Right. It's part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Retired Physicists. Nobody in the US has built a nuclear weapon in decades, and everybody who knew how is dying off. DoD/DoE is trying to hang onto the expertise and recruit some new people to at least maintain the ones already built. So they have to have something for them to do.

Mod parent up. Bear in mind how this thing works. There's a resistance heater inside, and it is never completely off for long periods. The claim is that the heat given off by the device is greater than that being pumped in by the resistance heater. The heater is fed with a "proprietary waveform" from a control box the watchers were not allowed to examine. All they could do was put clamp-around current sensors on the leads to the device, voltage probes on the inputs, and feed those to a current meter. I strongly suspect problems with the current measurement.

Robotic maintenance was considered for SAGE in the 1950s. Robots were never built for that, but the SAGE racks were designed with easy-to-handle plug-in rack modules with all connections on the back.

(Vacuum tube failure wasn't a major operational problem with vacuum tube computers. For the UNIVAC I, normal procedure was to power up the machine and set it to 10% overvoltage mode for 10 minutes. This would burn out any tubes near failure. Those were replaced, and the machine would then run for the rest of the day without another tube problem. Since the machine had a dual CPU for self-checking, any problem would cause an immediate stop.)

"In your face from outer space" - Motto of the USAF Space Warfare Center, Falcon AFB.

That's from 1996. SWC never really quite lived up to that motto, and their successor, the Space Innovation & Development Center, is more of an R&D operation. It's becoming closer to reality, though.

We'll know it's real the first time some space-based weapon zaps an individual on the ground.

It's not really that tough a job. The thing is about 4 lanes wide, and not excessively tall. There's less than 20 miles of road movement at each end of the trip. So it's going to be a routine big move with brief road closures. Probably late at night.

The rest of the trip is by barge, down the East Coast, around Florida, and up the Mississippi, Illinois, and DesPlanes rivers to Chicago. There are standard barges which can easily handle something of that size. The locks on that route have 110 foot width.

Most of the articles about this are rehashes of the press release. They even use the same language. OK, there are 8 CPUs. But what kind?.

The new Kinect supposedly is a real per-pixel time-of-flight device. Any more info on that?

Somebody didn't get the memo that vampires are over.

You can track this at a Barnes and Noble store by noting how many bookcases in the teen section are devoted to a subject. At peak, there were four cases of "Teen Paranormal Romance" and two of "New Teen Paranormal Romance". That dropped to three cases total, then two. "Survival" books are big now - there are two cases of Hunger Games imitations, not including the table of Hunger Games merch.

We already have "knowledge bases", "community support", and support outsourced to Far, Far Away. Microsoft did some work with Bayesian statistics to find out which questions a support tech should ask first. Much software already "phones home" to send trouble reports and crash dumps. There's been some good work on automated crash dump classification, to group similar crash dumps together and send them all to the same maintenance programmer.

One word. "Apps."

So out of 3 million people signed up with Coursera, only 900 have completed 10 or more courses, comparable to roughly a year of full-time schooling. Only 100 have completed 20 or more. That's a 99.97% dropout rate after one year.

This isn't going to replace other forms of education with stats like that.

OK, so this vaccine needs a booster every decade or so. Lots of vaccines are like that. The vaccines against tetanus and hepatitis A and B all need to be re-administered every few years. No big deal.

The Android line is not a paid consumer product. It's a piece of middleware offered to phone manufacturers.

Wonder how long "Google Play Music All Access" will last? Compared to PlaysForSure (Microsoft), Zune Music Pass (Microsoft), and WalMart Music Download Service. Just having a big company behind it is no guarantee of success. Google has never had a successful consumer product that people had to pay for.

List of discontinued Google products.

Despite all the noise, almost nobody is making money in "social". Even Facebook isn't very profitable, despite its size. The business strategy in "social" seems to be to give the service away for a few years, build a following, then crank up the density of ads until the users get fed up. Worked for Myspace, right?

Facebook traffic peaked about a year ago. Twitter is now exploring the user's threshold of pain with "sponsored tweets". This is robocalling in another form.

Basic truth: ads with search results are useful to users and effective for advertisers, because they're presented when the user is actively looking for something relevant. Ads on "social" are merely annoying because the user is looking at what their friends are doing.

OK, a fanboy from the Arduno cult has been heard from.

Back in 1979, Milton Bradley introduced the Big Trak. This was the first mass-market battery-motor-wheels-CPU toy 'bot. Since then, there have been more machines in that category and slightly above it, like Lego Mindstorms.

It's been three decades since the Big Trak. There hasn't been much progress above that level in mass-market devices. A Roomba is only slightly smarter than a BigTrak. Mobile phones, on the other hand, have advanced somewhat since the late 1970s. R/C toys have become much better, but most of that reflects improved batteries, and the good stuff is still at a rather high price point.

There's a new BigTrak from 2010. It has an optional camera and a WiFi connection, and will connect to an iPhone. It has the basic hardware to be an intelligent autonomous vehicle. But it's no smarter than the original BigTrak. If you want something as dumb as a BigTrak, you can buy one of these. No assembly required. Ages 6 and up.

Here's what's possible today at the hobbyist level: an autonomous paintball robot. Runs a maze and hits targets. Uses a Kinect as a sensor. Has 2D SLAM; builds a map of its environment. That's what new products should be doing.