Hardly an apt metaphor. You can own a TV just fine, no fee necessary. You only need to pay if you use that TV to access the broadcast TV stations, virtually all of which benefit directly or indirectly from the collected fees. Think of it like Hulu.com minus the "free" ad-supported mode, and with the content protected by a legally mandated fee structure instead of DRM and account logins.

Heck, let's push for 1080p, then we can share the screen with standard-resolution outdoor TVs and drive the price down - go ahead and tell me there's wouldn't be huge demand for such a thing among the barbecue-loving sports fan demographic. Plus then we could proceed to re-purpose the TVs as additional monitors.

I've got to insist on the size though, even a 12" screen is painfully cramped to program on at any resolution - either you can only see a few lines at a time, or you have to hunch over to see the tiny text clearly, with your eyes and posture paying the price. Maybe in protrait mode, but doesn't seem like anyone has yet really worked out how to do that gracefully with a laptop. Plus it needs to be big enough for a full-sized keyboard anyway. I can live without a numeric keypad if I have to, but those netbook keyboards are *way* too small for real work unless you have dainty childlike hands (though damn would I have loved one of those as a kid).

>cutting the size/weight/and cost by half?
FTFY, assuming cost/pound stayed the same of course.
Now *that* would seriously kick-start the EV market. And start opening up the low end as well if you stuck with current ranges at 1/4 the cost, which are actually quite adequate for lots of people. Not to mention the effect it'd have on more city-friendly transportation like electric scooters, bikes, etc. which are currently right on the edge of widespread feasibility.

Of course that also brings up another factor - size. That's another significant factor in practical EV range, and they don't actually mention that in the article. If these batteries are considerably less dense than current tech (which micro-engineered materials makes a distinct possibility) then their kWh/liter capacity might not be as impressive as you would hope. Now you *could* make the car larger, but that carries a significant social cost anywhere that traffic congestion is an issue. There are ways to counteract that though, personally as gas taxes cease to be relevant I'd love to see them replaced with a milage tax applied to all vehicles, scaling nonlinearly with vehicle size and weight to reflect the specific vehicles impact on congestion (=new construction) and road maintenance costs (road damage increases super-linearly with vehicle weight)

Oh *hell* yeah.

Of course what I *really* want is a full-sized (15"+) laptop with a transflective or color e-ink screen, so that I could sit outside wherever I like when working, rather than having to hide away somewhere that I can actually see my screen. It doesn't even need very good specs, your average $300 crap laptop is already overkill for almost everything except games. Just give me a tool that lets me spend the day hiking and working in the woods and I'm sold.

Well, 4x the capacity in this case, so only 1200 equivalent cycles. That's not the big issue though.

The big issue is that you are assuming that your usage patterns remain the same. And therein lies the rub - typically you want more battery capacity in order to enable greater use - if your laptop battery lasted 4x as long you probably wouldn't bother to plug it in unless doing so were really convenient, in fact with a 16-hour laptop battery I bet most people wouldn't even take their power cord with them during the day. And so you run through those cycles much quicker.

>all for a simple battery tech switch

Not so simple, except in terms of the mechanic doing the battery replacement. (which of course is one of the beauties of electric vehicles - really easy aftermarket mods to the power system) Battery tech is *the* bottleneck for electric vehicles, and so far it's proved anything but easy to improve on significantly.

Fusion, definitely. Even traditional hot-fusion at that.

The Farnsworth Fusor was an device first built back in the mid-60s. For a while there was great hope for it because it *does* allow cheap, easy fusion. No-one was ever able to reach break-even energy production though, despite getting tantalizingly close. Basically your reactor is two concentric electrodes in a vacuum chamber - a big positively charged spherical shell on the outside, and a much smaller "wiffle ball" sphere in the center - usually just a few loops of wire. Ramp the voltage up to 10,000-20,000 volts, then let in a trickle of ionized deutrium or similar. The ions race inwards down the massive potential well and zoom right through the inner "sphere" to collide in a tightly-focussed point in the center of the spheres with enough energy to fuse. And if they fail to fuse, well then they zoom back up the potential well until they reverse course and try again, all without any extra energy input requirements. The problem is the inner electrode - an ion typically needs many "bounces" before it collides just right and fuses, and with each pass through the inner electrode there's a small chance that it will hit one of the wires and lose all its kinetic energy. Despite years of work in lots of labs nobody was ever able to get those losses low enough to hit break-even, though it does make for a convenient fast neutron and gamma-ray source (deutrium-deutreum fusion being one of the worst nuclear reactions known for # of free neutrons produced per Watt of energy released, far worse than fission)

Dr. Bussard (yes, of ramscoop fame), believed he could achieve net power production by using magnetic fields to steer the ions around the wires of the inner electrode, preventing collision losses and finally allowing net energy production, but at that point the Tokamak-based reactors had pretty much cornered the market on research dollars. He did eventually get some small sporadic NAVY funding for what eventually became known as the Polywell Fusor, but died not too long ago before achieving success. His team is still at it though, and while under a standard NAVY publishing embargo the few sentences in the annual budget report suggest that they may be at the cusp of success, even to the point of having perhaps achieved p-B fusion recently, which is a much more challenging reaction (something like 100x higher input energy IIRC), but releases all energy as high-velocity He4 nuclei meaning minimal neutron or gamma radiation (only due to incidental p-p fusion) of any sort and potentially a simple, high efficiency conversion to electricity without resorting to the crude "steam engines" that all existing nuclear reactors rely on.

Not really. Within a few decades the side effects are mostly indistinguishable from the natural course of events.

What ever do you mean? At this very moment we're in Iraq defending our petroleum-related profits and preventing those dastardly Chinese from being able to make a better offer as an oil pipeline route.

2) No fallacy, perhaps we misunderstood each other - from context it sounded like you were suggesting ecologically sustainable whaling was somehow a concept relevant to the next 50-100 years. For most species that is unlikely to be the case unless we start some truly massive ecological restoration projects.

3) Certainly, economic incentive seems to be one of the few broadly effective techniques to actually be successful, particularly if you can arrange it so that the same people who would have been profiting from whaling are profitting more from tourism or whatever. My point is simply that we're past the point where, as a species, we can in good conscience trade a few extinctions for some extra profit. Even from a totally self-absorbed perspective, we're beginning to endanger our ability to survive on the planet for the long term. So we have to start getting serious about finding or artificially creating those incentives

Short answer: yes. And the minimum distance to use our sun as a lens is something like 600-750 AU (I forget exactly). For reference Voyager 1 is currently at about 124 AU. So well outside our solar system by most definitions, though still near enough that it could orbit the sun easily enough, and in fact well within the orbits of the hypothetical Oort cloud objects.

And in fact I imagine Alpha Centauri has been used as a lens every time something of interest has passed behind it since we discovered the gravitational lensing effect. I wouldn't bet money on whether such an event has ever actually ocurred though - the problem witrh these astonomical-sized telescopes is that they're *really* hard to aim. It'd still be a pretty small 'scope though - we're already using other galaxy clusters as lenses - that makes any distance that can fit within our galaxy infinitesimaly small in comparison.

An interesting theoretical application is to put a pair of probes on the opposing sides of a line between two stars to create a dual-gravitational-lens optical link between two probes in mutual focus to allow interstellar signal transmission at extremely low powers. I can't think of the techincal term offhand, but it's somewhat analogous to the acoustic effect of those giant concrete parabolic reflectors - by standing at the focal points two people can whisper to each other across a football stadium and nobody else will hear them. Personally I think that's likely a partial explanation for why we don't hear alien transmissions - the only reason to transmit at powers detectable from more than a few star-systems away would be to announce yourself to unknown races. And unless sentient life is *extremely* common you'd have to keep up those transmissions for a very long time before anyone is likely to recieve them.

1) Humans are a good food supply as well - we're plentiful, relatively defenseless without our tools, and as long as you cook us thoroughly diseases are a non-issue. So why is cannibalism frowned on?

2) I haven't checked the numbers lately, but from an ecological perspective I believe we're still an order of magnitude or two below long-term sustainable whale populations, only a few fast-breeding species have managed to recover from our predation. Whales are, as a rule, extremely long-lived species (considerably longer than humans without modern medicine) whose populations take a long time to recover from sudden external pressures like the appearance of a voratious predator that's simultaneously poisoning their environment and flooding it with blinding propellor noise.

3) I don't feel guilty about being on top - however I do feel responsible for being a member of a species that has eradicated all natural checks and balances on it's population growth but has only just begun to make strides towards curbing its expansive predilictions. Eliminate wolves and other large predators and rabbits and deer become a plague that will devastate their ecosystem unless controlled by other means. At present we've yet to embrace any "other means" to prevent humans from doing the same, which leaves us with the default option of environmental collapse or global war. (The former will almost certainly lead to the latter anyway, so perhaps it'd be better for everyone if we have the wars up front while there's still a somewhat healthy ecosystem for the survivors to inherit)

There is minimal evidence to suggest that humans are biologically predsposed to long-term pair bonding at all, in fact there's considerable evidence to the contrary. Oxytocin does however seem to be a significant agent in the amount of pair-bonding we are predisposed to.

The problem is that researchers like these try to use species that are biologically inclined to long-term monogamy as models for an unrelated species (us) that are sociologically biased towards it. Because the basic fact is that sociological behaviors operate on an almost completely different set of rules, and changes on timescales that genetics can't hope to respond to effectively.

So how about for a change instead of trying to shoehorn human behavior into some sort of arbitrary "moral ideal", we instead take a good hard look at what we actually are, and adjust our sociological and moral norms to be in line with our basic natures. Socially enforced monogamy was a useful solution to support child-rearing as our societies grew beyond the scale where tribalism was effective, but it was hardly the *only* solution, and irrationally clinging to it as the ideal today, when pretty much everything else about our society has been utterly transformed, is intellectually questionable at best.

Indeed. Primate monogmay correlates fairly well with proportional testical size - by which measure humans fall about midway between gorillas (where the females will reject advances by anyone but their troop leader) and chimpanzees (who use sex for a wide variety of social purposes and demonstrate almost no prolonged sexual pair-bonding).

I would be inclined to suggest that holding long-term monogamy as the "ideal" human behavior is itself the source of the vast majority of the problems our species encounters in that domain. There are (were?) considerably advantages to such an arrangement when trying to establish stable sociological institutions upon which empires can be built, but those advantages come at the expense of trying to distort our basic natures into something that they are, generally speaking, not inclined to be.

Is it a problem? Assuming for the moment that "marrying up" is indeed a trend among women and not just a popular colloquialism, the natural extrapolation is that there are even more women "marrying down" (hypogamy) - they do after all outnumber men by ~2% (51% vs 49% in all societies that don't artificially bias their gender mix).

In fact it seems to me there are really only two options - either numerous individuls are "marrying up/down", or you end up with a very stratified society where virtually nobody marries anyone outside their current socio-economic caste.