No, "critical mass" is defined as the amount that can create sufficient runaway escalation of the fission rate by capturing the energetic byproducts of fission to stimulate more fission in a positive feedback loop.

I'll tell you what: I'll give you 1 gram of the radioactive isotope of your choice, if you can stop its fission. You can't. You can only moderate its rate somewhat. Clearly it's self-sustaining on every level down to the individual atom

RTFA, which was a study done in Radon, and cited confirming studies with other isotopes.

That said, I personally think it is AT LEAST as likely that both solar processes and terrestrial decay rates are being influenced by some outside factor. This is supported by other decay rate correlations with e.g. the Earth position in it orbit relative to the galactic center.

Under this years new "first to file" patent reform, prior publication, scientific or otherwise is not enough to void a patent, since the standard is explicitly NO LONGER "first to invent", no such claim need be made.

One hopes the courts act sensibly and close this loophole, but given the history of the matter (owners of IP-abusing patents settle or fold if they suspect a case will be ruled against hem, rather than risk a sensible precedent that would weaken their other IP holdings -- or deep-pockets third parties offer them cash behind th scenes to fold) I suspect that the first few lower court precedents to go all the way to a published decision will almost necessarily be silly ones (earnest plaintiffs can't afford to drop their cases even if they might lose) that will have to be reversed (perhaps in an unrelated future case) by higher courts or even the USSC.

The above applies only to the US, of course, but MOST matters of law are jurisdiction dependent

A Falcon 9 can lose not just one but two of its engines *after* launch and still complete its mission.

It's just not going to take off when it spots a problem when it's still on the ground. The Saturn V couldn't spot such a problem, much less abort half-a-second before lift-off. It would have been past the point of no return

How is that 10%?

Nukes are measured in kilo-or mega TONS, 1 ton = 1000kg, so 1 kt = 1,000,000 kg not 1000kg.

Yes, I know the original article screwed up on this point. I wrote that off as a typo, but let's not extend the error here, where future junior-high geeks will find it via search engine and contaminate their intuitions

It was ironic back *in* 1984.

I was an Apple developer pre-Mac, and THAT is when it began looking like Big Brother. The Apple II/III had been open (not quite as open as today's open source, but the principles hadn't yet been firmed up) but everything Mac, hardware and software was locked down. Apple forbade early Mac owners from using ANY hard disk for 18-24 months until they developed their own. Even an external HDD voided the warranty which you *needed* because Mac's expensive non-user-replaceable power supplies blew out every 6 mos, even without the load of an HDD

I'd think pole-strung Fiber would need steel strands for structural strength in high winds and other potent weather -- underground fiber has less need of structural strength.

The steel strands, however, happen to be conductors which need to follow proper isolation procedures.

After a year of increasing interest, I'll be buying a reader or tablet this week. I almost pulled the trigger 3x this weekend, but each time found a better deal on a better model -- though ultimately, *any* of the the three, in hand by the end of next week, will be adequate

I was excited to read about this release. It felt like a serendipitous alignment until I realized that I wouldn't have actual possession of ANY file, just a 'service' feeding me a page at a time -- and Google is quite clear that it logs each page I read and when (it touts this as a feature, saying they record it so I can pick up on the same page of each of my ebooks on any other device).

Do I want to be cut off from all my eBooks in wifi or wireless outage? No. That's when I'll want a book or manual most --- during an outage, in a plane, in the woods, in a lab or shielded room... Do I want anyone monitoring and recording exactly what pages I read or re-read and how often, tech or fiction? Nope.

I'm amazed /.ers take this so lightly

So much for serendipitous fortune. This reader is off my list, until it's hacked to keep Google OUT unless invited

Discovered? This behavior was discussed in great depth in my sophomore cell bio text 30 years ago.

That course inspired me to get a degree in molecular bio, and I've posted about this behavior often, here and elsewhere. It's remarkable and inspiring in many ways, but any reference to farming -- or sudden surprise that a microbial organism is capable of doing anything but grazing to death is ... sad and ill-informed

I found the LTC3108 (or the LTC3801-1 variant) best suited most of my projects, but the LTC3588/LTC3588-1 is better for capturing energy from ambient sound or vibration via a piezoelectric transducer. (Their evaluation kit, which includes all the parts and a selected PZT, is a bit pricey for a hobbyist, so just get some free sample ICs and roll your own)

Their online specs, designs and datasheets provide everything you need to build your own test rig. These chips even come with built-in support for auxiliary capacitor/ultracap storage, including bucking/boosting the ultracap voltage to the programmed output voltage, which I'd expected to have to implement externally. It's all there in one cheap package with a minimal of external components.

Why must a dictionary be electronic? A paper dictionary eliminate the wireless issue.

Why is an unfamiliar calculator such an issue? Are tests really written in a way that requires maximal calculator throughput? If so, doesn't that penalize students who don't work hard at maximizing their calculator speed during their less-strictly time-constrained homework problems? If you tell them they can only use a calculator (which you provide, and make available for prior inspection) with add/sub, mult/div, roots/powers, logs/exps and standard trig/inv-trig functions and algebraic entry (i.e. not RPG or stack based) then they have all the info they need.

I encourage accommodations, but inevitably, at some point, one is merely drawing a line between the failed and the all-but-failed (even if "failure" is failure to reach the threshold for an A). No reasonable-length college exam can discriminating to 1% accuracy consistently. Period. Our best studied, and slowly evolved multiple choice exams with sample sizes in the millions don't pretend to 1% accuracy/precision (and measurably fail to achieve it)

Will anyone will ever accept the "unfamiliar calculator" defense for a bridge failure? If a bridge, probe or key presentation failed due to picayune calculation/computer issues, it's always been unacceptable, not excusable

You want an A or a Pass? Show that you deserve one, not that under other circumstances you may have squeaked by

Just so you know, you can build a circulator and precision controller for quite a bit less than the lab equivalent. A couple of years ago, I built exact that kind of sous vide immersion cooking unit for under $30, plus $70 for two controllers, because I was interested in comparing a factory-made PID controller and J-type thermocouple (~$40 incl. S/H on eBay) with a microcontroller and thermistors (~$30). Result: either alone would've done the job just fine.

Actually, since I do electronics/hardware tinkering as a hobby, the entire experiment only cost ~$50 (most of that being the commercially manufactured PID controller), because I already had almost all the parts in my junkbox. If I hadn't *specifically* wanted to compare the PID controller+thermocouple, it would have cost me $20 out-of-pocket. The [repurposeable] controllers I built, and lessons I learned, were well worth the added expense

I like the forms feature. I most particularly use it [on comuters under my physical control] to keep track of my login names on sites I may not visit frequently. I don't want to clear my form history to clear my search history, as they advise and have good reason to believe it would help much if I did. Perhaps the Waltham MA Google center is running some sort of experimental "improvement", but they seem to track more than cookies and browser history

Though I have loved Google for over a decade, I dislike Personalized Search strongly. I've always minimized logins, and clear cookies frequently, but it has been increasingly skewing my Google results for at lest a year.

I know how to craft a search, so why not give me the results I request without adding your proprietary invisible weighting? Or let me set the weighting: I'd been doing that on a wide variety of search engines for years before the Web or Google existed, before Google's search experts (definitely smarter than I) had graduated college, but instead of increasing my options, they've silently decreased/disabled many search refinement options

I can name one good reason, BTW: ease -- not my ease, but their computational load through pre-indexing, etc.

At one time, I used "relatively virgin computers" (e.g. one I normally use for analog data acquisition/analysis) to get impartial results, but in the past year, even fresh OS installs haven't gotten me the same results I get when I travel. I strongly suspect Google is keying their indexes by IP, but changing my Google links to pass through a public proxy may only introduce a different bias, more diffuse, but still not geared to my requests!

Here's a novel idea: search for what I ask for, and give me the options that will help me narrow my search. This sort of "I know better than you" helpfulness is one of the fastest ways to turn me off a system.

IMHO, a lot of the "what-ifs" people are positing have already begun to happen. For example, I run a modest website on the side, under 1.5 million posts, a tiny peripheral mote in the Dust storm of the Internet -- but whether I am logged in or not, I often get results from my own site on my first page of results, even when the topic is less than 24 hours old, is a rare/unique topic on that site; and *is* covered widely by many other sites, larger than my own. That may tickle some webmaster egos, but it's terrible behavior, and I can't shut it off, even with a fresh install.

I'm especially sick of getting the same already-read results on the first page, then finding the answer I wanted on a search from a hotel, cafe -- or a colleague's workplace. (Do I seem as great a fool to them as they sometimes seem to me, just because Google presents information prominently to one, but not the other?

I ask myself this:

1) What fraction of Google's global Android paid-apps revenue could Optus/AU represent?
2) What fraction of Google's global Android paid-apps revenue could be lost if a payoff precedent is set?
3) What fraction of Android users will sit salivating in the window, deprived of the full benefit of their hardware, just to remain Optus customers, while their friends on other ISPs are not restrained?
4) What right does an access provider have to block legal access by their customers. By what argument are their customers *not* being deprived of they kind of access for which they are paying? This is as much a question of user perception as local legal technicalities, but it sounds like Optus has been thinking in terms of the latter.

I don't know what "average user" you mean. You may be right, but a properly configured fast 250 MB flash drive at 4-8x the $/GB of HD would be no joke in many *nix systems today, compared with the choices of snails-pace HDD or pricey volatile RAM. I put a small flash in a multidomain host server I run, Even if it is only used for nonvolatile cache or certain OS elements, it offers performance benefits to become a valuable adjunct to current systems. Check the speed of your BIOS chip lately? Contemplate upgrading its size? I didn't think so.

I also found it odd that people are projecting trends in Windows to 2020. The last I heard, MS itself wasn't even predicting ANY new "Windows" ca 2020. If that sounds outlandish, you have some back reading to do. Proprietary MacOS went away 5-7 years ago. OSX is a *nix kernel. For all its benefits and pitfalls, continued independent development of a completely proprietary Windows OS won't be viable 15 years after all its competition no longer has that solo burden, especially when MS apps/support, not MS OS has been their big profit center for a long time

Don't take my word for it. Read MS's press releases on the subject over the past year or so. They say there *may* be an proprietary Windows 8, but not a 9. That's one reason they're moving to time-based licenses. Though I love using old hardware for specialty applications, Windows XP's perceived benefits will mean nothing to anyone but hobbyists and extreme geeks 19 years of processor evolution after XP's release in 2001. I struggle to find any use at all for my once-state-of-the-art 1990 486 machines, and frankly, that's an exercise in respect, not practicality, even for a hobbyist geek like me.

I've been here before: I still own Apple II computers, ostensibly to retrieve data from the hundreds of floppies of my childhood, but realistically, any data I didn't port long ago is gone forever. The early CPU chips, like the 8008/6502 were meant as controllers, when a $20 Arduino would've been a mainframe. If you projected hardware forward from the Apple's 1978 48K (maximum) hard-soldered system RAM and floppies/cassettes to the HDD-based systems of 1988 you'd simply be wrong. I say that as someone who still runs 1999 PCs as specialty controllers