Yes,
      we have something here as exciting as cold fusion or polywater. it seems to violate newtons second law so people are looking for the escape clause. If it's real it's a huge deal because it means the fundamental problem of space travel--- bringing your propellant--- is permanently solved modulo the nitty gritty of making it more efficient.

On the otherhand, like polywater and cold fusion it's likely a reproducible experimental error that's not been identified yet. 3 groups have independently observed it so far.

My guess: it's just ions sputtered off the walls and accelerated or it's attraction towards an induced dipole in the room, neither of which would be exciting.

What's wrong with the plain old internet that we need this? I'm thinking that the notion here is that by making money by limiting access that they can give people free internet. AOL.com sort of started with the notion of monetizing a walled garden to offer cheaper internet access and it did spread to eventually giving access to the whole internet. But you could also describe indentured servitude in a similar rosie way of giving people opportunities.

Chrome is truly awful at opening multiple tabs at once on my mac. unbelievably slow loading times compared to Safari. And when a page is loading in one tab, other tabs don't continue to update swiftly. I find this really a weirds because chrome uses a separate process for each tab so one would think they would not step on each other. My guess, wild, is that tabs are contending for some resource like network or GPU and actually slowing each other down. In general I much prefer safari or firefox, but I use chrome because I also own a chromebook and I can't run safari on that. Basically, google is doing the same thing microsoft did to make IE dominant by not allowing other browsers on their platform.

An example of what? That patent is legal because of bad patent law. That's not the USPTO that's congress.

Why the hell should companies, including tax payers (costs of running courts & all) have to pay for the USPTO's fuckups?

There are two different issues here.

For the USPTO to vet patents properly would require a substantially higher cost per patent. The tax payers through their elected representative did not allow for patent fees to go high enough to cover that cost nor subsidies to cover that cost. They are the most responsible party for the policies.

As for companies. Companies don't have to pay for the USPTO. What they do have is a situation where their patents are registered but unvetted. They have to understand what they bought. They didn't buy much more than a filing.

Either the USPTO didn't do their job right (incompetence gets you fired in the real world, but not if you're a bureaucrat apparently)

In the "real world" offering a lower quality product at a much better price is applauded. It doesn't get you fired it makes you rich.

#1 Richest man Bill Gates got their for cutting the cost of desktop software.
#2 Warren Buffet got their for cutting the cost of running insurance companies
#3 Larry Ellison got their for reducing administrative expenses

etc...

What does often get people fired in the real world is blaming others rather than owning your mistakes. If people want a better patent system where the USPTO vets patents rather than registers them, they should pay for that system and stop pretend the reason they aren't getting such a system for 95% off is because patent examiners are being lazy.

I am wondering if this is a case where authors should be omitted in the submissions, and instead have the review based on content and quality of citations? Beyond the gender aspect, it would also ensure that there is no preferential treatment given to a 'buddy' or someone with a certain reputation.

My guess is it's the same sort of testing magic the latest cold fusion dude in italy is peddling.

You recycle them. They contain some lithium, a transition metal like cobalt or equivalent, and various anions (PF6, BF4, BPh4) that make up the electrolyte.

You can separate out and recover all of the materials you used to make the battery and make another one.

Lithium ion batteries also don't contain rare earth metals.

There wasn't enough fuel to sustain orbit. The team responsible for this went to heroic lengths to keep it in orbit --- including at one point venting the spacecraft's helium to give it a final boost. This was all done so the probe could keep sending back data, which it did happily. In the end we got approximately four times the expected data we wanted from the probe.

Not bad for government contractors.

I heard it doesn't work through bandaids either.

from apple's website:

https://support.apple.com/en-u...

Fake Steve Jobs would say we don't want those tattooed dregs sporting our watch anyhow. But the article seems like rubbish. There's no way a tatoo is going to impact a tap sensation. And if it does it's your fault anyhow for numbing your skin.

Except that he is a creationist. He is claiming God created and guides evolution. Why would you say that he's not a creationist? He clearly states that our origins and evolution itself REQUIRE a divine creator. Is it because he isn't insisting on the world being 6000 years old? Was that the only flaw in the creationist theory? The original poster I replied to tried to compare skeptic beliefs to religious beliefs, but the guy he's supporting clearly isn't all that strong of a "grounded in science" facts guy, is he?

First, to criticize the computer marking of exams one has understand the human process. In the human process readers are trained to use a rubric to award points for the presence of certain attributes. On objective subjects like maths and science, the readers will generally train until everyone gets the same score for the same work. On less objective tests, some variation is tolerated. For instance on my GRE essay, I receive two different scores that were averaged. It was the same essay, and from an assessment point of view the variation in grade is purely attributed to the personal preference of the reader.

Therefore the only task of those who write software to grade essays is that the variation of the machine is no worse that the variations of the humans. There is some success in this. Edx has a module that will grade essays. As far as I know the value in this is quicker and more uniform feedback for practice essays. Of course humanities majors, who have generally have minimal understanding of advanced technology, hate it. This, of course, includes journalists.

This is not to say that computer graded essays are going to be as good of an assessment as human graded essays. However, it may be good enough, and better than other objective measures, such as fill in the bubble tests. In fact anything that minimizes the cost of open ended free response assessment is going to benefit anyone. Securing multiple guess test is very expensive, and the value of them are highly questionable. They tend to overestimate the value of student how have vague passive knowledge, and underestimate the value of those who have an ability to actively apply knowledge.

But what's really interesting to me is the camera. I'm really interested in seeing that put through its paces.

Okay, I get itthe pope is right, because he's pitching in his support for climate changedespite the fact that he's a creationist, so anyone defending him gets modded up, and anyone pointing out that he's more about belief than he is about science gets modded downso let's throw you SJW's a curve ball then. The pope is against gay marriage: http://www.breitbart.com/natio... So is he right or wrong on this one?