The correct question, assuming the story is factual, would be something along the lines of "What do want us to put in the lab we're going to give you for free, sonny?"

eyes open, unresponsive to stimuli (can't be woken up), no memory of entering the state

Yes, but this isn't sleep. This is more like watching Fox News.

The claustrum has a phylogenetic background appearing predominantly in insectivores, Prosimians, and Marsupials.

Hmmm. A hint as to where to look for consciousness most similar to humans?

They will probably always remain inherently beyond the reach of scientific evidence.

Yes. that's because they are 100% made-up. Just as Santa Claus is inherently beyond the reach of scientific evidence.

You will never find evidence, that is, anything manifesting as objective reality, for a wholly illusory concept. You can, of course, drown yourself in delusion. We appear to be well designed for exactly that exercise, we even practice it most nights during REM sleep. And it's perfectly acceptable, socially speaking. Imagine away.

grave. Good grief. :)

It's a grace situation. Revolting, in fact.

Sounds nice, but without explicit control over what American companies are allowed to do at/across the border, (and foreign companies the other way) it's not going to happen. Right now, the door is wide open in every way: Hire offshore and have the hires work here *or* there, keep your money offshore and avoid taxes with blissful ease, manufacture elsewhere, all the while you're paying off congress and whatever agencies are involved.

Sure, corporations are people. Sociopaths. Psychopaths. Those kinds of people. Evil slimeballs, primarily. Exceptions are very rare, and will remain so, as long as being competitive means one company has to take advantage of the same things the next one over does.

That's the way it works now. And unless you can forward larger envelopes to congress (directly, indirectly, or metaphorically) than big business can, or somehow make congress actually ethical and focused on the betterment of the country, this is only going to become more so. Money for election chests. Sweet land deals for cousin George. Fully paid fact finding junkets. Post-congress speaking deals. Guaranteed book advances, complete with ghostwriter, sales irrelevant. Well paid lobbyist positions, commentator positions, corporate vice presidential or other high paid positions... or money... or a sweet deal on a boat, or a house, or whatever, all for 2nd cousins of course. It's so corrupt and ingrained you can't possibly picture it until you've had an inside view (yes, I have.)

Today, you want a great job? Start your own business. Are you really great at programming? Write a great program. Are you really great at electronics? Create a great device. The internet of things is rising, your opportunity is knocking. Real AI needs done (oooo, hard.) Are you really great at mechanicals? Create a wonderful mechanical thing. These are the *only* doors that remain open to technical people in general. Easy? Hell no. But there it is. Otherwise, change career tracks while you still can. Finance. Lawyers (it's the dark side, all right, but it's also a license to print money, especially with the extremely deep collection of bad law we have now.) Nursing -- medicine looks good right now, but doctors... not so sure.

Otherwise, prepare to be lowballed, then fall (or be thrown) from the workforce segment you're qualified for as you age. Also, just as a PS, you'll note that above, the apologists consistently talk about who is learning what in school. The underlying message is clear: Once you're out of school and if you manage to improve yourself, you're not particularly hirable. They're not even looking at/for you.

That's just the way it is. Be proactive and possibly suffer, or just definitely suffer. Choose.

(Stupid touchpad...)

  - If this deviation is the result of burning fossil fuels, they are expected to run out in about 800 years - after which the temperature might crash toward the "Ice age already in progress" as the excess carbon is removed from the atomsphere by various processes, or simply be overwhelmed by the orbital mechanical function if it remains.

Does this scenario count as supporting or opposing anthropogenic global warming?

The percentages come from looking at all studies, papers, research, etc. and determining the number one one side or the /i?

When the administrators of research funding withhold future grants from scientists who publish papers questioning some aspect of the current global warming scenario, while giving additional funding to scientists who publish papers supporting it (or claiming some global-warming tie-in to whatever phenomenon they're examining), the count becomes skewed. This is political action, not science.

This happened in the '70s with research into medical effects of the popular "recreational" drugs - before such research was effectively banned. Among the resuts were a plethora of papers where the conclusions obviously didn't match the data presented and a two-decade delay in the discovery of medical effects and development of treatments. Only NOW are we finding evidence that PTSD might be aborted by adequate opate dosages in the weeks immediately following the injury, or that compounds in marijuana may be a specific treatment for it - as they are for some forms of epilepsy and may be for some cancers, late stage parkinsons, and so on.

The same happens when the editors of a journal and their selection of reviewers systematically approve and publish only research supporting the current paradigms, to the point that scientists with contrary resuts must find, or create, other journals or distribution channels (which can then be smeared as non-authoritaive, creations of the fossil fuel industry, right-wing politicans, or conspiracy nuts - and their articles LEFT OUT OF THE COUNT). Again, this is politics, not science.

Then there's the question of the methodology of the count itself. What is counted as "support for" versus "opposition to"? What does it count as a scientific paper? Were well-established research methods used? Was it reviewed? By whom? Was it done by scientists with no established position on the issue, by scientists supporting one side, by pollsters, by an advocacy group, by politicians? (Hell, was it done at all? Truth is the first casualty of politics, and fake polls are one of the commonest murder weapons.)

For an instance: How would you interpret the study behind the Scientific American article that seems to indicate:
  - Planetary temperatures have tightly tracked a function of three orbital-mechanics effects on the earth's orbit and axial orientation - up to the time of human domestication of fire.
  - That occurred as the function was just starting to inflect downward into the next ice age.
  - The deviation amounted to holding the temperature stable as the function slowly curved downward. (Perhaps a feedback effect - more fires needed for comfort in colder winters?)
  - This essentially flat temperature held up to the industrial revolution, when the temperature began to curve upward, overcoming the gradually steepening decline of the function.
  - If this deviation is the result of burning fossil fuels, they are expected to run out in about 800 years - after which the temperature might crash toward the "Ice age already in progress" as the excess carbon is removed from the atomsphere by various processes, or simply be overwhelmed by the orbita

This. It was stupid.

In twenty-four hours this will go from "illegal" to "high demand professional camera service" for promotions, events, etc.

Sorry, that's already illegal (according to the FAA).

Just a few weeks ago the FAA issued an interpretation of existing rules that declared illegal any commercial use of video from a drone.

Nonsense. Emoticons are pop culture detritus, not formal grammatical entities. But by all means, you let me know when they pop up in Strunk and White's.

I dont get it. The average depth of oil/gas wells here in Oklahoma is approx 5,000 ft. The typical depth of earthquakes here in Oklahoma is approx 16,000 ft. I'm not seeing a connection between the two.

First: You're looking at the wrong wells. What's the depth of the injection wells?

Second: The depth of the well doesn't particularly matter, as long as it connects the water to a fault system. The water spreads out through the fault, turning it into a hydraulic jack the size of a small eastern state or so. The faults aren't purely horizontal and the pressure (except for an added component at greater depth from the weight of the water above it) is the same everywhere.

So of course the earthquakes take place at the usual depths where the "last straw" rock finally gives way.

Irrelevant. You're still limited by supply rates and feed wire heating.

LOL. No, you most certainly are not. Supply for the vehicle is from local storage, charged slowly over time, ready for fast discharge when needed; inevitable because of the requirement to move the load to the times when the plants have available generating capacity. You can't just pull at peak times, think about the consequences. What you're missing is the dynamics of supply. As for feed wire heating, that's absurd. At these lengths, and these voltages, it's simply not a problem. Then there's the obvious: you can always make the plug bigger, or use more plugs if charge rate limiting was a problem, which of course it isn't anyway for a vehicle in the weight range of a car, pickup or SUV. Commercial trucking might present some minor design challenges, but not serious ones. They're more likely to be resolved with conventional gearboxes than untoward amounts of raw power anyway. Now, an oceangoing vessel power plant, that might be interesting. However, then we have long times in port, so perhaps not even then.

Irrelevant. What, you think cars have multi-megawatt inverters and motors?

I know that with multiple high energy motors, motor peak current demands can be very high, particularly in the case of high power motors that batteries aren't good for, and that semiconductors can be arranged for very high parallelism.

10 years-ish isn't good enough for you?

Oh heck no, not even close. We own three vehicles; all are older than ten years, and none show any signs of needing anything more serious than the windshield wipers and tires needing replacement from time to time. I have no intention of replacing them in the next ten years, either, unless EVs real;ly take off. Furthermore, if the ones I have now were electric and UC powered, I'd just move the UCs to the next vehicle. There are plenty of vehicles on the road that are far older than ten years; the need to replace a huge battery pack at ten years has a serious impact on TCO and resale value (yeah, it's nine years old, in a year you're going to need a $10k pack. I'll give you the car for $500, how's that?). I expect to be able to replace the batteries in my vehicles with UCs, in fact, well before electric cars become common. Heck, I could do it now in the pickup, if I wanted to take up some space in the bed. The electronics required are trivial. It's tempting, too... -40 is quite a challenge for batteries, we have to keep a heating pad going under them in order to keep them working decently. Montana's not a great environment for batteries at times. I'd have to rig a cover for it all, probably lose 6 inches of depth in the bed. Hmmm. :)

The life expectancy of supercapacitors is identical to aluminum electrolytic capacitors

As it happens, I'm a collector of old audio gear. When kept in service, electrolytics run for many decades (lots of mine are from the 1970's, so that's 45 years so far) and they hold up, too. It's only when they are unused for long periods of times that they don't. Recapping is pointless if the unit has been kept in service -- I've put this to the test many times. The idea that their lifespan in use is ten years is a complete myth. Furthermore, check the cycle rate: the charge/discharge rate for a UC in vehicular motive service is doing so (perhaps) once a day. They allow for millions of cycles before any performance change is encountered. So use in a vehicle, as long as they keep being used, is many times the ten year underestimate. I've also got a bank of fifty of the early Maxwell UCs here in my radio room, they're well over fifteen years old and they're still just fine, every one of them. Because I *use* them. So I'm not buying any claims that they're much different than electrolytics (although I would expect that, given the unit cost, they'd be made much more carefully.)

Overheating of the supercapacitor can occur from continuous overcurrent or overvoltage charging.

Yes, yes, of course you can break them if you misuse them, but the relevant point you are ducking here is that an UC won't overcharge if a continuous supply is applied to them that is under their rated voltage. This simplifies charging system design enormously, and passes on zero aging and wear effects to the UC. Look at the various high power battery technologies and compare.

Show me a single type of ultracap which can be recycled at all.

Show me one in continuous, low cycle rate use that needs to be. Look on EBay. Search for them. Look at all the used ones pulled from equipment. Why do you think that is? It's because they're still perfectly good, regardless of what happened to the equipment they were installed in. Look in particular at the exact units offered for sale -- a very large number are well over ten years old. All of mine are; my initial curiosity resulted in a buying spree, and that eventually turned into the DC supply for my radio station, which requires about a kilowatt and a half when fully dialed up. I get a solid hour of runtime there, more without the linear running. Not a battery in sight. That's been working flawlessly since it was put into service just before 2000. I designed and built all the electronics (required to keep a steady 12v output as they discharge), there was nothing that had to be done that would raise any competent EE's eyebrows. UC configuration is fused parallel.

In short, please stop with the standard BS mythology of what ultracapacitors are, because it's just not in accordance with reality.

Well, you can say anything you want, but I don't think you've demonstrated any of this, and further, you're rather conveniently ignoring the current research, which (of course) is largely targeted directly at this application. But time will tell.

1 1/2 orders of magnitude worse volumetric energy density and 1 1/2 orders of magnitude worse gravimetric energy density

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. Are you actually ignorant of the rate of technological disruptions we've seen pop up in tech after tech? This area will require one. Which is exactly what I was telling you above, so it's kind of pointless to tell me back, don't you think? I think it likely there will be one -- again, look at the current lab work. If not, well then there you go. Again, time will tell. Your opinion, or mine, won't.