The thing is, some of the bulbs actually get bright almost immediately, but unfortunately, it's almost impossible when shopping for them in the store to figure out which are the instant-on ones and which aren't. Some of the instant-ons might be labelled as such (if marketers were smart, they would), but I've gotten some packages which weren't labelled like that, and were still instant-on.

The thing I absolutely love about CFLs isn't so much lower electric bills (though I like that too), but the fact that I seem to never have to change them. I've been using the same CFLs now for like 4 years.

So, there's 4 types of ionizing radiation. Gamma is only one. Is Gamma the type which is mainly radiated by the isotopes of concern? Or because that's the easiest/cheapest to create a detector chip for, so they slap one in a phone, creating a 1/4 solution to the problem, and market it to the public as a more or less total solution to the problem?

For the particular case of detecting reactor isotopes, is Gamma radiation even particularly useful?

I've got mixed feelings about this. It's been my experience that Silverlight/Netflix give me better video streams (higher definitions, good framerates, very few times it needs to stop to buffer), and my PC runs cooler, than Flash videos, for whatever reason.

I especially noticed this when I had a laptop - I would notice the laptop get VERY hot when watching videos from Hulu (which uses Flash), but it only got warm, not hot, with Netflix videos. The Netflix videos consistently seemed to have higher video quality (although, to be fair, Hulu's video quality seems to have gotten quite a bit better, so that's probably less a limitation of Flash and more of the way the videos were encoded by Hulu a couple years ago).

Still, for all that can be said bad about Silverlight, and it does suck that it's Windows-only, it does have some redeeming values.

There's a very legitimate question of jurisdiction. The U.S. has no legal authority over the moon, any more than they do venus or mars.

In essence, it would be kind of a dickish thing to do to mess with historical sites on the moon, but the U.S. government has no legal authority over the moon. I'd say something which has been left unattended for 50+ years would qualify as "abandoned", so it's not like theft laws should apply.

There is the issue that if the craft is a U.S.-based craft, then like ships in international waters, it might carry U.S. jurisdiction around with it wherever it goes, but if it's, I dunno, a Chinese or Russian spacecraft? What's NASA/USGovt gonna do?

The real issue isn't "running out", it's more like "running tight" - there will always be some limited number of "available" IPv4 addresses out there, available to the highest bidder.

But, we have a situation of "artificial scarcity" *for numbers*. The nice thing about integers, is that there's an infinite number of them available. Why should we suffer the pain of scarcity for something which is unlimited?

For now, the answer seems to be that upgrading to IPv6 will, it is thought, cause more pain, but I think that when people actually see how ridiculous things get in a world where IPv4 addresses are scarce, that they'll see the benefit of ending artificial scarcity.

It can't be remotely read (at least not yet), which is a good thing for many reasons, but everyone already has a (almost unique) code (I say almost, because there is the case of twins/triplets/etc which share DNA). It's just that you have to take a physical sample to "read" their code.

. . . to kill, detain, or avoid my soldiers/special ops, by putting a chip in them so you can track them at all times, and launch remotely guided ordinance programmed to seek their GUIDs. Brilliant plan.

      It's like she's never even heard of a covert operation.

. . . Why isn't China basically buying up all its own production and using them to produce power for China?

The fact that they can "dump" solar panels on the U.S. and European markets speaks volumes to how the Chinese themselves view the tech, don't you think?

Seems like it'd be useful for something like a "Wireless HDMI" standard, to allow your computer, phone, etc to transmit HD video to your TV or projector.