Does that mean that any time someone discusses that "byproduct" it will be linked to the presidential candidate? :O
That would be awesome! Will the comments be more negative than positive... which social groups?

Next president... Lincoln Free Beer!

It is really terrifying that you got modded for that, and it wasn't funny. :O

OLTP - Online Transaction Processing. An application/database designed for larger, equal, or nearly equal volumes of database inserts, updates, and deletes, as there are reads. The database is generally more (and often highly) normalized, meaning that there is less data duplication across tables and/or within tables.
OLAP - Online Analytical Processing. Essentially a data warehouse designed for larger volumes of reads than there will be inserts, updates, or deletes (often relatively very, very few deletes). Less normalized meaning that there may be duplicated data across and/or within tables in order to increase query speed at the cost of possible consistency issues due to the data duplication.

Mark this informative comment the hell up!
And smash my Karma if you want to, but the (four letter) acronyms really didn't help the article much.

You are correct in the case of airplanes and other macro structures...

But, interestingly the little mirrors in your TI based DMD/DLP movie projector use aluminum hinges.
They bend ~1% strain @540Hz for ~20khr before failing and that's >10^10 cycles!

Why? because the hinges are thinner than a grain size and so dislocations don't propagate.
Cool :)

I only use correct_horse_battery_staple now that I know how hard it is to guess!

Greg is a great guy, giant tesla coils are cool, and I'd love to know more about lightning, but it seems like lots of properties of air (especially when it has water or other polarizable droplets/particles) are frequency dependent. So I'm not sure how that this is really going to act like the natural lightning that we're used to... Science? Ok, but not Natural Lightning Science.

You are absolutely correct... the details of the patent claims (and supporting specification) are very important.
However, the selection of the examiner is also extremely important.
I won't be surprised if one of these patents is issued in a first action allowance, even if another (perhaps even narrower) receives a final rejection.

Some companies even submit multiple applications with minor tweaks to the abstract so that they go into different branches of art.
When the first examiner allows the patent, you abandon all of the others so that any prior art discovered by another examiner doesn't make it to the file folder.

Multiple submission triples or quadruples the cost of filing, but you can dramatically improve the chance of allowance for highly suspect patents.

You can vote on whether you think this was the right thing to do or not...
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/hundreds-cops-flood-zuccotti-park-occupy-wall-street-protesters-show-defiance-retreat-surrender-article-1.977430

Actually, finding a cloud containing only Radon gas would basically indicate alien intelligence or some completely new nuclear process since there isn't a process that would purify to only Radon... Even isotopes that decay into radon would need to be purified....

Finding a giant isolated stellar gas cloud that contains no other elements again either implies that they were purified by some process, or that it has been there alone since before there were other gases (eg Oxygen, Nitrogen) to mix with. It would (thermodynamically) ove to form ammonia (NH3) and water (H2O) to get to a lower stable energy state).

They have proposed the least unlikely answer (interstellar alien intelligence is a big leap).
Please pursue further education.

There was new data this year indicating subsurface water ice from two synthetic radars (SHARAD and MARSIS at different frequencies on two different landers).
They have estimates for the volume and placement of the ice as well.
http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/feats/2010/mars_glaciers.html

An original finding from 2002 based on a single Gamma Ray Spectrometer instrument showed excess Hydrogen...
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/28may_marsice/

And now even more extensive results from long term surface studies... I find the recent subsurface radar measurements most compelling.