It's like Hitler vs. Stalin. You don't really want to root for either, you just hope somehow it ends with fewer genocides.

The Hellfire missile weighs 100 lbs, and is a common ordinance on UAVs.

A third of the game? I believe it was ten quests and a crappy set of armor. And it isn't DRM, since it isn't required to play. Honestly, anyone who played this game long enough to enjoy the bonus material has earned it. Pick up a used copy, play it to completion, and then tell me that you really needed ten more quests.

The underwriters were actually propping up the stock which isn't all that unusual, but it does mean that the stock was overpriced. We'll see what the stock is really worth in a few months.

Wrong. Many radioactive isotopes aren't absorbed by the body and are flushed out rapidly, and some of the most damaging particles (alpha emitters in particular) are at their worst when airborne, only staying 'in' your body for the length of a breath. There are some isotopes that are absorbed easily (namely Iodine), but they are the minority. There is not a single "Radiation", there are a staggering number of different radioactive elements, and for each one, the chemistry matters far more than the half-life.

Sooo, it's basically defragging your genome?

In the town I saw it in this weekend, literally 100% of the Saturday seats were sold. Every. Single. Seat.

LEDs are semiconductors. And as every slashdotter worth their salt knows, what happens when you push >50W through a chip with passive cooling and a tiny heatsink? That's when the magic smoke comes out.

The mixed-color approach works with displays because the light is transmitted directly to the eye (or in the case of projectors, reflected once off a white screen). For ambient lighting, you need a continuum of light because the reflectivity of objects varies wildly by color. If you emit only in three sharp peaks, the reflection from any non-white surface will destroy your white balance. The CRI (Color Rendering Index) of a light source is a measurement of how well it illuminates differently-colored surfaces. A 'white' light with three narrow peaks might look great in an all-white room, but it would fail miserably at rendering anything of color.

Good news! You don't have to be gay - you can be straight as an arrow and happy as a clam. But that doesn't mean you can tell everyone else how to live.

This is what I was responding to. Sorry for the miscommunication.

Lightbulb != Incandescent. "Incandescent" refers to the technology of making light by heating something until it glows. That is an inefficient, dead-end technology. We will build (and have already built) a better lightbulb, but we will never build a better incandescent bulb.

Yep. The problem with incandescents is that they spread their power along a smooth, predictable curve governed by basic physics. When we put electrical power into a lamp, we want visible light out. But, that visible light occupies a tiny band (about 350-750 nanometers in wavelength) in the possible spectrum. With an incandescent, no matter what you do, you're still dumping ~95% of the radiated power into the infrared ( 350 nm). The best you can do with an incandescent is have it peak in the middle of the spectrum like the sun. But that would require materials that can withstand temperatures above 5000K, and you would only gain a few percent at best. Edison's bulb is a classic example of manufacturability trumping efficiency, and will eventually be regarded as being roughly as useful as a candle.

There is no "improvement" possible for the incandescent bulb - it is limited by physics. A blackbody is an incredibly efficient radiator, unless you only want a small slice of spectrum - in which case you're stuck with the abysmal ~5% we have now.

" there is a superconducting cable on the ground carrying 200 million amperes, and a superconducting cable in the launch tube carrying 20 million amperes, at an altitude of 20 km there will be a levitating force of about 4 tons per meter of cable length"

That works out to an energy density of (mgh)=1.5e9 J/m. Multiply that by 1600 km, and you get 2.5e15 J, or half a megaton, equivalent to the yield of a small hydrogen bomb. Anyone ever see a superconducting magnet quench?