We'll see.

It's absolutely wrong that I am proposing a 'stealable' ID. No, it's not that at all. Like NFC (ApplePay and others) you don't send out your ID, your bracelet will engage in a two-way conversation that uses generates unique identifiers every time that prove that it's you without giving the system communicating with you the ability to impersonate you. It's not hard at all; we should have been doing this years ago. This is described in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography twenty-fucking-years ago. Chapter 21(Identification Schemes) describes "zero-knowledge proof of identity". Curiously, researchers Feige, Fiat, and Shamir submitted a patent application in 1986 for this, but the Patent Office responded "the disclosure or publication of the subject matter ... would be detrimental to the national security..." The authors were ordered to notify all Americans to whom the research had been disclosed that unauthorized disclosure could lead to two years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine, or both. Somewhat hilarious, as the work was all done at Weizmann Institute in Israel.

That said, I do think that groups like the NSA and FBI have been quite successful in keeping people (like Jeff4747) remarkably uneducated. Banks, credit card companies, and groups like Google that make gigabucks tracking people have held back from doing things right as well -- and they're paying for it today.

To say again. It is easy to build a system that would securely verify that you have authority to do something, without giving the ability for somebody else to impersonate you. It's somewhat more challenging than printing number in plastic on a credit card, but only a tiny bit more challenging.

This will happen. Once it does people will wonder why it took so long.

The problem with phones is that you can lose them or break them or have them stolen. I agree that it's a good place to start, though.

I believe that the RFID tag that Coren22 suggests don't have, and can't have, the processing power required to do this right. You don't want to say "Yes, I'm 132132123123", that would be *way* too easy to fake. You want to have a back-and-forth communication that shows that you are who you are, without giving away your ID.

I think the bracelet would become a status symbol -- the status being "yeah, I care about security." I'm actually not kidding.

At some point, and my guess is pretty darn soon, reasonable people are going to have a very secure cryptobracelet that they never take off, or if you take it off it will never work again.

The bracelet would work like the NFC chip in current phones, it would create unique identifiers for each transaction, so you can be verified that you are who you are without ever broadcasting your identity.

Then, all email and every other communication can easily be encrypted, securely, and without adding complication. You won't have to worry about remembering a hundred passwords, or about what happens when the store you bought things from is hacked, or that a library of 100 millions passwords will find yours.

I grant that some will protest that this is not natural (I don't want to wear something on my wrist!) but people do a hundred other unnatural things every day (brush their teeth, use deodorant, wear glasses, live longer than fifty years...) The benefits will be enormous, the changes minimal, and this will be led, I believe, by thought leaders.

If the difference in list price of the expensive to the super-expensive Tesla is only $10,000; I would expect that at least 30% of that price would be extra profit for Tesla. Kind of like the gold Apple Watch. So their cost is probably less than $250/kWh.

The problem with license plate readers is that there are only so many cameras out there. How can they know where everybody was all the time?

The answer is the Vehicles Miles Traveled tax. Many states and the federal gov't have proposed over and over that all cars have GPS trackers in them that tax them on how many miles they drive. They say "the problem is cars are more efficient, so we don't make as much money." (Can't you just raise the rate then? wtf?) or that this is "more fair", everybody is charged the same amount for how far they drive; as opposed to how much gas they use and how much carbon they emit.

But, come on, the real reason is almost certainly to track where everybody went, all the time. If there is anything the Snowden revelations have demonstrated, it's that if there is any possible way to capture data on people, the government is going to do it. Anything you can imagine, and many things that you could never have imagined, are being done. If you want to believe that a GPS tracker that hooks up to a gas pump only sends one bit of information, well, I suppose you deserve what you get.

I tried for a day to get Linux installed on my Mac. I thought Boot Camp would be perfect; it repartitioned the drive nicely, but I couldn't get Linux to load. I couldn't delete the Windows partition, couldn't remake it as a Linux partition. Eventually gave up. Is there a way to do this?

You can finally print mirrors with this, apparently. Quite cool

Thank you. I just couldn't understand it; although clearly the clues were there and you interpreted them correctly.

So the UV light goes through the bottom window, through the oxygen-rich zone that will not polymerize. When the light gets through that zone, it polymerizes the resin. The polymerized resin must block the light from going deeper into the liquid resin.

If you have a thick part, though, I wonder if this could work? New unpolymerized resin would have to flow into the gap between the hardened part and the window, and this 'dead zone' is only microns thick. Now, I do believe that most 3D printed parts aren't solid blocks; but this could be a limitation.

Still, looks quite cool. I am sure that I'm not alone wanting to build stuff with it!

The area of the earth is 4,000^2xpi square miles, so even with 4,000 satellites there is one for every 12,000 square miles. OK, perhaps the very high latitudes don't need to be covered, and you can get that down to 10,000 square miles. For the United States, the average population density means that on average, you'd have 500,000 people covered by one satellite. Europe, Japan, China, Indonesia, and many other countries or regions have significantly higher population density. For cities, this is just a non-starter.

Now, Musk is not a stupid guy, but I just can't see how this works.

If you read further, they talk about restrictions on mothers eating while lactating as well.

My mom ate a lot of peanuts when I was a few months old, and I almost died of peanut allergy. I question this result.

55 years later, I'm still deathly allergic to them. It does add some adventure to life.

Yes on the light-based-communication, but no on the use of frequency-shifting polymers...that's new.

It's not particularly uncommon for an article about a scientific breakthrough to be almost satirically misleading.

If this really works, for instance, it could be a revolution in television design; far better than the quantum dot technology that people are adapting now. But, if the article was about TVs then it the responses would all go in a million directions (comparisons to plasma, talking about energy star ratings, whatever).

Back in the 50's, it was pretty common for scientists doing nuclear weapons research to talk about things that would happen in stars of unconventional configurations; when they were really broadcasting to the USSR that the US scientists had solved problems with hydrogen bombs that put them far ahead.

Go to a friends house and turn on their flat-panel TV. 99% of the time, it will have frame-rate interpolation turned on; which basically means that any content they see on that TV will be at 60 or 120 Hz. Even movies shot at 24.

More and more often as I do presentations to executives, they don't understand why my TVs look so "juddery" compared to what they expect -- it's because at home they're watching everything at 120Hz.

So no -- most people are happy with high frame rate most of the time, and that percentage is getting larger quickly. I am a big 24fps fan, but I believe the days are numbered.

No, we are not doing things that are artificial at all -- we are making things that could be far more real.