I think a practical goal would be to find ways for the US government to shift its military-industrial-complex spending away from weapons and war machines and encourage those companies to develop and sell peacetime technologies that will allow them to keep their technological edge. For example, instead of making fighter planes Lockheed could make rockets and space shuttles. Kind of the opposite of car companies being re-purposed to build tanks in WW2.

I just think that the military industrial complex has too much lobbying power to let itself get cut off from government funding. Some might also argue that we need to maintain the capacity to build weapons in case we ever need them in the future. I think it would be great if we could fund companies that take the sharpest minds and put them to work solving challenging problems for the benefit of mankind. And if war does break out we can take the minds off those problems and put them back to work figuring out the highest-tech way to blow people up.

From your linked source, in Bush's last 12 months in office the unemployment rate went from 5.00 to 7.4%. In Obama's first 12 months in office it went from 7.7 to 9.7%. Arguably this shows Obama inheriting a shrinking economy from Bush, but by no means accelerating the decline. I don't know what the "adding jobs" language means but I would argue Obama's term has seen better results (or less-bad results) than Bush's, which began in a boom and ended in a recession.

Use it to charge 30 Palm Pre's simultaneously. Or vice versa, buy 30 touchstone chargers and use them to cook a nice meal for that special lady in your life.

I'm interested to see how Valve's trademarking of "Dota" ends up impacting Blizzard's SC2 DotA mod. Hopefully Valve's trademark will only cover the spelling with the lower-case 'a'; I would hate to see it causing the mod community to be locked out of using the proper name for it.

Fucking laws, how do they WORK?

The cosmic microwave background is everywhere, at all frequencies. Any signal you send has to be stronger than this. But wait, if you use spread spectrum signals, you can actually receive a signal with a power spectral density that's lower than this noise floor! So there could be alien signals lurking below the CMB, but we have no chance of finding them without guessing their code. And as the codes get more complex and more efficient, they become more impossible to guess.

(This is not my field, but) I think a good way to state it is that if you are sending a data stream that has any order or predictability to it, you are not using your communication resources most efficiently. Surely the aliens wouldn't have truly optimal efficiency, but as they get smarter they will make it harder and harder for us to find them. (Ha. Maybe the efficiency is a happy side-effect.)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise. I remembered hearing this in school so I searched and found this paper.

As I understand SETI has always been searching for narrowband signals in the past. But our technology is moving toward spread spectrum signals for more efficient use of bandwidth, making our transmissions appear more like noise to anyone who doesn't know the encoding scheme. Aliens could be doing/have done the same. So good luck, scientists!

Power lines are 60 Hz AC here in the US, so i imagine your brain (and robins' brains) would just see the average of the magnetic field, which would be zero. I think you're stuck to just seeing the DC magnetic fields.

So the lost signal takes the path Antenna->Human Body->Ground. To model this effect for (ESD evaluation) the test is to touch the contact to a 1.5 kohm resistor in series with a 100pf capacitor to ground. (From http://www.esda.org/documents/FundamentalsPart5.pdf)

This 100pf capacitance is quite a low impedance at 1900 MHz (x=1/2piFC), just -j 0.838 ohms. To increase this impedance, note that capacitors in series decrease the overall capacitance (which increases impedance). So you can create such a capacitor by adding dielectric (any insulator) between the antenna and the hand. The thicker this insulator is the lower the added series capacitance. And the lower the added capacitance, the greater the impedance and the less overall coupling of signal to the human body. The calculation of exactly how much capacitance is created by a layer of clear coat between the metal antenna and the hand is, um, left to the reader.

Also, I believe the antenna is split to two sides because each antenna fulfills a different function in a different RF band. One is 3G and one is wifi. Broadband antennas are difficult, but not impossible to make, so I think this is a case of the keep-it-simple-stupid approach.

OK, and would that or would that not be solved by painting over the antenna to add a decent amount of resistance between it and God-knows-what?

Am I right to think that this problem could have been avoided just by adding a layer of black paint over the antenna? Of course, the capacitive coupling of your hand to the antenna would still have an effect as it does in many RF devices, but a thin layer of such insulator would prevent the hand from altering the effective length of the antenna. I do think Apple deserve credit for finding a place in the phone to include an antenna that I presume to be much bigger than your standard patch antenna. I just wonder if this is a case of form coming before function, with someone making the decision to go with the shiny metal look to appeal to the eye.

Assuming the anonymous coward is not a female? Sexist.

This book is by a friend of a friend; I think it tackles a lot of the issues brought up in this thread: Losing Our Cool

And the installer is blind and thus doesn't realize it's a mirror in which you can see the keypad. (I dunno, maybe he thinks it's a disco ball. Analogies are hard.)