"I see your prohibition is against 'liquids'. Can I carry ice onboard?"

The agent didn't know. Asked his supervisor; she didn't know

That may have befuddled a particular agent, but it shouldn't have.
The TSA website lists a clear policy on frozen items

Frozen liquid items are allowed through the checkpoint as long as they are frozen solid when presented for screening. If frozen liquid items are partially melted, slushy, or have any liquid at the bottom of the container, they must meet 3-1-1 liquids requirements.

So those looking for surefire ways to befuddle TSA agents (for fun and amusement?) should probably look elsewhere.

This is a well known covert channel that has been covered in many security engineering books. One of the design principles for military computer networks is to keep the bandwidth of such a channel below 1 bit per second, although for very sensitive data it may need to be even lower.

Of course that type of leakage rate limiting defense can lose its effectiveness when dealing with encrypted data. If the encrypted data is output and can be recorded then all the bad guys need to sneak out is the corresponding key which is tiny in comparison.

At the rate you mentioned it only take about a minute to covert channel out the largest AES encryption key (256 bit). But that key might have been used to encrypt all the traffic sent in the last day (which you could've already intercepted and copied).

Even the largest common RSA key size (4096 bit) would only take a bit over an hour to output.

Don't most current methods of generating electricity pretty much break down into somehow generating heat to boil water to force steam to turn a turbine etc etc? Except for maybe hydroelectric, where you have gravity acting on water turning turbines AFAIK.

That depends on how you define "most current methods". In terms of watt/hours produced you're probably right; but in terms of number of methods not necessarily.

Nuclear, Coal, and (most?) Oil, are used to boil water to run steam turbines.
Natural gas peak load plants are usually gas turbines, no intermediate water boiling step.
Hydroelectric, as you mentioned, is water turbines
Solar thermal is boiling water (or other working fluids)
Solar-voltaic is basically direct electricity generation
Wind turbines obviously don't use boiling water, and neither do tidal power plants.
Geothermal plants are (mostly?) steam turbines.

Diablo 3 will have PVP. You can take your 'single player' character and pit it against your friends. Your single player character is your multiplayer character. There is no difference.

That's a design change that Blizzard choose to make.

Diablo II had PVP but there was still a difference between the online multiplayer character (battle.net) and the local character (single player/lan play). If you wanted cheat protections you played on battle.net, you're character was hosted on their servers and you had to have an active internet connection to play. If you wanted to play locally or just lan play with your friends you could use a non-battle.net character but you'd lose cheat protection.

You could never mix non-battle.net and battle.net characters so the only people affected by character or equipment edits were you and friends on your lan.

So Blizzard removes all that non-battle.net functionality in diablo III and tries to sell it as an improvement. And they wonder why there's a backlash...

The fact that they are discontinuing the roadster seems peripheral, although one may ask why they would discontinue them if they were profitable

I heard that the Roadster was always going to be a limited production run. Tesla got the frame and body from Lotus; paying them to run an production line that otherwise would have been temporarily surplus. But Lotus now has their own uses for that line so Tesla can't buy the chassis / body from them anymore.

Continuing roadster production now would drain their cash because they'd have to license the right to built the frame / body from Lotus then fund a new production line for it. Instead they want to focus on their next step, making a production line for the Tesla S sedan.

It could be any number of things. It's only intuitive because you know how to use iOS, much like the iOS on/off sliders. Why not just have the word "Add..." on that button? You've got "Edit" on the left, after all. Really an odd paradigm switch, from text to symbols.

For what it's worth, that picture only has the 'Edit' button because the user's already set one alarm. (The one for 5:02 am that is currently set to 'on'.)

If no alarms are set you open the clock, clight on the alarm clock icon at the bottom of the screen (labeled 'alarm') and get a screen with only the '+' button on the top and some text in the middle saying "No Alarms".

Since the only buttons on the screen are to change back to clock view, stopwatch, timer (all labeled icons) and '+', I think you, at least, would try the '+' button.

Nuclear!? What about tsunamis?

If you converted that power into a weapon would you have a wave motion gun?

The 'dangerous for billions of years' guy was off, yes. But the half life of an isotope is NOT the same as the number of years that it's dangerous.

For a simplified example: if something is 8x the deadly dose right now and has a half life of a million years, it's still deadly *three* million years from now (it's still at 1/8th of the original 8x deadly dose).

Additionally, not all decay is a single step. Something with a long half life might not be all that deadly by itself, but its byproducts are deadly. In other words, something is slowly decaying, but what it's decaying into is actually hotter.

On top of that, some of this stuff is chemically poisonous even in the stable isotopes, so you really don't want it in your air/groundwater/food anyway.

You're right that the half life of a isotope isn't the length of time that it's dangerous, but there is an inverse relationship between the half-time of an isotope and it's radioactivity.

The mechanism behind this radiation is that an unstable atom fissions, changes into one or more new elements and kicks out an extra: high energy photon (gamma ray particle), high energy electron (beta ray particle), helium nucleus (alpha ray particle), or neutron.

If it takes an isotope a very long time to decay it's because these fission events are fairly rare. And since radiation is only emitted when one happens, slower decay = lower radiation (for a given quantity of material)

Now you're right that a long life-time isotope's decay chain can include some short-half life isotopes. But again, their effect usually isn't that great because fairly few of them are present at a time. At the simplest level an atom of the short-lived isotope is only created when a long-lived atom fissions. So their rate of existence is still controlled by the decay rate of the longer lived parent isotope.

And yes, many of the decay products are chemically nasty and poisonous; but that also true of many non-radioactive chemicals used in industry, mining, or get output from coal power plants that live on virtually forever like mercury or arsenic.

All of these cooling problems could have been solved by some sort of waterproof backup power, even if it had to be stored 50 miles away and delivered via an underground cable that comes up under the reactors

50 miles of buried power cable; massive earthquake...

I think I see a flaw in this little plan.

You could always offer them a cut. If it takes you 3 months to write, and it takes them 1 week to edit, offer them about a 12th of the overall profit (which means you're about equal in terms of reward-per-hour). If thee book's a runaway success you can make them rich, if not then they get a trickle of pocket money for their trouble.

I wonder if Amazon or other places that support self-publishing ebooks might build in some support for that.

When you register your payment information for the book maybe they could also let you specify some additional payees and their percentages. So the book seller handles the paperwork for the profit splitting. (They're doing most of that anyway to document that they're giving the author their percentage, splitting that author share a few ways shouldn't be a huge amount of extra work for them.)

And it lets the author focus on writing and not on documenting profits and sending out royalty checks to editors.

I seem to recall that pastel colors make for the best aerial camouflage, but the pilots protested flying pastel blue and pink planes and so the military went with grays and blues

The US's current grey paint scheme is the result a a fair bit of testing about best color given the various conditions that the planes might find themselves flying in. (Day, night, clear weather, clouds, etc, etc).

As I heard it pastel pink was considered specifically for the F-117 stealth "fighter" because it was less visible in clear nighttime conditions, which was the only time the jet was expected to be used operationally.
Nighttime because a stealth jet you can see coming is seems counterproductive and clear because it needed unobstructed visibility for its precision weapons, laser guided bombs. (It's design predated the current GPS guided bombs.)

The pastel pink would optimize the likely usages at the expense of all other usages. Reasons for going with flat black instead are unclear but reportedly public image (not so much crew feelings) was a factor.

That's a good explanation except for the fact that there's a minimum OS version required to play online. One USED to be able to run otherOS and play online, and after a certain cutoff date, you had to choose to lose one or the other. That's where (some of) the contention comes from.

And it's not just a choice between otherOS and play online because some Blu-rays also require post-otherOS firmware to play.

So now you have to give up full Blu-ray compatibility as well as play online (and as some other posters pointed out access to some online purchased content) in order to keep otherOS.

I'm assuming you live somewhere where it doesn't get below zero much eh? Try living without power for a week in sub zero temperatures.

I'd hope that anyone living someplace that cold would have at least a backup heating system that didn't rely on electricity. (Or the ability to go someplace that did have such a system)

Assuming the court allowed states to collect this info, I would be required to keep a list of all my customers in 2011, separate them, and mail-out 51 letters to the 50 states plus DC. That would require several days worth of labor on my part, and that is "taxing".

And that's assuming the court ruling required each state to take that list and handle the And that's assuming the court ruling required each state to take that list and handle the futher processing to split it up according to county/parish, city, town, special tax district, etc to portion out the tax revenue to the appropriate intrastate bodies.

If they made you do that it gets significantly more taxing because now you have to track all that crap, not just do a database query on the state a purchase shipped to.

(Not to mention all the other ways sales tax is often complicated. Different rates for different categories of goods, tax holidays, etc, etc)processing to split it up according to county/parish, city, town, special tax district, etc to portion out the tax revinue to the approriate intrastate bodies.

If they made you do that it gets siginificantly more taxing because now you have to track all that crap, not just do a database query on the state a purchase shipped to.

(Not to mention all the other ways sales tax is often complicated. Different rates for different categories of goods, tax holidays, etc, etc)

This all rests on the assumption that the Germans were logical and used a predictable sequential serial number scheme. If they hadn't you'd have potentially gotten some very wrong answers out of this exercise in statistics.

Of course the truly dangerous thing would be to have plausibly wrong answers, not wildly wrong ones. You can discount a finding that they produce 4 tanks a month or that they produce 50,000. But 120 or 700 could be plausible enough to be accepted and then lead to miscalculations from basis.