Wikipedia says:
While metallic gallium is not considered toxic, the data are inconclusive.
Pure indium in metal form is considered nontoxic by most sources.

Most metals are not ferromagnetic, and so are not held in place by magnets. I'm pretty sure neither indium nor gallium are ferromagnetic.

As they are good conductors, metals do develop eddy currents in a changing magnetic field, which heats them. (Try dropping a magnet through a narrow aluminium tube. The energy loss due to eddy currents will slow its fall considerably.) If you had this liquid metal inside you, having an MRI scan might be a really bad idea - I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the bits of you in contact with the metal could get cooked. This would be a considerable drawback in a cancer treatment. It would be no different than having metal inside you for other reasons - e.g. titanium pins used in surgery. Does anyone know how those react to MRI?

Aside from the risks of what happens to the liquid metal after it's done its job, you also end up with a big lump of dead cells inside the body, which can't be good. On the other hand, presumably successful radiation therapy has the same result, and the result doesn't have to be 'good', it just has to be 'better than having a tumor'. Would someone with actual medical knowledge care to comment?

Well enlighten us, Big Sexy Joe, what's so awesome about wherever it is that you live that you can so easily look down on the clueless 8 million or so that can't possibly have a good reason for living in the SF bay area?

Here is another cat hack story, although it seems in this case the cat was only used as a data repository.

No, that is the point. The mathematics is provably wrong.

I agree. The theory can be rubbished in very simple terms: The inventors assume no new physics, and conclude their device will violate conservation of momentum. All the 'input' physics conserves momentum. Therefore their analysis is wrong.

If I give you a list of numbers which are all even and ask you to add them up, and you give me a sum which is odd, I know you've messed up. I don't need to check the details of your adding and point to exactly where you went wrong. This situation is analogous.

So if the device *does* work (which I very much doubt) it will be pure wild coincidence, not due to any cleverness on the part of the inventors.

(Note: these comments are based on the description of the EmDrive in New Scientist some years ago. I am unfamiliar with the Cannae Drive, so I don't know if it has the same theoretical flaw. If it *does* end up working, I will revoke my vow to never again subscribe to New Scientist.)

I agree there was some trickery there. Since they did not address this at all, I am assuming that the answer is simply that they had to manually paint in the parts of the photos that were revealed when other parts were removed. Having to point that out in the video would take away from the apparent magic which is probably why they didn't mention it (and that's somewhat disingenous if you ask me). It's possible that they provide some tool that attempts to automatically fill in the background, and if so it would appear that it was used in some of the examples (such as when the apple or whatever it was was moved in the painting, the area that was revealed looked more like the cloudy background than it did like the table that the apple was on), but there's no way that they automatically compute the background for anything that is not on top of a pattern or more or less flatly shaded surface. I also noticed that in some examples, they were merely adding new objects to the scene (such as the NYC taxi cab example), and although they started with a scene that looked like the cab was already there is moved it to reveal painted chevrons underneath, it's likely that those chevrons were already in the photo and didn't need to be recreated.

In short: they glossed over that detail and used examples that didn't require explaining it, but it'c certainly an issue that a real user would have to address and doesn't happen as "magically" as it would appear from the video.

BTW, CMU alum here. Went back to campus for the first time in nearly 20 years earlier this year. My how things have changed. I suppose every college is the same way now, but holy crap it's so much more cushy than it used to be! Guess all that cush keeps the computer science juices flowing ...

Why in their right mind would believe that they will be delivered "boundless; infinite" bandwidth just because they signed up for a plan that called itself "unlimited"? I absolutely agree that the companies should not be using the term "unlimited" in their advertising, but can't we all recognize that this is a term now deeply embedded in the nomenclature of internet service that has a clear definition in that context (that should be especially clear to the highest bandwidth users, who certainly must be seasoned users), that doesn't actually mean "truly infinite" as you would suggest we should expect it to mean?

Nope, COMMON FUCKING SENSE is realizing that words are not always used literally and should not be expected to mean such. It's realizing that when an advertisement for Tylenol says that it cures headaches, that doesn't mean you can sue the manufacturer if your headache doesn't go away. It means understanding the context of meanings reflected in how the world actually works instead of pedantically insisting on meanings that clearly are impossible.

That, my friend, is COMMON FUCKING SENSE. It's the skill that we all have to understand WHAT IS MEANT, even when it is not exactly the same as WHAT WAS SAID.

In this context, anyone who believes that you really can take as much as you want of something that has been advertised as "unlimited" is not using common sense. You're saying that if I use so much bandwidth that it drives the company out of business, I should expect them to allow me to do it? If I use so much bandwidth that the company providing the service has to take out loans to support the infrastructure to provide my service, go broke, and starve to death, I should exect them to do that? COMMON FUCKING SENSE, man. There is no such thing as unlimited.

I disagree. They are the same thing. A certain amount of hyperbole is allowed, even expected, in advertising.

People who are using so much bandwidth that they are subject to throttling are almost certainly the *most* savvy, *most* knowledgeable users. There is no way that they don't know what bandwidth is, how networking works, and there really is no such thing as an "unlimited data cap", so pretending like they don't is really just disingenuous.

The problem is, no one wants to be first, because the first one to change their advertising will put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against those who continue to bogusly advertise unlimited internet.

So I guess this is where government regulation is supposed to kick in and force all such businesses onto a level, more honest playing field?

Too true. And when I go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant, I expect to be able to take the entirety of all of the food in the buffet, throw it in garbage bags, and carry them to my table, denying everyone else in the restaurant anything to eat.

Yeah, that works.

You know what really works? People using common sense and realizing that there is no such thing as "unlimited" bandwidth, food, or anything else. When such services are advertised I think we all realize, or at least the reasonable among us realize, that "unlimted" means "much more than the average consumer would utilize, and thus from the perspective of the average consumer, unlimited", not "as much as you can possibly use".

Who doesn't realize that limiting the highest users is sometimes necessary to ensure quality of service for everyone? Hey I paid my Verizon bill too, how come my service is slower because some dork has to torrent down 100 movies per month to add to his never-watched "collection"? Shouldn't I be complaining also about not getting the quality of service *I* paid for?

I have always wondered why the photographs that come back from space are so grainy/blurry and have poor color reproduction. Why aren't the images clearer? Why don't we get to see movies instead of just crummy looking stills?

There *must* be a reason that they can't make photos that come from space exploration better or include full color videos so that we can see what these things would look like if we were really there.

I can only posit that either the radiation hardening necessary for space exploration somehow precludes the use of large CCD/CMOS sensors, or the bandwidth limitation of sending data from that far out makes anything other than tiny images with low resolution possible, and makes video impossible.

But still I can't help wondering why, if they can spend tens of millions to put these things up there, they can't produce better images for whatever millions are left over for on board equipment.