32 pis, 800ma per pi, 25.6A. Call it 30A to give some margin for error. Not exactly exotic - should be doable for thirty quid or so.

I've read about servers that pack hundreds or thousands of arm or atom chips into one enclosure, giving great performance-per-watt for heavily threaded workloads. Mostly targetted at webservers.

"processors with multiple cores are cheaper than mutliple processors with one core."
And both are cheaper than one really, really fast core. You can only really go up to 4Ghz with off-the-shelf parts - any higher than that and you're on to exotic cooling systems involving liquified gasses of one type or another. The record is 8.8GHz, but that took liquid nitrogen.

Radio is non-ionising, it wouldn't cause DNA damage. Nor is is possible that the radio could heat the seeds - not enough power. Far more likely is that heat from the router electronics dried out the medium the seeds were on, and more likely still is that the 'fail' group were in an entirely different room and thus at a completely different temperature.

This lot were also aware that there was prize money on offer for whichever school produced the best research - and confirming what everyone knows doesn't win prizes. I'd consider not just the possibility of poor experiment, but of outright fraud: It only takes one team member to poison the plants, thus assuring the team of a good shot at the prize.

Joke fail: Radar is non-ionising radiation. Won't affect fertility or give you mutant superpowers. You need something with a bit more energy for that.

Mythbusters did attempt to cook a chicken by strapping it in front of a radar transmitter. Didn't work. It's doable, but you need something with more power than your little marine radar to do it.

This is what happens when carrier-level NAT is deployed. Even the plants would rather die than live with NAT.

Plants aren't that sensitive. Most likely explanation is failure to follow experimental protocol - these aren't professional scientists, they are students at a school, with the experiment in a room accessible to hundreds of people.

Chances are someone decided that 'plants grow' isn't going to get them a lot of attention, and sprinkled the router side with weedkiller. Or simply didn't water it. Thus they are assured of getting some media coverage, and a very good shot at winning the school science competition (Mission accomplished, there!).

This is why experiments need to be reproducible.

I am entirely confident that when some real scientists replicate the experiment in controlled conditions and nothing happens, it *won't* get widely reported. Or reported at all, really. There's no money in telling people they are safe.

Youtube doesn't claim copyright, but the upload terms grant them a (Very broad) exclusive license to distribute the video. The law can do funny things when technology is involved - the youtube terms are their way of giving people permission to stream their videos, someone violating the terms is thus streaming the video without authorisation.

For that matter, under US law, downloading and saving those videos is nothing less than a criminal offense - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes it an offense to access any computer system without authorisation. No compliance with the youtube terms means no authorisation, means a jail term if someone is government decides to prosecute. This is the legal trick that was used to threaten Aaron Swartz with a few decades of jail time. It's a silly and dangerous law, but the law nonetheless.

Everyone is a criminal now. There are so many laws, it's impossible not to break a few.

I think it's a matter of motivation. Open-source developers make things like downloaders out of ideology - they are opposed to needless dependance upon any service. Microsoft is just doing it as a way to screw over the competition. Youtube downloaders have always been of dubious legality at best.

That might fly for the advertising, but including a download functionality requires a deliberate effort - Microsoft is willfully including a tool with no functionality except to facilitate in the violation of Google's license agreement, and thus copyright. If this ever turns into a court case, MS would probably lose - but they could still drag it on long enough to cost both sides a few million dollars in legal fees, and get a lot of good press if they spin it right.

There are two problems with that standard:

1. Rodents react to pain too. For you standard to work you need to declare that humans are 'special' without specifying exactly why this is the case. That, or declare rat poison a weapon of mess destruction.

2. It's subjective enough that the definition can be twisted for political ends.

Mostly. There is still an issue with yield - almost all of the embryos cloned will die soon after. Everyone remembers Dolly, no-one really notices the hundreds of other sheep clones that didn't survive. Primate yields are a lot lower - for some yet-unknown reason their embryos are exceptionally delicate. It's a problem with human cloneing, because human eggs are expensive - the only way to get them is to pump a woman full of hormones to induce many ovulations at once. A very unpleasant experience for the woman.

Plus he's carrying written instructions, which is an incredibly stupid thing, and a compass which is going to be of little use in a city. This stinks of a setup. I don't see what the CIA could gain from this, but I can imagine Russia doing it as a propaganda piece - impersonate a CIA agent, 'recruit' someone, catch him, and announce to your people that the cold war isn't over yet but your superior Russian intelligence agents can still catch the minions of the capitalist pigs, or whatever the current rhetoric is.

Ohm's law goes out the window as soon as inductance becomes a nontrivial factor.

That R-78E3.3-0.5 looks useful... the raspberry pi uses a rather inefficient linear regulator to take the 5v input down to 3.3v. An NCP1117. Can't just replace it with an R-78, as the minimum input voltage is 6V, but if you're running it off of something higher... yes. This component may be of use to me.