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Comment Ads with movement (Score 5, Interesting) 507

by cras (#30868548) Attached to: Of the following online annoyances, I most despise ...

I probably never would have bothered to install adblock if ads were just still images. Maybe once in a while I might even see some interesting ad. Facebook and Google ads are like that, they've never bothered me. But pretty much all other ads are animated, so they keep trying to distract me from reading the actual page. Wonder if advertisers could be encouraged switch to still images by having adblock implement a mode where they're not filtered.
Science

How To Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine 392

Posted by kdawson from the magnetoelectric-quantum-wheel dept.
KentuckyFC writes "According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum will be filled with electromagnetic waves leaping in and out of existence. It turns out that these waves can have various measurable effects, such as the Casimir-Polder force, which was first measured accurately in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is still not clear. Now, however, a researcher at an Israeli government lab suggests how it could be possible to generate propulsion using the quantum vacuum. The basic idea is that pushing on the electromagnetic fields in the vacuum should generate an equal and opposite force. The suggestion is that this can be done using nanoparticles that interact with the vacuum's electric and magnetic fields, generating the well-known Lorentz force. In most cases, the sum of Lorentz forces adds up to zero. But today's breakthrough is the discovery of various ways to break this symmetry and so use the quantum vacuum to generate a force. The simplest of these is simply to rotate the particles. So the blueprint for a quantum propulsion machine described in the paper is an array of addressable nanoparticles that can be rotated in the required way. Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with magesterial understatement, this might have practical implications."

Comment Re:He makes one excellent and crucial point (Score 4, Informative) 427

by cras (#28396957) Attached to: State of Sound Development On Linux Not So Sorry After All

Is there any document out there which explains why /dev/dsp doesn't get mixing with ALSA? And why nobody tried to patch that yet?

Yeah, TFA explains it.. Here's it in short: /dev/dsp goes to kernelspace, while ALSA does mixing in userspace. I've no idea how difficult it would be to make ALSA do sound mixing in kernelspace.

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