This is basically the best reason to read the Honor Harrington series of novels. It blows every other science fiction writer away in terms of portraying reasonable space combat.

Rules:
1. Always wear a space suit in combat. Duh.
2. You don't know where your enemy is until c*\Delta x has passed. This is both advantageous and disadvantageous.
3. Surprise! You can only decellerate as fast as you can accelerate! What? You mean I have to spend half of my time rushing at my opponent slowing down?
4. Laser beams hit at the moment you know they've been fired (not that they're used much, lasers are weak).
5. Lots of people die all the time. I think they killed billions of soldiers in a major war.
6. Yes, even your friends and main characters. Stray missiles suck.

It's fantastic.

I don't know if this is the best solution for everyone, but I just have my computer generate pink noise. It's got roughly the quality of a rain storm, and after a few minutes I don't even notice it anymore. I can use it to sleep through anything, and I live with roomates who are, shall we say, active at night.

This seems from the reports I've read to be pretty spot on. I would add an addendum to an earlier comment about this being why no nuclear plants will ever be built in the US again though; the current designs are generally "passive fail", meaning that unless electricity is supplied to the control systems, the plant will just... stop being just sub-critical and will go non-critical very quickly. For instance the pebble bed designs. My (somewhat, I'm probably giving myself a little too little credit) understanding is that these plants use nuclear fuel that just... can't react on it's own due to the sheathing materials. I think those are pyrolytic carbon still though, so of course there will still be problems with burning if they are exposed to air, the accompanying release of hydrogen, etc (I think).

This seems very honestly to be the entire focus of the nuclear industry -- designing plants which are safe to operate no matter what, which maintain reasonable cost-effectiveness. It's basically the holy grail.

I think the current problem is:
1. Natural gas is cheap, coal is cheap, they are cheaper to build and easier to maintain.
2. The regulatory process and validation work to get a new plant design is intimidating. Probably even intimidating as compared to the design of fighter jets.
3. Nuclear *is* scary to the vast majority of people. This is residual in large part from Long Island, and based in concerns over running reactors commissioned in the 60s still being operated. *That* part I am scared of. But as a scientist and engineer, I think that these are solvable problems so long as safety and the concepts of "fail safe" systems engineering based on the Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) which seem to have very permanently changed the way that people fundamentally think about how to do system engineering. These problems had not arisen and become understood when those plants went into operation. A current plant definitely would do a far better job of that.

Heck, it even effects me on a daily basis (at this point in my career I would classify myself as a systems engineer); I think all the time "What happens if all this equipment just stops working" and the answer is always "go to a safe operational mode". The are different ways to do that. You have the F-16 style of doing that, which includes crazy amounts of unstable control algorithms. But by *far* the preferred mechanism is physical. For instance, if I have a furnace I expect to go to 2000C, and monitor the temperature with one thermocouple while I use a single additional thermocouple as a safety, is not really enough. I would *far* rather have a thermal fuse that blows hard when a temperature exceeds some set ultimate super failure limit and shuts everything off immediately. I don't trust thermocouples to be reliable, and I don't trust the controls equipment to respond properly in an emergency.

But in one of these pebble beds, the sorts of controls they are integrating are way beyond "having power", by far the best safety integration is to design it such that electricity failing causes large physical things to happen. Dumping the pebble bed entirely, or dumping immediately a mediator into the reactor that is only prevented from triggering by constant electricity. Some of the designs I've seen literally place the reactor under a ridiculously large tank of water held closed by electricity. I don't know in what way that would fail, but it would be far superior to what happened in fukoshima.

I thought they were happy endings...ish?

Not as happy as the lord of the rings, but way happier than brazil.

Jeez man, spoiler alert?

The movie isn't even out yet!

Trolling. How is that not obvious?

This is true about patents in some areas, but not others.

I say this as someone who has easily worked around patents before, and nonetheless has heard repeatedly from investors that *some* IP is critical for self-defense and protection of core technologies.

Yes, absolutely. I'm a startup founder (not a web startup, which actually seems to make it much harder to find VC's nowadays, by the by).

I've got tons of impressive credentials, but if my startup idea sucks, or I've got serious issues with my team ability to implement it, of course I would want to know! I can't fix a problem I am too inexperienced to understand. If the solution is a search for a new co-founder who has more experience, then heck yes I want to know that so that I can do it! I want my startup to succeed, not flounder forever.

Even more, if it's got serious fatal flaws then it's worth me seriously thinking about whether or not I should be doing it. I can make an extremely nice salary at a regular job, even a job at another startup to learn really useful stuff at in terms of doing my own. Why would I want to waste tons of my time and spirit on a project that makes no sense, or won't work for team reasons?

I have gotten far more negative feedback than positive feedback from potential funders. I have never taken offense; the criticism isn't about me as a person, it is about me in the context of my startup. If the feedback I got was about how my religion or gender or sexual orientation or race was wrong or something ridiculous like that it would be one thing (although I am easy going enough that frankly I probably still wouldn't take offense). But if it's practical concerns about my skills with leadership, or my team's lack of expertise, or whatever that's incredibly valuable to know! Anyone that gets offended by free advice is doing it wrong. Yeah, the VC may be wrong, but you get what you pay for.

The problem I was talking about is where a schematic with 50 parts on it is a giant rats nest of stuff all on a single page that someone then tries to fit onto a single page/monitor, making extensive panning and zooming necessary to understand what's going on. Following the rules I outlined prevents that problem by making it so you can simply print out the images on a normal sized piece of paper and find everything completely legible (and similarly with most monitors).

The problem that you are talking about is one that can be solved with any moderately competent image viewer. Even firefox's automatic image scaling is perfectly capable of handling it, within reason. If that's all that this javascript tool accomplishes, then it is incredibly sad how slow it is. On my computer it hangs for a good 20 seconds when trying to zoom in or out, and god forbid I try to drag the image. Surely a better tool for dynamic image viewing already exists -- the one on amazon.com seems to work fine, after all, for the same task.

And yes, the PNG image is 2952x2202 pixels, but it's also 70kB... this isn't exactly an unwieldy image. And if it were a vector graphic or pdf, it'd probably be even smaller. I only chose not to do that because there is less support for it in browsers... like how I can't open PDFs inline in firefox very pleasantly.

If it had labels for logical blocks, I think that the schematic you linked to would be perfectly legible. A bit overkill, but at least it's not messy. What if there were two LEDs? Three? Four? There is definitely a limit where no matter how obvious the connection is, it increases legibility to use named nets.

Yeah, I definitely agree with this. This seems to be a solution to the problem "how can I make illegible and amateurish schematic drawings more readable without learning anything?"

Use a frame that limits the total schematic size to a standard paper size. Use named nets and labels on nets instead of actually connecting wires between parts (except for trivial connections like capacitors). Put lines in your schematic that separate logical blocks of your schematic. Label logical blocks with a title (AC Rectifier, Boost Converter, Control System, ADCs, Filters, etc). This makes it trivial for someone to look at your schematic and rapidly identify errors. It makes it simpler for *you* to rapidly identify errors!

Just follow these four simple rules and your schematics (pretty much regardless of software used to make them) will suddenly appear to be fairly professional (if not perfect). For examples, take a look at this. I'm not an EE by any means, but the more you separate functionality into logical blocks and limit your size with frames, the closer it looks to "professional".

http://saikoled.com/lightshield/
http://saikoled.com/lightbrick/
http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/artwork/design.html

(for the last link, some fairly complex schematics are shown in the "New Schematics and Diagrams" section. The ones near the top are duplicates of what I published on the other website.)

You can either have academic labs researching things which are commercially interesting, and then give the professors working on it the perk of having the opportunity to commercialize it first (or at least royalties), or you can have academic labs researching things which the professor is academically interested in, and hope that it is commercially interesting. It is difficult to get both.

Either you get people complaining that publicly funded research isn't free to the public to use, or you get people complaining that stuff invented in academia has no practical application. And since there aren't any industrial research labs left, that means either no commercially interesting research, or encumbered research.

Not to mention that it would be *damn* hard to get professors to work for peanuts (seriously, I've seen what these people make for their qualifications) while training basically all high-skill future scientists, and under a contract where all work they do they can't even commercialize because some big company will snap it up underneath them.

No, I'm afraid that I have to disagree with your position. Yes, I have a bias because I am working very hard to commercialize technology that my lab invented, but I also think that is is more than fair to give the actual inventors first dibs on trying to commercialize something. I would have left academia in a hurry and just did all my work as a trade secret pretty quickly otherwise.

National labs of course are a totally different story. Usually their inventions are licensed under reasonable terms in only non-exclusive licenses. But those inventors are *working* for the government as opposed to just having a small fraction of their costs paid for by a government grant.