Coppermine, the little L2 that could. First released just before the Athlon and staying competitive by rapidly racing from 500 MHz or so up to 1 GHz.

It's hard to say what is timing, what is product perfection, and what is good marketing. I remember being at a Nokia event in 2001 (basically "what are our future products as a recruiting event"). True, they talked about different concepts, including augmented reality and HUD solutions, that haven't taken off. But they certainly also talked about always-connected rich finger touch big-screen devices.

What was most striking at that event, however? I was the only one in the group I was in that thought the new devices seemed cool, and this was in a techy audience. Most phones only had circuit-switched data at this time, still going on basic WAP. Since then, we got cameras and MMS, HTML browsers, although limited. Most of these additions were also frowned upon by rather large groups, "why would I want a camera". And yet, they became commonplace. Only at that point did Apple release a smartphone which got a capacitive touch interface right. But even if capacitive touch had been available at a reasonable price point five years earlier, the market itself would not have been ready.

I can only guess that Nokia used focus groups more similar to my friends and concluded that a slow, gradual entry, focusing on niche devices, would be much easier on their R&D budget and result in higher sales. That held true for a number of years...

Considering that the data part of Thunderbolt is basically a different physical layer for PCIe, it should be very simple to handle. I guess, though, that it will be quite possible to do Really Stupid Stuff where the added latency compared to a motherboard PCIe board is enough to cause trouble. On the other hand, the latency is positively fantastic compared to what you can achieve with USB.

The resonance isn't caused by changing magnitude in the main field (B0), which is the strong field here. By imposing a static, homogenous magnetic field, however, the nuclear spin states separate slightly in energy. If you send a RF pulse with the right frequency, you can observe resonance back, caused by the excitation between the states. Matter rich in 1H nuclei (like water) will show more resonance, detected in the receiver coils.

I think another scenario is more interesting: brand and location awareness. Make the driver pass by retailer X once, or once every n months. Not every trip. Immediate "click-through" equivalent will be low, but the driver might spontaneously go back to the same place to get the service offered at some other time. Getting one additional regular customer out of (let's say) 500 such occasional drive-bys can be worth it, even with the numbers you cite.

Kepler is observing the dimming of the light of the star (basically a part of the star disc is shadowed by the planet), when the planet transits directly in the line of sight between Kepler/Earth and the star. Hence, you can get a cross-section area, and by assuming the planet to be reasonably spherical (a fair assumption), you get the volume.

I think there is a dent even in the simulated one. Remember that these 2D visualizations are only representations of the 3D densities. Where you put your cutoff for surfaces, or in this case, where you put the steepest slope in your grayscale definition, can influence the perceived shape a lot more than what is actually the case.

You are assuming there are no holes in the protocol. How is the ID pairing truly done? Is it possible to do some kind of hardware reset over the wireless interface, either by design or by an implementation flaw? Is the ID sent in clear, or is there some proper handshake going on? If there is a cryptographic handshake, is it based on a single common certificate? (Reverse engineering one remote would then still be enough to spoof the ID of any other.)

If the secret of the ID itself is supposed to maintain security, how many requests can be sent in a certain timeframe. Can the pump be fooled to drain its battery receiving bogus wireless messages? There are so many possible attack venues. That does't mean this is necessarily a bad thing, but a high-level understanding of how the system is supposed to work hides so many possible ways to circumvent it.

And suddenly you have a whole different bag of problems. Even just sequencing genomes have frequently been done by putting huge parts of human DNA into yeast or other hosts as a method for amplification and storage. Are the yeast cells human? No. Is a mouse with a single human gene (maybe a disease allele) human? No, and your suggestion would seriously hamper research. Is a bacterium with a human or rather human-derived insulin gene human? No.

On the other hand, is there a problem if one would create e.g. the equivalent of a geep (a sheep-goat chimera, really two distinctive cell lines constituting different parts of the same body) from chimp and human lines? I would definitely think so. The tipping point is not too clear, and that's really the problem here. "Any creature with human DNA" is far too broad, so what criterion should we use.

And during those times when the sun is not hitting right on, a black surface will generally emit, you guessed it, more black-body radiation. (However, the real issue at hand then is the emission/(re)absorption properties in IR instead, but many black surfaces are black in IR and FIR as well, and the opposite holds for many white ones.) In short: staying black will not keep you warm, unless there is a lot of radiation around to absorb.