USB keyboards work fine. Bluetooth ones too, assuming they have the BT support working (last I heard it wasn't working in Android yet, but maybe in some desktop Linux distro it is...). The touch / type keyboards use an interface that apparently confuses Linux, though.

That... is bullshit, actually. I've got one of the original Surface RTs (from work, to hack on it and learn the platform) - the ones that released with the already-slightly-aged Tegra 3 - and it's jailbroken so it can run third-party desktop apps. The performance isn't going to rival my 8-core 4GHz desktop, but it beats the old convertible clamshell tablet from ~2008 (Core 2 Duo ULV, 1.2GHz, upgraded to 4GB of RAM) on some tasks, and it's good enough for a lot of stuff.

I can write, compile, and run C# on it (using Notepad++ or Vim or a VS knockoff), do web app testing (using Fiddler or using IKVM as a Java runtime to run Burp Suite), play Flash games, and also play various old games using open-source re-implementations of their runtimes (Baldur's Gate on GemRB and so on) and also old DOS games on DOSBox. I can even run some old Windows (x86) software through a dynamic retranslation layer; it's not fast but it runs Heroes of Might and Magic 3 just fine (and that layer was one guy's part-time project for a few months, not a effort with many resources behind it).

The Surface is also is thinner and weighs far less, while still being much more durable (seriously, the things are nigh-indestructible; people have had them fly off the roof of the car and get driven over buy another vehicle but still be fully functional). It has much more battery life than the old machine did when it was new, including when running desktop apps or things like Skype. Would I have preferred a similarly-designed ATOM chip? Yeah, probably. On the other hand, I'd also like it if Microsoft hadn't tried their damnedest to cripple the platform (RT 8.1 contained an absurd amount of work aimed at defeating the jailbreak, and the inability to domain-join the device made it much less useful in the workplace where somebody might actually want that kind of lockdown).

Uh, you use MSVC (the Visual Studio compiler), the same as almost everybody else writing code for Windows does?

It would actually be nice if GCC or Clang supported targeting NT/Win32/ARM (Windows RT or WP8) as it would make porting open-source code a lot easier - some of it was never meant to be run through MSVC and requires substantial work - but so far I haven't seen any sign of that happening except the VLC team making noises about either implementing that support themselves or maybe just modifying the VLC codebase to be MSVC-compatible.

VOY was also the worst series about pushing the "RESET!" button at the end of every episode. I don't necessarily require that every show have a multi-series plot continuity (though B5 and DS9 are among my top favorite shows, because they *do*). However, if you're going to make a show about being stranded far from home with limited resources, PLEASE try to remember those limited resources? They fired many times as many photon torpedoes and lost several times as many shuttlecraft as they supposedly carried, for example. They also never had old damage still be a problem in the next episode; with limited replicator capacity (almost never actually a plot point aside from the whole "we need a cook!" thing), the ship should have been a flying patchwork of jury-rigged repairs by the series end. They probably would have written off some (sections of) decks as not worth maintaining anymore, would have lost some of their weapons/sensors/transporter capacity/bridge and engineering consoles (seriously, how many spares did they have that there was never a need to cobble one together from scavenged parts??), and ideally their ship model would have changed a little throughout the show to reveal damaged sections of plating and so forth (yes, I realize this would be expensive, but it would have added greatly to the gritty, barebones struggle for the ship's survival and onward journey).

Ah, but can you get those uN to consistently point in the direction that the thruster is pointing? Can you explain why you get them off the thruster, but not off a resistive dummy load dissipating the same amount of heat?

Don't get me wrong, they definitely need to test it in a vacuum. But saying "it doesn't matter what they say" is quite incorrect. The experiment was pretty thorough, it just used some components (for the power system, not the thruster itself) that won't work without atmosphere. They're working on a high-power version that will also work in vacuum.

I actually like some of IE's features that other browsers don't have. Their tab grouping beats anything available out-of-the-box in Firefox or Chrome, and their Quick Tabs feature was excellent (until they inexplicably axed it in IE11). The built-in support for mapping or translating highlighted text is also quite nice. The best, though, is probably the built-in "tracking protection" (which actually makes an excellent ad blocker). I know there are other (niche) browsers with built-in ad blocking, but IE's feature automatically detects content (like tracking pixels and scripts) that is loaded from multiple addresses and blocks it. You can control the block lists (to, say, allow JQuery) and can also subscribe to third-party lists (EasyList, who are best known for their AdBlock Plus list, also have one for IE).

Of course, once you add extensions, Firefox has a lot more features... but Firefox also still runs almost everything in a single process at Medium Integrity (normal user level) while Chrome and IE have per-tab processes and sandboxes.

Yes (in the sense that the XP Compatibility Mode image comes with IE6 installed), but also no (in the sense that XP in general is no longer supported).

WP7 came out almost three years ago. Good luck finding an Android phone supported for anywhere *near* that long! Most Android phones don't receive updates for even a full year. In fact, some of them ship with outdated OS versions and never even receive an update to the version that was current at their release (never mind the version that is current when they leave support). That means that apps targeting the latest APIs are very frequently unavailable.

True, the highest-end (things like the Galaxy S5) and best-supported (things like the Nexus 5) phones generally don't have this problem (although you still aren't likely to get OS updates for as long as WP7 did). But, as bad as it was when MS announced that WP7 phones wouldn't be getting WP8, Android is still usually worse than that.

Under the system you propose, any time Yahoo (or their federal overlords) wants to read your email, all they have to do is slightly modify some of the JS that your browser runs. Since your browser has your decrypted private key in hand, the JS can then upload it to anywhere the JS tells it to. This only needs to happen once; as soon as the attacker has your private key in plaintext they can decrypt all of your stored email (and sign outgoing emails as you).

The problem with that idea (much though I'd love to see it) is that the current experimental apparatus - the one that produce only-barely-detectable thrust - is already much too large for a cubesat, and that's ignoring the need to power it. The Chinese tested a much more powerful version, but they had to use kilowatts of power to get that much thrust; again, the whole thing is way too big for a cubesat. You're talking a moderate-sized (and priced, by satellite price standard) satellite here, and you'd need something like a dedicated Falcon 9 launch to put it in orbit.

Mind you, I'd love to see that launch. Hell, I'm sure Elon Musk would love to see that launch too; his dream of regular space traffic between Earth and Mars gets a lot more likely if he doesn't need to invent a new chemical rocket engine (which even then wouldn't make the trip nearly as fast as a scaled-up EmDrive might) and in the mean time, launching all the parts for such a ship (plus of course the early experimental platform) will need to be done with something that can reach escape velocity from the surface, and he just happens to have the cheapest way to do that. If it doesn't work, well, he's already working on the new engine anyhow. Win-win.

A little background (good question): To the best of our knowledge, there's no such thing as gravity "on" something; all gravity is *between* things. Think of it like magnetism (in fact, if you change the constants and swap charge and mass, the formulae for computing magnetic attraction and gravitational attraction are the same). When the Earth's gravity imparts momentum to an object (an apple you drop, say), the apple's gravity imparts the same momentum on the Earth. Of course, since momentum is mass times velocity, and the Earth masses ludicrously more than an apple, the delta-V of the Earth is basically imperceptible. Momentum is still conserved, though.

Now, as far as a space drive goes... we can't use gravity as a drive right now, because it always just pulls towards nearby massive objects (and because we can't control it in any way). We can accelerate using gravity - you've probably heard how some space probes would "slingshot" around massive planets to gain a lot of speed on a different vector - but in order to do that we first need an acceleration that we create ourselves, so that we don't just fall straight down the gravity well.

So yes, gravity imparts momentum (to both spacecraft and the planets they slingshot around) without *itself* involving a high-momentum exhaust... but only because the spacecraft already had a lot of momentum in the correct direction for the maneuver. Getting *that* momentum has, so far, always required an exhaust.

There are other options for generating thrust in space - light drives (the "exhaust" is just massless photons) and solar sails (where the high-momentum particles come from something else, like a star), for example - but neither are currently practical. Of course, even if the EmDrive happens to really work (which the experiments support but have definitely not yet proven) it isn't yet practical either. NASA has tested a *lot* of experimental drive types. However, at this time, all of the ones that have actually flown are reaction drives (throw something out the back of the ship, get an equal and opposite reaction forward). That may change at some point in the future, though.

Since there's already a pre-release version of IE12, probably not! They've increased the release rate a good bit the last few years; Win7 shipped with IE8. Still nowhere near as fast as Firefox and Chrome bump their "major" version numbers these days, of course, but that's no surprise.

Thank you. The hilarious thing is that this time, the zealots aren't even reading the report before "debunking" it. TFA (and, to be fair, lots of other sources) confused the recent NASA experiments on the Cannae Drive for experiments on the EmDrive. These are similar devices, but are invented by different people and their inventors claim different explanations for how they work. The actual inventor of the EmDrive (whose device was also tested, and produced more than twice as much thrust as the ~40 from the Cannae Drive as mentioned in TFA) is arguably vindicated by the result; having built something "different" but of basically the same design, it *also* produced thrust!

Oh, and that "null" device? That was the lack of a supposedly-required feature on the Cannae Drive, without which it supposedly is inoperative. The *actual* EmDrive has never required any such modification (radial slots on the chamber). Shawyer (inventor of the EmDrive) is probably also wrong about how it works and or even whether it does... but not for the reasons that all the idiots - most of whom *don't* even have lab coats - are claiming.

A good article refuting the claims of things like TFA (found by somebody else but worth reading): http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar.... A more powerful test device is already in development and will be tried out at multiple labs on multiple apparatus. *THEN* we will see whether to change the textbooks...

Sadly, you're actually wrong even though you're right. Shawyer never said that the "null" device wouldn't produce thrust. That was the claim of a guy named Guido Fetta, who invented something he calls the Cannae Drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Cannae_drive). Shawyer just said that the Cannae Drive is an inefficient EmDrive, with or without the slots which distinguished the "null" device from the "real" one.

Oh, and when NASA tested the actual EmDrive (which was months ago), it actually produced more than twice the thrust on just over half the power. Every result that TFA "reports" for the EmDrive is actually from the Cannae Drive test, not the EmDrive test at all! The author of that piece of dross needs to be hit with a clue-by-four...

Note that I'm not saying the EmDrive is "real". I'm definitely not saying Shawyer has a valid explanation for how it works either, even if it does. However, the experiments so far disproved nothing except Fetta's theory of the Cannae Drive; arguably, it actually provided *support* for Shawyer.

Bigger stupid one: the "null" device wasn't even supposed to be an EmDrive. It was supposed to be a Cannae Drive, which has a similar design but was invented by a completely different person and (supposedly) operates on different principles. The inventor of the Cannae Drive claimed that the difference between the null and actual test devices would mean there were different results. He was wrong, as shown experimentally.

The actual inventor of the EmDrive (whose device was also tested by NASA, months ago, and was produced twice the thrust on 60% as much power) says that the Cannae Drive is just an inefficient EmDrive in either null or "real" configuration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...