Also; I hear plenty of government workers saying Management has a no open source software policy; for security reasons, the more money spent on the product the better, as closed source code is deemed to be more secure...

And that's a convenient meme for the spooks who have been getting the big companies to embed spyware in their systems, where the systems' closed-source or as-a-service nature makes it difficult-to-impossible to detect such spyware, even as it's doing you harm.

Perhaps the revelations about the Prisim program will drive a reevaluation of such policies and a move toward open systems which CAN BE CHECKED for embedded nastiness.

And if you're going to complain that "hamburgers" must be beef... I'm going to argue they should be "ham."

Nope. A hamburger sandwich should be a sandwich made out of people from Hamburg Germany. B-)

By the way, with Obamacare (or any other single-government-payer system) you can expect such new treatments to NEVER be deployed - or even developed.

If such a new procedure succeeded it would mean paying a lot of extra money saving the person, after which it would mean paying MORE money as they live longer to collect more benefits, further straining an already self-bankrupting system.

Preventing this is what "death panels" are about.

(As a government official once said - about in 1979 or so, when the impending bankruptcy of Social Security was first being hand-wrung over - "We've got to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate.")

As usual, any kind of clinical use of this stem cell stuff is "ten years away". These guys are as bad as fusion researchers.

I'm sure they'd love to try it in a human dying of liver disease. But between the FDA regs, the self-appointed Medical Ethics czars, and the malpractice ambulance-chasers there's a lot of hurdles to jump before they MIGHT be allowed to try it (let alone deploy it as a regular procedure).

I visited him in the late '80s, along with a number of others of the hypertext startup I came out to CA to work for. It was sort of a pilgrimage to see the great man.

One of our people took the mouse from his computer and got Doug to autograph it. This left him with the ONLY mouse (at the time) autographed by Doug, because (as Doug mentioned) nobody had thought to ask him before. B-)

It's all about power.

Our notions of right and wrong tend to adapt to fit our notions of what we want.

Someday, users will use software to create the software they want. When that happens, 95 percent of software developers will be redundant and they will belatedly learn that unions multiply their individual power.

Does she put it in the fridge before using it or something? Or does it use the difference in temperature between your hand and the flashlight.

The latter.

If you RTFA you'll see she's using the aluminum flashlight body as a heat conductor and the "head" and other exposed portions of it as an air-cooled heatsink.

She's stuck the handle of the light into an insulating plastic pipe, cut a hole in the pipe, and stuck the peltier cell in the hole, with the "cold" side in contact with the flashlight handle and the "warm" side in contact with the hand. (I expect the next step is to wrap an outer aluminum tube around it to conduct heat from the whole hand to the cell, rather than just heating it with a patch of palm directly contacting it.)

Voltage boost converter between the peltier assembly and the LED (because the peltier cell she used was not stcked for the right voltage to drive the LED.) The LED shines as long as you hold it, if the air is cool enough. (She's used it for 20 minutes running.)

Also, since this is generating electricity from a temperature differential, rather than generating a temperature differential from electricity, wouldn't this be the Seebeck effect?

Yes. Seebeck discovered current generation from heat differential (with dissimilar metal wires and a compass needle), then Peltier discovered heat-pumping with current.

But, like most rotating electric machinery (where the same device is a motor or generator depending on whether you power it or twist it), the same effect is a heat pump or heat engine (depengding on whether you apply a temperature difference and pull power or apply power and pump heat).

The effect is now often called the "Peltier-Seebeck effect" in textbooks. The cells are typically called Peltier Cells because the efficient ones are manufactured mainly for heat-pumping, though they work just fine both ways.

The noise-cancelling scheme sounds interesting.

If you'll read TFA a little more closely than the OP did, you'll find that the noise-canceling thing is NOT how they got the 1G-ish single-pair link to work.

What the noise-canceling thing is about is when you have TWO OR MORE pairs bundled into a single logical link. Then it figures out what the cross-talk between the individual pairs looks like and cancels THAT out. This lets the individual signal pairs run as fast as a lone pair and the total bandwidth of N bundled pair be N times the bandwidth of one, rather than substantially less.

But open source prevents this from happening because the source is constantly being looked at!

No, open source doesn't keep it from happening. Providers can stick any cruft in there that they want.

What it does do is make it much more likely to be discovered when some fool DOES stick it in there. Don't be surprised if you hear about a lot more bad stuff found in open source than you do in closed source, as a result. (At least until the bad guys wise up.) Try to find the malware in Microsoft's stuff, for instance. B-)

(Of course this stuff was found with a packet sniffer before anybody found it in the code. So it's an apples-to-oranges comparison and open/closed source has nothing to do with it.)

I'm in Silicon Valley. I want to live in Nevada, far enough from the neighbors that I can't hear their HIFIs in the daytime or see their lights at night.

I want to live in Nevada so much that I built a house there - a few miles over the state line near Lake Topaz. Fully paid for. Marvelous view. Good neighbors. Also rabbits (jack and cottontail), quail, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, cougars, and black bears. Gun laws are a lot different there, and I have a Nevada CCW that's also valid in many other states due to reciprocity (though not in CA).

For the Town House near work I also moved across the bay from Palo Alto. Just off the other end of the bridge, for less than I was paying in rent in Palo, I was able to BUY a two-story four-bedroom with 7,000+square feet of yard and remodel it. 200A electric service (two 20A circuits to each room for starters). Satellite TV and Cat 5E everywhere. (Only running 100M at the moment but I hear that with house-sized runs you can get away with 5e for gigabit Ethernet.) The yard is now a garden and orchard. We get most of our veggies from it - and our eggs. We were also on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour last year.

They tell me the city here on the Back Bay has a gang problem. But for several blocks around our house it doesn't. It's much like in Palo Alto (where the burglars worked their way down Loma Verde street and skipped only two houses - ours and the retired cop two doors down). It seems the crooks don't like to bother NRA instructors, and the wife's "Ducks Unlimited" sticker tells them she can hit a spot the size of a duck (or a human heart) with a shotgun, from 50 yards, even if it is flying at the time. B-)

Of course NV has no such crime issues. Even machine guns are legal there. B-)

Move to a SF or Oakland? By preference? You've GOT to be kidding.

Sounds to me like the kid has the makings of a very lucrative suit for denial of civil rights under color of law.

If you want to stop the authorities from misbehaving, hit 'em in their budget.

I think of it as being analogous to injecting separate beams of light at different angles, having them bounce back-and-forth between the walls at different distances between bounces, and emerge at angles corresponding to the angles at which they entered.

Of course it's not angle of flight that's in question, but another property of the light propagation that can be varied to allow different beams to propagate down the fiber and be separable at the far end. But they're still separate because each beam's cross section at a given plane cutting the fiber has a different distribution of phase and intensity, resulting in different propagation mechanisms that conserve a property which can be used to separate the beams when they emerge.

any House GOP member voting for this abortion is going to get skewered

And while we're at it, let's mount primary challenges against all the ones in the senate that turned coat.

Normally I side more with the D's than the R's (not that I have much faith in either), but this time I'm damn glad there's an R majority in the House.

Why the HELL do you usually side with the Ds? They consistently do the opposite of what they promise. It's the Ds that bring you war, censorship, racisim, and a whole host of other junk that they promise to be fixing: Like government in general they're a problem masquerading as its own solution.

The Rs have their own pathologies. But compared to the Ds they're pikers.

I wish I'd had the equivalent when starting at my first University back in 1975.

Typo: Back in 1965.