If you've got steel studs or steel nails you can just use a small neodymium magnet from your fridge. Run it along the wall until you feel the pull, if the walls are sufficiently thin then it will even stick directly to the studs. Heck, you can even just knock on the wall to feel and listen for where the studs are. It's harder than with a nice stud finder obviously but for the occasional hanging it's fine. If you really want a stud finder you could also ask around your friends to borrow one, ask your neighbors, your apartment manager, or make a post on Craigslist or Freecycle.

Sure a rental service for such things would be nice (assuming it's even profitable at a price people are willing to pay), but it's lazy on your part to not explore your many and varied legitimate options.

Do you think spammers scraping the web for email addresses respect robots.txt?

Commercial versus non-commercial is about a company building a standard product which the government utilizes through firm fixed price contracts. SpaceX has a published price for a launch, and that's exactly what they charge. In contrast the traditional NASA approach has been to award cost plus contracts to major contractors and an army of subcontractors and NASA is more of a partner than a customer, building a one-off custom design. In this type of system cost overruns often get billed to the customer (NASA), but with firm fixed price the work is expected to be completed for the agreed upon price and SpaceX has stated that any cost overruns on their NASA programs above the fixed price launch costs will be covered by SpaceX, not NASA.

Contract vehicles notwithstanding, it also appears that even in NASA's opinion SpaceX is simply more efficient at getting things done than the usual NASA & defense contractor method probably due to reduced management and organizational overhead: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

A big part of SpaceX's efficiency is that they are vertically integrated, doing most of the work themselves. With the non-commercial cost-plus model Congress had the ability to split up subcontracts for the shuttle development and manufacturing across the entire nation, with drastic hits to efficiency.

Although it may not seem like a totally commercial enterprise with NASA as the major source of SpaceX's revenue (for now), but there are important changes taking place in how NASA is acquiring launch capacity which seem like they have the capability to reduce costs over the past model

Field emission is indeed a tunneling process. Old vacuum tubes used thermionic emission - as the cathode is heated some of the electrons have enough energy/speed to escape the potential barrier that ordinarily exists between the cathode and the vacuum. At room temperature essentially none of the electrons have enough energy to be above that potential energy barrier. When the bias voltage is applied it must decrease the potential energy past the barrier which will make the barrier thinner. With enough voltage the barrier is thin enough to tunnel through.

To use a gravity and beach ball analogy: Think of the electrons as beach balls confined to a canyon, they are bouncing around a bit because they're not at absolute zero temperature, but they're not going anywhere. With thermionic emission, heating it up is like blowing a big fan at them which gets them bouncing around at much higher speed - so much so that some of them bounce right out over the top of the canyon. For field emission, with an applied electric field you are decreasing potential energy on the other side of the canyon wall. Since I'm using a gravity analogy, that's like digging out the other side of the canyon past the canyon wall, which thins the canyon wall until some of the beach balls can break right through it. In either case in this analogy, once they're out of the canyon the electric field is like a downward slope, and they just roll down the hill to the anode.

Very doom and gloom! Converting all vehicles (not just cars) to full electric will require about a 50% increase in electricity generation, on average. This will be spread over several decades because the gasoline and diesel engines are hardly going to disappear overnight, so the rate of upgrade is well within our capabilities.

The bigger challenge is dealing with the load transients of fast charging stations. The ideal way to charge vehicles in terms of battery lifetime and grid impact is overnight, which will make use of cheap base load energy, and slower charging is better for the battery. But there will be a need for fast charging during the day, and some upgrades to the grid will be required as it becomes more common. Charging stations may need to make use of local energy storage to supply the transient demand for high charging powers without overstressing their grid connections. As charging becomes more common, charging stations will be equipped with beefier connections to mitigate the need for local energy storage, and smart load management can even out the grid demand at a single charging station, and even across multiple charging stations in a regional area to ensure that the grid capacity is not overloaded.

So on short, yes the electrical infrastructure will require upgrades. But supply follows demand, and as demand for electricity rises so will the supply. Some areas that have overstressed grids will not be able to add many fast-charge stations, or they might have time of day restrictions or higher prices for their electricity. But there's plenty of capacity at night, and people can easily charge their cars then.

I thought commercial LEDs had moved on to SiC substrates for the higher thermal conductivity, even though they're more expensive than sapphire. Most commercial GaN RF circuits and transistors (including Cree) moved on from sapphire a while ago are fabricated on SiC substrates, and a couple companies are doing GaN circuits on silicon substrates. I thought that Cree for sure would be growing their LED's on SiC given that they're the world's main source of SiC substrates, and based on their webpage that seems to be the case.

Go read your source a little more carefully, including the linked interview with the original reporter. When Bill Nye criticized literal interpretation of the Bible, there were a few people who left upset, but it was apparently very low key, no booing, no "bastion" of people storming out or making a scene, and Bill Nye's lecture was uninterrupted and Bill may not have even realized the reaction of these few people.

Sure I'd like to live in a world where all religious people accept that the Bible should not be taken literally, but you (like many according to the followups in your source) appear to have greatly overstated the negative reaction at Bill Nye's lecture by repeating the inflammatory punch line without reading any deeper.

It's based on the fact that many researchers, or at least people reporting research to the media, will play games with statistics to make new research seem more effective or revolutionary than they already are. The concern that GP brings up is not trivial - it is a serious flaw not to have stated that in the relative completion rates of the two treatment methods in the article because this is a very easy way to mislead readers about the results. The researchers did address this is their paper, but as usual the article in the Slashdot summary was poorly written.

Even if you use a power buffer like a huge capacitor bank to store the amount of energy needed to recharge a vehicle like a Tesla Roadster (which has roughly the quoted 500 mile range suggested in the original article) in a short period of time, that capacitor bank will need to be recharged in roughly a similar amount of time... with a power load for a heavily used recharging station to be roughly equivalent to this device I was using in San Francisco. I could easily see such a filling station be in the MegaWatt range for power consumption. In other words the overall electrical transmission infrastructure to get a whole series of stations like this built would require a substantial construction effort just to get those power transmission lines put to all of those station.

Large discontinuous loads can be difficult for utilities to supply, but if charging stations charge up capacitors or some other local energy storage to be used to supply to high peak load of fast battery charging then the utility can easily supply the load, because utilities like steady loads. There will be an increase in average power delivered, and the load may have a somewhat higher peak to average ratio, but let's look at the increase in average power: Total vehicular energy usage from petroleum (including boats, planes, shipping, etc.) is on the order of 25% of US energy consumption, electricity accounts for about 40% of energy usage (source LLNL 2010 based on EIA data). If we convert all cars to electricity that's maybe a 50% total increase in electricity usage. Big, but not game changing. And the increase will be gradual, not instant.

Smart grid concepts are another option to present a more continuous load to a grid circuit by ensuring that the number of cars charging on a given circuit is relatively constant, and this can be spread out over many charging stations across a city. Those who are in a hurry can pay a slight premium to charge immediately, and those in no rush can take advantage of cheaper rates. It's much like discounts currently available for those who use less power at peak times.

So do you like a future with high voltage power lines being built in your backyard? That is the future you are asking for here, where those become a much more common sight in almost everybody's neighborhood. The grid impact of these stations is going to be enormous with any kind of electric vehicle future.

That's hilarious, your dystopian future is one where we have a few more power lines! As I said we're looking at order of 50% increase in electricity usage to accommodate electric vehicles. They're not going to have to run HV transmission lines in people's backyards to make this work, they'll take the existing power infrastructure and upgrade it - increase voltage, add more circuits in parallel. Even if they build dedicated circuits to every fast-charge station you won't see much of it because it's going to be focused in commercial areas and near highways where gas stations are. Who cares if there's a new power line next to the highway? Actually, who cares if there's a new one in your backyard? There's a power line I can see from my backyard and I don't care.

The fossil fuel gravy train is leaving the station, and sooner or later you'll need to get on board with the alternatives, even if it means *shudder* more electrical power lines.

We're interested in anything geeky and technical (at least I am), but you can't squeeze blood from a turnip, or at least not much. So you can talk about products that have new features as long as the features are actually interesting and new. Or you can talk about the features from a technical standpoint, showing what the features really mean, what's important, and what's physically achievable, instead of just rattling off specs like a Best Buy salesman who doesn't understand the product or the specifications.

Taking the Plantronics video as an example, there isn't a whole lot of interesting stuff going on there because they're just making very run of the mill consumer/business products. You could try and squeeze out something good talking about the wireless interface design, or frequency response, noise floor, and distortion in the audio quality, or what makes one headset ergonomic and another uncomfortable, or whether bacteria really grow faster in your ears when you're wearing headphones, just to name a few ideas. But by going with Plantronics you're limiting your options, because their products are fairly boring.

If you want to do a video about computer interface devices you'll have an easier time if you pick something that's already geeky, maybe gaming mice. Then you can get a company that really cares about its products who will tell you about the ergonomics and how their latency and movement accuracy is better than another company's, and they'll have numbers to back it up, and maybe talk a bit about how they accomplished those things. Or talk to monitor manufacturers about new display technologies like OLEDs and 3D, just make sure not to get caught up in marketing-speak. Even better if you could get a monitor manufacturer to HONESTLY discuss monitor specifications like why the contrast ratios are generally BS, how accurate the colors are and how to color calibrate your monitor, and what to look for if you're buying a monitor for watching videos or gaming.

You could also delve into wireless standards, look at all of the different technologies that carriers are calling 4G and what the actual performance of each is and whether it really deserves to be called 4G. Keep an eye on new ultra high speed wireless technologies like Intel WiDi or anything else operating in the 57-64GHz ISM band.

Of course this is just a few of my thoughts about what kinds of information about products are interesting, not about whether it makes a good video. I'm generally not a fan of videos versus static content unless the videos are really well done, or unless you're taking advantage of videos to show something that can't easily be presented in a static page. A big part of that is that videos generally take longer to watch and have less information.