All of the KMart stores in my area - and I include in this the ones that are currently closed, which is most of them - are located in parts of town that used to be high-traffic retail but aren't anymore. The other businesses in the area are mostly commercial services and specialty. One I can think of that is still open is pretty much surrounded by large car dealerships. The KMart where I had my first part-time job closed over a decade ago. The building is now used as a warehouse for a construction supplier. Other businesses in the area is a farm equipment dealership, an auto parts store, and some place that I think sells well drilling equipment.

My point is that in my, admittedly anecdotal experience, the KMart stores are no longer in prime retail locations. It certainly makes sense for Sears to say, what the heck can we do with all these buildings we own?

Craftsman is no longer a Sears exclusive. Can't guarantee this is the case in all areas, but my local Ace Hardware carries Craftsman.

I've never seen it either, but I know that it must happen because it's so obvious.

Photons can send states, you can send binary ascii this way. therefore send classical information foreward, very easy to do and then use that classical information to send backwards through the limited communication medium.

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. You have to send the classical information from the sender to the receiver (because it's at the sender where it is generated). That classical information also isn't "extra", by itself it is just as random as the measurement results on the quantum system. Only if you combine both, you get transmission of information.

There are several proposals (and calculations) about entangling (microscopic, but still large compared to typical quantum systems) cantilevers, but I'm currently not aware of an experiment which already did this (and didn't find any with a quick Google Scholar search).

I'd be (slightly) more likely to trust Anonymous Coward's explanation of the process if he could spell nickel properly.

Because he's made a fortune helping people get movies and music without paying. Well, without paying the producers of those movies and that music.

And this is Slashdot, so helping a bunch of leechers makes him a hero because MAFIAA.

" I think smoking crack is extremely out-of-character for him"

—bwahahahhahah

"video of drunken bumblingness, ..., or just general belligerence"

—it has that *as well*, including slurs against Justin Trudeau, gays, and the kids he spends his afternoons coaching instead of working.

"kudos to the epic trolls who started the rumour"

—The video is not a "rumour". It's out there and has been seen by journalists who didn't have the $200K on them at the time.

Plus the amazing possibility of bacon and hot wings from the same animal!

You see this all the time with crackpots.
"I invented a perpetual motion machine/cold fusion device/200mpg carburetor/etc...! I just need money to develop it!"
"Wonderful! Let me replicate the results first and we're in business!"
"NO WAY! You're just going to steal the technology and kill me and leave me in a ditch somewhere!!!"

If the process were legitimate, they would be more than happy to let you test it. All that paranoia is just an excuse to hide the fact that it's bullshit.

This is one of the strangest sentences I have encountered in quite a while.

First, "belie" is very definitely the wrong word to use here. It means "to show to be false". And second, Ethernet is ubiquitous largely because of its simplicity... there is nothing surprising about that.

I don't have an opinion about Rossi's device, and skepticism is warranted. But outright rejection is not reasonable, for a number of reasons.

In the decades since the Pons-Fleischman debacle back in 1989, there has been a huge amount of evidence that the phenomenon they described is real. The problem is just that it has been grossly unpredictable. Lots of people have replicated their results, just not reliably.

In addition, researchers for the U.S. Navy and other laboratories have been investigating the exact same Nickel-to-Copper LENR reaction for many years, saying that it shows great promise.

Don't confuse outright rejection with skepticism. They aren't the same things. I am skeptical of Rossi's claims too, but until more evidence comes in I am keeping an open mind. Even if Rossi turns out not to be the one who has made this work, there is every reason to believe there is something to this technology.

Here's the problem: they're pulling the same blunder that got Intel in hot water back in the 90s.

People aren't stupid (although many of them act that way sometimes). If you can take a part that sells for $1,000, disable some of the functionality, and sell it for $650... then you can sell the whole unit for $650. It's a ripoff and people know it.

Now, if it's a matter of disabling cores that don't pass testing anyway, that might be an effective way to dump "defective" parts on the market and still profit from them. But it's pretty hard -- for very good reasons -- to convince people that it doesn't actually cost you MORE money to disable only those that don't pass tests... meaning you still could have sold those better parts for the lower amount.

Wow. I don't know how that sneaked in there. The final paragraph should simply have been:

"The 'not very practical' designation simply means you haven't been using your imagination."

First off, the kind of OTP situation discussed in TFA isn't even a very common concern: using forensic tech to recover the key from memory. Either you'd have to have some kind of computer with virtually no garbage collection of free memory, or the computer would have to be seized immediately after having sent the message. Just not something that is going to happen every day.

But to address your own comment: you must keep in mind that almost ALL modern encryption has the problem that a key must be generated and distributed. Public-key or asymmetrical cryptography is great for certain things, but even that relies on keeping a key secret (although the secret key does not have to be distributed).

The point is: as long as your OTP key remains secret (if the key is pretty random and of course if it is used only once), then it is inviolable. There are many extremely practical uses for such technology.

For example: you can dispense with the "one time only" requirement if you simply want little more than a "keeping the kid sister's prying eyes off my email" level of security. You can dispense with the key distribution requirement if you have agreed upon a common external changing key source. And so on.

The "not very practical" designation simply means you haven't been using your imagination. common kind of OTP, nor is it a very practical one. The subset they describe is made by adding characters to a message from a random source to obscure the message.