Pretty much. Take some of those space-based masers you're using to beam electrical power down, and point them up.

Actually its just that orbit is the ultimate high ground. You absolutely can't negotiate with someone who can resolve their problems by sniping you with X-Ray lasers from 150km up.

Acceleration conversely does matter and would dictate maneuverability. Fighter ships with low mass and high thrust would be able to run circles around larger ships, but conversely would have almost no range compared to say, something with ion engines.

There's a fair amount of scope for interesting limitations on ship combat based on realistic physics.

It seems pretty likely that Ubuntu smartphones would be able to be shimmed to run Android apps, since that's already happening for regular Linux desktops.

Wrong question: fundamentally it's neurological damage. How many resources should we dedicate to helping people who suffer it by some means?

The environmental cost is simple: less mercury emitted into the environment then will be emitted by a coal power plant burning the amount of coal needed to supply a regular incandescent over the same period, notionally more controllable because with proper disposal you can recycle them.

And for that matter, everything about the hummer being better then a hybrid was thoroughly debunked. For one thing, nobody just "throws away" those batteries into landfill.

Learn to size your lighting plan.

The reality here is almost every house and a lot of businesses have chronically been installing underpowered lighting. But that looks "normal" so no one complains. Then they go and put a natural white CFL or LED in, of the exact same "equivalent" and complain it's too dim. It was too dim before. Check out those power savings and put 2-3x the incandescent equivalent in, and see how much happier you are.

The single greatest thing about CFL and LED lighting is that I've been able to go through my house and install dramatically brighter lights, and get it up to actual acceptable values and it makes everything nicer. Moreover, since I can pick my color temps easily, I can get what I want where I want it - warm for the living room, cool white for laundry/bathroom/work rooms to give nice crisp visibility.

Listening to the talk now, and it's just a joy to hear a great low level discussion of all these things with no marketing BS.

That's uh, kind of the point of this research. Verifying black box chip functionality is a huge concern for the military, who has a standing policy to use consumer hardware off-the-shelf where possible. With chips made in China and all. Beyond that, there's a big problem in just regular supply runs with counterfeit chips.

I can confirm there's an application design issue there: both me and my girlfriend made the mistake of running backwards in the Tuscany demo, and when you do that you can pretty much feel your stomach lurch forwards. There's definitely a learning curve there where VR games are not going to be able to have sudden accelerations like we do with current movement systems. Though conversely, I felt great playing HL2:DM in VR - getting blown about by fans and the like just felt...like well I was being thrown about, but didn't make me feel sick at all.

Oh that's not what it's about. See, Australia's policy on boat-arrival asylum seekers was recently all categorized (and its funding transferred) to the defense department, so the whole thing is now a military operation with a budget put out of sight behind general defense spending (which you can increase effectively without limit or consideration).

Which makes everything about it "operational security". Like you know, the number of boats that arrived, how many sank, where the people are being taken...

That...isn't what false flag means.

Almost certainly there was a real investigation going on. Someone (probably Abbott himself) just put the call down that they wanted it closed up, asked for a worst case scenario (which would've been dutifully given) and then they were told to go ahead with arrests on the basis of that.

All a colossal waste of money which I'm sure a bunch of analysts and intelligence officers were probably pretty pissed about because any actual leads they might've been following would've gotten a huge "go to ground" flag and they're probably the ones getting the blowback for it not yielding terrorists that they themselves could've told you wouldn't be found at that time.

What doesn't get said about this type of BS, is that at the end of the day we don't end up being any safer because intelligence is being pushed to create a narrative, not actual results.

Right, this much I kind of inferred - but what I'm wondering is, surely you could connect a reasonably blunt reading of spinal cord electrical signals to electrodes, and use that to control the stimulation of the walking action. The brain's body map is a pretty fluid vehicle, so even with limited control it seems likely that people would be able to control the synthetic system fairly well.

Actually what I'm wondering here is if they can control how the rat walks, then what's stopping them from using electrical receptors on the other side of the break to let the rat control how it's legs moves? If the technology is precise enough to stimulate, then it can surely be precise enough to receive.

If you look at where it bends, it's pretty clear they don't even need to do that - they could probably get away with simply milling the aluminum thicker around the areas where there are cut outs for the buttons, which are acting as stress concentrators. Plug the whole thing into a simulator and tweak until those areas don't exceed the tensile strength of the region.