First of all it needs to be a form of fusion that's either hot / high pressure enough to allow reasonably efficient conversion to work through a thermodynamic process, or a form of fusion that emits charged particles that can be converted directly to useful electricity. If you can't extract work from the machine then all you have is a glorified heat pump.

Second it needs to go through the whole industrial process from prototype to worldwide mass production to be able to beat more established forms of energy. That is going to take years, if not decades and there would certainly be a fusion bubble or two or three on Wall Street along the way.

I suppose it could be used to blackmail hipster by threatening to reveal their listen history to one another...

Hush. Don't you know that lots of people need to finish their PhD:s?

The article says that the target application is phones, but that's not true. Journalists tend to think that they're writing for readers with the intellect of six-year olds, and scientists have learned to play along. That's why news articles about advances in energy storage say that they will give us better phones or better cars.

The primary target applications for supercaps are things like regenerative braking in cars (where the power is coming from a generator in the car), all sorts of military applications, grid leveling, etc. By the time that there are cheap supercaps that store enough energy per unit of weight there will be cheaper batteries that store even more. Batteries are also trending towards shorter charge times. Remember when it took 5-8 hours to charge a phone? Now it's more like 1-2 hours, tops.

Looks like whoever edited the Wikipedia page slipped in a zero too much in the Joule number. It should probably say 108 kJ/kg or 30 Wh/kg. But then that is still wrong, because commercially available supercapacitors typically store at most single digit watts per kilogram.

I got what you meant, but my point is that people in general will keep using tablets until someone comes up with an invention that defeats the benefit of owning multiple devices with multiple screens. If the tablet market dies it will be because we're all wearing contact lenses that paint images directly to our retinas.

Saying that tablets have found a niche is a bit like saying that hamburgers have found a niche. Tablets are cheap, or will be cheap once the surge in demand has been satisfied and the manufacturers have recouped their investments, and tablets can do 75% of what an average user does on a laptop, and more.

If you look at it from a hardcore user on a budget angle it makes sense to spend a little less on your laptop or desktop and monitor and direct some money towards a tablet or two. More machines and more screens make you more productive.

Then you're almost old enough to remember when IRC was created in 1988. I'm 29 and I clearly remember the splash that mIRC made on TV and in the newspapers when it came out in 1995 and IRC took off among normal people, or semi-normal people, and I clearly remember how everyone in school was trying to learn how to use it in 1996. Hell, you could be 18 and still have learned to use mIRC when significant numbers of people where still using it, if you were an early writer/typer and started using it at age 6.

I guess it could be that the rate at which software and electronics is changing causes us to over estimate the amount of time that has passed since technology x was hot.

So I guess in North Carolinian schools they only teach twin primes that consist of one odd prime and one even prime.

What about the idea that was popular a few years ago about making stuff fail gracefully, both at the hardware level and the software level, so that the system could swallow the error and go on calculating without completely ruining the result? Could failures be reduced to essentially just another source of error?

Here's an early preview... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v91m_F2NhfU

Yeah, in-game purchases and chapters could work in theory. It probably will work at some point in the future, as soon as most customers have gotten used to in-game purchases and don't perceive it as scammy, which could take a while.

But I don't think you can ever get around the basic problem, which is that it's hard to make money selling designer vases through stores that focus on plastic souvenirs.

Either drowning in $0.99 crap or not released because game companies predict that they will be drowning in $0.99 crap.

I think there needs to be a carefully curated invite-only game store for phones and tablets where game companies would agree to charge at least $9.99 for a game.

Because Python != Java Script. I don't even know that Python runs in Firefox, but I could be wrong...

"Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free [...]"

Now I'm not an expert on American law and I'm not an American and English is not my native language, but it sounds just a little bit implausible to me that there would be a law that said that it is not illegal to murder people if you make the gun yourself...

Or I guess maybe scott-free means something completely different than scot-free, like you're free like a character in a Scott movie, or something.

Or maybe the senator's best friend owns a gun factory.

Or I guess maybe the senator has a wildly inaccurate idea of what a 3-d printer is. I mean, it's probably easier to get fingerprints and DNA off of a metal gun than a plastic gun. A metal gun is really hard to destroy, but it would not exactly be trivial to destroy a plastic gun without the neighbors noticing.

Unless you have a good quality file and a lot of time...