Factories don't work on internet time. Once a large expensive piece of industrial equipment is installed it's there for a loooong time. I used to work on upgrading some software for four machines that were 15 years old at the time. Two new machines were ordered (with a price tag of around 4M) and they wanted the control software to be compatible with the old machines. That was about a decade ago. The plan was not to upgrade until old control computers start failing. As far as I know they are still working.

Microsoft's idea seems much like DoubleRecall, except there's a twist where they hope they can filter bad responses well enough to get useful statistics from survey responses. DoubleRecall just makes you retype advertiser's words.

Or maybe not, according to wikipedia they were doing something 20+ years ago:

First working scramjet "GLL Holod" in world flies on 28 November 1991 reaching speed mach 5.8. However, the collapse of Soviet Union stopped the funding of the project.

After NASA's NASP program was cut, American scientists began to look at adopting available Russian technology as a less expensive alternative to developing hypersonic flight. On November 17, 1992, Russian scientists with some additional French support successfully launched a scramjet engine "Holod" in Kazakhstan6. From 1994 to 1998 NASA worked with the Russian Central Institute of Aviation Motors (CIAM) to test a dual-mode scramjet engine and transfer technology and experience to the West. Four tests took place, reaching Mach numbers of 5.5, 5.35, 5.8, and 6.5. The final test took place aboard a modified SA-5 surface to air missile launched from the Sary Shagan test range in the Republic of Kazakhstan on 12 February 1998. According to CIAM telemetry data, first ignition of the scramjet was unsuccessful, but after 10 seconds the engine was started and the experimental system flew 77s with good performance, up until the planned SA-5 missile self-destruction (according to NASA, no net thrust was achieved).

Some sources in the Russian military have said that a hypersonic (10-15M) maneuverable ICBM warhead was tested.

I used to work on license plate recognition about a decade ago. Typically there are problems with illumination, motion and noise. So what the systems try to do is boost illumination (often by hidden IR lights) and decrease motion related blur by taking multiple shots and integrating images and/or filtering the results. All this algorithms have some built in assumptions about the expected area of interest, scale and most likely motion. Suppose you detect license plate at some position and scale in frame N. To boost the probability of being correct, you want to check if you can find the same plate number in frame N+1 and possibly N+2. Detection is all about probability. There are some thresholds built in that on one side maximize the probability of license plate detection and on the other side minimize pollution of the database with bad results. So in short, if your license plate is dirty and your trajectory is not what the system expects (changing lanes and velocity) it's more likely the system will not store the result. If you know the specifics of the particular system, you may beat it easily, like if the system first looks for the plate frame, you can mask or offset the frame, or if you know about the exact illumination filtering procedure you may add some conflicting structured illumination.

Radiation readings were reported by the same company that took a year to finally admit triple meltdown, you can trust them if you want.
Reactor blowing up does not necessarily mean a huge nuclear explosion. Going only a few percent overcritical for a fraction of a second can build up enough pressure to blow up. There's this educational video from a US experimental reactor showing what I'm talking about.

According to NRC transcripts there were fires in several fuel pools which were exposed to the atmosphere (the roofs were blown away by explosions). Many people believe the hydrogen was not enough to cause the mess at #3 so until the Japanese show the lid of #3 reactor an impartial observer cannot exclude the possibility of reactor itself blowing sky high.

I listened to a talk by someone doing materials research for the first wall. Apparently disruption of the plasma is not the big problem, what they are doing is optimizing the whole process of producing, running, cleaning and recycling the first wall tiles. They are testing different materials by bombarding them with neutrons, then they are trying to separate the nasty stuff and recycle what's useful.

The resolution is doable. There's a tradeoff between speed and noise. What you can do is take many pictures, align them and take a sum to get rid of some noise. If my memory serves me the noise will go down with the square root of the number of pictures. Or just pump up the light in say infrared spectrum, if you have 10 times illumination you can cut the exposition time to 1/10 and get about the same quality.

Note that the claimed total only includes iodine-131 and cesium-137, while they forget about radioactive noble gases and other isotopes. Besides, there are no public images where one could clearly see the cap of reactor 3. If reactor 3 or it's fuel pool has thrown significant amounts of plutonium in the air, the situation is much more dramatic than admitted.

Well in this particular case it was the Nazi government that was farsighted. The allies found giant presses when they occupied Germany at the end of WW2. So Germans had such presses running during WW2, and USA started heavy press program in 1950.

My telco offers IPTV box with a load of features but a really lousy interface. There's also a tablet app available that will show most of the channels but the interface is basically select one channel from a list and watch it. With so many people having tablets around it makes so much sense to integrate with TVs and make a tablet somewhat like a secondary screen and a much better remote. Apple has everything in place to make such a TV and a lot of space to innovate. Ipads and Iphones can become personal touch interfaces for the apps running on TV. I can think of dozens of functions that can be made easier and more intuitive with such a setup. Plus they can afford to use a higher-powered CPU/GPU in the TV making it more suitable for console-like software.

Even if there is an antisocial factor and the parents are to blame, it's not the kids fault and there are ways to help them without drugs.

It just so happens that I'm aware of a case of autism. My friend's kid was kept at home for the first 5 years with essentially no contact to any kids or any people outside the closer family circle. Sure enough she was diagnosed with a kind of autistic disorder in the kindergarten. They sought professional help and got it. If you look at the methods involved you will find there are surprisingly many things that you need to do counterintuitively with these children. Even if you know something about psychology you will be surprised at what works (talking to the animals...). Anyways, there were no drugs involved, the parents got instructed how to handle the kid in certain situations, the school teachers got a few instructions (and had to do some special handling during the first day of school) and in a few years the kid got to normal.

Imagine a low frequency high amplitude sine wave added to a lower amplitude high frequency sine wave. There you have a reason to sample linearly if you want to preserve high frequency fidelity. Of course, you can then store the samples using a delta/logarithmic scheme like any ADPCM variant that have been used in wavetable synthesizers since like forever. However, any audio mixing/transcoding math involved will work best with raw linear data. So it makes sense to keep audio data linear when you process it and convert to something space saving only when you are storing or streaming.

Proponents of low-energy nuclear reaction research seem to believe Widom-Larsen Theory describes what might be going on in some of the so called "cold fusion" test devices like the one claimed by Rossi.

It shouldn't be too difficult to check the isotopes going in and out, and measure radiation (gamma, neutrons...) with sufficient accuracy to determine if there was any nuclear reaction and compute whether the result is above statistical noise. But I can't find any papers doing rigorous testing.

There is a huge opportunity for Microsoft to provide a tablet that could act either as an independent iPad like item or a thin-client (similar to the Wii U controller) that could act as an extension or detachable component of Xbox360 and Win8 applications.

Given the track record with previous Microsoft tablet efforts (I was playing with their transmeta containing tablet a long time ago) I'd say the problem is the software. The hardware is all there.