Kilgore Trout was Kurt Vonnguts fictional science fiction writer, a character from Kurts novel's, that is, and not a writer of fictional science fiction, which would be doubly fantastical.

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Science Fiction Books Feed @ Feed Distiller

Looking forward the Quantum Dot heat engine, it nothing to do with the Helskini project and deserves a thread of its own. The authors claim up to 90% Carnot efficency is possible. Even at 40% this is better than almost every heat to electricity generator mankind has made so far. It would replace turbines and generators everywhere (if they can run that hot), and doubling the efficiency of gas/coal/oil and nuclear power stations. That's fantastic, and probably decades aways.

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Heat Recovery Feed @ Feed Distiller

Its really just amazing how quickly we've come in those 350 Years, when the Royal Society was founded we had no theory of gravity, electricity, heat, air magnetism or engines. The most complex machines, we're clocks and windmills. It make you think how far and how quickly man kind has come.

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History of Science Feed @ Feed Distiller

That very much depends on the specific LED, now that blue, and ultraviolet LEDs have been produce, LEDs can create any spectrum that we wish. In practice a white light combo LED is unlikely to have more that three specific emitters, but for tasks, like hydroponics, custom LEDs are likely to have the advantage. By contrast, florescent bulbs have a very blue tint that is probably unhelpful for growing.

I'm actually rather surprised that LED have only the same life time cost as fluorescents, I expected LED to be much cheaper, especially because of there longer life. Increasing there use and better manufacture will likely bring down the cost of LEDs in the futures, while fluorescents have been around so long i doubt there's much improvement to be had.

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Home Lighting Feed @ Feed Distiller

If client-side scripting went away, we'd lose a lot of functionality from websites. For example, editors for blogs and many forums, need javascript to work they link buttons. Widgets and many interactive website can dynamically update parts of a page using Ajax again javascript based. The web would be a poorer place without JS. Yes I agree that JS is a rather poor language, it grew into the browser, without any great design thoughts, and has many annoying language faults, i particular don't like declaring everything as 'var' instead of give a type for it, it leads to errors and hurts readability.

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JavaScript Programming Feed @ Feed Distiller

Even though this bug probably gets to inconvenience millions of people around the world. I can't help feeling a little happy as linux user each time such a story comes out. Its that warm smug feeling of superiority dispute all I did was choice to download an slightly rarer OS.

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Microsoft Windows Feed @ Feed Distiller

Only very few animal type make up most of human consumed meat, a few breeds of cattle, sheep, birds and pigs. These animals live they short lives in often rotten conditions, and a consume vast amounts of grains and wheat. If people didn't eat meat, so much more land would be available, that we could feed everyone and still have a lot more land to return to the wild, thereby increasing biodiversity. Synthetic meat will no doubt save on at least half the land needed to feed a populous, and might well led to entirely new favours and textures of food.

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Genetic Engineering Feed @ Feed Distiller

Its a slow ramp up of energies. The LHC has already been doing a few collisions at 450 GeV, here see here, but since the injection energy to the ring 450 GeV, the LHC wasn't doing any acceleration at all there. The 1 TeV milestone show the LHC is in good working order, and the'll be increasing the energy in steps, the few 14 TeV might not be until 2011, it will run at 10 TeV instead for most of 2010 barring any more mishaps and do good physics. CERN have said the'll need to retrofit new quenching mechanisms (safety features for if the superconducting magnets get to hot and cease to superconduct), before they can run at the few 14 TeV. Although it might seem like a shame not to be running at full energy, the Higgs particles are expectable to be of mass 120-190 GeV, what CERN needs to find the Higgs is not high energy but high luminosity, large statistics on a lot of collisions. So the lower energy isn't going to stop the Higgs boson discovery. Supersymmetric particles could have any mass or not exist at all, but the losing the 10-14 TeV range, won't make much difference to begin with.

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LHC Feed @ Feed Distiller

Considering NASA don't current have budget or permission for there next generation rocket, asking for extra funding for safety seems silly. Safety of what, a non existent rocket that will never get made. Such a request doesn't look good. I would hope that Ares would be designed with much better safety than shuttles (in practice) 2/129 failure rate.

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Space Craft Feed @ Feed Distiller

I Must admit to having never heard of it before, being lost in a sea of so many internet and phone gadgets.

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Gadgets Feed @ Feed Distiller

I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.

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Global Warming Feed @ Feed Distiller

In case anyone missing the above authors obvious sarcasm. I'd like to add, that C is the natural language for creating buffer overrun errors. Lets Sigfault the webserver just by putting too long a string into your web form. Overruns or not, strings.h is not want I want to be using when trying parse text from a web form.

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Web Servers Feed @ Feed Distiller

I'm all for a Lunar Base and Lunar Mining, but its not easy and realistical its not going to happen until at least 2030. In the mean that helium 4 comes from the same places that natural gas comes from and contains traces of helium 3 so stocks of helium 3 will regrow slowly until we run out of natural gas. Perphaps we can find some other way to detect radioactive materials.

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Nuclear Proliferation Feed @ Feed Distiller

Just how does it get power at night? Presummably on a clouded day, it can get power once it get above the clouds, but its batteries can't be good for very long in the advent of lose of sun light. Planes really need a constraited power source, and until wehttp://www.feeddistiller.com/blogs/Hydrogen%20Power/feed.html can do better than chemical, fuel cells or combustion seem best to me. For power/weight ratio, hydrogen powered planes, must be best, with methane or boranes beating all the other hydrogen carbons. The weight of the cryogenic storage, might be a problem though.

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Hydrogen Power Feed @ Feed Distiller

Both the elements Tungsten and Tantulum are off extreme stategic importances to the electronics industry. Tungsten for good old fashioned incandestant light bulbs. Tantulum for electrolytic capacitors. There isn't a room or modern consumer item that doesn't use one all the other, so banning either item, would have drastic effects on modern life. Off course, there are some modern replacements for either element for instance LED bulbs and carbon based, supercapacitors.

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Electronics Industrys Feed @ Feed Distiller