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Comment Re:Whaazzaaaa? (Score 2, Funny) 364

Well, theoretically, (unless the theory has changed) during the big bang matter could have been compressed past the Swartzschild radius due to pressure and black-holes formed that mass much less than is required for a black hole to form today from gravity alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole Most of these will have evaporated by now (or maybe not depending on how you interpret the string theory), but if they can exist there should still be a great many of these in the universe. We know that a black hole can carry a charge, and the surface gravity can be calculated. It is possible that there may be some of these in the solar system, perhaps in many years we will discover a way to detect them, and increase their charge to the point where they could be manipulated electromagnetically.

I love a sentence that can be misinterpreted to imply that I can retroactively change the workings of the universe based on my presumably mutable interpretation of a theory. I'm sure magic works just like this.

Comment Re:ya right (Score 1) 135

The motivation to overclassify is not very strong. It's blatantly against the rules to use classification to hide something embarassing to the US government; The classification on almost all classified documents "leaked" recently was decided long before the embarassing event occured. And yes, people do get reprimanded and punished for applying inappropriate classificiation routinely, since the system is way too complex to be done well.

I would like to think that, but my expectation is that classification is routinely used to cover up embarrassing events. The legal precedent for the "state secrets privilege" was nothing more that that. If we take the term embarrassing to include criminal, negligent, and treasonous.

Comment Re:Reverse Works Too (Score 2, Insightful) 77

Future devices could work just the opposite, where an outside electrical current could power the pump and alter how quickly ions are pumped into or out of a cell.

That has potentially far reaching effects assuming they can eventually find a way to install these things throughout the body (or even better just on targeted cells). You could install one of these devices on each cancer cell, for example, and power a pump that forced chemo drugs into the cells. That means that cancer cells would receive a much higher dose than non-cancer cells meaning less side effects and/or more effective treatments. Of course, there's a million problems to be solved before such a treatment could become reality, but the possibilities are endless.

If you could install one of these devices in a cancer cell, it wouldn't need to pump it full of medicine. Water or would work just fine. Pop!

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 120

if it needs to be in a vacuum then it would use a vacuum tube

It would have to be in a tube to be a vaccuum tube, but it would still be a transistor. The way a vaccuum tube works is electricity heats a filiment (cathode), analogous to a transistor's emitter, which throws out electrons and photons. There is a mesh, analogous to a transistor's gate, that the current to be amplified is fed to which controls controls how much energy reaches the tube's anode. The anode is analogous to a transistor's collector.

Even if this were inside a vaccume tube, it would still be a transistor, while an old-fashioned amplifier tube is not a transistor.

So, were talking about a series of tubes then?

Comment Re:Next steps, please (Score 1) 98

"Funny" gains no karma. The way to tell if someone doesn't care about karma? If they joke a lot, they're no karma whore. And some of us are swimming in karma and really don't worry about it.

I can tell you care about Karma because you didn't make a joke.

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