Sending the content of every search request to Apple? Notifying Apple if the user sets up a non-Apple email account? That's a blatant violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act unless Apple properly discloses that up front and gets the user's consent.

Apple didn't do that.

The EULA for MacOS isn't on line on Apple's own site. This matters. It violates the FTC's "clear and conspicuous" rule on disclosures. It's just like bundling spyware, which the FTC and state attorneys general have routinely hammered vendors for trying.

This puts Apple in the uncomfortable position Sony was in when they put a root kit on an audio CD.

The actual study only applies to sugar-sweetened drinks.

Somebody watched Robot Jox too many times.

That's how it always starts. In a few years, more ads than content.

You are not the customer. You are the product.

That's characteristic of small-volume production. If Tesla were making enough units, they'd have more custom ICs made to get the parts count down.

"Labor of love" - right. That's why game developers are so exploited that EA got into trouble with CA labor laws.

Yes, you should explicitly refuse to implement your patented IP for the company without a separate licensing fee. This is completely separate from employment.

In particular, you don't want to use your IP in their product without a licensing deal in place. That creates a conflict of interest situation, one likely to result in litigation later. What if, later, you sold your patent rights to another party and they sued your employer? Your employer could then sue you for putting them in that situation.

Bring in a lawyer. Welcome to the big time.

It's worse than that. Much worse. Robocoin, right now: "Sell rate: USD 347.43 | Buy rate: USD 465.87". That's a 17% spread in each direction. On top of that, the one at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View adds a 5% fee. So you lose about 22% on each transaction.

In other words, they haven't built a battery yet.

Why are so many "nanotechnology" articles like this? People find some new surface chemistry phenomenon in the lab, and immediately announce it as if it were a product ready to ship. Then it turns out that the phenomenon only works under limited conditions, or is really expensive to make, or doesn't even perform in the intended application. The nanotechnology crowd should STFU until they can demo.

Whatever the X-37B does, it seems to do it well. The USAF sends them up into space, they stay up for months or years, they do whatever they do, and they come home.

Space is the place - for robots.

What does it do, establish a connection to the "cloud" to send a message to your cell phone? I

It's just that the user doesn't have access to the playback function.

The article says the actual paper is being posted, but doesn't link to it. Anyone have a link?

The last time I looked at this, it appeared that the thing requires input power to function, and the input power is provided in a "proprietary waveform", even though it's just used for resistance heating. Other "free energy" schemes have turned out to be fake because measuring the wattage of a funny waveform is tricky, especially when current and voltage are out of phase. So I'm a bit suspicious.

If you want a non-bullshit view of Tesla, read his patents. His real achievement was that he figured out most of the kinds of modern AC motors. It's not at all obvious how you get an AC motor started and turning in the right direction. Clever tricks with bits of copper in the magnetic circuit are used to bias starting direction, and synchronous motors start up as induction motors. Tesla worked all that out. It's very elegant. AC machine design is hard, and, unlike DC machine design, requires calculus. That was a big jolt for engineering at the time. Nothing before had required that much math to make it work.

You can also read his thinking about the Wardenclyffe tower in his patents. He had RF propagation all wrong. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. His plan was to punch through to the ionosphere by ionizing a path all the way up (!), and transmit power and signals conductively, using the ionosphere and the ground as a pair of conductors.

The whole pulsed laser fusion effort turned out to be a cover for nuclear weapons research. It lets Lawerence Livermore study H-bomb like fusion reactions on a convenient scale. With a gym-sized bank of lasers aimed at a single point, they can pump enough energy into a tiny space to force fusion. That's a research tool.

So is the Z-machine, for much the same reason. It's yet another pulsed-fusion machine relying on inertial containment.

The tokamak crowd has at least been able to hold a fusion reaction together for 400ms or so. But plasma instability is the curse of all tokamak designs, including ITER. There's much doubt that ITER will work. It's conjectured that a bigger plasma will be more stable, but many physicists question this. ITER has become a pork program, though, and it's hard to stop. Cost is about $15 billion. If there was real confidence it would work, the private sector would fund it.

Right now, the new generation of stellerators looks more promising than the tokamaks.