The modern near field charges basically prove this wrong. You don't need to radiate that much power to get your battery to absorb 1W. You can get the radiator to absorb the energy it radiated if nothing else absorbed it, meaning the field strength can far exceed the input power. In the end your device is better modeled as an air core transformer, the primary's input power is dependent on the secondary's output, if nothing is connected the transformer consumes negligible power.
With that said, trying to make that work at 30 feet is hard, and I tend to think that the frequencies required will mean that you will get serious EMI like issues when your system designed to transfer 1W into a AA accidently transfers 10W into the AC power lines, or it transfers 1W into the poorly shielded HDMI cable on your TV, etc.

No, they most likely don't have to. Root exploits are fairly well know and none of the phone manufacturers are that fast at fixing them (and this is how everyone roots their devices). As long as the NSA has a working root exploit for your phone (which may be kept open by google failing to notify Samsung of it's existence) then the NSA can use the exploit to root your phone, once rooted anything on the phone is readable, and encryption performed on the phone can be read on the clear side and the keys can be figured out if needed. Of course they rarely need to do that type of thing, most people sync with Google, and Google forces much of that syncing on the users, so the NSA's access to google servers gives them your contact list (and the google play store could probably be used to push things to a particular phone if need be).

Or BES just has an NSA backdoor.

> Btw, is there any good reason why the idle power consumption of graphics cards increases significantly when more than one (or in some cases two) monitors are connected?

A few reasons, but if you have twice the pixels then the video card needs to read twice as much data out of it's output buffers (one 1080p@60fps monitor would require ~2.9Gbps of writing to DVI, two 1080p monitors would require 6Gbps of writing to DVI). For idle card that are not doing much, and especially one with a very weak GPU like many of the onboard ones that might be a good chunk of their power. But for the high end gaming GPUs, I don't think it should matter all that much, if the 3D application is drawing to more pixels then it will probably use more power, otherwise I don't think it would be a significant difference.

They work just fine, but require a decent camera. The issue is they are generally not linked to systems that do this. The metermaids have them to find ticketable cars, the red light cameras have the software (though probably don't run it real time), and the toll booths have it. The issue is they are all configures to ticket someone for one specific thing, they are tied into the system right there and generally only scan when an event happens. The cameras watching the sidwalks are just not setup to do this, and many of them are not linked into systems that can scan the plates anyways. In the end it's a money issue, the people who own the software probably want something ridiculous for their software/

Android, it is linux by many standards, loads of incompetent users, loads of malware.

If they try hard enough you can figure out the owner of that plate with a few well worded searches or alternatively ask a cop or something who probably knows. Once you figure that out you just go directly to the legislator with it, they have far more power and absolutely do want to make the ticket go away. They will handle it for you.

In the US they don't either (at least not in NY), the solution is to not fine the driver. They fine the vehicle owner, but it's not considered a violation against the driver, thus it doesn't show up on your record and it doesn't affect insurance. Basically it's done the same way parking tickets are handled (which also don't need anything other than a license plate).

Sounds to me like that's the root of the problem, the tickets are for the vehicle owner, and the legislator plates are not tied to the vehicle, thus the system can't pull the owner from the database. They could send it to the driver, but generally that doesn't stand up in court so the systems don't do that.

Exactly, they do operate at half power, easily, there is a steam accumulator, basically a big tank, hooked up to ships steam, they fill the tank to whatever pressure they need and then fire the catapult (they have to do it this way as the reactor does not generate enough steam in the second or so the catapult fires to do the job, it needs to be stored). The magnetic ones do the same thing but with a different method.

It's mostly a cost thing, the U2 flew very very high, the wiki puts it at 70,000 feet, very few planes can even fly that high, so planes can't really do an intercept, also it's altitude is above the design range of most radars. Radar searching for planes puts most of it's power in areas where they will find planes, so they are pointed to not look too much into the 70k ft flight area, they could probably pick it up, but it probably wouldn't track it through the whole coarse over the coverage area. The same radar could just be pointed up and it would do a much better job at tracking it, but that would significantly reduce the range of the radar. The only real option to take it out is then a SAM that can hit things at 70k ft, when the U2 came out, things just didn't fly that high, SAMs simply couldn't fly that high either, now with modern planes many will hit it, but ultimatly it is a cost tradeoff, like a space ship adding a little bit of range means more fuel, and you need more fuel to carry that extra fuel, it all adds up, twice the distance on the missile means much more than twice the size (and cost) without increasing any speed/damage/maneuverability specs. Once the missiles came out that could hit those altitudes they came out with an SR-71, basically even if you did see it, your missile would need a range of something like 100 miles at mach 5 to get an intercept coarse, that in a huge amount of fuel when you consider even today, things like a sidewinder only goes 22mi at mach 2.5.

It actually ends up saving everyone money, the power grid is sized to the peak loads, the peak loads are during the daytime, they charge much higher rates during the day and it costs them money at night as it is difficult to change the output rapidly on many of the power plants. A PV array sells the power company power at below cost during the period when they charge the most money, and your net zero house sucks power off the grid when they have more than they can use, in effect a net zero house acts as a battery on the grid, and this is a service the power companies already pay good money for, except for a net zero house they don't pay them anything.

Basically, the power usage of a PV net-zero house is the inverse of the grids usage, and as such it's helpful, if it matched then it would be a problem (like if you ran a generator all night and turned it off during the day)

Meh, I live alone, so it's just me here (in someone else's basement, not my parents), I'm not even close to 10, I got 1 Phone, 1 Desktop, 1 Laptop, 1 HDTV Tuner, 1 Roku, and 1 PS3, and I almost never use the laptop. I think for most people (maybe not most /. 'ers) my age (fresh out of college) it's going to be way under 10, as they usually just have a phone and a laptop per person and maybe a console or some other media device of some type.

If you are behind you can use stolen tech to accelerate your development, to a rate that exceeds the rate that the original developer achieved. Speed and position are not the same thing.

Exactly, Quality, Speed, Cost, pick any two, seems like all they care about is speed right now (maybe quality?), they can easily develop faster than the US, especially with the help of stolen tech.

Really? I remember I tried UFS around 10.4 and it was just a nightmare, every BSD seems to have their own version of UFS and linux could never autodetect it just right for me, I eventually gave up and went with HFS+ which worked just fine with the minor exception that unmounting HFS+ didn't set the flags right and I had to run some HFS+ app in linux (or boot OSX) to reset the flags so it would mount. I assume some of that has changed, but HFS+ still works in linux without a problem and the apple software likes it a bit better than UFS.