In competitive markets what the market will bear is driven by the cost to provide the product. This is true even if you are required by law to by the product. The auto insurance market is very competitive ("15 minutes will save you...")

You can use high powered lasers in short pulses to compress and heat a fuel pellet to achieve fusion. A particular approach called fast ignition requires a petawatt pulse. Given that the laser is named LFEX for "Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments", it is a good bet this is what it is for.

(My expertise in this is limited to having had an inkling which Wikipedia article to look in for the answer. Further input from real experts is welcome.)

The cooler thing would be if you have enough high speed printing capacity that you could manufacture and assemble a 1000 drone swarm in a very short period of time and overwhelm an adversaries defenses without requiring a ship big enough to carry a 1000 completed drones. And then another one, and another one. You would need a tanker full of plastic and a freighter full of batteries, electronics and propellers.

âoeKill decisionâ baby.

Not just a projected image, but anything it illuminates (so long as there is little other illumination to mess up the effect.)

The only things holding back people to Windows, I thought - IE and VB style client server apps. There are still ao many websites, specially banking and so-called inhouse web apps that rely on ActiveX and Craptive things on the Windows Ecosystem. So with Edge, the intrwebs will be forced to support a standards-compliant browser on the Windows desktop. Very good.

Once that is complete, the only reason for Windows on the desktop will be gone, and browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera - which are all standards-compliant, more so than IE at any rate; will become first class citizens again. And there will be nothing to hold back Linux in the Enterprises which have moved on from VB crap.

Good to hear.

If you've ever played with a normal monochrome laser in a dark room, you'll have seen how laser illumination makes things look speckly. Illuminating with this "white" laser will make superimposed speckly in three colours, with the locations of the speckles not coinciding, so it would be iridescent speckly.

Ohm's law: V=IR => I = V/R
Power dissipated in a resister: P=VI
Substituting for I from Ohm's law: P=V^2/R
So for a fixed voltage, you dissipate more energy with a low resistance. This would be what you're remembering from electronics. For example if you attempt to short high tension power lines with a dry kite string, the effect will be unimpressive. On the other hand if you short them with a solid copper bar, expect to be rained with molten copper.

However it is not the case that you're going to take a circuit and replace a Si device with a GaN device and leave everything else (including the voltage) unchanged. You design your circuit to provide voltages appropriate to the components it contains. If you need a certain current to make a device work, and can adjust the voltage to provide that current, then instead you get P=I^2R, and lowering R lowers the power dissipation.

What really keeps police busy is high school chemistry lessons. You know the one where you dissolve crystals in water, put in some electrodes and run a current through? That will get you charged with assault and battery.

I would mostly agree with parent. Soylent is fine execpt the community isnt big enough so the comments are barely there or worth reading, the name is kind of bad and the stories are routinely just old enough to be yesterdays news on Slashdot or Hacker news.

Their Twitter feed, which is where I get my news feeds, also puts these really annoying lame "from the deptâ attempts at humor in the tweets instead of just the title of the story and the link:

Razer Acquires Ouya Software Assets, Ditches Hardware from the kicked-down dept

They will even thorten the title to make room for the utterly stupid âoefrom theâ.

The best solution to replace Slashdot would probably be if Hacker news grafted the classic Slashdot look, commenting and moderation system on to their generally good stories and great community.

There is a high probably no Sunday talk show would have let him speak once they found out what he was going to say. They are all owned by giant media conglomerates you know. They wouldnt risk the wrath of the Federal government. Pretty sure Snowden went to Greenwald because he was one of the few journalists with the balls to do the story. The Guardian was hammered by the UK government for running it.

Remember when the CEO of Qwest defied the NSA plan to tap all data and phones lines after 9/11. The Federal government pulled all their contracts from Qwest, hammered their stock and then put him in prison for a phony securities rap. Qwest was a rare corporate hero among telecoms, long since swallowed up by CenturyLink who are just as bad as all the rest.

It will take a demonstration satellite accelerating through space before the physics community goes into party mode. Until you're in free fall and vacuum, there is too much scope for systematic errors to accept a result of this level of importance.

Looking at this another way:

When LHC were looking for the Higgs boson - a particle entirely expected by modern physics - they required a five sigma signal before they were satisfied that they had really found something.

This is a result not only entirely unexpected, but contradictory to almost all known physics. A two sigma (NASA) and three sigma (Germany) signal is not remotely enough to be convincing. At best it is convincing enough for someone to spend the money to further and better test it.

People are so sceptical of this one because if true the implications are universe-shaking. It would completely overturn not just modern physics but all of physics since Newton. The claim is that the device violates conservation of momentum. Then via Noether's theorem this implies that the laws of physics are not independent of location in space. (Alternatively, the device is creating a beam of hard to detect particles via some completely unknown but low energy mechanism.)

Also, the device was first designed using a provably incorrect analysis - an analysis using standard physics determined that the device would produce thrust without reaction mass, violating conservation of momentum. As all the standard physics used in the analysis conserves momentum, the analysis must be incorrect. If someone adds up many even numbers and comes up with an odd total, we know they have made a mistake, even without examining their calculations to find out where. This case is exactly analogous. So if this device really does violate momentum conservation, it is a complete and utter fluke, and not by design.

the most obvious solution is to uninstall third party driver management and hand it all over to Windows Update to avoid clashes.

This is neither obvious nor desirable, never a solution. Windows is an OS written by Microsoft. Generally, Microsoft makes no hardware, yet, the OS runs on hardware.

So the obvious solution is for MS to publish and adhere to standards for device drivers interfacing and integrating with the OS, and keep shut. Otherwise, Microsoft should be the sole mfr. of all hardware that is supported by and on Windows.

H/w vendors aim to make money by making their products superior - faster, better resolution / frame rate / quality etc. So they tend to keep their innovations private. If MS demands all h/w mfrs to send their code to Seattle and get it certified for every version and release, the vendors would be afraid of backstabbing, and code, architecture, design reaching their competitors.

So only obvious way is to release a standards compliance OS and keep shut. Or else, like Linux, MS can open source their OS and allow the distribution makers to bundle the OS, h/w, appln s/w, printer drivers and updates to all of them. Or else MS must put up and shut up while ambitious companies like NVidia, Samsung etc. try to innovate..

Question: Who owns the device drivers for hardware?

In the Linux world, the h/w vendor publishes specs, or conforms to standards, so the kernel guys write drivers and merge it. The distributors like RedHat keep sending updated drivers.

In the Windows World, Microsoft seems to have deep distrust of h/w vendors, despite not making any hardware by themselves. MS does not enjoy any h/w vendor having control of the OS internals, but such control is essential for the h/w to work.

If MS published interface or device driver standards, and adhered to them, then again the device mfrs wouldn't have issues. But MS keeps changing WDDM, DirectX and other interfaces, very often and without prior notice to h/w guys.

Atleast in Linux, if somebody wanted to use a display h/w with just some poor standard such as VESA without any fancy acceleration stuff, they can get it without instability and proprietary shims and stuff. Windows users are doomed by design.