By far, the Samsung Galaxy Gear, which The Woz says he sold on eBay after half a day's use. "It was so worthless and did so little that was convenient,"

Well jeeze, Woz, with salesmanship like that, I'm surprised you managed to sell it at all!

The most recent bulb I replaced was the one in my oven. It had been burned out for years, but I decided to replace it when I was in there to replace a heating element. $4.50 for a tiny 40W bulb! I suppose a run-of-the-mill bulb isn't meant for use in a 500F environment, nor necessarily (in the U.S.) to be run from 2-phase power.

Yes, it was an incandescent - this is one situation where energy efficiency in lighting is a rather moot point. Bulbs in refrigerators, on the other hand...

If bitcoin was trading at something like $600 beforehand, why would anyone bidding $450 be surprised that they lost out? If these bitcoin boosters are so firm in their belief that bitcoin is as fungible as any other currency, shouldn't they have bid at something like the going rate?

Put differently, if the U.S. was auctioning off a briefcase filled with €100,000, and the exchange rate is presently €1 = $1.37, would anyone be surprised if a hedge fund bidding $1/€ lost out?

gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor

Boron is B, Barium is Ba...

Worse, the mistake showed up in the press release from Cambridge. I guess their editors are about as good at Slashdot's!

The first chest compression might work a bit, but then you go flying across the room. The shock from hitting the bulkhead might provide another stimulation to the heart, but after that you'd probably just roll up into a ball or something and drift around a bit.

The Hollywood fairy tale of CPR, or a sudden thump to the chest, causing someone's heart to start beating again is just that - a fairy tale. Even today, with CPR knowledge relatively widespread, most people that have a heart attack (i.e., the heart actually stops beating) will die of it. The purpose of CPR is to keep the rest of you - principally your brain - properly oxygenated until definitive medical care (drugs, defibrillator, oxygen, stents, etc) can properly revive you. The notion that astronauts are going to perform CPR on one of their colleagues for several hours, through re-entry, and all the way to a hospital is laughable. Even if the astronaut survives, all that's left would be a turnip that can breathe.

The reason it was difficult to seal vacuum tubes was because you needed to get wire leads to pass through the glass tube (or its end-cap). Sealing to glass is really tough. Sealing an electronics package isn't so tough.

This is why there is zero oversight from Kickstarter/Amazon - they get their 20% cut if the projects gets funded

I gotta make some correction there - it's not a 20% cut. Kickstarter get 5%. Amazon get 3-5% depending on several factors. Granted, it's still a lot of money, and provides a powerful incentive for them to have as many projects funded as possible, but you're overstating it by 2x or more.

in which position are white sharks? Next to deaths by stepping on a rusty nail while running at the beach?

Hey, man don't underestimate the dangers of tetanus. Rusty nails are a real killer, especially when they're attached to boards.

This is one of the many reasons I don't go anywhere near the ocean

The reason I don't go anywhere near the ocean is because I've got a chance of being killed in a car accident on my way there (and back). Actually being killed in the ocean? That's nuthin'.

When you are printing a 10nm wire into the silicon chip, you are not very far from doing it atom by atom as the wire is only like 50 atoms wide.

Perhaps, but at least with lithography you can do it across the entire wafer (or die) area in a single go. That's batch processing all the transistors at once, rather than serially processing them with AFM.

Silicon atoms are 0.2nm wide. We're getting into "why aren't you just directly pushing the atoms around with atomic force microscopy?" territory.

you probably could. However, for a processor with 10^9 transistors and perhaps a dozen layers, it gets pretty time-consuming to build it by pushing atoms around one at a time.

I am amused by this bit in the summary:

But as we approach 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm, the low-hanging fruit disappears

I'd say the low-hanging fruit disappeared a few decades ago. Continuing down the feature size curve has for many years required a whole slew of every-more-complicated tricks and techniques.

That said: yes, going forward is going to be increasingly difficult. You will eventually reach an insurmountable limit that no amount of trickery or technology will be able to overcome. I predict it'll be somewhere around the 0 nm process node.

Propose a $0.12 increase, settle for a nickel to get it passed. It's better than nothing...

Take pictures of all the documents and send them via snapchat. Isn't this the kind of application it was made for (restrictred permission viewing)? It's, like, toooootally secure.

There are a number of studies that have examined the life cycle energy costs for photovoltaic panels. Start with this and go from there. Some numbers I've seen (like this) indicate the energy payback for monocrystalline PV modules is around two years; less for other technologies. Those numbers are from 2011, so I suspect that with increased manufacturing volume the numbers are even more favorable today.

A different argument that could be made comes down to basic economics. If solar panels took substantially more energy to manufacture than they produce over their lifespan, it would be reflected in their price. As the GP argued, albeit poorly, one can look at the price for a commodity and get from it a rough sense of the energy investment that it embodies. The wholesale price of PV modules is $1-2 per W of capacity, which one could argue represents tens of kWh of energy input. Even if there are externalities not captured in the price, and the total energy cost was hundreds of kWh per panel, that's still one or two orders of magnitude lower than the total lifetime output of the same panel.