And all too many patent applications are crap for reasons of prior art or obviousness, but examiners at the USPTO don't have nearly the time to research all, or even most of them. BUT, if you hear of a patent application (or patent) that is just BS due to prior art, you can just go to the Ask Patents website (run by StackExchange and free) and ask if it's a valid one based on prior art or obviousness. Anyone can also provide answers to the questions asked, and the answers will be crowd-ranked according to correctness and reasoning. Bad patent apps will be forwarded to the USPTO and the examiners actually do listen.

Hello everybody, I play a HUMAN on TV...

And advertisers are only equal to their advertisements. And do not try to school me about my confusion, because I WILL have confusion. But I also create software for a few (aka 3) of the largest companies in the world. So STFU, child.

If by big in a couple of niches and by narrow you mean very very deep, then OK. you do know what money is, right?

And you are not well thought out, and thankfully not a political cause.

Me either, but I just did.

I got 200K to blow. Wanna patrol back?

Basically, the minimal things that life requires are,1) an energy differential into which it can pump "work" and create an environment where entropy can locally decrease, 2) mathematical combinations of participating elements (which may be amino acids, or shit that we don't have a clue about) that can exploit these energy potentials and 3) the likelihood that they will at some point reproduce themselves and eventually exhibit selection for better forms of what they reproduce. We should not presume to know all of the forms that that can take, because the math says that we don't know even a small part of it.

Good point. The stick and the hole. GOOOOALL!! (She'll say something similar I assume.) XX chromosomes are delightful, when used in delight, and they have brains too, sometimes.

But at least to some extent, sex IS a "stick and ball" game.

I beg to differ. The example that I meant to portray is that any man, any father, with any sense, does not beat his children. Most fathers have no desire to do so anyway, 'cuz your kids are the best thing you ever did. I meant that that child abuse is not acceptable within society, and it might be met with one's own severe punishment, despite one's arrogance and vitriol. And "within an inch of your life" does not mean that you are beaten to death. It does mean that you know not to beat your kids again.

I am from the South. When someone crosses the line into plain cruelty like this, regardless of the folly of their kids, there is no statute of limitations, and there is no court of law. They get beaten to within an inch of their life by those who they thought were friends, and they never ever do it again.

Sorry, I meant to say he's detecting the neutrons produced by fission as they move faster than light does in the detector medium, not gamma rays.

He did use a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor to actively interrogate for special nuclear material, causing a subcritical fission reaction. This produces radiation of higher energies than are normally emitted by enriched u-235 (HEU) or weapons-grade plutonium (WGPu) or are significantly present in the background, but it is nothing new technologically. For detection, he is using another technique that is not new, but is perhaps novel in its application. He is using both a Thallium doped Sodium Iodide scintillation detector and a Cherenkov Water Detector doped with Gadolinium Chloride (in concert with photomultiplier tubes) to detect the Gamma radiation that is produced by any fission events that would be induced in HEU or WGPu (respectively) by active interrogation. This method has the benefit of high sensitivity AND high specifity. It is also more cost-effective than current passive methods, since it uses more commonly available materials (no He-3) and proven technologies. Currently the setup exceeds the amount of time allowed by DHS for a scan, but is useful to confirm or rule out initial tests. It is also being improved upon.

Perhaps, just maybe, we could adopt a very fuzzy metric instead of precision without accuracy. Say for example, what important questions can they help us answer? As amorphous as that criterion will be, it will likely stimulate smart engineers to do whatever necessary to get tangible, valuable, benefits.