Yep. A physicist trying to explain a balanced line to other physicists, without knowing the word for it.

Haldane would be spinning in his grave.

If the end of the coil that is hanging is grounded (earthed), it becomes an autotransformer. As it's shown, it's a variable inductor and the disconnected end is irrelevant and has no meaningful physical effect at the frequency a spark transmitter could have reached.

This comment seems to get closer to what they actually mean in their scientific paper. But the article about it is garble and the paper might suffer from second-language issues, and a lack of familiarity with the terms used in RF engineering.

Sorry, I was being sarcastic. I happen have built more than one counterpoise.

The point they're missing is grounding of the "asymmetric" half of the antenna, and that's to keep a static charge from building in the antenna that'll zap through your electronics (or you) for safety reasons.

Sometimes. But you're missing what a Counterpoise does.

OEMs and their main lobbying organization say cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle.

It sounds like it would be in the interests of public safety, to use their own quotations to support an injunction from them being able to sell these unsafe cars.

Just as unmaintainable computers should not be allowed on the Internet, unmaintainable cars should not be allowed on public roads.

So, your average software developer. Which explains a lot about why software quality sucks so much. (and then someone writes six code analysis tools and ten testing tools to at least catch the shit before it hits the fan).

Same reason that fascism and communism are unlikely to win any elections anytime soon - the name has been tainted by a horrible first version, even if you came up with a perfect current version, nobody would believe it.

Damn, I wish I would have patented that and all its quantum magic...

I noticed that my vertical transmitting antenna often works better if I connect a horizontal wire about the same length as the antenna to ground at its base! The wire isn't connected to the transmitting side of the circuit at all! And how well it works varies depending on the length! Obviously there is some deus ex machina at work here...

Clearly you missed the bit where they invoked quantum mechanics, surely that explains away all the inaccuracies, like the fact you can already buy chip scale dielectric antennas

The thing that I really hate about Innovation Stories is that the reporter invariably doesn't understand what's going on, and invariably is easily convinced that The Obviiously Very Technical People have some very valuable invention.

Marconi's connection to the center tap of a coil with one end not connected worked by broken symmetry? Really? It wasn't just a method of tuning a coil to the correct reactance for a particular frequency?

Whilte it originally was introduced in order to execute painlessly, following basically your logic, it has since turned out that this is not true and the Guillotine is actually a fairly cruel execution method.

It is great for market-square entertainment, though. Maybe that's what you're really after?

Actually much more interesting than I thought at first glance.

The game is designed intentionally with computational complexity in mind. It failed. The rules (WP has them, or a dozen other sites) are mostly designed to increase the search space. For example, instead of the fixed setup in chess, you get basically the same pieces, but you can put them into your 2 rows in any way you want. I'm too lazy to calculate the initial starting positions, but thanks to the Internet, someone else did it and came up with ~10^15. That makes an opening library practically impossible.

However, I'm a hobby game designer, so I look at rules with slightly different eyes. The complexity of the game is largely artificial. Brilliant minds will, like in a badly designed crypto-cipher, find tons of places where the complexity can, for the practical purpose of actually playing and winning a game, be reduced dramatically. Remember that in theory chess has 20 valid opening moves for white. The vast majority of them you will never seen in any real game.

I'm also bothered by the fact that complexity is reached by the addition of rules, instead of the subtraction. Go is a perfect example for how you can reach complexity with very simple rulesets. When building games, especially board games, you generally strive to keep the ruleset as simple as possible and check every rule for whether or not it adds anything worthwhile to the gameplay or not. For a simple, conventional style 2-player board game, the ruleset is overly complex IMHO. Maybe that's why I never heard about this game before - it doesn't actually appeal to many human players, except those interested in not being beaten by a computer.

New at Steam: We replace people who don't give a fuck with people who really don't give a fuck.

No, don't get me wrong, it's a step in the right direction. But the step itself begs questions. In general, the great firewall is the first cent - people who spend nothing at all and people who spend something, no matter how much. If you don't believe me, try charging 10 cents or something ridiculously small for any free web service you offer, and you'll find your user numbers drop through the floor.

I don't think there's a measurable difference between $5 and $4 or $3 -- the number is entirely arbitrary. A psychological barrier would be $10 (the two digits, the reason almost nothing in any shop in the world costs $10, it will always be $9.99 or $9.95).

But if Goebbels' heirs don't have an exclusive right to the diaries, then what incentive does Goebbels have to write diaries? We must continue to grant and enforce this monopoly, or else Goebbels' lack of return for his hard work will cause him to give up and get a job as a dishwasher. Is that the kind of world you want to live in?!

But the act in question here would be the writing of a dictionary, and even in the most totalitarian states, that is not a crime.