The plates are in plain view. As the first poster indicated, they could sit a cop on every corner and note down every plate. I can't think of any reasonable argument for this requiring a warrant. Forcing my ISP to cough up data on me, or planting a GPS tracker on my car -- or even asking those "nice folks" at onstar to spy on me (I don't, and won't have an onstar equipped vehicle) -- THAT should require a warrant.

Chances are that this "e-cat" is crap. However all of the above blather is not relevant. 1. Catalysts can and do change the nature of reactions, whether they occur at all, and how exothermic or endothermic the reaction is - this can occur with chemical reactions 2. Chemical catalyst properties are irrelevant to the proposed process, which is supposed to be a fusion process. 3. The solar fusion reference makes sense only in the case of solar fusion -- yes -- in that process you bind up a tremendous amount of energy in nickel and iron. No it doesn't fuse higher naturally. So? Does that mean it's impossible? Absolutely not. We do all sorts of things that don't happen naturally. If as the original poster said: the binding energy is stronger for nickel than copper (I must admit I don't know if that's true -- but I'm willing to believe that it's possible) Quote: "Nickel has the highest binding energy of any nucleus. When stars die it is because they've turned every element into iron and nickel and it is impossible to fuse anything further exothermically." If a catalyst changes the fusion "activation energy" could heat be released in that process? I'm betting that it could. This is a bit like the folks that jumped on the ice melting and assuming that it proves that climate change is caused by human factors. No, it simply proves that it is significant warming trend -- and NOTHING else. It's probably caused or helped by human input to the ecosystem -- but proving that is separate from proving warming.
Don't use a bit of knowledge to spread confusion and ignorance. This isn't a "free energy" scheme -- it's a fusion scheme. It may be highly improbable, but it's not a violation of thermodynamics. You eventually run out of nickel or hydrogen. Fission seemed like free energy at first as well - the fuel didn't burn or blow up, but still generated heat -- preposterous! If you know enough detail to really critique it, please do! If you don't -- please don't pretend you do. - Jeff Dodge

Win-R (or Alt-F2) "notepad" On linux system notepad is aliased to whatever seems the most useful editor -- kate gedit etc. save the files into a network share f:\txt\dmvpn-notes.txt for windows or a symlink to it (linux) txt/dmvpn-notes.txt recently I've been dumping them into my dropbox -- but dropbox security issues have me nervous about this practice -- I don't like having to think about where to save it -- ie - is there a password in the note? Best system ever -- locate for filename searches and grep for content searches -- on windows boxen windows search works tolerably -- and cygwin allows for grep when that fails.

Power usage:

This guy on the silent pc forums seems to indicate he saved probably 2w, possibly 5w of power by removing his RAGE XL card. -- This is admittedly an older card -- but even if it's 5w -- at 24x7 we're looking at less than $6 per year at 12c / kwh.

Link: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=453510&sid=c07f21d546ad78002ce04fee65b0e989

More to the point re: power savings -- can you in fact shut down most of the video? -- how much power are we talking about?
I understand that when a high end gpu is loaded up it sucks down power like no tomorrow -- but how much does it burn at idle?
Assuming you don't boot X, can you put the graphics card to sleep pending a keypress?

1. Bios setup through serial console -- the great majority of motherboards do not support this -- but you might try LinuxBios (now known as coreboot) http://coreboot.org/ supports serial console.
2. A number of non-server Asus "enthusiast" boards do support remote/serial console I believe the A7N8-X did, and a few others - check, you might get lucky.
2. Serial support -- most medium old desktops kept a single serial port on the motherboard -- many systems didn't pin these out -- but check your manual and scrounge for old serial header to d-sub slot fillers.
3. People mentioning laptops re: lack of serial ports -- this is a discussion about headless desktops -- keep your mind on the problem and solutions and stop spitballing -- laptops don't go headless.
4. If it's a desktop without serial ports put in an add in card. Hopefully a common one that the kernel and grub will both be able to see (and presumably coreboot if you go that route for bios level serial)

I would not recommend trying to work out USB -> Serial for your console -- you'll almost certainly not be able to make it work with grub (pending some savant deciding to add PL203 support to grub)

Again -- how much power are you saving by going absolutely headless? Did you measure? I've generally assumed load from AGP card at rest is minimal -- am I wrong?

- Jeff Dodge

Actually they have vp6 and vp8 http://www.on2.com/index.php?564 which -- surprise, surprise -- on2 claims is better than h.264 -- if google decides to open up vp8 -- it would change the equation radically. Particularly the ogg/vp8 combo. It's also possible some vp3 diffs (theora) would still be useful when applied to vp8 -- although what the chances of this are, I couldn't say. It does solve the h.264 patent license problem for google with android and chrome os. A theora / vp8 release and a move to primacy of vp8 or derivative for youtube would reshape the whole playing field. I'm hopeful, but not gleeful yet.

Faster-than-light does necessarily not mean instantaneous. Ansibles (as Card used the term anyway) allow instant communication. What your reference claims is that ftl and instant communication end up being the same thing. "For any faster-than-light system there will be some inertial frame in which it appears to act instantaneously, and so the same argument may easily be applied to any such system." But this is completely unproven in the reference, and doesn't seem quite right to me. If you are saying that special relativity does not correctly explain the behavior of faster than light travel or communication, you are completely correct. That says nothing about whether such things can or do happen.

NTP had no product -- they had no service. (on a push e-mail front)
They simply waited for someone else to do it and then sued them. This did not serve innovation.

Again: Can anyone come up with two cases where patents have driven innovation in software or even electronics?