The fundamental property is mass, and the "weight" is defined by the force generated due to "standard" gravity.

The kg is a measure of mass. The pound can be mass or force, depending on the system of measurement involved. Most technical people would consider pounds to be units of force, where the corresponding mass is the slug. (Though honestly SI units are more convenient for doing physics with.)

When doing physics the pound is most often used as force, but it's not quite as simple as you make it out to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Also, consider the system of measurement with pounds-as-mass, where the unit of force is the "poundal".

I suspect that if you exempted someone's primary residence up to say half a million dollars, that would avoid much of the difficulty with penalizing the poor.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

"Effects of inequality researchers have found include higher rates of health and social problems, and lower rates of social goods,[81] a lower level of economic utility in society from resources devoted on high-end consumption,[82] and even a lower level of economic growth when human capital is neglected for high-end consumption.[83] For the top 21 industrialised countries, counting each person equally, life expectancy is lower in more unequal countries..."

The article I read talked about carbon-fiber flywheels spinning in an evacuated chamber on maglev bearings. I think they were hitting over 100000 RPM.

The following is all subjective, so be warned. :)

From what I've seen (admittedly second and third-hand) the people attacking women are generally doing so at least in part *because* they are women. On the other hand, attacks against men are rarely gender-based, but rather based on other factors like religion/ideology/actions.

If this is true, then even if the numbers of attacks are the same, it would not be unreasonable for the attacked women to feel it differently because they are being attacked for something they *are* rather than something they *think*. (And actually I suspect this same feeling may hold true for race-based attacks against people as well.)

The issue is that cheap access points/firewalls run out of resources trying to manage (and possibly do connection-tracking) on all the different connections. If a bittorrent user suddenly opens up a few thousand additional connections (regardless of actual bandwidth) then that ends up knocking everyone else off that firewall.

The bittorrent users could prevent the problem by limiting how many connections are allowed per torrent, but it sounds like they're not doing that.

Rather than forcing bittorrent users off the network entirely, it would be better if the access point itself limited the number of connections per MAC address to something reasonable. This would prevent the symptom from occurring.

That's crazy. I would have expected a cap on how much of a rebate you can get.

It's possible to reduce those externalities. Near where I live is a recently-opened large-scale coal plant with carbon capture and storage. They're capturing carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and fly ash.

http://www.saskpowerccs.com/cc...

That said, I'd love to see a commercially viable fusion plant.

What we need is a physical write-protect switch for the firmware itself, as well as for the contents of the drive.

It wouldn't be hard to have a single pin control whether or not the microcontroller firmware can be written to.

What we need is a physical switch that write-protects the microcontroller firmware. Most people would never want to update the firmware on their USB controller so it can default to "off".

Couldn't you put the intermediate radiator behind a layer of glass with a coating that is tuned to be highly reflective at the exact frequency that it is re-radiating at? That would reduce the amount of wasted energy.

In the article the intermediate body is simply absorbing heat energy but then re-radiating it at a specific frequency. Would the Carnot effiency rules apply?

That chart you pointed at is specifically for gaming. If you're doing parallel compiling, or running multiple VMs, or other easily parallelizable work the fact that an i7 generally has twice as many cores/threads can make a huge difference.

At work we have a 24-core machine that we use for compiling. It makes a huge difference when you're basically building a custom linux distro.

Even when using sendfile() in linux, the disk does a DMA transfer into RAM, and the NIC does a DMA transfer out of RAM.

While the CPU is not involved in copying the data, it still goes into RAM.