The media does a great job glossing over a fundamental problem with dirty bombs. You have to shield it well enough to get it to it's deployment before it kills you, but it then has to disperse it's contents widely to be even vaguely effective.

A dirty bomb isn't about killing people, it's about scaring people. A pipe bomb will blow out a few windows and maybe kill someone who was unlucky enough to be standing next to it when it went off. A pipe bomb mixed with the guts of a hundred smoke detectors won't be any more deadly, but the resulting radiation scare will keep a few city blocks evacuated for weeks or months.

It's not a bug; it's a *feature!

No, this one is very definitely a bug.

If the hackers decide to use a dictionary attack, then an xckd-style password is about as good as one 4 characters long.

Four characters, yes, but four from a bloody huge alphabet (2048 characters). An XKCD-style password is almost as strong as four random Chinese characters.

I'd just like to note that a will o' the wisp is not the same thing as ball lightning.

Rock? No, it's a CIA camera and microphone, cleverly disguised as a rock.

Fine. Split them up like a normal double slit experiment. As stated, neutrons in both arms.

If it's like the standard double-slit experiment, each neutron travels through both arms of the interferometer. Under quantum mechanics, any particle behaving in a wave-like manner can do this sort of thing, even if the particle is of a type (such as a neutron) that people normally think of as being a discrete object.

This is where my understanding gets fuzzy, but I think what they've done is rig things up so that the position-like attributes of each neutron's wavefunction are detectable in one arm of the interferometer, while the magnetic-property attributes are detectable in the other arm.

If you'd read the article, you'd see that he did use an industrial linescan camera for some of his work.

I prefer Remington.

There was an effort in 2006 to re-create the Scott expedition to see if they could figure out why it failed (see the second paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_Amundsen_and_Scott_Expeditions#Food_and_fuel). They called it off before reaching the pole because the expedition members were suffering from severe weight loss.

I think it'll be interesting to see what happens to a human once they leave the magnetic environment of their home planet.

Nothing much, really. A number of the Apollo missions left the Earth's magnetic field, and nothing spectacular happened.

According to the OpenBSD link, OpenBSD uses the Intel and Via random-number generators, but not as the sole source of randomness. The nice thing about mixing random number generators is that if you do it right (like OpenBSD does), the result is at least as random as the most random source: a bad RNG does not reduce the overall quality of randomness.

What's funny is the ones who say communism is a good idea that just hasn't been done right never really pay attention to the times it has been done exactly according to plan and still failed anyways.

Communism works just fine on a small scale, where everyone involved can see all the "ability"s and "need"s. It's a good bet, for example, that your immediate family operates on communist principles.

Depth perception has over a dozen components, of which stereopsis (your "normal binocular part") is one of the weaker. People have trouble with 3D in movie theaters (and will probably have trouble with the Oculus Rift) because two of the stronger components (accommodation and convergence) are giving very different depth signals from stereopsis. This technology has the potential to be accommodation- and convergence-neutral, meaning the strongest depth signal comes from stereopsis.

But we can't do anything magic to fission products to make them decay into something stable any faster

Actually, we can. Neutron bombardment will usually create particles that are less stable, so they take a faster decay chain down to a stable state. It's a tradeoff: your radioactive waste becomes more radioactive, but for less time.

Maybe. On the one hand, if 100% of our electricity comes from fusion, that works out to around 100,000-1,000,000 kilograms of helium produced each year. On the other hand, the amount produced per reactor at any given time is minuscule, and would be a pain to try to collect.