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Comment Why the frog jumps (Score 0) 215

Nano obviously misunderstood why the people were working there. It was fun. Big ass machines making big bangs and sparks, working with the raw elements of nature, doing things no one else was doing. But a dweeb like him telling so many boffins to march to his tune? He was taking the fun out of it. There are other jobs out there, or there's retirement. He couldn't force them to work at Los Alamos and so they left. Why should any citizen be forced to work someplace that makes him miserable? People vote with their feet all the time. Only pocket dictators think this is wrong.

Comment Nothing like a portable holocost. (Score 1, Insightful) 471

Are these guys nuts or con men? They want to design a portable device to generate a directional EMP to help police stop fleeing cars. Point and click, off goes the suspect's car computer and the thing rolls to a stop. Whee! Sounds great, doesn't it? But physics and legal liabilities will stop them from getting this out of the lab. First, EMPs are not directional. So the first time a cop uses it, off goes his car and every car around him along with every bit of electronics in the cars. And every bit of electronics in the homes nearby and the stores and the hospitals, etc. Permanently. Thousands, maybe millions of dollars of damage and potentially many deaths. Let's not forget the folks with pacemakers, hearing aids or insulin pumps, either. The power required to make an EMP strong enough to disable a car isn't trivial either. It takes some huge high voltage capacitors or nasty explosives to manage the job. Los Alamos Labs can do this, but it's very expensive for each EMP produced. The car computers are pretty well shielded and located in protected areas in the car. So the EMP will have to be much stronger than what's needed to damage the computer. Almost all of the EMP will be reflected. Reflected only God knows where. Jerks.

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