure continuation of civilization and its current pace of technology advancement. I'm an engineer; I think it's important. As much as I've love to see alternative energy take off, they can never really substitute well - world economies still have to decline far more to reach an energy cost-benefit trade-off level that can work well with alternative sources.

So pick your poison: do a satellite system which is practical with current off-the-shelf satellite, electronics and launch technologies, or simply slip back into a Dark Age worse than the post-Roman Empire era.

It's clear we should have been working harder on this during the 1970s when these ideas were first brought up seriously after the Arab Oil Embargo, but the United States, perhaps predictably, completely blew it. Today it really is debatable if the United States has the capital and manufacturing to do the job itself or even as a partner to a larger prime. China could do it - no problem. If you want VC money that's the only place you'll be finding it right now - I know from personal experience. I'd consider joining up with a program for something like this. It's only humanity itself that is at risk.

Male primates have a Y chromosome which is far smaller than the X chromosome so the impact of a constant mutation rate on the Y in contrast to the X should be that Y genes have higher probability of mutation than X over a given period of time. Evolution is partially mutation rate dependent ergo evolution of the Y proceeds faster.

Seems pretty obvious yet why did people imagine the Y was stagnate? Magic DNA in Y that is immune to the laws of chemistry and physics with regard to mutation rates?!

"Contrary to a widely held scientific theory that the mammalian Y chromosome is slowly decaying or stagnating, new evidence suggests that in fact the Y is actually evolving quite rapidly through continuous, wholesale renovation."

There seems to be a lot of stuff in biology that is too superficially examined to pass the laugh test. One-Gene-One-Phenotype is another one of those that was so obviously going to be wrong, simply based on graph theory. Then again, why do many people chose biology as a science major? Avoiding math! That's a good part of the problem right there.

This could be incredible useful for automobiles. In order to increase efficiency you need to drop weight (as in, stop having SUV-like weight). The problem is that that weight creates a certain amount of crash safety (for the SUV driver to some extent - not so much thought, and not at all for anyone driving a smaller car). Given that, being able to use a light-weight energy absorption system like this could solve that problem and allow cars to have weights below 1000 lbs yet still have excellent crash safety.

Looks like a rocket plume to be sure. Seem pretty obvious but I was once a real rocket scientist so obvious is relative.

Remember this is in Norway. As in, a country close to the north magnetic pole of the Earth. What geometric pattern do ions follow in a magnetic field gradient like at the poles? A spiral or helix. Voila! But why two? Two different chemical species in the exhaust with two distinct masses and two distinct ionization recombination emission colors.