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Comment Why does it work? (Score 1) 137

I'm not feeling very competent, but:

a) Soot particles aggregate, lowering their surface-to-volume ratio, shutting down the combustion, or
b) Soot particles escape the plasma, shutting down combustion, or
c) Electron flow from the gun interferes with the combustion reaction itself, which would be awesome

Comment External + Online + Friends (Score 1) 680

It seems to me that the combination of a large external drive and online storage is easy and safe. The crashplan backup software lets you perform backup of a set of data to multiple destinations, including any connected drive/folder, online storage and sending to friends' computers. Thus you can be a couple of friends (3 should be more than enough) who team up to have 3 copies of each others' backup sets.

That way the backup is performed quickly to the external drive, while it trickles to the online repository and to your friends, depending on your broadband speed. Get some international friends and you're ridiculously secure from any disaster. I imagine crashplan soon will have "virtual friends" which are backup sites in the siberian tundra or something, why not?

Simon

Comment Re:academic Vs. real-life (Score 1) 86

Come on, any good salesperson in a shop, booth, kiosk would to the same:
"One mars bar please"
"There you go. By the way we've got a good offer on razors this week. Playboy mag here says the ladies like it clean nowadays. Although that coke ad says the opposite, that them girls like it ruffian style, it's refreshing."

Comment Fulfilled (Score 1) 459

I've tried an ipad and I thought it was awesome. I would love to have in the lab to make notes and look up information and later run to my colleagues down the research hall and show a video of something amazing that just happened, which we can discuss and giggle about. That tablet thing makes certain collaboration and sharing tasks more fluent than either emailing or physically shoving a laptop around.

If there is a tablet that can be docked in a comfortable keyboard and has the power (thin-client?) to do serious work, then I'm all in.

Right now, though, I have a nice laptop which is fairly portable and can run without any cables for a significant amount of time. Plus I have an iphone 4 that allows me to consume and share cool things rapidly and fluently. I still need something that replaces my current laptop, which is a very high step to reach.

Comment It's okay to be gay (Score 1) 422

I just thought it should be said. Even in a discussion about metric and imperial units, christmas and new year's, religions of various kinds; It's also okay to be gay. I'm not saying that imperial units are gay. That would be wrong. Like racism. I'm not saying that imperial units are discriminating anyone either. I'm just saying..that some times.. it's good to divide and multiply by ten. It's nice to be gay, and divide by ten, whereever you are in the world, what your history is, multiply a little, by factors of 10! It's cool. And it's okay.

Comment We have to (Score 1) 97

To all who criticize the money spent on this research: Do you really think we ever can or should stop a question from being answered? Are not scientists in their position because at some point they were curious about the world and went about getting educated in skillfully pursuing answers? I think in this case a simple question was answered and presented decently with the first empirical data. Next, they can dig out a theoretical model that fit the observed data. If they struggle finding a good theoretical match, then things get interesting.

Comment Re:This might be a little uncomfortable... (Score 1) 284

I was scrolling down to see if anyone had suggested this before posting myself, and lo.. This all leads to a society that preserves the knowledge of a person by adapting an artificial intelligence to it and letting this artificial intelligence free to communicate in a network. I've read this somewhere I'm sure, maybe The Night's Dawn Trilogy? In this way, you are not only preserving the factual knowledge a person possesses, but that person's unique interpretation and creative constructs based on that knowledge. We would maybe need to mimic a neural network that is modeled closely to the person in question. The problem won't be to have the computing capacity to do this in some years, the problem will be how to read the neural network of a (recently deceased?) brain. Anyway, if we made an artificial intelligence that would post things to facebook and twitter, I think it would only turn out creepy because what we post on facebook/twitter is curated information or new media or brainfarts. Now the brainfarts we can do, but we can't create new media; Imagine a photo of your dead friend at a bar five days after he died. Nope, it doesn't work. another stone for you

Comment Corporate morale (Score 1) 677

I believe freedom of speech is good morale, even by objective scientific terms, because it reflects that each person on this planet are perfectly equal. If brought up with an ideal set of equal oppurtunities to food, education and the expression of their utility; be it building a park, harvesting oil, producing art, solving conflicts etc, any "clean slate" baby taken from any mother on this planet would have no less place in society than the next k+1 member. It is utopia, but an approachable one. Some nations are closer to it than others. Some nations "do it wrong" by muddling the right of the individual with mechanisms that allow the individual right to not create conditions conducive to the right of the individual, even while accepting to live in the same society. Maybe the world should have one anarchist geographical area, ratified by all the nations of the world, as Anarchia, where everyone not happy with having leaders, can go and live their lives in total freedom. We like to think that facebook is the real world. But it's not. It's a company that shares what we publish with the people we choose. It's not a society where you need proper morale or ethics to create a place where the individual has the right to say or become what it wants. They make money through advertisement. They have no morale to look after except the profit of their investors. They are protecting their employees by making sure they make money, even in Pakistan. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a closed circuit. You don't need facebook to protect the right of the individual in the real world. Yet. Maybe some time in the future nations will recognize facebook or something similar as a public space which everyone has the right to have access to, and therefore must include freedom of speech. But it definitely doesn't have to be that way now. We're living in a really cool time where The Network is something we will depend on much more when the capacity of transport diminishes while oil and gas reserves deplete. Maybe our world will slow down its pace soon, we've had a really good half a century at rapid speeds, but it's probably not sustainable. Thank god we developed The Network. It's the single most important invention to the coming centuries.

Comment Re:Consistent Histories? (Score 1) 365

No the article still states that the receiver needs to know the "correct measurement" to be made, which means that Bob needs information from Alice on which measurement to make and that information has no choice but speed-of-light exchange. I just wonder if not the energy of the information exchange exceeds the energy exchange of the entangled pair, even theoretically.

Comment travelling (Score 1) 152

I bet it initially smashed through a porous structure and entered an underground river which spans a martian continent. Now it's popping up closer to the surface and can penetrate the thin ice it is trapped under! I could also suggest it is being carried by aliens, but that's boring if you're a scientist. Wait.. I'm not a scientist. But I'd like to be one, so there.

Comment chrome bar (Score 1) 447

I guess chrome/chromium location bar is a ripoff of firefox, but I think it works faster and better.. I just tested typing 'banana' into my chrome bar, and it presented me a with an obscure link with no 'banana' in it, I clicked it, no 'banana' in the title either, but somewhere on the page it said 'banana'. That's awesome. I guess. Anyway, why the hell use firefox with all that junk, all that junk, when you can have chrome with humpless minimalism?

Comment Re:I'm thinking about moving to Norway (Score 1) 154

I'm not going to comment much on this, I think everyone can see that this is bombastic and narrow. I'm norwegian myself and I don't recognize myself or my friends in this. But alas, this is not forum for discussing nations and the people there. But seriously man, you should get out more, locally but also globally.

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